The Future of Fusion Energy with Fatima Ebrahimi

0:00So Paul, finally catching up with what fusion is doing here on earth. What it's doing on Earth and where we're going to be. Because I know what it's doing in the universe. The sun is plasma. The sun. And doing fusion. The whole universe is this. How about on Earth's surface? We need it here. We need it now. And we need it locally. Yes. And save money. And when is it going to happen? That's going to be something we're going to find out.

0:26Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

0:40This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Paul Mercurio. Paul. What's up? Co-hosting today. Good to see you, my friend. Good to see you, man. It's always fun. Love you. And you're always doing interesting stuff. I'm trying. Yeah, you got your own like off-Broadway show? Yeah, and then it became Broadway, and now we're taking it out around the country. So I was going to ask you, when's it going to get on Broadway? Well, we're coming back to it. I'm tired of seeing you in the streets off Broadway. We ran into each other with nine people across from the late show.

1:10Off Broadway. They loved it, yeah. Permission to Speak, it's directed by Frank Oz. We love Frank Oz. Yeah, he's the best. And it involves people telling stories and connecting people through shared stories. So you're interacting with the audience? Yes, bringing them on stage and telling my own stories. We were just in Florida with it. We're gonna be in Rhode Island. And people can go to paulmccurio.com to see where we're gonna be. McCurio. McCurio, M-E-C-U-R-I-O. Love you. Love you. Love it. So, you know what we got today? The day has to arrive in all our lives when you want to be in arm's reach of a fusion expert.

1:43Well, I'm glad I could be here. You could be here. Oh, her. I'm sorry. Fatima Abrahimi. Did I pronounce that correctly? Fatima. Almost. Almost.

1:57Abrahimi. Yes, Fatima Abrahimi. Yeah, see, I got that, the last one. Okay. Yeah. I love it. You have a PhD in plasma physics. That's a whole thing. Not just physics. Yes. Plasma. Very specific. You got to say plasma. Plasma. You heard me. I said it right. And you're a research scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, PPPL. Correct. Out there in Princeton, New Jersey. Yes. Up Route 1, I think. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You should come. There's a fabulous Home Depot right there. Big fan. So this is, people have heard fusion. They've heard the word, and they've heard the word plasma, and most people think blood plasma.

2:46This is a completely different plasma. Blood plasma is like what's left over in your body. Body, right. I mean, after you take out the red blood cells. Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So this is not that at all. Right. No, not that at all. Let's start off, get the vocabulary on the table. What is a plasma? So plasma is the fourth state of matter, and it's 99 % of observable universe is plasma. So it's really the first state of matter. Exactly. You want to think of it that way. And it's very unstable, right? It's unstable. No, not necessarily. Don't disagree with me. Just because you wrote notes doesn't mean you're correct.

3:26Okay? Continue, Fatima. It's actually, we are all floating in a plasma state in our universe. So, and if you want to see what is actually plasma is, is when, you know, electrons are kind of freely moving and charged particles, negative charged particles, ions, positive charged particles. It's basically a soup of, you know, charged particles, as plasma is. All right. So why is it that we always, in physics, we see plasma joined together with the word fusion? Why are they relevant to each other? Because our sun, that Korean, that actually produces a lot of energy is through fusion energy. And that is in a plasma state.

4:21So plasma, in order to get a plasma, it has to be very hot. Yes. Nothing to think of as a cold plasma, is there? Yes, actually. For the case of fusion, it has to be 100 million degrees to actually achieve fusion. But plasmas, you know, they could have variety of temperature, it could be low temperature plasmas. Oh, but then you're not gonna have fusion. Exactly. Plasmas could also be lightning strikes. That's plasma. So I remember this, not a toy, this thing you could buy. Remember Spencer Gifts? Anyone older than 70 will remember Spencer Gifts. Lava lamps. Yeah, lava lamps. Well, one of them was this ball.

5:05It had this sort of glowing thing in it, and you put your hand on the ball, and it would react to your hand touching the surface. Exactly, because it's charged particles. You know, all of these, you know, the plasma kind of respond. It makes it glow. Exactly, glow, because particles could also can de-excite and kind of produce photons and lights and things. Okay, so the electrons recombine. Exactly. And every time they recombine, they give off light. Exactly. Right, okay. Excite and recombine and, you know, de-excite and you get the light. So that's a plasma that's not at very high temperature.

5:44Exactly. Right, exactly. Yes, like a candle is also a plasma. Or the flame. It's a flame, yes. The flame of a candle is, yeah. All right, so now you need high temperature for fusion. Yes. What are you fusing? It's actually required for fusion. High temperature is required to fuse really light atoms, hydrogen, and also isotope of hydrogen, heavier hydrogen, deuterium and a little bit heavier tritium with having two actually neutrons so they can collide and they can fuse and it has to be really really high temperature to be able to kind of overcome you know these forces and create a lot of energy through neutrons so the forces are because you have you have a positively charged proton over here and another positively charged of proton, light chargers repel.

6:43Right. Exactly. They don't want to get together. Right. Yes. And you're trying to overcome this. Exactly. With high temperature. Yes. Because high temperature means higher speeds. Yes. Within the soup. And you're able to achieve the high temperatures or we're still working toward the temperatures have to be high enough? The temperature actually can get very high temperature. But are we there yet? Yes. That's what the protons ask on their long journeys. Are we there yet? Are we there? I have to go to the bathroom. We're not pulling over.

7:15Yes, we achieve really, actually in the experiments or facilities that we have to create, you know, high temperature plasmas to get to fusion. We really get to high temperatures. The temperature we actually achieve in a fusion experiment is even hotter, you know, than the center of the sun. It's like 10 million degrees, something like that. Yes, this is 100 million degrees. What do you generate? What are you using? They're trying to make another star. Yes. What do you generate? Don't tell anyone. This isn't on, is it?

7:55This is the kind of stuff that like when you were a little girl, were you doing these kinds of experiments in your basement? And then your parents said, we got it. That's how the nemesis to superheroes are done. I'm going to make something hotter than the center of the sun. Yeah. We just got you an easy bake oven. Well, I'm going to turn it into - I gave it more power. I gave it more power, and now it's 10 million degrees. You know what I'm baking? Plasma, and you're going to like it. You want it with or without mozzarella cheese? Yeah. No, and then the lights of the town go - That's Fatima again.

8:32Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't have to confess to that. That's fine. So how do you get high temperature? Yes, how? Because as I understand it, in order to make the plasma high temperature, something else has to be at a higher temperature than it. Is that right? You get the high temperature because plasmas, you know, carry electrons and current, electricity, current, you could say. Because they can. They can, exactly. They can. So, therefore, they can get to very high speed and high temperature. So the question is that, so you get this soup, how do you, where it's going to go? So how do you confine it?

9:10If it's 100 million degrees, what are you putting it in to contain it, to control it? To control it is put a lot of energy through magnets. So a magnetic field, it's not a physical thing, so you can't melt that. Right. And all your charged particles, they respond to magnetic field. Electromagnetism. Right. It's another force that our universe is electromagnetic force. Yes, that is long range. It's one of the fundamental forces, you know, electromagnetic forces everywhere. You know, our sun, all the stars, you know, wherever you have plasma, you have electromagnetic forces and they respond to it.

9:53So you have the gas, you need to make the state of plasma, which means that you can have some waves going into the gas, like antennas, and create your plasma. You could induce inductively current into your particles, plasmas. It can go around your chamber, which we are talking about a tokamak chamber, a donut-shaped chamber. A tocomac. Yeah. Right, because Princeton has a tocomac. Yes, yes, it has a tocomac. What does that word even mean? Because it's Russian. Oh, it's Russian. That's a Russian name? It's two Russian scientists called this configuration tocomac. Toko and Mac. Yeah. They were a great act in the 70s in Atlantic City.

10:44They worked the Stardust. Toko and Mac. They worked the Flamingo. Okay, so I did not know that. It's named for actual scientists. No, it's not actual scientists. The two scientists actually called it. It's kind of their invention, tokamak. So when you say this chamber, the chamber is basically sort of harnessing or controlling the plasma. That's the donut shape. The donut shape, exactly. That is being heated up at incredible temperatures. Exactly. Various ways of heating the gas become plasma and heating the plasma to really, really high temperature. But are we heating it to the point where we're at the cusp of being able to use nuclear fusion and get nuclear fusion that then propel rockets through space much more quickly.

11:28The rocket is a plasma propulsion. You actually get rid of the plasma you make from the back of the rocket. You're not confining it with magnetic field. So the plasma rockets don't use fusion? Not necessarily. They don't have to use fusion. But if you kind of, you know that in space, we don't have any power or any, there is no gas station. The only thing we have is our sun sitting there and it's only going to give some amount of energy. There are rest stops with McDonald's. So if you want to go far, you need energy and you need fusion. If you're going to go stay around with solar panels, you have enough energy to use locally.

12:12You could use that for just propulsion. I remembered reading. Yes. Because I know enough to know that in any gas, at any temperature, not all particles are moving at the same speed. Some are slow. Some are fast. The temperature is the average speed that everybody's moving. All right. I remembered that there's some method where you can pick off the fastest moving particles and put them over here. And their average temperature is going to be higher than where they came from. Here we go. Treat them special. Put them in the slower group. But they're the fast class. Yeah, they're in a special class.

12:54Leave everybody else behind. Oh, my God. And so you're cherry picking the fastest moving particles. Is that a thing? Am I remembering that correctly? Conventionally, it's usually a collective heating. It's basically you have true current. It's like current. Now, plasma also carry current. Current itself can heat. Really, it can actually, it's basically ohmic heating. That's one way of heating the plasma. So, that heats up internally. Yes. It's not hotter on the outside. You make it hot on the inside. That's one way. That's a conventional way of actually heating up the plasma, the first way to do it.

13:49Hello, I'm Finky Broke-Allen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

14:08I spent 10 years at Princeton. Yes. And this is long ago. Yeah. Like, I'm an old man now. In my day. We didn't have electricity. She was just yelling and someone would hear us. So in my day at Princeton, every year there was talk of people saying, we're almost there by producing more energy than we put in, which would then make it an energy source for the world. A very inexpensive energy source using readily available ingredients like hydrogen, which you will find at your neighborhood water molecule. They would say, oh, we're just five years away. And that was 30 years ago. Yes. So what's going on?

14:57You're almost there. Oh, my God. Wait, wait. Let's back up. So Princeton has a tokamak, but Lawrence Livermore has a different configuration. So there are two approaches. One is just tokamak. Actually, Princeton has a special tokamak. It's called a spherical tokamak, which is kind of not like a donut. It's like a fat donut or corn. Corn, apple. How is that different than a standard toke? The nice thing is that it's more compact. Oh, okay. So that's, and other differences, but the main thing is - So a really puffy donut. Exactly, puffy. You could say that a puffy donut. It was created by a fluffinator.

15:42I remember that. Fluffinator, remember? I think so. So it's a tokemak, but a spherical tokemak, and it's very special because of compactness and other things. And so by using magnetic field, you actually confine the plasma. Okay, so there's that. So now let's go to Lawrence Livermore in Livermore, California. It's so-called inertial confinement. It means that by shooting lasers at a very small, dense target, you get fusion. So our plasma at PPP, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, is not that dense, but we have very high temperature. And so there's something we call a little bit specific, something called Lawson Criteria, which is basically the multiplication of the confinement time, how hot you get, your density.

16:37All of that combined. Combined, and if it's larger than something, you say that, oh, I achieved fusion. So inertial confinement has more... Generates a denser. Denser, exactly. Of all of those factors, is density the most important thing that gets you to— The sun gets high density for free because you're in the center of the freaking sun. It's dense there. So they get free density. But what you're generating at PPL is not as dense. Yes, it's confined. Sort of like it's what I would get at Walmart versus Saks. Like if I were buying a product, it would be like the lower end. That's the first time most of the stores have ever been in the same sentence.

17:16Ever. Wait, so you can have it dense but not hot or hot but not dense. Exactly. And some combination of those two will get you the fusion. Yes. And the time scale, yeah. Do you know the optimum relationship there? So, yes, we know. The optimum is that you want to, first of all, fusion was achieved in around 1995. But I have to correct that. Fusion was achieved like in 1947. It was just uncontrolled, and we called it a bomb. Exactly. At all times, she's referring to controlled fusion. Exactly. Now pick up the story where you left off. Where we're safe. We got fusion. We got it. It's everywhere.

18:04We got fusion. Correct. Exactly. The H-bomb uses the A-bomb as a trigger for it. That's the scale of this. Yes, correct. Exactly. The controlled fusion was done at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in the device called TFDR, you know, test fusion reactor. It was obtained in... Achieved. Achieved. It was, you know, we obtained fusion. It was achieved in the 90s. here at Princeton Plasma Physics and also another experiment jet in Europe later. And about 10 million joule energy was, you know, or 10 megawatt, million watt power was obtained. So we've got fusion. The question is that... One joule per second is Yeah, yeah, yes.

19:10Okay, so she's thinking joules and energy, but watts is a power. Well, watt is the correct one. It's 10 megawatt, and actually the record is 17 megawatt later, so it's around that much. But I have a question. You have this big fat donut, and the whole thing is plasma, but if you hit the fusion threshold, does the whole thing undergo fusion? Because in Lawrence Livermore, they know if it's going to happen, it's going to happen in that little pocket that they created. Yeah, it's basically in the vessel, in the core of the vessel. So it's kind of your plasma, it's in the core. It actually needs to finally touch the wall.

19:56And that's where you actually get the energy. It's touching the magnetic field around. Actually, there is a real wall. It's magnetic field all around. around. It's made of drywall, like plasterboard? We call it blanket. But what forms the blanket in all seriousness? What creates the wall? It's a various solution for wall, you know, it could be tungsten. But does it come as a byproduct? It's a various material. It's a byproduct of what you're, the way you're manipulating the plasma, a wall creates out of that. No. Actually, no, you actually put a physical, wall. Why is it only measured when it touches the wall?

20:39Because it's not measured. It's actually the plasma heat is being measured in the core. And that's when you get really hot plasma. So what do you need the wall for? Because it has to be confined and the plasma needs to meet some boundary. Well, we thought that was the magnetic field. Right. Isn't that the magnetic field? So the magnetic field is all around the torus, all around the donut. So the magnetic field. So the magnet field gives it a shape. Yes, exactly. Give it a shape. So you could say at all, you could think that you could put direct magnets around your vessel or you actually put coils that goes around your vessel and then the wall and then the plasma.

21:25Have these magnetic fields. We've all played with iron filings and magnets and you can see magnetic field lines and they form these loops. Yes. These toroidal loops. Okay. I know that on the surface of the sun, because it doesn't rotate as a solid object, there are these magnetic fields in there that get stretched as the sun rotates its equator faster than other regions. And there are points where the magnetic fields snap. They break. And then they, like, reconnect. Does that happen in your space? Yes. It happens on the surface of the sun exactly the way you said. Sun actually, as you correctly mentioned, it's in a plasma state, also create, you know, fusion energy.

22:12So a lot of energy in there. Another thing sun creates is magnetic field. All the motions of the plasma there creates magnetic field. So I'm creating magnetic fields. I need to get rid of this magnetic field somehow. these invisible field lines that I'm creating. Where does it go? It goes to the surface and it kind of goes up like loops. And then the loops kind of, at some point, this invisible field lines, one go up, one go down, and then they snap, they kind of cancel each other. And then there's, we call it detachment, the whole loop kind of get away. And it's chaotic, right? I mean, it's sort of like a bunch of— Well, it's not controlled.

23:00It's like a bunch of five-year-olds in kindergarten on Skittles. You can't control them. They're loud. On Skittles. Oh, okay. Okay. But is it right? Yes or no. It could be places that is really chaotic, but also it could be likely collective, you know, ropes of magnetic field. They come together, they kind of cancel each other magnetic field, and then you get the reconnection site, and then the whole thing detached. The plasma and the magnetic field. This is how you know that physics do this, not astronomers, because the people who study that are called magnetohydrodynamicists. Oh, my God. That should not be a word.

23:43That is one long business card. A little fold-out extra section. Yeah, this is your business card. It's like that. You know, just, so let's get back to the energy and then I want to go to rockets. Yes. So if you're going to be useful to anybody, you can't just make energy under the ground in Princeton, New Jersey. It's got to be, I don't want to call it portable, but it's got to be scalable. So you can move it to a town that can generate energy that has no radioactive byproducts. You can generate it 24-7 and you're just using hydrogen. Yes. Whose method will be better for this? The one, the inertial confinement from Lawrence Livermore or the tokamak design from Princeton and other places?

24:28We have to pursue all the methods. It's actually a not - Diplomatic answer. I was trying to say. Oh, man! Wow. Man! I didn't know I was in Congress right now. That was what you say to members of Congress. Yes. But Senator, we need to pursue all methods. Okay. America is great. I like pie. And you even don't know about other methods. We call this some more innovative alternate method. But again, using magnetic field to kind of confine plasma and get fusion energy. So all of them need to repair. But all of them need to get to some condition. And the condition is that you get more, you produce more energy than you put in.

25:15Otherwise, what's the point? What's the point? Exactly. Yeah, it's kind of the net gain that you kind of need to get. And we haven't got there engineering-wise. Physics-wise, scientifically, maybe in some range we can say that, oh, we got energy from fusion. And as I said, this happened also in the 90s, you know, at PPPL. Yeah, there was a little bit of an overstatement about the Livermore experiment because that one had net extra energy from the experiment. And so this was a, it was championed. But the extra energy they got was relative to the energy that they put in in this little spot. It didn't add up.

25:59The whole system that made the thing a thing to begin with. Right, right. So it wasn't the total energy budget of the experiment. It was just the energy budget of the Vetsa. Local, around the target. On the target. And it had to be attached to that target or near that target to be an energy budget. Yeah, that's how they make the measurements. So I think, correct me if I'm wrong, if you're going to scale that, presumably you get some good engineers in there to say, how do we make this littler? And you can make this more efficient than that. And then you just run the energy out the other side. You actually need to also make better lasers, more efficient lasers, because the efficiency of it is not too great.

26:37Right, because you have to put energy in the lasers to make the better energy. Yeah, because the lasers are going to help you to get the fusion. So you need engineers. Exactly. So engineering net gain is not too high in that experiment. But the physics gain was good. But the physics gain was good. And also the physics gain is also for magnetic confinement. We have good gain before and we are actually moving toward it with various, you know, configuration. Okay. In all of this, the idea of excited particles, and where does that fit into all of this? And sort of how do you calm down an excited particle?

27:13Jazz music, I don't know, candles, scented candles. Like how do you - You asking her how does she cool down the plasma? Is that what you're asking? In a sense, right? Because the whole plasma is excited particles. Right, but there are specific things that you do to control the excited particles. Oh, yes, yes. I think that you just want the whole hot, you know, plasma confined, controlled, and self-heated, because it kind of interestingly, if it gets to some temperature, it can kind of on its own can get, you know, heated the plasma for a long, long time and produce a lot of energy. And that is fusion, a system or reactor.