The Stuff You Should Know Doin’ Science Playlist: Can Nuclear Fusion Reactors Save The World?

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1:47Visit USPS.com slash Ground Advantage to start shipping with confidence. USPS Ground Advantage. Hey everybody, I'm back. I first heard about EIDR, which is the nuclear fusion reactor being built in Europe, from a New Yorker article called Star in a Bottle by Rafi Kachadurian. And if you find this episode floats your boat, I highly recommend reading that article too. The whole idea of what they're trying to do, which is to contain plasma, that crazy intense fourth state of matter that the sun and lightning are made up of, into a chamber here on Earth where it has no business being really, really caught my attention.

2:28And if they can do it, extremely cheap, abundant, climate-friendly energy will be unlocked for all, and who knows what will follow after that. The Eider Group was shooting for 2025 to start but recently changed their date to 2034. You can pass the time while you wait by enjoying this episode. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. From HowStuffWorks.com.

2:58Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry, who's Barrel of Laughs. And this is Stuff You Should Know. She gave us the old quick start. Yeah. Like, I don't want to hear anymore. I'm pressing record. Yeah, she knows that shuts me up. Or at least cuts off whatever conversation I'm chiding her with. It was great. I'm telling you, if we could release the 20 seconds before each show as its own show, that would be terrible. No one would care. No. We'd think it was funny, but everybody else would be like, you edit this out for a reason. Yep. So, Chuck, how are you doing?

3:36Great. Have you ever been to Ais-en-Provence, France? No. Is that a place? Yeah. No, I haven't. It is a rustic little town in Provence, and it is, strangely, maybe even ironically, in the non-hipster use, but in the actual definition of the word, also cite to one of the most futuristic engineering projects humanity's ever undertaken. Meep, meep, that's the sound it makes. Oh, I thought you were mocking me. No, no, no. for being thrilled by the thought of this thing. No, it is kind of funny that this thing's in a sleepy little town. It's like a - A hamlet maybe even. CERN in Switzerland, that's not in the city, is it?

4:22No. You can't build these things in cities. That's why they're in sleepy towns. Exactly. Because no one knows they're being poisoned. Yeah, and you can push the mare around pretty easy. Exactly. This thing is called ITER, I-T-E-R, which is an acronym for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. That's right. Which really gets the point across. Did you know the word acronym is an acronym? That's not true. Okay. I just wanted to see how long you would try and sort it out in your head. I would have kept going another 30 seconds maybe. That would have been a great joke. I could have just kept it going like, I'm not gonna tell you.

4:56I would have, maybe 15 seconds. Because you would have gotten that much more. Sure. So I wouldn't have looked it up, I would have figured it out myself. Anyway, Eider is this colossal engineering project. Somebody compared it to the pyramids at Giza. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's exciting stuff. Sure. The thing is, it's a nuclear fusion reactor, and it's the culmination of decades of attempts to create a nuclear fusion reactor. Yes. Because we got fission down, and we'll talk about the difference in a minute. Yeah. But fusion has been very elusive, And nowhere is it more apparent than in the Eider project.

5:42Yeah. Because this thing is going to cost approximately$50 billion when it's completed. $50 billion. They started in 1993. They're hoping to turn on the switch in 2020, but it's looking like 2023 or 2024. And it won't be starting to produce anything until the 2040s at the earliest. So what's the point? I'll tell you the point. If we can figure out nuclear fusion, Chuck, the world's, literally, the world's energy problems will be solved for millennia. If we can just figure this out, we will have an almost no radioactivity nuclear option, almost limitless fuel supply, totally green, Clean. No pollution, no greenhouse emissions.

6:38Right, and with plenty of energy to spare. Yeah. Using the already extant infrastructure we have to supply power. Like you don't have to completely rebuild everything. You can just, to the electrical cables outside, it'll be the exact same thing. Yeah, you can just go to a nuclear fission reactor and press the button that says fusion, and it'll all of a sudden join atoms instead of split them. Exactly. It's that easy. That's what the difference is. With fission, you're splitting atoms, and you're gaining energy from that. With fusion, you're smacking them together, and you're gaining even more energy because you're exploiting a different fundamental force.

7:14Yeah, and I was being coy. Clearly, there is no button because we would have pushed it a long time ago. Yeah. And when I say no pollution and no greenhouse emissions before the pedantic among you write in, we know that just even shipping something from here to there causes pollution and greenhouse emissions. But we're talking about the output of the reactor itself is very green. So if you want to know all about ITER, well, we're going to talk about it here or there because you just can't talk about nuclear fusion reactors and not mention ITER. But if you want to know a lot about ITER, there is a really great article called A Star in a Bottle.

7:52And it's by a person named Rafi Kachadurian. And it was written in the New Yorker not too long ago. And man, it is every detail you want to know about the Ida project written really well. And it's long, but it's totally worth the read. Yeah, it's all over the news lately, and for good reason. You said a lot of energy. I have a stat. Gonna throw back to the old days here. Per kilogram of fuel, if we're talking fusion and fission. Lay it on me. Fusion produces four times more energy than fission. I saw seven. It's probably one of those things where it's like five to ten or something. Right. I found four times.

8:32Okay. And ten million times more than coal. Yeah. Ten million times. Yeah. The energy is coal. Yeah. And that's with equal fuel, per kilogram of fuel. Right. It's just, I mean, it is the future. Yeah, and you can say, well, that's great because we want 18 million times the amount of power that coal provides. You can say, whoa there, buddy. You can also bring it backwards because you can supply an awful lot of power then with a lot less fuel. Yeah. Like the advantages of nuclear fusion are mind boggling. Sure. And very few downsides, which we'll get to, of course. Yeah. I mean, like really genuinely, it's not just like some like here's all the great stuff about it and just don't pay attention to all these like really horrible aspects.

9:18Like there really aren't too many downsides. The downside is we are at this moment incapable of successfully creating a commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor. That's right. But we've got an understanding of what the challenges are ahead of us thanks to the last 50 or so years of really, really, really smart physicists working on the problem of nuclear fusion. And the great inspiration for nuclear fusion is the sun. The sun and all stars like it are enormous, immense nuclear fusion reactors. So if you are building a nuclear fusion reactor here on Earth, you're essentially creating a star. And that is a very difficult thing to do, it turns out.

10:06Yeah, the sun creates, I know we talked about the sun in our very famous episode on the sun. The sun creates 620 million metric tons. It fuses 620 millimetric tons of hydrogen at its core every second. So every second at the sun's core, it produces enough power to light up New York City for 100 years. New York City? Every second. And that's the sun. And all we want to do is do the same thing on a much smaller scale. That's all? I think the guy, there was this kid who built one in his garage, and he said he wanted to, I saw this TED Talk, He wanted to create a star in a box is what he called it.

10:48Yeah, I've seen it. Like this New Yorker called it a star in a bottle. Yeah, this kid's name is Taylor Wilson. And he's a nuclear physicist and he's like 16. Wow, he's like Dougie Hauser. Yeah, he created a successful one. And the key though is not to be able to create the fusion. The key is to be able to harness enough plasma, which we'll get to, at a high enough temperature and density for there to be a net power gain. You can create fusion, but in order to get out more than you're putting in is the only thing that matters because what you want to do is create electricity. Exactly. There's two huge challenges right now to nuclear fusion.

11:26We pretty much understand it enough to start it going and get energy from it. The problem is material science isn't at a point where it can build a containment vessel to really house a thermonuclear reactor. Yeah. And then the other big obstacle is, like you said, net energy gain. Like if you're putting in as much or more energy than you're getting out of your nuclear reactor, then you're wasting energy, and it's the opposite of what you're supposed to be doing. Yeah, they're not just trying to impress people with their science knowledge. No, but up to the - They're trying to create energy. Up to now, though, Chuck, like every single thermonuclear reactor that's ever been built has just been impressing people with knowledge.

12:11Sure. They haven't gotten any net energy out of a single thermonuclear fusion reactor. Oh, see, I have that they have, right now they're up to like 10, presently they're at 10 megawatts. Oh, is that right? Yeah. And that's more than they put into it. A net gain of 10 megawatts currently. Everything I saw was when we turn this thing on, it should have a net gain. Yeah. But I didn't see that they've actually done it. Yeah, 10 megawatts now, and ITER is going to produce 500 megawatts once it's fully operational. Right. So the next challenge then is this. If we're already getting a net energy gain out of it, then that means that the net energy gain is not sustainable.

12:57Like you said, you want to keep the thing going so you don't have to keep starting from scratch to power it up. you want it to basically be self-sustaining, so you just have to add a little more fuel to it. That's the dream. So let's talk about the history of fusion reactors, Chuck. Yeah, it kind of goes back to this guy named Lyman Spitzer. He's a 36-year-old Princeton astrophysicist, and this was in the 1950s. And he was recruited to work on the H-bomb, and went out and got a copy of a paper that was released from Germany, I think, right? No, in Argentina. Oh, Argentina? Yeah, they announced that they had successfully built a fusion reactor.

13:43Right, so he gets this paper, goes on a ski trip, starts thinking about how he can do this, takes a little break from his job building the H-bomb, and figures out, you know, I think it's possible if we can harness this plasma, I guess we should just go ahead and define what plasma is, since we keep saying it. Well, there's the normal three energy states that we're familiar with, water, solid, and gas. Liquid, solid, and gas, right? Right. There's a fourth one, it's plasma. And plasma is basically like an energetic gas where the temperatures are so high that whatever atoms you put into it, the electrons are stripped off and allowed to move around freely.

14:25Right. Basically, the surface of the sun is plasma. That's what plasma is, it's a gas. It's just a roiling gas that's really hard to control and is really unpredictable. Which is when you see the sun like that rippling, wavy looking thing, that's plasma. Right, and the reason the sun manages to stay together is because it is enormously massive and has a ton of gravity at its core. Yeah, we don't have that advantage here on Earth. We don't, so we try to make up for that by increasing the temperature. That's right, and he was onto it way back then in the 1950s. If we can just harness this, if we can just get it hot enough, and he created a tabletop device called the Stellarator and it was in a figure eight position.

15:07It was a pipe and a figure eight. Yeah. And this would keep things from banging into walls theoretically. Yeah. And he was on to something because, well, we'll get to Lockheed later, but they're using a similar device now, a figure eight. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I didn't realize that was a figure eight. It is, which is weird because what they eventually found out was that a donut shape was really the key to get that net gain. So the reason that they found out that a donut shape worked was because in the, I think the late 50s, the US had run up against the wall. They're saying like, okay, we've got this, but we can't control the plasma.

15:45Because think about it, what you're trying to do is create a star inside something, but it can't touch any of the vessel that it's in, or else it'll just completely erupt it, right? Yeah, they compared it to holding jelly in rubber bands. Right. It was just like you can't, they couldn't figure out how to control the plasma. Yeah. So when the U.S. ran up against this wall, they said, hey, rest of the world, we're gonna declassify what Lyman Spitzer has been doing. Help us out. And we'll share if you guys share, and it turns out that the Russians had already come up against this problem and licked it.

16:24They figured out that if you put the thing in what's called a toroidal shape, a donut shape, using electromagnets, you can tame the plasma, essentially. And the donut shape itself was pretty ingenious. But the real stroke of genius was by running electromagnets in rings around the donut. So it's like you have a donut and you put a bunch of earrings around it, right? Yeah. And those are electromagnets, so you're creating an electromagnetic force field, which contains the plasma. But then you also put an electromagnetic force field in the middle of the plasma. So not only does it heat it up to the temperatures you want, it also stabilizes it further.

17:07So the Russians had invented what they call the tokamak, which is this donut-shaped nuclear fusion reactor that basically became the standard for the next 50 years or so. Yeah, you basically could achieve a really dense, super hot plasma. And we'll get into temperatures and stuff in a bit. But since we can't create that kind of pressure that they have in the sun due to their gravity, their gravity, the sun's gravity. Right. You know, the sun and all those people. Yeah. Like you said, we had to make up for it here on Earth with temperatures. Right, because apparently if you are in the middle of a nuclear reactor, a nuclear fusion reactor, you're going to find that the temperatures inside are about six times hotter than the core of the sun.

17:54Not even the surface of the sun, the core of the sun. And the reason why it has to be so much hotter is because, like you said, we can't replicate that density. We can get to those temperatures that we need, but we can't get to that density, so we have to make up for it. So we'll talk about kind of the physics of what's going on here and why you have to have high temperatures and what we're making up for with density and everything right after this. They track. They target. That hotel, those shoes, your searches, your clicks every time you come back. Prices can change when websites know you want something.

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20:11So, Chuck, we're talking about nuclear fusion, and it's actually surprisingly understandable at its most basic core. Yeah, you're fusing atoms. It's not the hardest thing in the world to wrap your head around. Yeah. So with fission, we're splitting atoms. You're taking an atom, and you're splitting its nuclei apart. You're splitting the neutrons and the protons apart from one another. And when you do that, one of the four fundamental forces, electromagnetic force, pushes them away, and you get this burst of energy. Yeah. With fusion, you're taking nuclei from different atoms. You're taking protons and neutrons, and you're smashing them together.

20:52And when you do that you're unleashing what's called the strong force which appropriately enough is stronger than Electromagnetic force which is why nuclear fusion yields more energy than nuclear fission Yeah, Einstein himself said you know each time you smash these things together You're gonna lose a little bit of mass and that little bit of mass is a ton of energy as it turns out That's right the famous E equals MC squared Yeah, and I don't think he realized in 1905 or maybe Einstein did Einstein probably did Yeah, Einstein probably did. I would guess he did. Yeah. So the problem is, even though it is very easy to smash some protons together, there is a tremendous amount of resistance to that smashing together.

21:35They don't want to smash together. No, because it's just like if you take a magnet, two magnets, and you put the positive poles toward one another, they repel one another, right? Yeah. Same thing. That's the same principle on an atomic level, too. If you take protons, which are positively charged particles, and try to put them together, they repel one another. And the closer you get them together, the stronger the repellent force is, the electromagnetic force, right? But if you can get them close enough, the electromagnetic force is overcome by that strong force, the strong nuclear force, and they become bound together.

22:13because the strong force is that one of those four fundamental forces of the universe, and that is the force that keeps atoms together. And that force is stronger than the force that repels like charged particles. Yeah, and when you talk about close, they need to be within 1 times 10 to the negative 15 meters of one another. Right, so that is, if you'll indulge me. Sure. Are you going to read a bunch of zeros? Yeah. It's.0000000000001 meters apart. Right. That's how close they have to be. That's right. To get them to accept one another and to fuse. Right. I think I have a theory that if they're not fusing because they think they're going to be made into a bomb, and if we told them that we're creating energy, they might be more willing to fuse together.

23:07Yeah, because protons are peaceniks. Everybody knows that. Sure. So when they do fuse together, right, when you do cross that threshold and the strong force takes over and overcomes the electromagnetic force, like we said, a tremendous amount of energy is released. And it's released in part in the form of neutrinos, neutrons, right, which are neutral particles which suddenly start carrying a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. So let's say you have one atom. you got another atom, and they're both like, I'm not getting close to you, we're not going to get to, okay, we got together. That force, that mass that's displaced, is transferred through the neutron that gets kicked off of the atom, right?

23:52Yeah. And is carried out. Now, a neutron doesn't have any kind of positive or negative charge. It's neutral. It's a neutron. Yeah. Which means that it can pass through the very electromagnetic fields that are keeping this plasma where this reaction is taking place together. Once that happens, Chuck, it can go out to what's called a blanket wall in a thermonuclear reactor, warm it, and then that heat is transferred into a water cooling system. The water's warmed up, turned to steam, which generates a, which I guess moves the turbine, and then all of a sudden the turbine's producing electricity.

24:30Yeah, it's funny how it gets so complex, but all you're still trying to do is create steam. to turn a turbine. It's like hooking the ISS up to a horse. Right. You know? Move it over there. So there are a few types of fusion reactions. The ultimate goal, right now what we can do on a small scale is what's called a deuterium-tritium reaction. That's the one that we can currently achieve. That's one atom of deuterium and one atom of tritium combining to form a helium-4 atom and a neutron. Yeah. The ultimate goal, I mean, that's good, and that'll create a lot of energy, but there are a few downsides.

25:11Tritium is radioactive, for one. You have to mine it from lithium. Yeah. And lithium's fairly rare. Sure. The ultimate goal is to reach deuterium-deuterium reactions, which is two deuterium atoms combining to form that helium-3 in a neutron. And you can get that from the seawater. It's abundant, almost limitless. and I couldn't find this but I think clean water can be a residual effect of this. Am I wrong? I don't know if it's, well you're probably not injecting water but to get the deuterium, I mean desalination plants are the key to the future as far as supplying the world with fresh water. Yeah, I thought I saw somewhere where it was an actual byproduct.

25:55Is that right? Yeah, but then I couldn't find it so I'm not sure if that's right or not. You know what? You just jogged my memory. I feel like in a hydrogen powered car water is one of the byproducts. So maybe so. Yeah. All right. Don't quote me on that though. At the very least, it's a great way to create energy. Right. And you also can get tritium from helium, I believe. So even now with the deuterium-tritium reactions that we're working on, there's already a workaround. You can create a thermonuclear reactor that's a breeding reactor to where the byproduct, helium, can be used to harvest more of the fuel you're using, tritium.

26:37Yeah, and aren't we running low on helium? We are, which is like, remember when we were talking about the Dirigible, the Zeppelin? Which one was it? How blimps work. Yeah, and then a long time ago we did one on... The Mars turbine. Yeah, Mars turbine requires helium. But yes, there is very clearly a helium shortage, and the idea that we're just using it for party balloons rather than this. is scary. Yeah, and don't be confused. We say things like deuterium and it sounds super complex. All that is a hydrogen with an extra neutron. Yeah, it's an isotope. Yeah. So there's three isotopes of hydrogen.