- 7/6/2023
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PeopleTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:04 >> The fundamental concept of how
00:06 these systems work is unlike most fusion.
00:09 [MUSIC]
00:11 >> Most other fusion is trying to heat
00:14 a working fluid to run a steam cycle and generate electricity.
00:18 We think that adds a tremendous amount of complexity.
00:21 It's pretty low efficiency.
00:22 [MUSIC]
00:27 >> One of the things personally for me of
00:29 fusion is you had all this beautiful energy
00:32 already in the form of electricity.
00:33 It's electromagnetic, literally magnets.
00:36 You had charged particles in the fluid, in the fuel.
00:40 But then we did everything we could to run
00:42 a thermal cycle because what we knew how to do then.
00:46 But now we have modern power electronics that can switch at
00:49 very high speeds and can actually transmit
00:51 and recover energy in electricity.
00:54 [MUSIC]
01:05 >> Welcome to Helion.
01:06 >> So yeah, can you just start explaining what this machine is?
01:11 >> Yes. So you're at Helion's Redmond facility.
01:14 Here we're staying in front of our sixth generation machine.
01:17 We call this one Trenta.
01:18 This is the sixth generation of machines that form,
01:21 merge, and compress fusion plasmas
01:24 to fusion conditions doing fusion.
01:26 >> We're looking at this end of the machine,
01:29 but it's mirrored on that end.
01:30 Can you explain why you do
01:32 the pulse reaction towards each other?
01:33 >> The fundamental concept of how these systems
01:36 work is unlike most fusion.
01:38 In here, we inject a fusion target.
01:40 We call this one a field reverse configuration.
01:43 Then using pulsed magnetic fields to very high pressures,
01:45 we compress that fusion plasma up to fusion conditions.
01:49 One of the challenging parts is how do you get that target,
01:51 that initial fusion fuel into the compression chamber,
01:54 and do it in a repeatable,
01:56 symmetric, high-energy way.
02:00 So one of the things that we pioneered was a concept of
02:02 merging field reverse configurations, merging these plasmas.
02:06 We actually have a symmetry on either side of the machine.
02:09 We have these injectors,
02:11 we call them the formation section,
02:12 where we actually form this initial plasma.
02:15 We inject the fusion fuel.
02:16 We then accelerate them,
02:18 merge them in the center region,
02:20 where they take all that kinetic energy that we put into them
02:22 when we accelerated them, and they stop.
02:24 They stagnate, converting that kinetic energy
02:27 into temperature, into thermal energy,
02:29 and that starts the fusion reaction.
02:31 We then can compress it all the way up to the full fusion conditions.
02:34 >> The actual plasma generation happens on this end, right?
02:38 >> The plasma generation happens right here, interestingly enough.
02:41 So over here, we're standing in front of what is called the diverter.
02:44 This is what happens after the reaction.
02:46 Here is our formation section.
02:48 In this part, we inject our fusion fuel as a neutral gas,
02:52 deuterium and helium-3.
02:54 It flows into this area where we ionize it,
02:57 first taking it from a neutral room temperature gas
03:00 to an ionized plasma,
03:02 stripping the electron off of the nucleus,
03:05 heating that up to about a million degrees in this section.
03:07 We then form what is called a field reverse configuration,
03:10 where what we do is we take magnetic field
03:13 that's keeping this plasma.
03:14 This part, it's ionized.
03:16 It's, for us, relatively cool.
03:17 It's about a million degrees.
03:19 But that's still so hot that it can't touch any of the walls
03:22 without damaging materials.
03:23 So to prevent that, we have magnetic fields
03:25 that thread through this entire machine,
03:27 keeping that hot fuel, that hot fusion fuel plasma,
03:31 off of the walls.
03:32 But what we do here, which is quite unique,
03:35 is that we then take that initial magnetic field
03:37 and by pulsing at very high intensity,
03:40 over 100,000 amps per coil,
03:42 we then reverse that magnetic field,
03:44 trapping magnetic energy in a closed field.
03:47 This is called a self-confined, self-organized plasma.
03:51 It's a really unique version of fusion fuel
03:55 that Helion and very few others do.
03:57 But what that enables us to do
03:59 is form a closed magnetic topology,
04:02 a closed plasma object that we can do things to,
04:04 we can actually do work on.
04:07 And so at that point,
04:09 we now have a closed field reverse configuration
04:11 in this formation section.
04:13 We then start to pulse these magnetic field coils
04:15 at high pressure, sequencing them.
04:18 And they get sequenced as we go down,
04:20 we call that peristaltic acceleration,
04:22 like squeezing a tube of toothpaste.
04:23 It accelerates that plasma out of the formation section,
04:26 which had all the complex ionization, gas injection,
04:29 and all those things, into higher field section.
04:32 At this point, we've now moved into
04:34 what we call the acceleration section
04:36 or the plasma injector, where literally here,
04:39 we are now continuing to accelerate this plasma
04:41 to over a million miles an hour,
04:43 300 kilometers a second and higher,
04:45 down the length of the system.
04:48 But as we do that, we start to compress it already.
04:51 So as we increase the magnetic field
04:53 through adiabatic compression, ideal gas law,
04:56 as you increase the magnetic pressure,
04:57 the plasma then compresses, decreasing in radius,
05:01 but increasing in pressure and temperature.
05:03 So as it's left the formation,
05:05 it's on the order of several million degrees.
05:09 But now we start to compress it, we start to accelerate it.
05:12 And if we've done everything right
05:13 and sequenced these in just the right way,
05:16 this plasma field reverse configuration
05:19 has now accelerated all the way to 300 kilometers a second.
05:22 It's heated to on the order of 10 million degrees.
05:25 And then we inject it into the main compression section.
05:29 You notice here, the bolts, the pressure, everything goes up
05:33 because here's where we really do the fusion.
05:36 If we've done everything right,
05:37 this FRC that we've injected
05:40 into the main compression section has met its mate
05:42 that we made symmetrically on the other side.
05:44 And what they do is those two collide,
05:47 those two plasmas collide.
05:48 And here's a really important part, they stop.
05:51 They stagnate, they take all that kinetic energy we added,
05:54 all that velocity, and we turn that into thermal energy.
05:58 It super heats up.
05:59 And if you've done everything right,
06:00 in the middle of this, you have a system
06:02 that's on the order of 10 to 20 million degrees
06:04 sitting in this main compression section,
06:06 ready to do fusion.
06:08 So now you rapidly,
06:09 as fast as modern technology will allow,
06:12 we increase the magnetic field to high pressure,
06:14 compressing that fusion plasma
06:16 all the way up to fusion conditions,
06:17 over a hundred million degrees.
06:19 Fusion begins, large amount of fusion is happening.
06:22 Inside this core compressed FRC now,
06:25 this core compressed fusion fuel,
06:27 the fusion reactions start to occur.
06:29 Those fusion reactions are creating new particles,
06:32 deuterium fusing together with helium-3
06:36 to form helium-4 and an extra hydrogen.
06:39 And both of those two particles
06:40 are very high temperature now.
06:41 They're born inside the fusion plasma,
06:43 applying pressure back on these magnetic fields.
06:46 That works just like in a piston,
06:48 where in a piston you compress the fuel,
06:50 it begins to burn, it then gets hotter,
06:52 it pushes back on that piston,
06:53 and we do it all electromagnetically.
06:55 That electromagnetic reaction then returns energy
06:59 back out to the pulse power system,
07:00 which we'll talk about more in the future.
07:03 Returning energy back out to that system,
07:05 expanding, cooling that fusion plasma.
07:08 If you did everything right,
07:09 you created just a little bit more energy
07:11 than you put in, more electricity than you put in,
07:14 and then you exhaust your fusion fuel.
07:17 The exhausted fusion byproducts,
07:19 the burned and unburned byproducts,
07:20 pass back through the accelerator
07:22 in the formation sections, down into the diverter.
07:26 What the diverter section does
07:29 is now deals with the remaining energy.
07:31 It deals with the burned and unburned byproducts.
07:34 It expands it one more time, cooling even further,
07:37 and then exhausting through turbo molecular pumps
07:40 the burned and unburned byproducts,
07:43 getting that fusion fuel out of the system,
07:45 where we can process it, we can separate it,
07:47 we can inject fresh fuel for the next fusion cycle.
07:50 We puff in gas again, and we repeat everything
07:53 over and over and over again.
07:54 In Helium's approach to fusion,
07:56 this is high-density fusion,
07:58 so the amount of fuel we get to put into it
08:01 is actually quite high, more than the impurities.
08:03 So what that means is that we can,
08:05 a lot of fusion is impurity-driven,
08:07 where you're worried about the impurities
08:09 slowing down the fusion reaction.
08:11 But because we can do this at high density,
08:13 we no longer are very concerned about impurities,
08:15 so we can run this at relatively,
08:17 still very high vacuum, but compared to other fusion,
08:20 it's much higher pressure than other fusion types,
08:23 which allows us to use a kind of pump
08:24 called a turbo molecular pump.
08:26 This pump has spinning blades
08:28 that actually pump the gas out,
08:30 and what's really unique about them
08:32 is that they're very, very efficient.
08:33 So these turbo molecular pumps,
08:35 once you spin them up to high speed,
08:37 can pump out gas and cost very little electricity,
08:40 therefore your fusion system doesn't have to actually
08:43 create so much electricity for the pumping systems.
08:47 That's in comparison with a lot of other fusion
08:49 that uses cryogenic pumping systems,
08:51 where you have a panel that you cool
08:53 to very, very low temperatures
08:54 to freeze the fusion particles,
08:56 the leftover fuel onto those panels,
09:00 and as you might imagine,
09:01 taking a fuel that used to be 100 million degrees
09:04 and now cooling it all the way down
09:05 to cryogenic temperatures,
09:06 and then trying to exhaust it,
09:08 can spin a tremendous amount of energy
09:09 in the balance of plant of the system.
09:12 - Would that make it more difficult
09:13 to separate the byproducts of the reaction
09:15 with the cryogenic pump versus the turbo molecular pump?
09:19 - So not really.
09:20 In practice, what you have to do
09:22 is that you then close off that cryogenic pump,
09:25 you then return it up to room temperature,
09:27 where the gas comes back off from where it was frozen,
09:30 and then you can separate it at room temperature.
09:32 But it means you need twice as many pumps
09:34 to be able to run the system.
09:35 So you not only need a lot more capital equipment
09:37 and hardware,
09:38 but you also have to deal with all the coming up
09:40 and down in temperature,
09:41 all the electrical requirements.
09:42 - Just adds the,
09:44 like makes it more difficult to get to the net energy point.
09:47 - That's right.
09:48 When you start thinking about what we call
09:49 the balance of plant or the whole system,
09:51 and 'cause our goal is to get electricity out,
09:53 not just energy from fusion,
09:54 then that all of those components,
09:57 the pumping systems, the cooling systems,
09:59 all of those start to matter.
10:01 And you really need to consider that
10:02 when you're looking at the full system.
10:04 And something at Helion we did from the very beginning
10:06 is think through,
10:07 if our goal is electricity,
10:09 what are all the things we can do from the engineering side
10:11 to get to electricity sooner
10:13 and reduce the physics requirements?
10:15 - Is there any other major advantages here?
10:16 I know we talked about the magnetic field generation
10:20 is 90% of the electricity demand for the system.
10:23 Is there anything else about Trenta
10:26 that's more efficient in terms of like the magnetic field
10:29 or other energy draws?
10:31 - Yeah, several things.
10:32 So we know that the magnetic field,
10:34 generating that magnetic field to confine
10:36 and compress that fusion plasma
10:38 is where the majority of the energy is in the system.
10:40 The majority of the electricity is in the system.
10:43 And so because we operate at what's called high beta,
10:46 high fusion pressure,
10:48 we can actually get most of that energy into the fusion fuel,
10:51 unlike many fusion systems
10:53 that operate at only a few percent beta,
10:55 where the vast majority of the energy
10:56 never actually does any work,
10:58 doesn't participate in the fusion.
11:00 So we can be much more efficient
11:01 about getting energy into the system.
11:03 And then we work really hard on efficiency
11:05 of getting electricity out of the system.
11:07 And so in these fusion systems with modern semiconductors,
11:10 we've shown that for coils
11:11 and not just in the compression section,
11:12 but all of the coils,
11:14 we can build these systems with over 90%,
11:16 sometimes well over 90% efficiency
11:18 of recovering that magnetic energy,
11:20 that input electricity, output into electricity as well.
11:24 - So you're recovering electricity
11:25 from the magnets on this end,
11:27 not just in the central fusion reaction chamber?
11:31 - So on Trenta, Trenta was designed to demonstrate
11:33 that we can do the full fusion physics,
11:35 generate large amounts of fusion reactions,
11:37 and do it over a hundred million degrees at scale.
11:40 So in this system right now,
11:41 we're not recovering the electricity from these coils,
11:45 but in a full fusion system, including Polaris,
11:48 our seventh generation system,
11:49 we'll be recovering electricity from every single coil.
11:51 Any coil that you don't recover energy from,
11:55 one, you've lost that input electricity.
11:57 You've got to make that up with more fusion reactions,
11:59 which means a bigger, more expensive system.
12:00 And you have to deal with the cooling of that system
12:03 and drive the HVAC and all the other cooling systems.
12:06 You've got to pay for that electricity too.
12:08 So everywhere in the system that you can be efficient,
12:10 everywhere you can, the good analogy is
12:12 regenerative braking in an electric car.
12:14 Everywhere you can recover electricity,
12:16 that's the last amount of electricity you have to generate.
12:19 - How do you actually recover electricity
12:22 from a magnetic field that you've already generated?
12:26 - Yep, it's a very good question.
12:27 It's a little bit counterintuitive.
12:29 The way I like to think about it,
12:31 similar to the way an alternator works,
12:34 the fundamental physics of an alternator
12:35 is that you have Maxwell's equations.
12:37 If you have a changing magnetic field, a dB/dt,
12:41 that's changing in time,
12:42 that generates a voltage and a current.
12:44 And so you can actually take electricity
12:46 in and out of a magnetic field.
12:48 That's one way to think about it.
12:50 The other way I like to think about it is
12:53 the reverse process.
12:54 To induce a magnetic field,
12:56 you have a magnetic coil that's a loop.
12:58 You flow electric current in that loop.
13:00 That generates a magnetic field that increases in time.
13:04 But if you have, instead, you have a magnetic field
13:07 in the center of that loop, and it is increasing in time,
13:10 it does the exact opposite,
13:11 where it induces electric current back out of that coil.
13:15 - So when you stop the current,
13:17 like your own voltage through the actual magnets,
13:20 the magnetic field actually just causes it
13:23 to reverse back around again.
13:24 - As the fusion plasma gets hotter
13:26 and new fusion particles are born,
13:29 it pushes back on the magnetic field,
13:31 increasing the magnetic field
13:32 between the plasma and the coil.
13:35 And what we do is we allow that plasma
13:37 to actually push magnetic field, magnetic flux,
13:39 into the coil, inducing a current,
13:41 and that flows back into the pulse power system.
13:44 - And like other fusion reactors
13:47 aren't generating electricity in that way.
13:49 They're mainly trying to run a steam turbine
13:52 like nearly every other form of electricity generation.
13:56 - Yeah, it's very similar to other types of power generation.
14:01 Most of their fusion is trying to heat a working fluid,
14:05 a lot of times water,
14:06 but it could be all kinds of working fluids,
14:08 to run a temperature differential,
14:10 to run a steam cycle and generate electricity.
14:13 We think that adds a tremendous amount of complexity.
14:15 It's pretty low efficiency.
14:17 - One of the things personally for me of fusion
14:20 is you had all this beautiful energy
14:22 already in the form of electricity.
14:24 It was electromagnetic, literally magnets.
14:26 You had charged particles in the fluid, in the fuel,
14:30 but then we did everything we could to run a thermal cycle
14:34 'cause what we knew how to do then.
14:37 But now we have modern power electronics
14:38 that can switch at very high speeds
14:40 and can actually transmit and recover energy in electricity.
14:45 So this is a good example.
14:47 These coils run at over 100,000 amp.
14:50 The main compression coils for Trento,
14:52 we're running them at well over a million amps per coil,
14:55 and there's multiple coils.
14:56 So this whole section will have
14:58 tens of millions of amps of current,
15:00 and it has to come online in about 10 microseconds.
15:03 So that timescale is very fast.
15:06 And it's a function of the fusion fuel itself.
15:09 As the fuel gets hotter, those molecules move faster.
15:13 And as those molecules move faster,
15:14 those atoms move faster,
15:16 we have to be able to respond with that
15:18 in that same timescale as they are moving.
15:21 So this needs to be able to come online,
15:23 generate a large magnetic field,
15:24 and transmit a large amount of current
15:26 in a very short amount of time.
15:27 This was theorized that you could do approaches
15:30 like this to fusion as early as the 1950s.
15:32 However, that was before the transistor even existed.
15:35 And we weren't able to even theorize the ability
15:38 to transmit millions of amps of current
15:40 in these short microsecond timescales back then.
15:43 But now we can.
15:44 Modern semiconductors can switch that amount of current,
15:47 and you can buy off-the-shelf products.
15:49 In the very beginning of my career,
15:51 we saw the curve that this would be available one day.
15:54 But even at the beginning of my career,
15:55 and even there's still some parts of this machine
15:57 that were built with older technology,
15:59 not modern semiconductors.
16:01 And so Polaris, our seventh generation system,
16:04 will take the fusion that we've demonstrated here
16:06 and add high efficiency energy recovery,
16:09 add high efficiency switching, and high speed switching
16:11 to be able to build these systems
16:13 and show that you can do it reparated,
16:15 repeatably, and at high efficiency.
16:17 - What are the goals of the seventh generation?
16:20 - Seventh generation system is to show for the first time
16:22 that you can make electricity from fusion.
16:24 It's to take, do this entire process,
16:27 a little bit bigger, but do this whole process,
16:29 merge, compress a fusion fuel,
16:31 and then extract electricity right back out of that system
16:34 and make more electricity than you put into that reaction.
16:37 - When, I know this is always like a difficult question
16:41 to answer, and you always get the same answer or so,
16:44 20 years or so, but like, when do you think
16:47 the seventh generation will actually show net energy?
16:50 - Yeah, we think it's gonna be,
16:51 it has to be much sooner than that.
16:53 And so we are doing everything in Helion
16:55 to accelerate those timelines.
16:56 The whole philosophy behind the company
16:58 is to move and iterate fusion as fast as possible.
17:00 While we're running our sixth generation system right now,
17:03 doing fusion many nights a week still,
17:07 we are building our seventh generation system, Polaris,
17:10 and doing the early design work
17:11 on the eighth generation system,
17:13 the commercial system that comes after.
17:15 So we're building parts now,
17:16 and our goal is to have that system
17:18 be building through 2023, have that online,
17:21 showing that you can make electricity from fusion in 2024.
17:24 After that, we come online,
17:25 we start working on the commercial systems
17:26 that are designed for really long life,
17:28 that are designed to put power on the grid.
17:31 - What sort of pushback or challenges
17:35 do companies like Helion face in just the regulation
17:39 of the energy grid and everything else?
17:41 - Yeah, that's a really great question,
17:44 'cause there's two real components to this
17:47 that I think about anyway.
17:48 One is it's a new technology,
17:50 and you wanna make sure you're building new technology
17:52 as safely as you can, but also as fast as you can.
17:55 And so that balance for business
17:57 is always an interesting balance to do.
17:59 And as you're rolling out new technologies,
18:02 you have to not only build systems,
18:04 demonstrate that they work,
18:06 and demonstrate you can do it safely,
18:07 but you also have to then take the people
18:09 that are making the decisions and help educate them,
18:11 help bring them along with you,
18:12 help show them how these systems work in practice
18:15 rather than in theory.
18:16 And so part of that is an education campaign
18:19 and a policy development that we do internally.
18:22 And so we have a team working right now.
18:24 This system is regulated under
18:25 the Washington State Department of Health right now.
18:28 So it's regulated in the same parts
18:29 that a hospital is regulated under.
18:31 The other thing to consider here is that
18:33 here in the United States,
18:35 we have a very robust power grid that's on all the time.
18:38 And with new technologies,
18:39 a lot of the challenge is availability.
18:41 A lot of the challenge is you're taking
18:43 this new technology,
18:43 you're demonstrating it the first time,
18:45 you're gonna run it for a while,
18:46 you're gonna turn it off,
18:47 you're gonna change some things,
18:49 you're gonna evolve it,
18:49 you're gonna put power back on the grid.
18:51 So a lot of our work is thinking about
18:53 and working on reliability,
18:54 on thinking about building these systems
18:56 so that they can run steadily
18:57 and put power on the grid steadily.
18:59 And so what we imagine actually
19:00 is the earliest customers for this are private customers,
19:03 industrial power uses,
19:05 where you have a large amount,
19:06 maybe like a data center or factory,
19:08 some other kinds of applications
19:10 where you have a large amount of power required,
19:12 but it doesn't have the same public utility requirements
19:15 as other power sources.
19:17 So as we've demonstrated this
19:18 and built these for industrial customers,
19:20 then we would go on and roll them out
19:22 to the public utility grid.
19:24 - What is the advantage of that,
19:26 of just like trying to fit into the electricity grid
19:28 in general and like obviously the energy market is
19:33 complicated at the moment,
19:35 especially with renewables just fluctuating so much.
19:38 Is that part of why you wanna go
19:40 with the more industrial partners initially or?
19:43 - Well, I guess there's two parts to that.
19:44 Industrial customers are single point uses
19:48 of large amounts of power.
19:49 Even a small data center is in the 100 megawatt category
19:53 and large data centers can be way larger than that.
19:55 One of the things that we really love
19:57 about this approach to fusion and this technology
20:00 is on a commercial scale, this competes really well
20:02 because it's pulsed.
20:03 We can actually match loads very efficiently.
20:05 So sort of exactly like turning up the RPMs in your car,
20:09 you can adjust the power output of an engine.
20:11 Same thing by changing the repetition rate of this system,
20:15 we can actually match the power requirements
20:17 and do it pretty fast.
20:18 Do it in less than a second, adjust the power loads.
20:21 - Do you have a fixed amount of energy
20:24 that comes out with each pulse
20:26 and the amount of energy you can get out
20:28 is just determined by how quickly you pulse?
20:31 - We designed these for a single optimal operating condition
20:36 of a single pulse configuration.
20:38 In practice for a Trenta, we've been able to vary this
20:40 over large amounts of temperatures and fusion power outputs.
20:44 Last year, we announced that we had gotten
20:46 over 100 million degrees operating temperature,
20:49 but we can dial that down or up
20:50 depending on how much fuel we put into the system.
20:53 And that may not be the optimal operating condition
20:56 for a given situation.
20:57 But what we imagine is that you have now optimized
21:00 all of the energy inputs, the efficiencies,
21:02 the gas input systems, and all then you're changing
21:05 is the repetition rate to adjust the power output
21:08 rather than changing more of the different fuel conditions
21:12 of how much fuel you're putting in each pulse
21:14 or how much compression you're doing.
21:15 - Okay.
21:16 And that's obviously like huge
21:17 for the actual commercial viability
21:19 of being able to load match.
21:21 Having base load is just difficult these days.
21:25 - And you wanna be able to provide base load?
21:27 There's many places where times of the year
21:30 or in Seattle now where there isn't a lot
21:33 of renewable energy possible.
21:34 And so you need good base load power
21:37 when the wind isn't blowing
21:39 and when the sun isn't shining
21:41 here in Seattle in the winter.
21:42 But for other parts of the country
21:45 where you have large amounts of power available
21:48 in the middle of the day and nothing at night,
21:50 being able to load match within minutes
21:52 and it is really important.
21:54 And so that's what we envision for this technology.
21:57 So one of the good analogies that I like to think about
21:59 is in a gasoline engine to change the power output
22:03 that you actually get to put on the wheels
22:05 by what you actually change is the RPMs,
22:07 how often the pistons run,
22:09 not how much fuel you put in
22:10 or how much compression you do.
22:12 And you optimize, you design the system
22:14 for one operating condition
22:16 and then you change the repetition rate.
22:17 And we similarly can do that by using modern electronics.
22:21 We can dial in the repetition rate over a very large range.
22:24 And we've been able to show that in these systems as well.
22:28 - Thank you for watching this video on Nebula.
22:31 Your support here helps us keep improving
22:33 and investing in our craft.
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