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ASTRO TELLER: There is a place
that has been doing moonshots
for quite a while.
I think that the lore about Bell
Labs and Xerox Park is
well known, and I think it's a
little unfair that the place
that has, in a way, been running
the longest, and
certainly over the last 30
years, done some of the most
exciting stuff, is not
as well known.
This is Skunk Works at
Lockheed Martin.
But they are on a mission to
take real moonshots, to do
radical things on
a regular basis.
And so I'm excited, not only to
hear about what Charles is
going to tell us, I think this
particular moonshot is
extremely exciting.
But I also think it's great to
see that there is a place in
the world that is doing this on
a regular systemized basis.
Welcome to Solve for
X, Charles, can't
wait for your talk.
CHARLES CHASE: Thank you.
So at the Skunk Works we very
seldom get to talk about what
we do behind closed doors.
So I'm really excited to be
able to share with you a
project that we've been working
that might be able to
bring energy for everyone.
And you know, just to give it
some perspective, the energy
problem is really an enduring
one, it's an obvious one.
And the world uses enough energy
for every man, woman,
and child to be running
a refrigerator, an air
conditioner, a TV, and a
microwave all at the same
time, 24/7, 365 days a year.
But that energy is not
evenly distributed.
There's still 1.3 billion people
in the world without
electricity.
So wouldn't it be wonderful to
be able to bring power to the
developing world?
That would just be a fantastic
thing, and, of course, our
energy use is only growing.
It's projected to about
double by 2050.
And to try to meet some of those
needs, there's like a
whole bunch of coal plants that
have been proposed, that
are in the planning stages.
So not only are those going to
cost significant capital to
build, about $4 trillion,
but also going to have a
significant impact on our health
and on our environment.
So an approach that people have
looked at, really since
the early '50s, which is a
zero emission approach to
generating energy, is fusion.
And in fusion, what's depicted
here is really the simplest
fusion reaction to achieve.
So what you do is you bring
together two isotopes of
hydrogen, deuterium
and tritium.
And so when you bring those
together with sufficient
energy and for a long enough
time in a small enough volume,
they fuse together creating
helium, the neutron, and a
whole bunch of energy, that you
can harvest with an old
fashioned heat energy cycle.
So you can generate energy
with the heat.
So in addition to being zero
emission, fusion has a lot of
other benefits.
Its energy density is six
orders of magnitude
greater than oil.
And the fuel is very low cost
and quite plentiful.
Deuterium comes from seawater.
You can buy bottles of it
on the internet for
a few hundred bucks.
And lithium, that would be used
to breed the tritium, is
also really very plentiful.
And this fuel, there's no
proliferation issues, so you
can't make a bomb out
of this material.
And there's no meltdown risk.
So you take away the input
energy to the fusion reaction
and the reaction stops
immediately.
And there's very, very little
long lived radioactive waste.
So because of the promise,
there's been, really since the
early '50s, lots of
work on developing
different fusion concepts.
But there's really one approach
that has come to
dominate the fusion community,
and that's
what's called a tokamak.
And there's been more than 200
tokamaks built across the
world to date.
They've come closer to being
able to generate more energy
out than energy in than
any other approach.
But the physics of a
tokamak lead to a
really enormous size.
So what's depicted here is the
current major tokamak effort
going on, which is the
international ITER project
being constructed in the
south of France.
This thing was started at a
summit between Gorbachev and
Reagan, so it's been a long time
getting to this point.
And you can see the scale, if
you look at the very lower
right-hand corner.
I don't know if you can see
a little man over there.
Let me have a little
pointer here.
Sorry.
So yeah, so here's a little
guy right here.
So here's the guy.
And again, this scale is
driven by the physics.
You can't make this smaller.
So that scale naturally leads to
extremely high costs, high
complexity, and really
long time frames.
The first power plant based on
ITER is not projected to be
ready until the mid
2040s at best.
So what if there was another
way of doing this?
If you weren't hampered by the
physics of a tokamak, and you
were able to generate fusion
in a compact form factor.
Something that would generate
100 megawatts of power.
Enough power for a small city
of 50,000 to 100,000 people,
and something that would fit
on the back of a truck.
And so if you think of the
complexity of something like
this, it's closer to that
of a jet engine.
So it's something that you would
be able to build on a
production line, versus
being a major
infrastructure project.
And so we can all imagine the
benefits to the world of
having a virtually unlimited
zero emission energy source.
We would be able to provide
decentralized power for the
developing world.
We would have plenty of energy
for desalinization, so we
could have clean water.
We'd have a base load
for an electric
transportation system.
And we could even enable
fast space travel.
So we could get to Mars in a
month, versus six months and
not have to worry about
some of the cosmic
radiation health issues.
So we really think, at Lockheed,
that we can make
this a reality.
And so what we've done is we've
built upon the past 50
years of fusion research and
created a brand new way of
generating fusion that's very
suitable for a very compact
form factor.
And, in my mind, this is a
perfect example of the
adjacent possible.
Where you take different parts
of things that already exist
to come up with something new.
And so we've had a--
I really can't say enough
about the brilliant,
fantastic, dedicated team we've
had working on this.
Some of them are pictured here,
in our lab, including
the inventor.
On the very right,
is Tom McGuire.
He's the guy who's come up with
our brand new concept.
And so you can see in our lab,
in the background, you can see
our experiment, which is
a cylindrical shape.
It's about 1 meter in diameter
by about 2 meters long.
And so an actual 100 megawatt
reactor would be
about twice that size.
And so in our experiment, what
we do is we put in deuterium
gas and then we heat it
up with RF energy.
And so that generates a plasma
that the magnetic fields hold
and confine.
So what we do is, we look and we
see how that plasma evolves
over time, and how well it's
confined, what temperature it
can get to, and seeing if that
matches what our predictions
and our analysis says how
the plasma behaves.
Basically, we're taking a look
at how the joule seconds per
cubic meter are changing over
time and seeing if those
conditions are what are
needed for fusion.
And so you can see on the right,
is during an experiment
inside our chamber.
And you can see the plasma.
And then, what you see here,
this is a coil inside, this is
one of the magnetic coils
inside, and then you can see
the plasma following the
magnetic field lines exactly
as predicted.
So this configuration is
something that's called a high
beta configuration.
And what that refers to is the
ratio of the magnetic field
pressure to the pressure of
the plasma that wants to
expand out.
So in this type of
configuration, the magnetic
field increases as you're going
out from the center of
the plasma.
So as the plasma wants to expand
out, it encounters a
stronger and stronger magnetic
field that tends to push it
back into place, and so it does
that until it reaches an
equilibrium point.
And we have a beta of almost
one in our configuration,
which is in sharp contrast
to a tokamak.
In a tokamak, it's that rotating
plasma that generates
the magnetic field itself.
And so, in that case, the
magnetic field actually dies
out as it goes away from the
center of the plasma.
And so the plasma will expand.
As it expands it encounters a
weaker and weaker force so it
tends to go unstable, and that's
like the major issue
that has plagued tokamaks
over the years.
And it's a negative feedback
loop as well because as the
plasma expands in the tokamak,
the magnetic field gets weaker
and weaker, leading to more
unstability issues.
In our case, again, the magnetic
field is stronger as
you're going out and it pushes
the plasma back in.
Additionally, we have very
few open field lines.
So there are hardly any paths
for the particles to be able
to leak out of the system.
And then, another important
consideration is the curvature
of the magnetic field lines.
You want to have what's called
good curvature, which is like
kind of an arch shape.
That is very good at, again,
keeping the magnetic field
lines and the plasma,
the way the plasma
flows, contained in.
So in what we've come up with,
we've been able to combine
together these three factors,
very high beta, very few
escape points with the field
lines, and then, also this
excellent curvature, so we
have good MHD stability.
And we think this is really the
best approach that we've
seen, of course we think that,
to accomplish this.
And so, I don't know, maybe
we really can change
the world with this.
And, again, I just wanted to
make the point that because
the complexity is more suited to
something you can put into
production on a production
line, versus a major
infrastructure project that
takes a consortium of
governments to achieve, the
timeline to making this happen
is way different.
So five years from now, we
could have a 100 megawatt
prototype reactor, and then in
a 10 year time frame, a fully
engineered power plant based
on this approach.
And so if you look at the bigger
picture of what that
means, is that the fact that we
could be ready with a power
plant in 10 years, would enable
us to meet global
electricity demands by around
the 2050 time frame, in time
to have a significant impact
on our climate.
And you contrast that with the
current approach of the fusion
community, where they would
not be able to meet global
electricity demands until
sometime close to the turn of
the century, when it might be
just a little too late.
So when we can provide energy
for everyone, it's interesting
to think about what the far term
impact will be of that.
And I like to think about what's
going to happen when
the whole world is first
world, and what new
interactions are going to be
possible when that happens.
This rising billion people.
And then, also, what new
adjacent possibles are going
to be possible, that are not--
we can't even imagine now,
because the pieces
don't exist yet.
And so what I like to think is
that there's really only one
guarantee, and that's
if we don't try,
nothing is going to happen.
And I think it really behooves
us to try to make this happen,
and it takes a persistence
of vision.
That's it.
Thank you.
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