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Fusion Energy From Promise to Powerhouse
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00:00Ok, c'est de voir vous encore.
00:01Nous allons parler de fusion.
00:03Nous avons des talks sur les AMRs et les SMRs juste avant.
00:10Avant de commencer par une petite introduction,
00:14Dr. Armat Roule et Richard Pitts,
00:18vous pouvez vous présenter un peu de mots ?
00:20Oui, bonjour tout le monde.
00:22C'est un plaisir de vous présenter l'ETA organisation.
00:24Je suis un senior scientifique officier
00:28à l'ETA project au sud de France.
00:31Oui, et je suis Mr. Roule.
00:34Je représente une start-up.
00:38C'est le Marvel Fusion start-up en allemand.
00:42Et peut-être que je peux parler un peu.
00:45Ok, donc, as vous avez dit,
00:47nous avons discuté des AMRs et des fissures.
00:51Donc, maintenant, c'est une grande histoire.
00:55Donc, nous avons fait notre focus sur fusion énergie.
00:58Et, bien sûr, quand vous pensez sur fusion énergie,
01:00nous sommes pensés sur le sun.
01:03Et nous avons un futur futur,
01:05de clean et d'abonnant de l'eau.
01:08Recently, nous avons witnessed numerous breakthroughs
01:12et flourishings de nombreux start-ups dans ce field.
01:16Cela, en fait, nous avons tous demandé,
01:19qu'est-ce que cela arrive sooner que prévu ?
01:23Ou plus tard, en 2000, en 2001, ouSecurity ?
01:28Ou peut-être, nous avons un rôle de faché à fossile faches
01:32et mitigant la change de climatisation ?
01:35Ou pas ?
01:36Mais avant que nous puissions répondre à ces questions, nous devons aussi s'occuper major technical challenges.
01:43Il y a différents pathes que peuvent être pursued, et nous allons voir avec ITER et Marvel Fusion,
01:54comme le magnifique confinement de plasma avec Tokamak,
02:00ou aussi le confinement de plasma avec Marvel Fusion.
02:05Et nous sommes très heureux d'avoir nous joignons aujourd'hui par Richard Pitts et Armour Thoreau.
02:12Ils vont expliquer les advantages de la fusion power de la fission,
02:17aussi expliquer leurs propres technologies,
02:20et aussi expliquer les insights de quand la fusion power peut devenir une réalité dans nos homes.
02:26Donc, first, je vais vous demander une question.
02:30Qu'est-ce que la fusion power offer over nuclear fission power,
02:35et peut-être aussi,
02:36qu'est-ce que les difficultés que l'on pense aussi ?
02:40Go ahead.
02:41Oui, merci.
02:41Je vais commencer.
02:43Je vais commencer.
02:43Dr. Ruhl peut compliquer sur tout ce que je me souviens.
02:45Donc, des advantages de fusion over fission.
02:49No large amounts de fissile fuel dans le réacteur.
02:52On a working fusion reactor,
02:54based on the principle that ITER will use,
02:56at best,
02:57there will be a gram of combustible fuel
02:59in the reaction chamber at any one time.
03:02In a fission power plant,
03:03in a fission reactor vessel,
03:06can be hundreds of tonnes of highly fissile fuel.
03:09We use only isotopes of hydrogen,
03:11deuterium and tritium.
03:12So, no long-lived radioactive waste.
03:15There will be some radioactive waste
03:17from the structures around the reaction vessel,
03:19which are contaminated by neutron bombardment,
03:21but this is relatively low-level waste.
03:24There are abundant supplies of the fuels for tritium on Earth.
03:29Deuterium is in the sea,
03:30to the level of one part by 6500,
03:34easy to get it out, limitless source.
03:37Lithium, which we need to breed tritium,
03:39is effectively limitless on the time scale of millions of years
03:43in the Earth's crust and in the oceans.
03:45So, we have no fuel problem,
03:47no proliferation problem.
03:49So, no way to make bomb material
03:51or any other fissile material out of fusion.
03:54And, what I consider to be an important advantage,
03:57no real runaway problem.
03:59In the worst case, in a fusion reactor,
04:01based either on inertial confinement
04:03or magnetic confinement,
04:04if there is a problem,
04:05the reaction will shut itself down immediately.
04:07there is no long-lived stored energy in the reactor.
04:12It cannot run away, cannot melt down,
04:15nothing can happen like you see in fission power stations.
04:18That's what I would say.
04:19Armand, do you have any other thoughts?
04:22Well, Richard covered the most important aspects.
04:27Put maybe the mic just closer.
04:30Yes, it's the abundance of fuel,
04:33so fuel availability is not a principal issue.
04:36And, along with this comes principled scalability of energy.
04:41Yeah.
04:41And, that is extremely important.
04:43And, people believe, you know, that fusion,
04:46as compared to fission, is a lower risk.
04:52Also, Richard, could you explain in simple terms
04:56how ITER operates to confined plasma,
04:58a state where hydrogen nuclei are heated beyond 100 million degrees,
05:03more than in the sun, if I remember well,
05:05which is needed to initiate a fission reaction?
05:08Sure.
05:09So, you are right.
05:11We, in our reaction chamber,
05:12will be looking to reach temperatures of the order of 150 million degrees Celsius.
05:17I know it's difficult to imagine that.
05:19Physicists don't tend to think about temperature in degrees C.
05:23We think about it in particle energies.
05:25So, around 10 to 20 kilo electron volts of plasma temperature.
05:30At that temperature, everything is a plasma.
05:32All the fuel ions and electrons are separate.
05:36They are separate fluids.
05:37In ITER, we use the magnetic confinement principle.
05:40So, we will inject fuel, in our case, deuterium and tritium,
05:43which is similar to many inertial fusion approaches.
05:46We will heat that plasma up by driving an electrical current through it first
05:51and then adding additional heating systems on top,
05:54microwaves, radio frequency waves, particle injection techniques,
05:59to heat the plasma hotter and hotter.
06:01And then, when this plasma is very hot,
06:03it is confined by very strong magnetic fields.
06:06And then, it is prevented from, if you like,
06:10interacting too much with the chamber around it.
06:13And, when you get to the right fusion temperatures,
06:16which, by the way, has been reached on interrestrial fusion devices for many decades,
06:21the temperature is not the problem.
06:22Even the density of the fuel is not the problem.
06:25The problem is keeping it together long enough for fusion reactions to start.
06:29So, deuterium reacts with tritium to produce neutrons and helium.
06:33Helium is a charged particle.
06:35It is retained inside the magnetic field.
06:37The neutrons escape and embed themselves in the walls.
06:40That's how you generate the electricity.
06:42The helium just stays in the magnetically confined plasma
06:45and keeps heating the fuel.
06:47The deuterium and the tritium keeps it nice and hot.
06:49And, if you build your reactor big enough
06:51and you have the magnetic field strong enough,
06:54you can reach effective energy confinement times sufficient to keep the plasma
06:59in what we call a burning state,
07:02in which the energy you will produce from the reactions
07:05exceeds, by a large factor, the amount of energy you put in.
07:09And, do you see any advantage or drawbacks of this technology?
07:13There are several.
07:14That's why it's taken us a very long time to get where we are.
07:19The disadvantage, or rather, the obstacles that we face
07:22are similar for inertial fusion and for magnetic fusion.
07:26We have to get over the problem of materials.
07:29We are not yet at the stage where we can be sure
07:32that we have the right materials
07:34that will withstand this very aggressive burning plasma
07:3724-7, months after months, year after year,
07:41without having to change the inner linings of the reactor too frequently,
07:44which would not be a commercially viable solution.
07:47So, we have material development work to do.
07:50We have scalability work to do.
07:52We've got to demonstrate that we can get to a reactor scale
07:54if you use ITER's technology,
07:56which means a little bit bigger than ITER
07:58if we use the same superconducting coil technology,
08:01or a bit smaller if we use more advanced,
08:04more recent high-temperature superconductors,
08:06which allow us to reach higher field, smaller compact size.
08:10But, the long-term problem is really the materials,
08:13and then the second key one is the tritium.
08:16Tritium does not exist in nature.
08:19It's not naturally available.
08:21You need from lithium, if I remember well.
08:23You get it from lithium by using the fusion neutrons
08:25to bombard the lithium to produce tritium,
08:28and then you extract the tritium from the walls of your reactor
08:31and feed it back into the reaction.
08:33Now, there are at best anywhere in the world at the moment,
08:37in the public domain, about 25 kilos of tritium.
08:41So, on the whole planet.
08:43And ITER will consume 17 of them in its lifetime.
08:46So, you can imagine if you build more than one ITER,
08:49you run out of fuel.
08:50So, the reactors have to generate their own fuel.
08:52We know how to do it in prototypical stage.
08:56We've been working on it for decades.
08:58ITER will test some of the prototypes,
09:00but there has never been a demonstration of steady-state,
09:03long-term tritium production.
09:04And that's a major challenge that all approaches using deuterium,
09:08tritium have to overcome.
09:10But I am confident we can do it.
09:12There is a massive research area on this,
09:14and it's not like we don't know how to do it.
09:17We just need the fusion neutrons.
09:19And fusion neutrons can only be produced by the DT reaction.
09:23So, you need to make the reactor to breed the neutrons
09:25to see if you can make the tritium.
09:29So, Armut, in fact, Marvel Fusion utilises an alternative technology,
09:34which is lasers to confine plasma,
09:37which is very different from magnetic.
09:39Could you explain how it works?
09:41And could you also tell us about the pros and the cons of the technology?
09:44Well, okay.
09:47There are different strategies to achieve a technological realisation of fusion.
09:56So, the underlying physics is quite universal in both of these strategies.
10:03So, one is magnetic confinement fusion, or the commercial version of it, MFE.
10:10And the other one is inertial confinement fusion,
10:14or inertial fusion energy in a commercial context.
10:19And what distinguishes, you know, the inertial fusion energy concept
10:25from the magnetic fusion concept is that we try to establish
10:31what Richard called confinement by inertial confinement, not magnetic confinement.
10:39And the technology that we use are lasers.
10:48So, the lasers provide external energy, and they establish, you know,
10:54or bring the fuel into a condition that is then sufficient for fusion.
11:02And so, we try to have extremely small targets, which we irradiate by intense laser radiation,
11:11and then they explode.
11:13And then we try to repeat this process, you know, sufficiently frequently
11:18in order to get a quasi-continuous energy production.
11:22What are the pros and the cons?
11:26Well, we believe that the inertial confinement fusion approach
11:33can also utilize fuels that are not purely DT.
11:39We also believe, you know, that there might be some benefit
11:43in separating the energy delivery source, so many energy drivers, from the target.
11:51And it might be that, you know, less material is required for a reactor.
12:00But that needs to be seen, yeah?
12:02But the tridium breeding problem is there as well.
12:06The confinement problem is there as well.
12:09And what ultimately will succeed is unclear, I'd say.
12:12So, I believe, I advocate a multi-pathway, you know, broad approach to fusion.
12:21Yeah, I mean, just to remind you, plasma, I don't know if you know, it's the fourth state of material.
12:27You know, there's liquid, there's gas, and there's solid.
12:31And plasma, it's when it goes over a certain temperature.
12:36And the problem is that you just can't put materials, like for fission, close to it.
12:41So, you need a confinement meter.
12:42So, these are the two different meters that are used.
12:45And in addition, one of the other problems of fusion is that you need to have a certain amount of
12:50energy to get much more energy.
12:54It's like, sometimes we say, an amplifier of energy.
12:58And just to tell you at first, in fact, fusion reaction was with Bomb H in 1956 or something like
13:04that.
13:05Or 51, I'm not sure.
13:06I wasn't born at that time.
13:08And, in fact, they used an atomic bomb to, in fact, create a fusion, in fact.
13:16But the problem now is how do you manage to canalize, in fact, or to channel, I would say, a
13:22channel of this energy to make it happen and put it in the grid.
13:26And, in fact, that's really one of the questions I wanted to see.
13:28When do you see, or foresee, I would say, the first fusion reactor will be connected to the electricity grid?
13:35And what are the prerequisites, in addition to what you said, to achieve this milestone?
13:41So, for you.
13:44Okay, that's the $65,000 question.
13:47And it depends on who you ask.
13:50As fusion has always been said to be 30 or 40 years away.
13:54No matter which year, whether you start 50 years ago or now, people say it will never come.
13:59Well, it will.
14:00The question is when.
14:02I would say it has to.
14:04And I think that we are now today, especially with the advancement of the ETA project,
14:09with demonstration of ignition in NIF in the US for inertial confinement,
14:14and the big private sector initiatives that are coming,
14:18which are driven largely by the successes that are seen in the public domain,
14:22I would say that we are no longer 50 years away,
14:26but I would still say we are 30, 40 years away.
14:31That would be my own personal assessment.
14:32I believe that if you go down the route of ETA,
14:35the magnetic confinement principle, the tokamak principle,
14:38which is just one option, but it's the most advanced and the most researched in the world right now,
14:43which is why we are building ETA, because it's based on seven decades of research into this line of fusion.
14:51I personally have been working four of them out of the seven,
14:54so I know a little bit that we are getting very close.
14:57But what you need is to make sure that, as Hartmut said, you have to scale.
15:04So ETA will demonstrate the feasibility and a lot of the technology that is needed,
15:10but you need to build many of these reactors.
15:13If you would like to supply, say, 10% of the world's electricity demand today,
15:18you need more than 1,000 ETAs, but even bigger.
15:22And not just ETAs that are demos and that are prototypes and testing reactors,
15:27but real ones that work, that generate electricity 24-7.
15:31And I would say that without a massive international effort,
15:34which you might argue is needed to combat the climate change problems that we see,
15:40without that effort, I don't think humanity can build enough reactors quickly enough
15:44to make a big dent on the climate change problem.
15:47But certainly if we accelerate and we get massive industrial input soon,
15:52we can get to the point where we can get a first reactor onto the grid,
15:57say, in 30 years' time. That would be my personal guess.
16:01And then after that, we've got to accelerate very, very quickly.
16:05Armart?
16:06Yeah. So, as has been pointed out, the Americans at their National Ignition Facility
16:18have achieved a target gain.
16:21Target gain is a, for the IFE concept, a very important first step.
16:27So the GENI, in a sense, is out of the box, yeah?
16:31So everybody believes, you know,
16:33that sooner or later fusion energy will work personally i believe that fusion energy is
16:39absolutely necessary for mankind and what's the time scale so being a representative of a startup
16:47i have to be extremely optimistic so i of course say yeah that it's not 30 years out so it's
16:55probably will mature sooner but to be honest you know we have to see yeah it's a complicated
17:02technological path that we have to conquer and so yeah we'll see so yeah who knows i mean
17:10the private sector is now opening up and that of course brings many new minds many new ideas
17:19yeah many new approaches you know simultaneously to the table and maybe that will help so i'm
17:26hoping for this yeah i mean i didn't introduce myself but i'm a spokesperson spokesperson of
17:32an association called the shifters of the shift project and it's true that climate change i mean
17:38we're also thinking how to reduce our impact and to mitigate in fact carbon and it's true that when
17:45what from what you say i mean the timelines are very different i mean we're not in the urgency
17:50i mean fission is not going to come into the urgency of 10 or 20 or 30 years but it's
17:55going
17:55to come later and it's true that we have to also think of what's going to be uh how it's
18:01going to
18:01be mankind after those 30 50 100 years we'll see if we'll be able to have nuclear fission or not
18:07question but i think i i don't want to disappoint anybody but i don't believe fusion is help is going
18:15to help the climate problem humanity has to act quick and do something different very quickly
18:19my personal opinion push up the renewables as fast as you can as get them out as fast and as
18:26and the largest scale possible but you need to replace the base load generation capacity that's
18:32fossil fuels right now more than 60 percent of the world's electricity generation that's got to come
18:36from nuclear fission for me and then fusion comes along in the background we're getting there and at some
18:42point you take the fission out and you replace it with fusion but i don't believe on scale that is
18:47even perhaps this century but denying that fission is the answer i don't see any other option i am very
18:55sorry not for high generation base load capacity yeah which means that we don't have we don't have a kind
19:01of illusion that it will bring this over problem now um we'll discuss about investment also i mean the
19:08united states and china are increasingly investing in fusion power with numerous startups and projects for china
19:14could you tell us how their investment in fusion technology compares with europe and what are the
19:20advancements in that domain
19:25yeah so you are right the u.s has a massive influx of private funding in recent years stimulated by
19:32the inertial fusion um um uh records that have been reached and by many other things um but the public
19:40sector still doesn't invest as much as the private sector now china on the other hand i was there very
19:45recently they have a really serious fusion program they've decided that they got to push it hard and
19:50when china decides to push it hard then it goes very hard so i think china will get there uh
19:56probably
19:56even earlier than we will at eta at least to the stage that we would like to reach um in
20:03europe we
20:04have this very diverse multi-country um effort in magnetic confinement fusion almost every country has a
20:11small research device or a medium device everybody's pushing their efforts into eta i think what has to
20:16happen is basically a more of what eta is doing so basically we we take the academic side we take
20:24the
20:24engineering industry side we meld them together to build a research device in the end but which
20:28contains many of the features of technology you need for a reactor if we really want to go faster
20:34in europe i think we have to foster more of the academic uh fusion research laboratory industrial
20:40um collaborations and at some point get industry really involved into the point where they are equal
20:47players or even bigger players inside uh inside the the development and the problem is that if you don't see
20:53a
20:53profit it's hard sometimes to get industry involved so there needs to be a big public private push
20:58that goes along in parallel with eta you don't have to wait for all of eta's results to be
21:03on the table before you build your demo reactor i don't think but it's certainly there will be some
21:08things that eta needs to show before you can really commit to a strong uh forward push uh that brings
21:15industry on on a large scale yeah which is also interesting is that it brings together a lot of
21:20many different um countries together different companies and maybe also the methodology of how
21:26it works and because there's also a lot of different projects i mean they could be used also maybe to
21:31address climate change or energy armit what also what are your thoughts on um yeah united states china
21:36and also europe well fusion well china is extremely committed and dedicated and they are also very fast and
21:46they pursue a very broad approach to fusion that one can say i'm not informed about the specific you know
21:54amount of money they put into fusion but what i've recently heard at a conference in the united states is
22:02that the private money in fusion is almost six times the public spending at this point and that is
22:12extremely encouraging and there's also this idea to have these public private partnerships yeah so
22:19that public and private entities work together and i believe that in this combination it is extremely
22:27promising yeah and uh it's true that um by i mean mixing all and diverse having diverse yeah what's what
22:37i
22:37what i said what i said you said before diversity brings up new ideas being a native innovative especially
22:43when for instance you're facing so much uh challenges i mean you have to diverse team and and it goes
22:51a bit
22:51of the other way but currently the geopolitics they go the other way around i mean everyone is
22:55king blocks against each other so uh hope that also will give some ideas um also i mean what could
23:03europe
23:03do maybe to um bring more pace or uh to uh to fusion energy well i think it's a bit
23:13what i just said get
23:15industry much more involved now if you look at the ether model we are a hybrid between an academic research
23:20institute and a fully industrial complex so we have industry already fully engaged because they're
23:26building the big components but we also have a lot of research element we have to engage the full fusion
23:31community so it's somewhere in between not corporate we don't depend on investors we don't depend on
23:37profits we depend on the goodwill of the science ministries of all the participating countries we don't
23:43have to work to the same deadlines you would in a corporate environment but if you start to bring
23:48industry in early into your various programs that are being developed in the different european countries
23:53encourage them in from the start and and don't don't forget that because of either european
23:59industry also already has a lot of knowledge that it needs to so you should bring the industry in when
24:04you're planning your next step facilities from the beginning get these public private ventures
24:09engage profit from this massive surge of private interest in infusion and uh armut well i mean i believe
24:18it's very important that the public understands the immense impact fusion could have on uh the uh let's say
24:27cultural level of society so it is a very high gain potentially high gain endeavor and um it would really
24:37change a lot and so um what we do is of course um we try to come up with new
24:43ideas and concepts so that we
24:45get a broader scope a broader view on possible solutions in the context and so uh if you all you
24:53know work
24:54together i think we make it work and it will end up with a better life for all of us
24:58i guess
24:59well thanks a lot uh richard and ermut for uh for your talk thanks for all of you for listening
25:11i wish you the best and have a nice day at vivatech see you
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