The need for fusion – with the UK Atomic Energy Authority

Explore and delve into fusion energy’s complex scientific underpinnings.

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This lecture was filmed on 21 October 2023, in collaboration with the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).

Join us for a captivating academic discourse on the need for fusion energy, where audiences are invited to explore and delve into fusion energy’s complex scientific underpinnings.

Mark Maslin, a preeminent researcher from UCL, talks about the interplay between fusion energy’s development and its positioning in the broader energy market. Dennis Whyte, a respected scholar from MIT, delves into the formidable complexities of plasma physics, a crucial aspect of the fusion process. And Jenny Cane from UKAEA, an expert in fusion engineering, demonstrates the importance of integrated design and materials research in fusion energy development.

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Jenny Cane is the Technical Lead for the STEP In-Vessel Components, responsible for the design and performance of the systems that lay closest to the plasma – the Blanket, First Wall, Divertor, Shielding, Limiters and Vacuum-Vessel.   After graduating from a DPhil in the Aerodynamics and Heat Transfer of Ramjet Engines at Oxford University Jenny decided to move into renewable energy engineering and spent 7 years at the Wind Turbine manufacturer – Vestas,  working as a control; project; and aerodynamics engineer both in the UK and the USA.   Jenny began working as an thermo-hydraulics engineer at UKAEA in 2013 working on the JET safety case.  She then moved into a lead engineer role for JET as it prepared for the record breaking deuterium-tritium campaigns; before moving to the STEP programme in 2019.  She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, has two children and enjoys, running, cycling, tap dancing and gardening in her spare time. 

Mark Maslin FRGS, FRSA is a Professor of Earth System Science at UCL and the Natural History Museum of Denmark. He is also Strategy Advisor to Lansons, Net Zero Now, a CSR Board member of Sopra Steria and a member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. He is a leading scientist with particular interest in understanding climate change and the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.  He has published over 190 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, and The Lancet. He has received research, consultancy and training funding worth over £75m from government, charities, NGOs and the private sector. He was the only climatologist on the original 2009 The Lancet report on climate change and global health and is a co-author on the annual Lancet Countdown reports that started in 2015. Mark has written 10 books and 100 popular articles (e.g., New Scientist, Independent, Guardian, Telegraph, New York Times and The Conversation on which he currently has over 5.5 million reads). He regularly appears on radio and television, including BBC One David Attenborough’s ‘Climate Change: the facts’. His books include ‘Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction – 4th edition’ (2021), ‘The Cradle of Humanity’ (2019), ‘The Human Planet’ with Simon Lewis (2018) and his latest book is ‘How to Save Our Planet: the Facts’ (2021).  Mark was recently named the Number 1 Global Sustainability thought leader and influencer of 2023.   

Tim Bestwick is Chief Development Officer and Deputy CEO at the UK Atomic Energy Authority.  Tim joined UKAEA in 2018 after leading commercialisation and innovation from big science programmes and campus development at Harwell and Daresbury. Following a career in corporate research in electronic devices and optoelectronics – including IBM and Sharp – Tim has been involved in establishing and growing multiple technology start-up companies. He was Chair of the Eureka Network, the major international business to business innovation network and is Chair of the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. Tim was awarded an OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours List in 2023 for services to the commercialisation of science, technology, and innovation.

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Good evening let me add my welcome to hassans to the Royal Institution I’m Tim bestwick I’m from the UK’s atomic energy Authority and we’re the UK organization that is developing Fusion so Fusion has been in the news recently it has an increasing media presence for a long time it was really a

Research topic but really now it’s becoming much more prominent and we thought together with Royal Institution it was a good opportunity now to look Beyond those headlines dig a little bit into it and ask some of the questions and go in a bit further behind what we read in the

Headlines in the media so we’ve put together a series of three lectures and this is the first one tonight and tonight we’re going to concentrate on two questions really broadly speaking it’s why do we need Fusion an important question I think and the second one is

Broadly why is it so difficult and that last one we’re going to split into two there the difficulty and the challenges of the plasma and then harnessing that to do what we need to produce energy so the word expert is often thrown around a bit Loosely perhaps but

Tonight we have three speakers who genuinely are true experts and thought leaders in their fields and I’m delighted that to take us through those aspects of fusion we have Mark mlin Dennis white and Jenny who are going to talk to us about those questions why do

We need fusion and why is it so difficult and first up we have [Applause] mark thank you very much Tim so I’m literally the opening act I’m here to try to persuade you that Fusion is critical because of the state of the planet I love this cartoon we all

Suffered under covid we all had our lives restricted and we were all worried about flattening the curve but what was really interesting was while we all closeted and we were stuck we realized that climate change was a bigger threat that was coming down the future and so

It’s really quite apt that we’re here so if we go back 150 years Unice foot an American female scientist and activist she discovered the greenhouse effect very simple she took two test tubes one filled with air one filled with CO2 she puts thermometers in them and left them

Out in the sun and recorded the one with CO2 got hotter quicker got to a higher temperature and lost the heat slower than one with air and the next year she published it and it was presented at a conference by her male colleague but things have moved on now okay as you

Will see from today um and then John Tindle five years later here in the Royal Institution used this equipment which is somewhere in the dusty basements here I can assure you and used a thermocouple to show how much heat each gas absorbed and he realized that water vapor was the most important

Greenhouse gas followed by carbon dioxide methane so we know about the greenhouse effect 150 years ago but what is climate change because we hear it banded around in the media a lot we also hear lots of people going oh it’s nothing to worry about well if you think about it the

Sun’s energy which does come from Fusion see There’s the link okay comes from Fusion this energy is mainly in the light okay it’s a short wave radiation and it hits the Earth about a third of it bounces straight back into space of white clouds of ice sheets because of

That refle reflective albo 2/3 hits the earth now just imagine you’re not here you’re on a tropical beach just imagine you’ve got your favorite cocktail M A majito and what happens you feel hot that’s because the light energy is hitting your skin and it’s converting to

Heat and you’re radiating that uh skin I was going to say radiate that heat away from you the Earth does exactly the same and it gives that heat up to the atmosphere and this is where the magic of the greenhouse gases come in water vapor methane and CO2 they absorb some

Of that heat they hold on to it and they keep the world nice and warm strip out those uh greenhouse gases and the temperature of the Earth would drop by about 35° so let’s be generous so that would be an English winter of say minus 15 and

An English no actually an English summer of-5 and English winter of aboutus 35 okay so greenhouse gases are good except in 1938 okay this is not suddenly discovered in the ‘ 80s it’s 1938 and Guy calendar shows with temperature data from around the world and some CO2 data that had been measured

That temperatures were already rising and he worked for the British coal board so he knew burning coal produced CO2 and he was the first person to talk about global warming and it was already happening yeah we sort of ignored it from then so CO2 this is the classic

Keeling curve we’ve now uh made CO2 in the atmosphere 50% higher than it was during pre-industrial times methane is 150% higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution and I can tell you as a paleoclimatologist it’s been uh the highest time it’s been about the same

Same is about 3 million years ago so we’re pushing the atmosphere out of its normal alignment and they are killing curve going up every single year now this is where a little bit of a uh audience participation be honest because the cameras are facing me not you so

You’re fine how many of you actually like skiing and snowboarding yes okay um memo you need to do it really quickly okay so the the top left graph guess what Northern Hemisphere snow cover has been dropping every single year since the 1960s if we look at Sea ice extent in

The Arctic uh it’s been reducing we also have probably the smallest amount of sea ice in the Antarctic we’ve ever recorded this year and the one that really worries me and this is very esoteric and very geeky is the heat content of the upper ocean so that’s the top thousand M

Remember the oceans cover 70% of the earth and it’s just absorbing heat we know it has a high inertia and therefore there’s a lot of energy being stored there and the slow creep of sea level which is never going to catch us unawares but is rising at about 8 to 9

Mm per year it’s ra ridden by about 24 cm so that’s the evidence that climate change has already happened and of course air temperatures highly variable but as you can see strong warming through the last 100 years and 2020 was the warmest year on record yeah and I’m going to put a bet

Down which I know I’m going to win 2023 will be warmer I’m probably by quite a lot I’m also presenting now graphs I know all of you are here to see wonderful physics graphs but you know graphs are not for everybody so Ed Hawkings from uh Reading university

Beautifully put the climate stripes or the warming stripes and so this is what they look like for England since the 1850s blue cold red warm and this has also become a bit of a cottage industry so um you can have a tie okay and the thing is sometimes I give this same talk

To um CEOs and big companies and so I say look if you can afford to Tesla you can afford to wrap it properly you know show your true Stripes okay uh t-shirt I can I can uh I can uh afford the T-shirt uh I’m not going to wear the leggings

Okay that that really will put you off and of course the face mask that luckily we now don’t have to wear all the time so let’s be serious about the events that have happened so for me last year was a seminal moment we had a 40° heat wave in

London the peak temperature the peak temperature for July for the last decade is 24° this was 16° warmer than it should have been and 3,000 excess deaths occurred in those two days because of that heat and look what’s happened to 2023 one of the warmest actually the warmest summer we’ve ever recorded Ed

And you’ve seen all the extreme events now this is on the Noah website the floods in Pakistan 30 million people affected the heat waves in North America in southern Europe and in China we’ve seen them happening more and more so what about the future okay I’m a

Scientist so I’d like to have lots of little Earths I’d like to double CO2 half CO2 you know bit like the physicist they actually get to play where we’ve only got one and we’re sort of doing a really massive experiment on it anyway so I’m not allowed to play anymore so

How do we do it supercomputers so we have grided networks around the earth which basically go into the Earth go into the ocean vegetation into the atmosphere we have Cloud models we have the chemistry and on the hang on right hand side this is the increase in computer models so the first

Models that were produced for the 1990 report of the ipcc as you can see um bit of a joke here guess what uh Europe really was part of Britain so yeah no brexit then um as you can see now unfortunately we have much higher resolution models down

To sort of like 100 or sometimes 50 kilm and we have this fantastic Revolution now the reason being is because of guess what computer power computer power has gone exponential but the really interesting thing is the story is exactly the same you take the world you put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere it

Warms up it causes climate change so the science has got more and more uh detail we have more and more knowledge and guess what it’s exactly the same as we knew in 1990 right so what does the future look like because again guess what the physics is really good the chemistry is

Really good the science is really good guess what the problem is yeah you lot and by you lot I don’t mean the people in this audience I mean all the8 billion of us okay um how many are there going to be by 20150 um how are we going to

Generate our energy how are we going to make our food and so therefore with economists and social scientists we create scenarios which is a plight way of going future stories and so the the red one the red one is we had no climate policies this is something I was talking

To people about 10 years ago we’re looking at 4 to 5 1 half degrees warming that’s not going to happen current policies 3.1 to 3.7 de and if all the pledges made at cop 26 and the other climate meetings are fulfilled 2.4 to 2.8 that’s still nowhere near the 2 Dee

One that we promised the leaders of the world promised in Paris in 2015 and it’s certainly nowhere near the 1.5 remember we’re at 1.2 already so what are the effects of climate change just to really upset you and then I’ll move on to Solutions more extreme storms floods droughts heat waves and wildfires

We’ve seen those which may lead to food and water insecurity but I’m going to talk about that we make enough food to feed 10 billion people but there are still hungry people in the world may lead to migration and conflict well possibly but if you look around the world at conflicts they’re

Not because of environmental problems they’re because of politics may lead to tipping points so just to actually uh put some tipping points up there are major areas of the world that when we go above 1 and a half degre and definitely above 2° scientists that I trust believe that there are

Points where the Amazon will start to die off the arctic ice will move and melt we will lose parts of Greenland and Western antarctic ice sheet we haven’t got there yet we don’t think so Paris agreement and this is where I have to say yeah as an

Englishman I have to say oh the French were magnificent okay whenever I say that that stresses me but they were brilliant they got the whole world to agree to keep climate change to 2° and if possible one and a half deg and in their statement they said well the achieving

This will require the complete transformation of energy generation okay industry infrastructure and personal behaviors okay guys so you’re one of the four bits um and this is the reason why the deadline is the increase in emissions up until last year it doesn’t have last year because 2022

Was the most greenhouse gases we ever pumped into the atmosphere in a year so no we haven’t flattened the curve we haven’t even sto the rise now if we want to keep to 1 and a 12° we need to get to Net Zero by 2050 okay so that means nobody admits

Anything or if they do they have a mechanism for sucking out like growing forests or uh direct air capture and then this is the bit where I’m a little bit quiet CU what we don’t tell you is once we get there which will be an amazing achievement well done um

Yeah we have to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere for the next 50 years to keep it at 1 and a half degrees but I’m not going to tell you that CU it’s really bad anyway right moving on so where are we with this so 80% of the world’s energy now is

Produced by fossil fuels 80% now but you all know that Renewables are going mad we’ve got exponential growth in solar in wind in electric vehicles 26% of all cars sold in China last year were electric batteries exponential but all that is doing is eating up the increased demand in energy

That the world has every single year Simon Sharp’s book uh brilliant book basically summarizes in 250 pages I can summarize it he says we’re doing brilliantly but we have to do everything five times faster five times faster okay but this is interesting because what it means is by

2050 we have to get rid of that 80% of fossil fuel and guess what we need Renewables we also need to think about how we actually increase energy there’s a huge population that doesn’t have enough energy and there’s a huge population that has too much energy and producing

Lots of CO2 this is the energy poverty and CO2 emission curve and think at the state of the world now 7 million children die needlessly every every year because of preventable diseases and starvation that’s the population of greater London 80 sorry 8825 million people go to bed feeling

Hungry every night that’s gone up by 25 million For the First Time In The Last 5 Years in a world where we produce enough food for 10 billion people 1 billion people have no access to clean safe drinking water and 1.1 billion that’s one in eight people do not have access to

Electricity which is madness we have all of the ability to make that and make it without CO2 I’m also going to point out that actually if we look at emissions the top richest 10% and by the way all of you unless you’re a student all of you okay

Are part of that 10% produce 50% of the lifestyle emissions going into the atmosphere so this is a rich person’s problem that we need to deal with at this moment in time and I’m going to leave you with this one thought and this is why Fusion is absolutely essential the most conservative estimate

For energy growth by 2050 is that we need to double it others who are very respected like McKenzie suggest it might triple so think about it today we have to produce 80% of the energy for the whole world as Renewables by 2050 we have to produce 180% of energy as Renewables or even

280% of energy think about that that’s the first thing the scale the second thing is when I actually said this at the fusion 2020 sorry 2022 conference here in the science museum last year I also turned around to them and went and just think how much

Money that is worth if you can produce 280% of the world’s energy from Fusion so it’s not just a science we really do need Fusion to make up the gap between what Renewables can do and what we need to actually lift everybody out of energy poverty out of poverty and

Make sure that we have a clean world and we stay below that 1.5° thank you very [Applause] much I’m now going to pass over to Dennis he’s going to tell us how we’re going to do it oh yeah no pressure yeah thank you for that uh it is really important to understand

This context and in a sense my comment to this is like you’re going to see that Fusion is not easy but this is why we need to try it so the slides coming up there we go okay so the answer is actually in front of us because life in the universe and

You are possible because of fusion because it’s the power this the process that powers stars and stars and our own Sun essentially conversion engines that take hydrogen the most abundant element in the universe and convert it into helium so on Earth the idea is we actually take heavy forms of hydrogen

These ones that we fuse them together like happens in the center so means we Jam them together and on the other side of this we remake the elements that were originally there it turns out the things on the right have less Mass mass than the things on the left where does that

Mass go it goes into energy by eal mc^ S an equation you might have heard of before so what does this mean this releases enormous amounts of energy and it can become a terrestrial source of energy with effectively inexhaustible fuel source it’s intrinsically safe and it has high power density which are the

Features of what we see we’re required as well too let’s walk through this where does this come from it comes so it’s not a it’s not a typical energy source of how you’re thinking of hydrogen or carbon based fuels which come from chemical reactions this comes from the rearrangement of the nuclei

Themselves at what’s makes it what’s is what makes the element uh its own identity so just a a brief recollection the nucleus which is makes up an incredibly small fraction but almost all the mass of the atom is made up of protons and neutrons and it’s surrounded by electrons chemical reactions come

From rearranging electron orbits these sources come from this famous curve which is the thing that’s on the on the right hand side which tells us that for all we know this that uh in fact because of Rutherford who discovered the nucleus is that if you look at the masses and

Therefore the the energy stability of all of the existing Isotopes this makes this very famous curve and what this shows you is that the most stable element is iron so anything that’s on the right and goes up this curve releases energy by equals mc^ 2 and that’s fision which is on the right

Because you take the heaviest most uh unstable nuclei and split them apart and that makes fusion and because it goes up the curve it releases energy this is traditional nuclear energy Fusion is literally the opposite process what it does it takes the lightest Elements which are on the left hand side of the

Curve and boosts them up so what does this mean numerically it’s really important to look at numbers so if you take a look at the energy per a mass of this is that chemical reactions have I’ll just use this unit conveniently of I’ll just make that one and if you look

At Fusion you get something like 5 million times the energy per mass of that and fusion is is around 1 fth of this this comes from the fundamental fact that you’re changing ma much larger mass and therefore the energy is released the way that we know this by

The way is that this is why the sun lasts is going to last for about 10 billion years has a very hard time converting all the fuel because of how much energy is released then what’s the other part well the threshold temperature how do you get it to burn is

That you know we’re familiar with this with fire Fusion has a requirement of 50 million degrees on Earth what okay um uh and uh Fusion is easy because it has zero temperature requirement but the fundamentals of this is that what what comes out of the product and what comes

Out of the burn of chemicals is the thing that we were just discussing which is co this has to come from it you can’t avoid it and what comes out of fision is a wide array of radioactive isotopes because it comes from the process and what comes out of fusion is helium and

Inert gas and a free Neutron so I’m going to explain this in a way that deals with essentially recycling we all like recycling Fusion works on Recycling and what I mean by this that Fusion Energy sustains Itself by by recycling its own heat and and also by recycling neutrons which are this fundamental

Aspect of it so how does it all start off so we this is the basic process so we take these two ones on the left duum and Trum you see them over here and they have well just start there they have an average energy this is this is in

Millions of units of those energies that I said were chem chemical energy this is a staggering uh energy in temperature because even at 01 that translate into Celsius at 100 million degre Cs and when you get to that condition the average energy of the particles is high enough that they can

Get close enough to fuse together and change into what’s on the right which is helium and this free Neutron and the amount of energy is way way bigger on the on the right hand side of the and on the left because of equal mc^2 so this

Tells us why Fusion is hard right away and it’s actually what stars are made of it’s called the plasma State because it’s very very hot and it’s at 100 million degrees so at this point you’re about ready to go home and what is it there’s the Rugby World Cup going on and

You’re ready to go you’re ready to go watch that and you’re saying wait you can actually make something 100 million degrees yes so this is from the the laboratory uh experiment at MIT in fact there’s a picture of the one that’s not too far from here just behind as well

Too yes we have routinely achieved 100 million degrees uh on the planet Earth uh and how this is done is that we actually use a containment system which has a very powerful magnetic field which basically allows us to suspend the star in place without actually being touching

A physical object and it uses a magnetic field that is around a million times the Earth’s magnetic field so this is also telling you it’s like oh yeah this is this is hard technology but in fact it is uh it is in fact in fact uh it is in

Fact feasible and it’s done in many experiments around the world so how does the rest of so imagine that you get 100 million degrees how what do you actually use this for well a very key point in this is that the energy that comes out of this is that a distinguishing feature

Of plasmas is that they’re made of particles that have electric charge uh and what this means is that the thing on the right which has electric charge is get gets contained by the same mechanism so this helium has extraordinarily high energy and because it has charged particles interacting with other charged

Particles on the left it essentially forces that energy to be recycled as heat back into that so this is the way that in fact the the Fusion fuel the plasma keeps itself hot through its own Fusion reactions we instinctively know this is true because tell me what what

Power source the sun is plugged into it isn’t plugged into anything because it keeps itself hot and then therefore enables all the remaining Fusion reactions weit we can actually get net energy from Fusion yes uh what’s cool about this slide that I couldn’t show this slide a year ago this was uh so

This is the national ignition facility at Lawrence uh at at a laboratory in the United States in California uh and in this amazing facility what they did was they had two units of this energy of of laser energy and they got three units of energy from the fusion that came out of

This um and it’s complex technology which I will not go through the important aspect of the science of this was they got to the place where that product that helium particle that is the product of the fusion was the dominant heating Source inside of the fuel it was

A star instantaneously on Earth so that’s pretty good for a group of uh you know for some uh from primates in running around we actually figured out how to make a star on the planet Earth that’s like that’s pretty aspiring and by the way this feature is so regardless

Of the technology that was used to get there this is a common science feature to any every energy source you basically have to make the star light up and then what’s the last part well you basically need to keep it going so what happens well most of the energy is actually in

This particle that has no electric charge called the neutron and it is going very very fast so this is good in in a way because it escapes any containment and what you have to do then but it contains 80% of the energy so you throw something in front of this so you

It’s not 100 million degrees anymore you throw an object like a glass like water it’s probably not going to be but anything that’s in the solid or liquid phase and what happens is this particle is forced to basically give up its energy through collisions into heat and

What’s the important part of this is that what does fusion produce on Earth it actually produces heat it’s not an electricity Source it’s a heat source so it goes to the other comment which was there as well too our the one of the challenges of the energy transition is

Not that we make electricity just electricity we have to replace all of our energy sources and energy uses not just those that which make electric electricity um and then finally we basically we we put lithium in front of this because there’s another reaction that occurs because tridium doesn’t

Actually exist naturally on Earth so we use this free neutron as a kind of catalyst because this greatly increases the the amount of fusion power that you can make in a given system this produces another helium particle and another one of these tritium particles it’s it’s not

Magic we actually do this uh and in the end what this means is that what goes into a power plant of fusion is Du iium and lithium and these don’t come out again these are the consumables and what you get out are two helium particles uh and this Neutron is actually recycled as

I said like a catalyst almost inside of it and the actual Ash particle of the fuel cycle itself is helium which is an inert harmless gas and you say wait we can change elements like Alchemy yes we do this in in fact I’m just showing this one perally because I’m proud of my

Students this was done by a set of MIT students two weeks two weeks ago they were sending these high energy neutrons into to a part to a special molten salt made it collide with lithium and they were measuring the trium that was made in this as well too so yes we are kind

Of the Alchemists of the modern era I guess we would call ourselves hey wow what you painting such a Rosy picture Dennis what’s waiting in front of us well these neutrons are very very intriguing and in fact you’ll hear more about this from the next speaker is

That the they’re so energetic that they can literally remake the elements inside any of the material that surround them and this is required because you have to capture the heat these have to be inside complex vacuum systems in the end we’ll see more about this in the end what we

Lack is the complex and integrated and reliable solutions that would make fusion economic energy source most of the science is actually we’ve grabbed this and actually demonstrated it so the science of Fusion Energy this is really important because it even though it’s difficult it drives the need for this is

Like there are no polluting emissions because you’re making helium certainly no carbon you have a freely available and inexhaustible fuel supply why is this it’s because the fuel comes from basically from water and it’s this is not and and you’re getting 20 million 5 to 20 million times the amount of energy

Than you would get from a chemical reaction you basically cannot run out of the fuel okay um uh you get flexible generation any everywhere and anywhere because you can turn it on when you want meltdowns are not possible because of the fact that it’s making helium which

Can no longer fuse so in the end you know that you can actually make energy at civilization scale so how does this all work the reason it works in stars is that the thing that we think of as hot at the surface of the sun which is at

Around 50 around 5,000 de cus the center of our sun is at around 20 million de C and that’s where the fusion is occurring so how does this all hang together if something’s getting really hot in the middle why doesn’t it just Escape into outer space and then cool off off

Because it can’t because it’s held in place by the gravity of the sun itself and this is why and gravity is an extremely weak Force fundamental Force so in the end this is why stars are incredibly large they’re not small by default so we have to overcome that and

Using much power more powerful force which is essentially electromagnetic force which is many orders of magnitude higher and the idea is we basically exert a force on these particles which are made up of the fuel and this means that then we can shrink down the size of

The star to something that we can fit on Earth into a power plant so how does this all work CU it all sounds confused how do you hold something at 100 million degrees you can’t what will happen is it will just get cold no Fusion will happen or we

Would melt the interior of this thing so we’re actually not using a physical object the purpose of that magnetic field is what we use are electromagnets which were probably demonstrated right here around this desk or something like this because understood by Faraday and amp here that you what you do in an

Electromagnet is you pass an electric current through a wire and put put it in a pattern this will make a strong magnetic field and these electromagnets make the magnetic field but the electromagnets have no idea there’s a Fusion fuel inside of them and the Fusion fuel actually has no idea that

There are electromagnets outside of them so it’s a force which is exerted at a distance and this allows you to hold it without physically touching it uh so why do we care about this well so this plasma is the state of matter when things get hot and this and we’re not very familiar

We don’t teach us very well in school by the way because about 99% of the universe is in the plasma State because that’s what all stars are so about 5,000 Dees that’s this because Fusion happens at 50 million degrees and above everything’s in the plasma state so the

Reason that we study plasmas it’s the equivalent of knowing a steam table and be able to build a locomotive back in the old days right and it also behaves very differently because it’s it its behavior is set by the fact that it interacts through the charges of the particles rather than just physically

Knocking into them as well too so what are all the conditions necessary to do this it’s like building a fire in the in the end what is required we all understand Building A Fire because this relies on recycling its heat rather than particles you have density of wood they

Have the temperature and then you put it into a configuration so that one log keeps the other logs hot as well too it’s the same infusion so except the extraordinary condition is the middle one the temperatur is at 100 around 100 million degrees C but in the primary way

That we’re considering doing magnetic Fusion the density of the particles is extremely tenuous 100,000 times less dense than air and you only have to hold it in place for 1 second voila you’ve got Fusion uh now here’s some equations which TR I’m not going to explain but in

The end actually it comes down to the same thing it’s the density of the fuel it’s the temperature and it’s how long you can contain the energy so I I have to show this plot because it was it was actually derived by a British scientist

In the 1950s John Lawson uh uh who who must have been at the Uka at the at that time Earth’s predecessor and realize this this basically set the conditions for making the star on Earth the key thing that to look at this is the horizontal axis is the temperature so 10

Which is 10 to the 1 which you see on there that that is 100 million degrees cels and then these configurations are it turns out it’s the product of the density of the fuel in the confinement time you hit these with any configuration you will start making that

Energy out of this system so I’m not going to show you these equations instead I’m going to point out a few interesting aspects of this so the temperature is extremely high but if you go to Magnetic Fusion and the densities that we have I say this has a this has a

A density of 100,000 times less dense than air so what this means is that the energy density of the fuel is less than boiling water it’s a lot less than boiling water this is also why Fusion is intrinsically safe it’s because you think how what happens if this escapes

Will it turn everything to 100 million degrees nothing happens because it just turns back to room temperature um uh and then a really key one is cuz the fusion reactions are controlled by heating not a chain reaction it’s physically impossible for the process to run away you you can’t actually create a meltdown

Even if you tried because it’s physically impossible and in the end the reason that we tried dyum Fusion that you can see by this plot where these are factors of 10 by the way on there it’s at least a factor of 10 easier in fact than any of the other fuel sources so

You say well wait we’ve actually okay so you’ve drawn this theoretical curve wait we’ve actually figured out how to put the fusion fire together and make net energy yes mostly um and what I mean by this is one of the extraordinary and in in the popular press or maybe your conception

Is that Fusion was uh an Endeavor that has failed far far from it if you look at this this is amazing to think over here again and these are these are factors of 10 by the way you start with some of the very earliest experiments in

Fact I see Zeta there which which is in fact a British experiment as well too ones in the US ones around the world we went up this and we improveed the we improved the performance of this both in temperature getting up to 10 which is 100 million degrees and towards these

Curves on the upper right which is where you start getting net energy out of the system those are real data points yes we have made temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees on the planet Earth and you can see about how we filled that out

We got right to the edge in fact of me starting to make net energy out of the system that’s in fact the next Frontier because now the key thing to make an economic and reliable energy source you must have a large ratio of fusion power out compared to the energy that you have

To put into it and we are right at The Verge in fact of that so I’ll conclude with this because if I hope I convinced you that this isn’t science fiction I mean it’s amazing science but it’s not science fiction uh and really what we

Have in front of us if you put all those together my my look at this as because of the compelling needs of climate change and the time scales we have both challenges and opportunities of commercial Fusion because we can do this in the lab for a long time but until we

Build units that actually get out and power the world is not going to make a difference and it has many amazing you get low marginal costs because the fuel is free so you get firm and rapable generation which is unlike uh what you get actually with Renewables it’s

Scalable because we should be able to build it anywhere and we can also leverage existing infrastructure which is a real what do we mean by that energy delivery because it makes heat and almost everything we use in the energy system uses heat already so we just replace the interior of that with a

Fusion device we can get there inherently safe as I com as I pointed out our challenges are really about making it economically competitive so that we get a high quality of heat at a low cost per unit of energy and then finally this what does it look like it

Looks like all the other hardtech innovations that the human species has taken on it takes more than science it takes integrated technology it takes Innovations in in fact how you finance it it takes Innovations in the kind of organizations that you build to do these things but we’ve done it because you

Already showed it like you look at this like the transistor was invented you know in the late 1950s and we turned it into this it’s like that’s the challenge in front of us because we need to re keep making those Innovations to make fusion a practical and reliable and

Economic energy source and that’s the topic of our next speaker so please welcome uh Jenny up [Applause] hello just wait for my slides to come up so I am taking you from Fusion experiments to fusion power plant um so I am Jenny Kane and I am the lead for

The team that is designing and delivering the vacuum vessel for the step prototype power plant step is a government Initiative Program where we are going to be building we are designing and we will be building a protype power plant that will produce net electricity to the grid and its own

Fuel right here in the UK in Nottinghamshire in West Burton so I am very much in the business of making power plants fusion power plants step stands for spherical toac for energy production so from that you get the idea I’m also into magnetic confinement Fusion so toax so we’ve been left from Dennis’s

Talk with a lot of very high kinetic energy neutrons you can see them all here in the red smashing into the the walls of our toac device into the center of our power plant but what we need to do is we need to convert those neutrons

Into the Heat we want to either go out directly to factories or to make hydrogen or convert it into electricity how do we do that well we do it in a power plant but the power plant will look incredibly similar as Dennis said to an oil or a gas or a fishing

Power plant all we’re doing is changing the kettle in the middle the bit that makes the Heat and so all we do is we add into the our Fusion toac but how do we make it commercially viable well first of all we better produce some electricity out e so

We’ll talk a bit about that we then as Dennis mentioned we need to produce that tritium Fuel and most importantly of course it needs to be at a price in the end that we can all afford that the world can afford and that means it needs to have the availability that we need

And it needs to be fast to maintain now we we need to take those first big steps to net energy production and Fuel self-sufficiency and on the way start getting an idea of how maintainability and availability will work so let’s home in now on that kettle onto the toac this

Is a preconceptual design of the step toac so you’ve got those magnets around there they’re driving the plasma and they’re containing the plasma we then get to the bits I’m really interested in because we’ve got the vacuum vessel we need to be working with a a vacuum

Inside that plasma chamber to make the fusion happen there the exhaust to get that helium gas uh Ash out and we also in a spherical toer back have a very narrow Center column it’s about 3 m in diameter is on a spherical toac of this kind of scale and we’ve got to Shield

Those magnets CU those magnets do not like radiation and what are we doing we’re pumping out neutrons so I’m going to touch a little bit on that but mainly what I’m going to talk about is this bit because all the other things I just showed they already exist in Fusion experiments all

Around the world we already have all those parts of the fusion power plant but we don’t yet have the blankets now blankets are incredibly important because they are the bit that convert a fusion experimental machine to a fusion power plant they are the bit that r W around that’s why they’re called a

Blanket they wrap around the plasma and they the neutrons crash into them we have some kind of a coolant it could be a liquid it could be gas that those nutrients go into and they convert the kinetic energy into the heat energy that go then goes off to the turbines or

Directly out to the industry or your homes and get and it either gets converted to electricity or we use it as heat they also need to breed the tritium that we need as we said we tritium is not naturally abundant doesn’t naturally occur on Earth and at the moment we have

Kind of tens of kilograms of tritium in the world that’s fine because our experimental reactors they only use grams of tritium but once we get to power plants we’re kind of in their hundred hundreds of uh kilograms kind of place but that’s okay because we can generate it ourselves because of that

Lovely situation that you high have highy neutrons that go into lithium and you can produce tritium we can breed our own tritium our own fuel we also need to survive that plasma so the blanket also must survive the plasma more about that in a second and then that shielding aspect to stop those

Magnets on the outside becoming damaged so there you can see a nice schematic of our blanket it you’ve got your neutrons coming in very high temperature very high heat loads into your first wall into your breeding Zone where you’re going to make your tritium and your thermal extraction Zone into

The Shields and then you’re protecting those magnets let’s take each of them in turn survival first of all so what I’ve done is I’ve overlaid a radiative heat flux map onto our plasma and what you can see there is you’re getting one megawatt per M squared steady state on

That first wall that is equivalent to a jet engine or inside an internal combustion engine piston area and so you need to do something pretty fancy to make sure that you get that heat away and you aren’t going to destroy your first wall you put something pretty

Strong and hard on the front something like tungsten or maybe it’s a carbon or brillium and then you must be actively cooled so you need to get from that tungsten to something that is very highly th thermally conductive and into a pipe or a channel where you’re

Shooting through fluids uh it could be a liquid it could be a gas to take away that heat very similar to AET turbine engine and indeed we can use a lot of that technology in what we do in Fusion so you’ve got through your first wall

Which by the way is only a few centimeters at the most thick and don’t forget it must let the neutrons go through cuz it’s going to get to the blanket because it’s the blanket where you’re going to make the heat generation and you need to breathe that tritium so let’s talk about generating

Heat so you’ve got a sanky diagram or a version of one down on the bottom right there so that’s showing it’s what process Engineers uh use to put to work out how much energy in and out of a of a power plant so we put a little bit of

Heating power in just to get our plasma going that arrow is probably a bit big it goes into the the the plasma region and of course that’s where the magic happens that’s the enormous energy that we get out from our Plasma in the form of high kinetic energy neutrons they

Crash into our blanket and we extract that thermal power only then we’re going to we at least need to make some electricity to run our power plant we’ve got magnets to power we’ve got coolant to pump and all the other things you need in a power plant and then out of

That we need to make even more energy cuz that is what you and I are going to switch our kettles on with when we’ we’ve actually sold it to the grid and so that conversion loss from thermal energy to electricity is very important we know from thermodynamics it’s hard to

Get that efficiency up and the way you get it up is by running hot making the hot coolant that goes into your turbines as hot as you can and that’s where the graph above comes in at and it starts to give you a little pi picture of the

Trayes the difficulty of Engineering in the fusion regime because the red and blue line they’re a very standard fusions still we love using them in the fusion industry however you go above 600° with those and what you can see is the yield strength the strength of those materials drop you

Just can’t use them in a blanket when you’re running very hot that you need to get good electricity out to get a good efficiency for your electricity generation and so you start having to hunt around for other materials you might have to do some Advanced still um that that exists but needs development

Or you might start looking for a completely different kind of material that you don’t normally think of using and that could lead you to somewhere like vadium which isn’t a standard structural material but could work for a blanket particularly if it’s working with po pure liquid lithium so these are

The the kind of Trades we’re having to make this is the The Innovation that we are doing literally every day to make these things work let’s talk about breeding tritium so this is a picture of what Dennis described here you’ve got your neutrons they’re crashing into your lithium and you’re producing tritium and

You’ve got the equation down the bottom in case you’re interested however the re the the equation I’m really interested is the one that says Tran bre breeding ratio is the tritium generated in the blanket divided by the tritium that you need to run the plasma quite simply if

Your tritium breeding ratio is above one you do not need to buy any tritium if your tritium breeding ratio is below one you are going to need to find some tritium from somewhere so this tritium breeding ratio we live and die by it in the blanket design

Business so what might this blanket look like well this is a design that we showed at the Symposium of Fusion Energy conference back in the summer um so it’s a possible concept for step you’ve got these big segments of blanket that you could lift out for maintenance and those

Are separated into modules and you can see you’ve got your first wall there that’s the survival region of your blanket you then move into a breeding and heat generation area so in this design it’s a kind of a bath of something perhaps like lithium in there

Or maybe a uh pure a pure liquid lithium or a lithium lead in there and that is where the breeding is happening and then that liquid could get taken off and put into the fuel cycle the Trum extracted and poked back in you’ve then got coolant pipes going through that blanket

Region and that could have some different coolant in it maybe carbon dioxide or hel iium and that is getting the heat out and going off to the turbines but this is just one possible design for a blanket this is complicated and this is supposed to be complicated

This slide because you can make blankets at the moment in many different ways you can have a different First wall material you can have a different structural material you could have a solid breeder such as a lithium orthosilicate that then you put a purge gas through to take

Away your tritium we just don’t know which are the right ones to go for at the moment and which ones will be the the magic ones that get out net power and the tritium we need which are going to be the best ones and so what we are doing it’s not

Just at Uka all around the world what companies and organizations are doing is we’re unpicking this challenge it means going to multi physics joined up analysis code where we have to start with the plasma equilibrium which gives us our heat flux that will tell us what

Our first wall needs to be made of and how fast we need to run that coolant which in turn will tell us what the pressure inside that region is and how much structural material and what Structural Materials we could use you then go into the breeder area and you

Start picking breeders and you start picking coolants and you have to do the same thing and you start to build up a geometry and a structure for your blanket that structure is very important because just think about it every time you put a structural material into a

Breeder into a a breeding blanket you’ve got less room for breeder and a lower TBR you’re trying to make these lovely slender blanket designs and yet they need to stand up to all that magnetic field force and that heat as well so you’re playing with this and you run

Your neutronics analysis and you get your tritan breeding out so now you’ve got an optimization tool you’ve got a thing you can circle around and that is what allows us to start stepping towards the concepts we need to actually bring together the power plants that will produce tritium and produce net

Power once you’ve done all of that you start looking at how many neutrons you’ve got left over and you think to yourself okay I’ve got some magnets out the back there I better Shield it and in the center column that’s a really tough challenge you haven’t actually got a breeding blanket

For a spherical T back in there so you’ve got a lot of shielding to do you’ve got fast neutrons you’ve got low you’ve got um slower neutrons and you’ve got gamma but what you also have is really not a lot of space and so you have to go for something really dense

Something like a Tungsten is really where you need to be but even better if you put some bore on or some carbon into that tungsten it’s even better because then you can capture both the Fast and the slower neutrons and so this leads us

To some of the things that we do in the fusion industry we do things and say well tungsten pent B ride on paper looks really great should we make some and so we do we go away and we work with universities and organizations to actually start making things like Tung

And pent boride that didn’t exist before in real life now all we have to do is scale this up to something that’s about 20 M high and 3 m diameter but that is the job that we do and that is just one part of the design that

We have to Grapple with so I’ve kind of covered the green side of things this which is one part of sort of the trade area and all the decisions you have to make when you design a fusion power plant I’ve talked about which blanket you use and what temperature the coolant

Should be there’s also decisions just simple ones like how many diverter regions are you going to have or how big are you actually going to make your toac and what power cycle are you going to use and how are you going to maintain it and how many ports do you need to

Maintain it would it be vertical do you need to take your magnets apart these are all things that we have to do as Fusion Engineers but it’s also things that we literally are doing as Fuji Engineers this is now this is this is literally what I do every single day I

Go to work and I design a fusion power plant that we are going to build at West Burton in Nottingham we are no longer in the time of fusion experiments we are now in the time time of fusion power plants and this is what we do uh we do

Every day so I hope you show you that it sounds like science fiction but it’s actually science fact and not only that that we are moving from experiments to power plants that actually can power our homes in a carbon free way with abundant Fuel and I hope you find that as

Exciting as I [Applause] do [Applause]