- il y a 21 heures
Breakthrough Power The Promise of Nuclear Fusion
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TechnologieTranscription
00:00Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
00:30Welcome to everybody who's joining us right now.
00:32I don't know if you've ever heard of nuclear fusion, but we are going to hear an expert on this
00:38topic.
00:38Fusion has tremendous potential to revolutionize energy production, so it's actually a big deal.
00:44We are going to see the latest breakthrough with Laban-Koblenz.
00:48Please make a beautiful round of applause for Laban-Koblenz.
01:15Thank you, Laura-Jane, and thank you to all of you coming out here.
01:18I have 15 minutes to explain nuclear physics, some incredible engineering from the most advanced, probably the most complex experiment
01:30humans have ever tried,
01:32and some topics on international relations, and I want to leave time for questions.
01:36So, if you do have questions and you've got the app, put them on the iPad, or put them on
01:41the app, and I'll try to leave some time at the end.
01:43So, here we go.
01:45This is ITER.
01:47It's directly south of here.
01:48This is in the south of France.
01:49France is the host for the most complex scientific experiment of all time.
01:53This is about a kilometer long and 400 meters wide.
01:57In the middle, you have fusion.
01:59So, I'm going to get to the science and technology in a moment, but let me start by just looking
02:05at the flags.
02:06Where do you see China next to Europe?
02:09Where do you see Russia next to the United States?
02:12Think about what you see in the headlines, right?
02:15It's usually conflict, trade wars, maybe at a FIFA World Cup, maybe at a UN organization,
02:20but here, they are actually making a 40-year commitment to try to build something together.
02:26Not like, say, giving it to Siemens or EDF or a big company to build,
02:31but making parts, more than a million components, in thousands of factories all over the world,
02:36and they've got to come together and work like a giant Lego.
02:40So, keep that in mind.
02:42Fusion.
02:43What is it?
02:44Fusion is the only reason you're here.
02:46You would not be alive.
02:47This is the reason that we have heat and light and sun and even life on Earth.
02:53In the center of the sun and the stars, fusion occurs.
02:56We think of the sun like a big ball of hydrogen, right?
02:58Hydrogen gas, which it is.
03:00But at the center, it's about 70 times the density of steel.
03:05And fusion happens because particles are crushed together.
03:08So, if we want to do that on Earth, how do we do it?
03:11We can't do it the same way.
03:13What we do, there are several different approaches.
03:15I'll get to that in questions if we have time.
03:17What we're trying to do at ETER is called magnetic confinement.
03:20So, we take a gigantic circular donut-shaped tube.
03:24We put gas into it, two forms of hydrogen, and we run a current through it.
03:29The current, just like a fluorescent light bulb, the current makes the nuclei separate from the electrons.
03:36And then we heat it, and we try to heat it to about 150 million degrees.
03:41That's 10 times hotter than the core of the sun.
03:43And yes, that part's been done already, right?
03:45So, we heat it, and therefore the particles, for which velocity and heat are the same,
03:51the particles speed up to the point where instead of making a repulsion, they combine and fuse.
03:57This is what we're trying to do.
03:59Now, how does this compare to the nuclear you know?
04:01Nuclear you know is fission.
04:03You take a giant reactor, you put about 200 tons of uranium or plutonium in there,
04:10and then you start a chain reaction, right?
04:12This is not that.
04:13This is two to three grams of two forms of hydrogen, which gets you to equivalent power levels.
04:20So, you can see right away that there are advantages in terms of safety and so forth.
04:24It's a baseload power.
04:26You could say it's not renewable, but frankly, we've got fuel supply for millions of years.
04:31As long as we can make the deuterium that goes in, the one form of hydrogen, millions of years of
04:38supply.
04:38Tritium, we don't have at all, except in very, very small quantities.
04:42But we put lithium in the walls, and we will try to breed tritium from the lithium as our separate
04:48fuel supply.
04:49So, that's enough technology, except to say safety, but really, really hard, yeah?
04:55So, I've pretty much covered this.
04:57I won't go into it a lot, except how do you contain this 150 million degree plasma?
05:03This machine is about 30 meters wide, 30 meters high, and the one that we're building in the south of
05:09France.
05:10So, a bit of history.
05:11Reagan and Gorbachev in 1985 were trying to decide how to reduce their nuclear weapons arsenals,
05:17and they wanted to do something positive as well, and this is where ETA was born.
05:21Japan and Europe joined almost right away.
05:24There were conceptual studies, design studies through the 90s.
05:27Then, in the early 2000s, China, Korea, and India joined the project,
05:32and that's where we got to this ETA agreement.
05:36The method is just weird.
05:39Europe, as the host member, pays for 45%, but it's not cash.
05:43It means that they also make about 45% of the components that go into this, right?
05:48So, European innovation, I'll show you later, is all the way through this.
05:53And every other non-European country, like the US, Russia, India, etc., contributes 9%.
05:58Both a small amount of cash and a large amount of components.
06:02So, to give you an example of how you contain this, this is an example of our magnets.
06:06You see the human at the bottom, right? That's the scale.
06:10So, that giant middle magnet is made in San Diego in the US.
06:14It's the heart of ETA in six modules that have already started to be shipped to the south of France.
06:19The gold ones are made in Italy and Japan, about half each.
06:26Every one of those magnets weighs about the same as a 747 jetliner.
06:31To give you like 360 tons, roughly.
06:34And then the round magnets, which you can't quite see in this cutaway,
06:38the one on the bottom was made in China, that's installed.
06:40The next one's 17 meters in diameter, too big to ship.
06:44So, that was made right on site.
06:46And all the way around, the others are being made.
06:48The one in the very top was made in St. Petersburg and it was shipped in February of this year.
06:55Think about everything you know about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and so forth,
07:00the sanctions, all of that.
07:01The project continues to progress in spite of that.
07:04And if you don't have a time for a question on that,
07:06I'll stand outside and you can throw things at me to ask me,
07:09why are we still continuing that collaboration?
07:11It is for one simple reason.
07:13Despite all of our differences, we share one common dream,
07:17which is a better future for our children.
07:19And we're willing to pool all of the scientific and engineering resources globally
07:23over that 40-year period to make that happen.
07:26So now I'll just show you a few photographs of this thing actually being built.
07:30This is a very crude breakdown of how the parts are distributed,
07:34but with more than a million components.
07:37You know that's quite simplified.
07:39This is what we've been doing during COVID.
07:41Remember in March 2020, France went into lockdown.
07:44This is us in May taking this Indian-made component about 30 meters in diameter
07:50and trying to put it inside the tokamak pit.
07:53So there, if you look, that's the top-down view.
07:55That is about, you can see all those little lines.
07:59What were those lines coming from?
08:00That's welding.
08:01So in the south of France, Indian supervisors were supervising a crack team of German welders
08:08under French nuclear regulation on an international site using a steel
08:12that had been invented elsewhere in Europe.
08:16And that's just sort of a microcosm of how the whole thing works.
08:19This, how many of you have been to Stonehenge?
08:22Know of Stonehenge?
08:23That's about the same size.
08:24That's the next piece that goes on top.
08:26It's a cylinder that got welded, has now been welded to that base.
08:30And then we started inserting parts.
08:32So there's the Chinese magnet that I mentioned.
08:35That one came up the road.
08:36And at 10 meters in diameter, coming up from Marseille,
08:39we had to ask the locals in Provence to please chip away a bit of the mountains
08:43so we could get this thing through.
08:44The next one made on site there, again, think of these as like fully loaded passenger jets.
08:52This is in May of 2022, about a year ago, when this represents one-fourth of the total 360 degrees.
09:01So if this is a tokamak, this is a 40-degree segment made up of a vacuum vessel sector with
09:07two walls,
09:08made up of two big magnets, and then a little thin shield that goes in between, a thermal shield.
09:14So I'm also going to tell you about some problems we're facing.
09:18This is when the vacuum vessel was installed, what it looks like in the pit.
09:21So you would make nine of those to make the whole machine.
09:24But what we found is that these little tubes, which have cooling water going through,
09:30it's not water, it's helium that goes through them, were subject to corrosion.
09:35That's an example of a step backward.
09:37And in fact, everything that basically that we are doing here is first of a kind.
09:42That's why you have all these countries involved.
09:44That's why it goes slowly.
09:45However, each one of those are just engineering things that you can then overcome.
09:51Support systems, not terribly interesting.
09:54That's a heat exchanger.
09:55We won't make electricity.
09:56We will be like a national lab for 35 countries that are all doing replicable experiments so that
10:02the commercial machines can, in fact, be built after.
10:05So this is just a giant heat exchanger.
10:08This is an example of our magnet conversion building, where you'll have components from Korea,
10:13Russia, China, and India.
10:15And a Korean transformer looks very different than a Chinese transformer,
10:19but has to have exactly the same specs.
10:21That's basically how the project works.
10:23This is a night delivery of a, think of that as, again, a 747 jetliner coming from, in this case,
10:31Japan.
10:33So globally, there are about 94, something like that, projects on nuclear fusion.
10:38Private sector has entered.
10:39If you look five or seven years ago, there were maybe three or four private sector companies.
10:44We're now over 40, because I would say in the last three years,
10:49there's been about five billion US dollars equivalent invested into private fusion companies.
10:54That tells you investors are starting to take higher risk, less chance of success,
10:59but if they win, everybody wants to win the race.
11:01And it's not a race, it is a competition, but ultimately anybody who gets there first, great.
11:06And then we'll continue to experiment at ITER in a way that will help them make better,
11:11and better, and better machines.
11:13The top two, Wendelstein in Germany is like what you saw, a tokamak, but it's twisted.
11:19So it's even more complex to build.
11:22This one was the topic of a lecture here two days ago from Kim Budil,
11:28who directs the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California,
11:32where they achieved fusion in a different way, harder to harness commercially,
11:37but they achieved a greater energy breakthrough there by shooting lasers at a little pellet.
11:41The ones at the bottom are kind of like ITER, but smaller.
11:44One in the UK, one in the US, that are also private sector.
11:49And then spin-offs. Since this is about innovation, I thought I'd just mention,
11:53ITER is like CERN, but with a practical endpoint.
11:56Not to say that CERN is not practical when you're doing like finding the god particle and so forth,
12:00and CERN has made practical inventions.
12:02But here, superconductors that help you map the brain,
12:05or make your trains run better with better bodies,
12:08or in the case of explosive forming, making aircraft parts.
12:13And there are many such types of advantages and spin-offs.
12:19We're going to be publishing a media campaign later this year with about 25 or 30
12:23of these kinds of spin-offs having impact in many other areas.
12:26So this is a Photoshop. I leave you with that.
12:29It's because we're kind of a little star on Earth.
12:31We Photoshopped ITER into the Milky Way,
12:33and I have a minute and 50 seconds to see if anybody gave questions.
12:38Otherwise, I'll go through some more stuff.
12:40So, when will ITER start operations?
12:43I don't know the answer to that question,
12:45because initially, we were planning to start by December 2025.
12:50But with the delays that we've had, and then the slowdown during COVID,
12:54we've had components arrive that weren't originally scheduled to be part of that.
12:58And what that was called, operations, was called first plasma.
13:02You don't use deuterium tritium. You don't make fusion.
13:05You just turn on the machine with hydrogen to make sure everything works.
13:08Now, we're in the process this year of reevaluating.
13:11We'll probably come much later,
13:12but we'll have a much more augmented path.
13:15So we'll get to full fusion about the same time, hopefully in the mid 2030s.
13:20Second question.
13:21Would fusion energy allow us to have access to cheaper renewable electricity?
13:25Yes, absolutely.
13:27How close are we to fusion energy?
13:29And then there's one.
13:30Will energy costs fall down if we have fusion?
13:34In terms of cents per kilowatt hour, yes.
13:37You're going to have basically the same costs with fusion
13:40as you have now with other costs.
13:43But if you were in the panel about, there was a panel about two sessions ago,
13:47on the complete supply chain, when anybody tells you cents per kilowatt hour,
13:51that's not the whole point.
13:52Tell me this.
13:53How many wars in the last 20 or 25 years,
13:57some of you are, yeah, there are a couple of you that are older than that,
14:00so we'll go 50 years.
14:02How many wars have been fought over access to petroleum, fossil fuels?
14:08That's not why we say we invade somebody, but how many?
14:12And what are the costs of those?
14:14And how many times do you hear that put into the kilowatt cents per kilowatt hour?
14:19So yes, the fuel for fusion will be available worldwide,
14:24which means that all countries will have equal access.
14:27And the original goal of the ITER project is for the benefit of all humankind.
14:32So the answer to that is yes.
14:34Thank you.
14:34Thank you very much.
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