Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough; Powering Electric Vehicles; Carbon Capture | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

Last month, the closest star to Earth was in California in a laboratory for the first time. The world's largest lasers forced hydrogen atoms to fuse into the same type of energy, producing a reaction that lights up the sun. It lasted less than a billionth of a second. But after six decades of work and failure, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory showed it could be done. The outpouring becomes commercial energy. One day it would be endless and

carbon

-free. In other words, it would change human destiny. As you will see, there is a lot to do, but later. The December trailer invited us to tour the lab and meet the team that brought star power to Earth unchecked.

Fusion is easy to master since movies have been in black and white for a long time. Fusion is what a hydrogen bomb does, releasing energy by forcing hydrogen atoms to fuse. What has been impossible is harnessing the fires of Armageddon into something useful. The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory helps maintain

nuclear

weapons and high-energy physics experiments. An hour east of San Francisco we met with Livermore director Kim Budell at the lab that made history. The National Ignition Facility is the largest and most energetic laser in the world. It was built from the 1990s to create conditions in the laboratory that had previously only been accessible in the most extreme objects in the universe, such as the centers of giant planets or the Sun or in the operation of

nuclear

weapons and the objective was really being able to study that kind of high energy density condition in a lot of detail.

The National Ignition Facility, or nif, was built for three and a half billion dollars to start auto- to sustain Fusion, they tried nearly 200 times over 13 years, but like a car with a weak battery, the atomic engine never started. This recent event has really got the ignition going at Neff. Ignition means starting a

fusion

reaction that gives off more energy than the lasers provide, so if you can heat it dense enough fast enough and hold it together long enough, the

fusion

reactions start to become self-sustaining and that's really what which happened here on December 5th. The main operation of the laser will begin in about a minute last month.

The laser shot fired from this control room put two units of energy into the experiment. The atoms began to fuse and approximately three units of energy came out. Tammy ma, who leads the lab's laser fusion research efforts, got the call while I was waiting for a plane and I burst into tears, they were just tears of joy and I actually physically started shaking and jumping up and down, you know, at the door before everyone got bored. Then everyone said: What is that crazy woman doing? Tammy Mom is crazy about engineering and that's another one of our sensors.

She showed us why the merger issue would make anyone cry. First, there is the required energy that is delivered by lasers in these tubes. They are longer than a football field and how many are there in total 192 each of these lasers is one of the most energetic in the world and you have 192 of them that are great, very hot, actually millions of degrees, that's why they use keys to block the lasers the rays hit with a power 1,000 times greater than the entire national

electric

al grid three one the lights in your house do not turn off when they fire because these capacitors store the

electric

ity in the tubes that the laser beams amplify By running from one side to the other another and the Flash is a fraction of a second, we have to get to these incredible official conditions that the center of the Sun, all that like very high energy densities, all that, Wallop vaporizes a target almost too small to see, can I?

Hold this absolutely, here we go, here we go, amazing, absolutely amazing, Michael Staderman's team builds Target's hollow projectiles that are charged with hydrogen at 430 degrees below zero. The precision we need to manufacture these projectiles is extreme. The projectiles are almost perfectly round and have a roughness that is 100 times better than a mirror, you think that if it were not smoother than a mirror, the imperfections would make the implosion of the atoms uneven causing a failed fusion, so they must be as perfect as humanly possible. That's how it is. and we believe they are among the most perfect elements we have on Earth.

Stateman's lab seeks perfection by vaporizing

carbon

and forming the diamond layer. They build fifteen hundred a year to make 150 almost perfect. All components are brought together under the microscope. and then the assembler uses electromechanical stages to place the parts where they're supposed to go, move them together and then we apply glue using a hair, yeah, usually something like an eyelash or something like that or a cat's whisker, you apply glue with a cat. mustache this way why does it have to be so small? The laser gives us only a finite amount of energy and to drive a larger capsule we would need more energy.

So it is a limitation of the installation that you have seen that it is very large and despite its large size, this is what we can handle with it, the target could be larger, but then the laser would have to be larger. On December 5th they used a thicker target so it would hold its shape longer and figured out how to increase the power. of the laser shot without damaging the lasers, so this is an example of a target before the shot. Tammy Mom showed us an intact target set. That diamond shell she wears is inside that silver-colored cylinder.

This set enters a blue vacuum chamber three stories high. It's hard to see here because it's

full

of lasers and instruments. They call this instrument Dante because they told us that it measures the fires of hell. A physicist said you should see the target we flew on December 5, which made us wonder: could we have seen this before? It's the first time I've seen it for Tammy Ma and for the world. This is the first look at what remains of the target that changed history. An artifact like Bella's first telephone or Edison's light bulb. This thing will end up in the Smithsonian, the target cylinder was launched into Oblivion, the copper support that held it flew back, the explosion at the end was hotter than the sun, hotter than the center of the sun, we were able to reach temperatures which were the hottest in the world.

The entire solar system, which would be an astronomical change in electrical energy, unlike current nuclear plants that split atoms and fuse them, is much more powerful with little long-term radiation and is easy to shut down, so fusions do not occur, but rather the first ignition is switched to a The power plant will be difficult. How many shots are taken in a day? We take on average a little more than one shot per day. If this was theoretically a commercial power plant. How many feedings per day would be needed? It would take approximately 10 shots per second. and the other big challenge, of course, is not only increasing the repetition rate but also getting the target gain up to about a factor of a hundred.

Not only would the reactions have to produce 100 times more energy, but a power plant would need 900,000 perfect diamond projectiles a day. Additionally, lasers would have to be much more efficient. Remember that the December preview put in two power units and took out three. It took 300 units of power to fire the lasers according to that standard, it was 300 in three. That detail was found to be missing from the focus of the Energy Department's December press conference, which conflated progress with an unlikely timeline. Today's announcement is a big step forward toward the president's goal of achieving commercial fusion within a decade when you heard that President Biden's goal was commercial fusion energy within a decade you thought what I thought was nonsense Charles Seif is a trained mathematician, science author and New York University professor who wrote a book in 2008 about the fusion energy hype.

I don't want to downplay the fact that this is a real achievement. The ignition is a milestone that people have been trying to achieve for years. I'm afraid there are so many technical obstacles even after this great achievement that 10 years is a pipe dream. Those obstacles, according to Sipe, include expanding on Livermore's achievement. The December shot generated enough energy to boil two cups of coffee, the obstacles could be overcome, Seif says, but not anytime soon. I have a bet that we won't have it by 2050. We're still betting against Charles Sipe's prophecy. More than 30 private companies are designing various approaches to fusion energy, including using magnets rather than lasers.

Three billion dollars of private money flowed into those companies in the past 13 months, including bets from Bill Gates and Google. Amid all this speculation, Lawrence Livemore director Kim Budell is sure Budell agrees that the obstacles are enormous, but told us that commercial fusion energy could be demonstrated in about 20 years with enough funding and dedication. We compare the first ignition with the first one. The flight of the Wright brothers that covered only 120 feet, it is one thing to believe that science is possible, that the conditions can be created and another is to see it in action and it really is a remarkable feeling after working for 60 years to reach this spot.

Whether fusion energy is 10 or 50 years away is now primarily an engineering problem Lawrence Livermore has shown that since a A Star is Born machine the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable electrical energy has become more visibly widespread. in the automotive industry; Major auto companies are chasing Tesla with ambitious plans for electric vehicle fleets; those cars and trucks run on lithium batteries; The United States has massive amounts of lithium, but has been slow to invest in the mining and extraction of the metal that is on the verge of changing clean energy-driven lithium operations are developing in an impoverished and long-forgotten part of California along to the Salton Sea, not far from the Mexican border, the region is called Lithium Valley and, like the Gold of 1849.

Rush companies are competing to get rich east of San Diego and south of Palm Springs are find the Salton Sea California's largest inland body of water extending east from the sea is a giant mineral-rich underground geothermal field boiling with potassium, sodium and lithium. world class lithium resource, this is when we hear estimates of how big this resource could be; It is generally measured in annual tonnes produced and we are confident that this is more than 300 000 tonnes per year at this time, i.e. well over half of the world's lithium supply Eric Spomer is CEO of Energy Sources Minerals , a company based in the Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley, is moving

full

speed ahead with plans to recover lithium using an existing power plant powered by the vast underground geothermal field we're moving into. era of green technology, especially with our cars, where does this fit?

The most conservative projection would support seven and a half million electric

vehicles

a year, which is half of total US auto sales, cars and trucks coming from the Salton Sea area, what about this? This plant will produce 20,000 tons per year, which is equivalent to about 500,000

vehicles

per year. Once operational, the tons of lithium generated here will be shipped refined and processed into millions of rechargeable electric car batteries in more than 50 percent of our lineup and our retail sales will be battery electric vehicles by the end of the decade. Mark Stewart is the director of stalantis North America, a global automaker that owns some of America's best-known brands, including Chrysler Jeep and Ram trucks.

It really is, in quotes, the Industrial Revolution. Next phase, this is the most interesting and exciting time to be a part of our industry. stalantis is investing $35 billion in an ambitious historic transformation. we are reimagining our factories in our assembly plants. They're already launching our plug-in hybrids as well as looking at two new battery joint ventures that are in full construction right now, the new Industrial Revolution is absolutely, it's really the biggest technological change in our industry in almost 100 years. We were in the Salton Sea region and they believe they can supply. the lithium needs for all American automakers, absolutely that is the case, anything you can produce, you will buy it, we will surely take everything we can get and to the extent we have, we have already ensured that early lithium is key topower electric cars dense metal helps make batteries rechargeable there is a lot out there but extracting lithium is a dirty business most of it comes from rock mines in Australia or as dust evaporated from mineral ponds in South America the United States has an evaporation plant lithium in Nevada power sources plans to break ground on a billion-dollar clean facility here next to the Salton Sea in the coming months to get the plant into this right location, that's not a big footprint, it's not a big footprint, no, what are these?

We call them clay pots and they are CO2 expelling hot CO2 with fluid bubbling to the surface, so this is evidence of underground heat and activity. Correct. The 600-degree geothermal brine that powers the region's power plants comes from more than a mile below the Earth. Boiling brine produces. clean steam driving turbines to generate enough electricity to power 400,000 homes in the past mineral-rich brine was simply returned to the earth now the power source plans to extend the process and extract lithium from the brine before reinjecting it underground our process in combination with this resource it will be the cleanest and most efficient lithium process in the world and how long will it be before lithium processed here will be in commercial use in the US in 2025.

Many of the components that go into batteries they come from, you know, anywhere in the world, but the United States, why do we have a lot of decent resources in North America? They just haven't been developed, David. Deek worked for Tesla traveling the world to find the best sources of lithium while increasing production of its electric vehicles or EVS Tesla turned to lithium-ion battery to power its cars, the same type of rechargeable battery that Sony first produced Once en masse for its camcorders there was a new market for consumer electronics, but the vast majority is for electric vehicles and that was largely driven by Tesla.

Additionally, there is a huge growth in UV and Eve demand and production in China which has been a large part of a large part of the global lithium demand The story comes in Deke is now director of energy sources development and He says he had a Eureka moment when he saw his unique technology in the company's lab. Deke showed us the miniature mechanics that the full size plant will have. be 100 times larger, so what happens inside this cylinder is pellets or what is The Matrix, yeah, I think of it as beads in a column, much like the activated carbon that you would find in a Brita filter.

It works on a similar concept: a Brita filter will filter out all impurities from the water. This orbital is something that would only absorb lithium and not absorb everything else. It takes just a few hours for the system to convert this orange brine into this clear lithium solution that will dry into a powder. and this is what everyone is looking for that's what everyone wants here for the Salton Sea energy source is leading the race for lithium bhe Warren Buffett's Renewables manages 10 geothermal power plants in the region and There's another one on the drawing board for an Australian company that controls thermal resources.

Both companies are moving to tap into the promise bubbling beneath the Earth. CEO Rod Colwell told us that controlled thermal resources had been fine-tuning the process at this test facility for 90 days. We are producing lithium from live brine here behind us. This is our optimization plant. Based on what is learned here, the Controlled Thermal Resources plan to build a new plant to recover lithium, which costs about four thousand dollars per ton to extract and currently sells for six times as much. The noise comes from machines that cool the 600-degree brine coming out of the well. releasing vapor this is a quality battery product from Salton Sea brine this for you is Eureka this is absolutely Eureka yes Rod Colwell told us that this bottle of clear lithium chloride is the purest product from this test facility so far this is the first time this has been done in my hands this happened last night.

I could take that home. There's about ten dollars worth of lithium right there so you know it works. We know it works. The question here in the Salton Sea Basin is: will this rich lithium resource work for everyone? It lies beneath one of the poorest sections of California, the Salton Sea, which was created when the Colorado River flooded the basin in 1905, but for the past 50 years the main source of water has been produce-laden agricultural runoff. chemicals and for decades the sea has been evaporating and The contraction of a once-thriving tourism industry has been replaced by environmental toxic dust and economic hardship, and with unemployment in the region hovering around 16 percent, the stakes are high. to convert the Imperial Valley into lithium.

Valley Governor Newsom called it, you know, the Saudi Arabia of lithium. I think you know that it can change the panorama of the region. Frank Ruiz, the Audubon Society's local program director, is fighting to include the community in that change. He was a commissioner on the state panel studying how the entire region can benefit from underground potential. If you are an environmentalist, how do you reconcile the industrialization of this area with saving wildlife and communities? We need to learn to balance the tables. The lithium industry can be really good. You know, for these communities, it can provide better paying jobs.

It can provide more job opportunities, especially for younger people. It can provide the revenue you know to offset the challenges we have here in the Salton Sea. Geologists predict that once the industry is fully operational, underground lithium should last for generations before it runs out. Good news. for stalantis who ran out of batteries for his Jeep Wrangler plug-in hybrid last year, we ran out what happened, you know, if I could return my crystal ball bill, I would have secured a little more capacity for last year to prevent this happens in the future Mark Stewart and Stellantis have committed to purchasing lithium from controlled thermal resources in the Salton Sea, knowing that it will be years before their product is commercially viable, we assure them of a large supply over a 10-year period because we are very positive on its technology, as is automaker General Motors, which has invested in controlled thermal resources, the energy department and American automakers are eager to source domestic lithium.

Companies were hit when the pandemic disrupted the global supply chain, halting shipments of microchips. Parts and Batteries Even today, three-quarters of all lithium batteries are processed in Asia. Current lithium. What typically happens is when it is mined in one place, moved around the world for processing and back again. Think about all that extra cost. Think about all that extra carbon that goes into making that. and in the end someone pays for it and that's a consumer, so will having this internal supply of lithium help keep the cost of electric vehicles down? It will certainly help bring down the prices of electric cars and they are projected to be on par with gasoline vehicles within the country.

After a few years fueled in part by tax incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Energy Source's Eric Spomer told us that the tax benefits have also been a catalyst for domestic lithium development. We are starting to see big investment announcements to create that domestic demand. so you will never have to cross an ocean this appears to be a turning point for American industry it is a competitive advantage it is an opportunity for us to be a global leader and why not lead last month the world's leading climate scientists presented a The sobering warning of his mammoth report to the UN boiled down to one message: act now before climate collapse becomes unstoppable.

The report says the extreme weather has forced millions of people from their homes and devastated food supplies. Oil and gas emissions are at a record level. The UN report calls for drastic cuts in fossil fuels, but if our old technologies got us into this mess, can the new ones get us out of the midst of politicians, corporations and billionaires? A new technology is gaining ground, it's called direct air

capture

, which sucks carbon dioxide out of nowhere and locks it in. Far underground sounds like science fiction, we thought so too until we went to Iceland to see the first commercial direct air

capture

plant in operation here on an icy plane near the Arctic Circle.

Concern about overheating. The planet seemed very far away, but little Iceland has come into its own. on the front line with a new type of machine that will fight climate change by sucking carbon dioxide from the air. This is Orca, the first commercial direct air capture plant on Earth. What are these fans? What is the rear system of eight of these fans like? Carlos Herrtle is the technology director of climbing sites, the Swiss company that built Orca, told us that while the fans suck in air, the carbon dioxide is trapped by a special filter inside these giant collectors, each the size of a shipping container, the captured CO2 is then extracted. to the storage tanks we had to shout over the powerful fans while a bitter wind whipped around us so you didn't come because of this wonderful weather no, we didn't know, we knew the windows were hard, but it's also a good test of real life for the Planter what you're describing almost sounds like science fiction, but what you're saying is that we can actually do this.

People never doubted its fundamental physics or chemistry, but performing it in real-life conditions is a completely different matter and that's what this system shows can be done. Climbing works are now building a new plant in Iceland 10 times the size of an orca that will look like this. A modular design that Hertel told us can be easily assembled, but capturing CO2 is only half the story, so here's this. It's where the magic happens. The second half starts here in these metal igloos where the CO2 is sent to be buried in the porous volcanic rock of Iceland, so this pipe is actually filled with water.

Sandra Ozke is a geologist at Carb Fix, a pioneering Icelandic company. the innovative injection method here we have the CO2 and the CO2 actually dissolves in water so it's actually just carbonated water just carbonated water yeah and this carbonated water is injected here in the injection well , this is the depth it really goes to. More than a mile per mile deep, yes, the sparkling water shoots like a stream of soda into Iceland's basalt rock, where it reacts with minerals and hardens into stone in less than two years, so that soda water turns into this, yeah, in just a matter of years, so So you take this gas that you can't see, you turn it into soda water and then it turns to stone and you don't have to worry about it turning into in stone.

It's quite surprising. Carbohydrate Solution didn't invent the process that nature did, but nature takes millennia. After years of experimenting in the grueling open-air laboratory of Iceland, Carbohydrate Solution figured out how to speed things up aerospace engineer Carlos Herald told us that Orca It was a milestone now the difficult thing is starting to escalate fast enough to stop climate change if we are taking the right actions. The direction will depend on both social issues and technical issues. I am an optimist as an engineer. I am absolutely a citizen. Maybe half of half I haven't decided yet. This goal can be achieved technically.

It is only if we have the political and social conditions. willingness to do it I think that's exactly the right way to look at it there has been a stampede of investment Microsoft Airbus The Swiss insurance giant has invested millions of dollars but it is a stupefying challenge Orca is built to eliminate the emissions of about 800 cars or 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, a small fraction of the 10,000 million tons per year that scientists say we must eliminate from the atmosphere, is the problem of Our Generation, it is like a shot at the Moon, it is becoming caloric.

Hegelson is an astrophysicist with doses of carbohydrates, he told us that we study. The space helped him think big. We found it on a stretch of barren rock that could have been Mars, but Hegelson told us he saw potential. We need great solutions. We need to return carbon to where it came from, which is the Earth. Tell me what. what you are doing here, this will be the first carbon mineral storage terminal of its kind, which means we will bring in CO2transported from industrial point sources in Europe and we will ship it here and inject for full mineral storage.

Thank you. It will be the world's first industrial-scale underground CO2 removal site, a vessel that will handle 3 million tonnes a year. Hegelson outlined a new world where tankers running on green methanol would transport carbon dioxide from European companies to Iceland. Will this happen fast enough to help? we with climate change I don't know to be completely honest we are demonstrating the first mineral storage center here on the Megaton scale if that will happen over time that is not entirely up to us that is up to the politicians they govern the financial societies and, frankly we are running out of time direct air capture as it exists now is expensive and energy consuming in iceland that energy is geothermal renewable and green that is not the case elsewhere from what the governments of Europe and the United States have offered billions of dollars in tax breaks to encourage companies to take the step, but there's a bigger question than just who writes the check, are you afraid people will think, well, now we can clean the air, we can just take out the CO2 of the air so that we can continue with our activities as usual? all the time yes, but that is not how it works, we must stop emissions and stop using fossil fuels, that is what we have to do right now, on top of that we must also reduce the carbon that we have already accumulated in the Only then We will meet our climate goals so that carbon capture can never be an excuse to continue with business as usual, but that's what critics warn against as direct air capture expands to the US. because here the oil companies are one of the biggest drivers of the technology.

They have been capturing CO2 to inject it into oil wells for decades, not to bury it but to extract more oil for cowrie hegelson of carb fix and many others, that is not To start, we don't see the need to work with the oil and gas sector, if the oil and gas industry could help with funding direct air capture, why not partner with them? We don't need them for direct air capture and, frankly, we don't want there to be an oil and gas sector. gas industry and within 40 50 years there will still be a complete industry within 50 years.

I have no doubt about it. I think our company will be a different company by 2050. That company is Occidental Petroleum and Vicki Holub is the CEO and she wants to become oxy. In what she calls a carbon management company, she has set aside more than a billion dollars to build what will be the world's largest direct air capture plant in Texas, so this would represent the CO2 equivalent of taking out 200,000 cars off the roads. Hollab showed us The Texas version of how CO2 would be absorbed from the air. These are contact air towers. Part of the captured CO2 will be locked underground as we saw in Iceland.

Some will still be used to extract more oil, but Holub told us they would use carbon. Sucked out of the air means that the new oil produced is what she calls carbon neutral, which was hard to understand, but it will use the carbon that you are capturing and taking in from the air to produce more oil which will then generate more carbon, but the oil will emit less carbon than the CO2 we have injected to get it, so we have put more, at least the equivalent and sometimes more CO2 into the ground to get that oil then the oil will emit when used Holub told us that producing oil from This way is essential in the transition to a green economy.

Airlines and ships, for example, would need to run on fossil fuels until a sustainable alternative is found, which could take years until then. Holleb maintains that using CO2 to get oil helps control emissions His critics will say that an oil company that talks about reducing CO2 cannot be trusted that its mission here amounts to greenwashing I would first say that we would never spend 1.2 billion greenwashing dollars, so we have a monumental task ahead of us. The way the CO2 enhanced oil recovery process works is that we can reduce more from the atmosphere than our products will emit when used, and if that's not a concept.

Philip told us that he knows that critics of Big Oil are suspicious and that many feel that the industry is not moving fast enough to avoid a catastrophe. On that point, Olub doesn't disagree, telling us that with the help of tax incentives, Occidental plans to build 130 more direct air capture plants by 2035. We know how to make it happen, we know how to drill the wells, we know how to sequester it in a safe way. We were in Iceland and we were talking to some of the direct air capture companies and to be frank, they don't believe you.

Let's lead by example, that's the only way to achieve it. Words will never convince anyone. We need to do it. To get direct air capture up and running, we need to improve it, make it more economical, and start rolling it out around the world. The next decade will be critical for the direct air capture industry to grow enough to have as much of an impact on carbohydrates. Fix and Climbing Works told us they will be expanding into the US and do not plan to work with the US oil industry.