How This Fusion Reactor Will Make Electricity by 2024

Imagine a world where energy was so clean and abundant that it was no longer a limiting factor in the growth of civilization. Governments, research organizations and companies around the world are racing to achieve a breakthrough in

fusion

energy, which would mean the end of fossil fuels. So impressive that his invention could be compared to the first control of fire made by man. Many critics say it's impossible, but one company believes they've cracked the code. So, David, are you building a machine that

will

produce abundant, clean, cheap energy in our lifetime? That's the goal. Helion Energy is building

fusion

generators.

Our goal is to build 50 megawatt-scale generators that generate clean, safe

electricity

. According to Helion, your home could be powered by fusion much sooner than anyone expected, but why is fusion considered the holy grail of energy if you could design the perfect system? energy source would have an inexhaustible supply of fuel would be environmentally friendly would not take up much space and would have a high degree of safety fusion energy an experimental form of power generation that harnesses the energy released when two atoms combine fits perfectly Research and diffusion power began in the 1950s and scientists have been able to fuse atoms in a laboratory for decades, but no one has yet been able to demonstrate fusion in a practical way to generate

electricity

.

The potential is enormous. Just one gram of deuterium powered by helium fusion contains enough energy to power a house for an entire year and its supply is virtually unlimited. They are found in small concentrations throughout the Earth's water. The fuels considered for fusion energy have traditionally all been isotopes of hydrogen, protium, deuterium and tritium, and what we saw is that there is better fusion. reactions and deuterium and a rare isotope of helium called helium-3 and you fuse them together and you produce helium-4 and a huge amount of electricity, but what is nuclear fusion? How can a single glass of anything contain as much energy as 10 million pounds? of carbon to answer that we must enter the inconceivably small and incredibly strange world of the atom the atom is the smallest unit of ordinary matter that

make

s up each element in the universe each atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons if we approach The We

will

find the nucleus made up of protons and neutrons because neutrons are neutral nuclei.

They are positively charged. If you heat atoms to high enough temperatures, they lose their electrons, forming a hot cloud of charged particles called plasma. Atoms always move, vibrate and bounce. The denser the plasma, the more likely nuclei are to collide, but positively charged nuclei repel each other if they get too close. The hotter the plasma, the faster the charged particles move, and the faster a particle moves, the more kinetic energy it has when the nuclei collide at speeds high enough to overcome their electrostatic repulsion. They can get close enough to be overcome by a stronger attractive force called the strong nuclear force and come together when two light nuclei combine to form a heavier element.

The reaction is known as nuclear fusion. This element weighs slightly less than the sum of its parts The missing or deficit mass was released as pure energy Up to four million times more energy than burning fossil fuels in the core of the sun Gravity produces incredibly high pressures that compress the elements at densities higher than the heaviest metals and temperatures higher than 15 million degrees Celsius perfectly extreme conditions for hydrogen to fuse into helium the sun is the largest source of energy on earth plants convert sunlight into energy chemistry with photosynthesis and we release it by burning fossil fuels solar radiation drives the wind that spins our windmills, the rivers that power our turbines, we can even convert sunlight directly into electricity with photovoltaics.

It is time for us to vertically integrate and bring nuclear fusion in-house, but without the benefit of tremendous gravitational forces and 10 billion years of fuel, man-made fusion. It will have to be even hotter and more efficient than the sun in a man-made fusion device, not only must it confine a plasma so hot that it will vaporize everything it touches, but also harness

this

chaotic thermonuclear reaction to generate more energy than the that is being lost. the environment and that is the critical parameter of whether you made a dense enough fusion fuel, whether the particles are close enough to each other, whether they are hot enough that they can react with each other and whether they are around long enough to create many reactions.

Bottling a star is one of the most difficult technical endeavors ever attempted on Earth, so I think the hardest part of the merger is that we have a combination of engineering and physics disciplines coming together and they all have to work, so that not only the complex physics around electromagnets and fusion plasmas themselves, but you also have these systems that operate at high temperature, high stress, high pressure and, most importantly, you have to do it in a way that is commercially relevant. . Gilian's key to solving the ultimate energy puzzle is contained. in these glowing purple rings that shoot at over 1 million miles per hour, but there is more than one way to fuse an atom in fusion, there are three key groups of approaches in magnetic fusion, the goal is to contain a very hot plasma in a constant magnetic field. for a long time until it ignites and forms a self-propagating fusion reaction, in contrast, inertial confinement fusion relies on achieving higher plasma densities.

Fusion is initiated by rapidly compressing and heating tiny targets filled with fusion fuel, typically using high-energy lasers. Every shot takes place. in a billionth of a second and there is a third type of fusion called magnetoinertial fusion that takes both worlds and confines and magnetically contains a plasma like we do in our reverse field configuration and instead of trying to hold it for a long time. Every time you compress it and heat it you add energy through compression and in our case you end up right in the middle where everything happens in about a thousandth of a second, while fusion reactions have been successfully demonstrated using various approaches,

this

does not guarantee that these methods can ever be scaled up to produce electricity in a commercially viable way, so in fusion one of the biggest challenges we have is knowing how to heat a fusion fuel, we know how to put energy and we have observed reactions fusion for a long time.

The challenge is that you need to get out more energy than you put in and from a healing point of view it is even more important that not only energy but also electricity heating fusion fuels to astronomically high temperatures requires a tremendous energy input. The first hurdle is to break even by producing at least as much energy as is used to heat the fusion fuel. So far, none of the 35 private companies and 81 research organizations working on fusion have reached break-even, but break-even is not enough to

make

fusion energy practically viable; more usable electricity needs to be extracted. than is needed to run the entire fusion power plant.

To do this, the rate of fusion energy production must not only exceed the rate of thermodynamic losses but also produce a surplus sufficient to overcome all the various energy losses. overheads at a fusion facility to produce net electricity to understand how Helion plans to become the first to achieve net electricity profit. Let's find out what traditional nuclear fission energy has in common with most in-

reactor

fusion approaches at the heart of modern nuclear power plants. Heavy nuclear fuels, such as uranium-235, are broken down into lighter elements that release enormous amounts of heat. Nuclear power plants have been in operation since 1951, but they still generate electricity the same way we have been doing since the 19th century, using heat to generate steam that spins a turbine connected to a generator and other sources of thermal energy such as Fossil fuels, geothermal biofuels and concentrated solar energy rely on basic electromagnetic induction to convert rotational energy into electricity.

Many experimental approaches to generating electricity from fusion work in a similar way, but Helion believes they have a shortcut, so one of the things we pioneered is a new approach to generating electricity from fusion. Ironically, this is actually a very old idea in the 1950s and 1960s, the pioneers around fusion said, hey, we know that all this energy is in magnetic energy and charge. particles in this fusion plasma, wouldn't it be great if we could extract that, in terms of direct electricity from the fusion plasma? The problem is that many of the electronic components needed to do it did not exist at the time, so it has taken years in between. so that we understand more about the physics and power electronics to be able to build the systems we build today in 2020 ilion completed its sixth fusion prototype, thirty thirty runs almost every day doing fusion and demonstrated that helium could directly recover some of electricity from your fusion generator.

That has been our focus from the beginning: can we take electricity directly from the fusion fuel of the charged particles of the magnetic field plasma and convert it into electricity directly without steam turbines? Taking the lessons learned from Trenta Ileon is in the final stages. to build its seventh-generation polaris prototype polaris' goal is to demonstrate that helion can generate net electricity from fusion for the first time electric future was granted exclusive access to helion's antares facility to gain a never-before-seen view of building polaris and understanding the science and engineering behind it, the first stage of the process is training.

Small amounts of helium, deuterium and helium-3 fusion fuels are injected as a gas into the formation chamber and superheated into plasma using oscillating magnetic fields, much like microwaves. What you are seeing behind me is the tube with which we actually inject gas into the system, so fusion systems operate at high temperature and high magnetic field, so these tubes require very specific materials, they are made of quartz of fused silica once fusion is complete. The fuels are in a plasma state, it's time to start adding energy, so in our systems we have these electromagnets with which we run large currents, millions of amperes, to compress and heat the fusion fuel, but to get that current of mega amperes we use electromagnets from capacitor banks.

They are a critical component of magnetoinertial fusion, so in a pulsed electromagnet large amounts of current flow, which means ohmic heating of the coil itself, there is a large pressure, a large force, perhaps on the order of 100 megapascals or Plus, a force pushing on this magnetic coil, so these magnetic coils have to survive both the high temperature and their pulsed nature and tend to operate at high electrical voltage. The capacitors charge for a few seconds storing electrical energy and then in less than a thousandth of a second that energy is discharged into electromagnets wrapped around the device.

The magnets invert the magnetic field of the plasma on itself in a toroidal structure called an inverted field configuration. electromagnetic properties of plasma are fundamental to understanding magnetic fusion devices let's do a basic qualification school demonstration if I heat helium gas atoms above their ionization energy with this tesla coil, the electrons are released from their atomic orbit, which gives This results in a hot cloud of helium ions and free electrons known as plasma because all particles have a net electrical charge. It is electrically conductive and magnetically controllable. When the helium electromagnets fire, they induce an electrical current that flows in a loop inside the plasma donut.

As the current flows around the plasma, it generates its own inverted magnetic field that envelops the plasma instead of confining it in an externally generated magnetic field, like most other fusion approaches in an FRC, the plasma self-organizes and is held together by its own fieldmagnetic. What it allows us to do is quite unique in an FRC field. The reverse configuration can really compress the movement of heat and translate that fusion. fuel and that's what we use to be able to make the fusion faster and smaller after frcs are formed at both ends. The magnets are fired sequentially at each other at over 1 million miles per hour, much like squeezing a tube of toothpaste, called peristaltic acceleration. you increase the magnetic field behind the fusion fuel and apply a pressure and that accelerates the plasma electromagnets accelerate the FRCs out of the initial injection system into the main fusion compression chamber where they fuse to become one large unified FRC and They actually collide with each other. superheat converting all that kinetic energy, all that heat directed speed into thermal energy, superheating the fusion fuel and preparing it to start compressing and getting fusion reactions in the center of the device, the machine's magnetic field increases rapidly, compressing plasma with a powerful force of more than 10 Tesla.

One of the other unique things about a reverse field configuration is that it is high beta and what that means is that there is high pressure in a reverse field configuration if you use a magnetic field to compress and heat your fusion fuel. about squeezing a balloon and a high beta plasma, which is very different from most fusion plasmas, the fuel pushes you back, so as you compress that balloon, the temperature and pressure inside the balloon increases, It heats up, becomes denser, and melting begins during operation. The fusion core inside North Star will momentarily be the hottest place in the solar system.

The plasma coating materials that line the inside of a fusion device must be able to withstand thermal loads greater than those of a spacecraft reentering Earth's atmosphere. Yeah, so the first wall is. Probably the most critical part of a fusion generator of any type where you have this core that is over 100 million degrees and you can imagine that any material next to that wall will not survive, it will melt, however the plasma does not touch the wall Fusion systems operate under vacuum and the fusion core is isolated from the first wall by a vacuum boundary, but fusion is postponed.

Intense electromagnetic radiation, as well as high-energy neutrons that destroy the wall with tremendous power, damage even the most durable materials. The search for the first perfect wall is a key materials science challenge to produce fusion energy at 100 million degrees Celsius, deuterium and helium. 3 atoms move fast enough when they collide, they have enough energy to overcome their electrostatic repulsion and get close enough to fuse into helium-4. Gilion's unique fusion fuels react in a way that is particularly conducive to direct energy conversion, while the majority of fusion energy reactions are released. at 80 of its energy and neutrons deuterium helium-3 fusion is neutron when they fuse their energy release is carried by an alpha particle and a high energy proton without a neutron the problem with a neutron is that it is not very useful in terms of In reality, when generating energy, it simply generates heat where other particles are charged, particles that can be directly extracted from electricity from all these fusion reactions within the plasma, convert matter into new energy, which strengthens the magnetic field of the plasma to as the magnetic field of the plasma becomes stronger and pushes it back. in the magnetic field of the machine causing a change in the magnetic flux of the machine, this change in flux induces current in the coils of the machine which is directly recovered as electricity and returned to the capacitors that originally charge the magnets around the machine, so our goal is to compress and heat the fusion fuel just until it starts to ignite and then turn it off expand it get that electricity out of the system put in new fuel and repeat the process the ileum fusion generator needs a way to expel the hot gases from the fusion chamber after each pulse, so think about your car exhaust, the diverter is where we take the remaining fusion byproducts, some have burned, some have fused, some have not fused, we separate them and also take the remaining energy that is outside the system and extract it for electricity, etc.

You have to deal with really complex engineering and physics where you have the high temperature gas that is escaping from the fusion system and then you also pump it out and you want to remove the air from the system in exactly the same geometry after every one millisecond pulse. Helion fusion electricity will be delivered to the grid. What a pulse system really allows us to do is dial in what we call repetition rate so that it can change, if you want to think about an engine, the rpm of that engine so that it can. Raise or lower the power depending on what is needed for the load.

Gilion's lodestar is delivering commercial electricity to the grid as quickly as possible. So when does Helion expect to start producing electricity and how much will the availability of fusion fuels cost? is a primary consideration for commercial fusion energy, but the amount of fuel used for each pulse is minuscule. 500 milliliters of deuterium are enough for approximately five and a half million pulses. Deuterium is abundant on Earth, but helium-3 is incredibly rare; It has even been suggested that we will need to extract it from the moon because the moon lacks a protective magnetic field, like the Earth, solar winds create a buildup of helium-3 and dust on the lunar surface.

The problem is that going to the moon is part of your business. Plan, you already have a lot of challenges to produce commercial electricity here on Earth, so to get helium 3, one thing that helium has done is we patented a process to take deuterium, which is found in all the water on Earth, which fuses cleanly and safely to produce helium. -3 then take another deuterium fuse that will be joined together to produce helium-4 gilion believes that commercial fusion energy is not a fundamental physics problem but an engineering problem that will be solved by building tests and iteration of fusion systems, Some of the most important things when rebuilding these fusion systems, these fusion fuels at over 100 million degrees is the diagnosis, how do you measure what you're actually creating?

So we inject an infrared laser here and it's like a refractive index, like you put straw in water and it bends the light as it goes through the water, so you see kind of a promenade curvature. The same thing happens in a fusion plasma where the laser passes and bends in the plasma and then we collect it by measuring the displacement and measuring the curvature. we can measure how many particles it passes through in the process. We also want to directly measure the fusion products themselves, so we have neutron detectors that measure the neutrons that are formed.

We have alpha particle detectors that directly measure fusion particles, the charged particles that Gilian expects Polaris to demonstrate net electricity production by

2024

, but in the realm of cutting-edge fusion demonstration it does not equate to feasibility, so what is Helion's plan to achieve commercial fusion energy? I agree with most approaches to merging. that although we know the physics and engineering well enough to build systems that can generate net energy, they may not be commercially viable, so you have to answer that every time you build these systems, what does the end product look like? ? mass produce this, can the cost be reduced?

Can it be brought to market profitably to achieve this? Helium is approaching production in a way reminiscent of Elon Musk's strategy for Tesla. Many experimental approaches to fusion require large scale and high capital costs, and although fusion scales very well, so as the radius of the fusion system increases you get a lot more energy, which is fantastic and the cost goes down. , but commercial practicality also decreases, so what we envision are small-scale fusion systems gigafactories where we can mass produce. These are low cost and so instead of building large, single boutique fusion power plants, you are actually building power plants or a collection of small generators that come together and that allows you to build fusion systems commercially. practical.

So how much will the merger cost? cost of energy for you the customer helion estimates that its fusion energy will be one of the cheapest sources of electricity and the cost of electricity production is projected to be one cent per kilowatt hour or ten dollars per megawatt hour if helion is successful How will fusion energy fit in? In the global energy mix, the need for clean baseload electricity is huge and at helion we don't believe fusion will replace renewable energy, it's an addition. Energy production, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, is responsible for the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Initially, fusion energy can serve as a carbon-free alternative to fill electricity production gaps in markets that do not have high renewable energy penetration, such as developing countries, in areas that already have a lot of solar, wind, , hydroelectric or geothermal. Fusion can become the source of permanent industrial load. Replacing fossil fuels and even nuclear fission energy, while modern nuclear power plants are the most reliable carbon-free energy source on the grid today, fusion energy has many beneficial prospects over fission, for one On the other hand, there is less potential for catastrophic accidents because fusion requires precise conditions that are difficult. enough to intentionally create fusion devices cannot be melted down like a fission

reactor

.

Fusion uses minimal amounts of fuel at any given time and the reaction can be stopped immediately by cutting off the fuel supply. Additionally, fusion creates far less radioactive waste than spent uranium fuel from fission. The rods are very biologically harmful and remain radioactive for thousands of years, requiring complex disposal and storage methods. Radioactive waste products from fusion consist mainly of irradiated components. They are generally less dangerous and the radioactivity dissipates within 100 years. A safe and low-cost energy source without carbon emissions. Since fusion can enable interesting possibilities for the future, then what would a world with commercial fusion energy look like?

All over the world we see water challenges, so suddenly desalination plants become really profitable and some water challenges can be solved. To help facilitate the transition to electric transportation, nearly half of all cars are projected to be battery electric vehicles by 2035. Additionally, the deployment of small modular reactors can enable flexible placement of power where it is needed most, such as areas isolated or unique industrial applications such as the Tesla gigafactory, it is often said that fusion energy is 30 years away and will always be that way. Will fusion energy be part of our electrical future? If we compare the progress of fusion energy with computers, a powerful trend emerges.

Moore's Law observes that the number of transistors in a circuit doubles every two years and we have all seen the rapid advancement of computing power in the last half century to nuclear fusion. The triple product serves as a key figure of merit and is growing at a similar rate to computing power. It seems likely that someone will do it. demonstrate net electricity from fusion this decade and helium is a promising contender, but this is just the beginning. Turning fusion energy into a competitive and profitable technology in the real world will be a long road despite the challenges.

Harnessing star power and providing humanity with unlimited clean energy is a goal worth striving for. Work devoted to nuclear fusion energy draws on all branches of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. If you want to better understand some of the concepts we present in this video, it is important that you first build your scientific fundamentals tree brilliant does a great job of taking complicated science and breaking it down into small pieces with fun and challenging interactive explorations master concepts learn the fundamental principles and develop your intuition so you can truly understand these innovative technologies. I have taken brilliant courses on electricity, magnetism and solar energy andI was impressed with how well they structured their lessons with clever analogies, examples, and quizzes to test your knowledge.

Bright offers a wide range of other content topics, from mathematical foundations to quantitative finance, from scientific thinking to special relativity from programming with Python to machine learning go to shiny.org electric Future and register for free and also the first 200 people who Click on that link to get 20 off your annual premium subscription. Electric Future presents optimistic but realistic coverage of sustainable advances. energy technology if you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel. You might be interested in checking out one of these videos below, thanks for watching and let the volts be with you.