70 YR OLD SCI FI TECH

This lab achieved a stunning breakthrough on fusion energy

Story by Bill Weir • Yesterday 

After generations of trying to produce the power of a star on Earth, a successful nuclear fusion ignition happened in the middle of a December night and was over in 20-billionths of a second.

That’s more than 100 billion times shorter than the Wright Brothers’ first, 12-second flight — but a brief, shining moment that could have even bigger implications for humanity.

But while the science teams at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are still buzzing over their Wright-Brothers moment, we only remember that name because their third flight stayed in the sky for 39 minutes.

The nuclear fusion reaction must be repeated, extended and scaled before the comparison sticks. And the race is on to make it work.

“But that’s what makes it so exciting, right?” lead scientist Tammy Ma told CNN. “The potential is so great for clean, abundant, limitless, affordable energy. It will be tough. It won’t be easy. But it’s worth doing.”

Ma’s office is a giant box of lasers the size of three football fields in the corner of a 7,000-acre lab in Livermore. Running across the soaring white ceilings are miles of square tubes holding 192 of the most energetic lasers in the world, all snaking toward a round room at the center.

The very middle of this target chamber becomes the hottest place in the solar system every time they run a fusion experiment, and it is covered with enough gleaming machinery that J.J. Abrams used it to portray the warp core of the USS Enterprise in “Stark Trek Into Darkness.”

With a legacy of delays and cost overruns, the National Ignition Facility was wryly nicknamed the “National Almost Ignition Facility,” or “NAIF,” by critics in Congress. If not for its work studying nuclear weaponry without the need for test explosions, the program might have lost funding years ago.

But now, for the first time since breaking ground in 1997, the National Ignition Facility can finally live up to its name. In December, 192 of the most energetic lasers in the world heated up a tiny pellet of hydrogen atoms with such force, they fused together to create helium and — most importantly — excess energy.

A little more than 2 megajoules of energy going into the target chamber became 3.15 megajoules coming out — a modest gain of around 50%, but enough to make history and allow scientists to call the experiment a true success.

The five attempts since have all failed to repeat it.

“We’ve learned a lot through those experiments,” Lawrence Livermore Director Kimberly Budil said during a celebration of December’s ignition. “And we’re very confident we’ll get back above that threshold. But it’s still very much an R&D project at this point.”



The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. - CNN

While some of the failed shots used less power than the successful one, others were unable to recreate the precision of the diamond capsules used to hold the hydrogen atoms.

“We made a number of modifications to try to compensate for the fact that the capsules weren’t perfect and some of those worked better than others.” Budil said. “And so the hope is always there. But if you look at the history of experiments that we’ve done, very small changes on the input bring very large changes in yield on the output side.”

“Every time we do a shot, we are the hottest place in the solar system,” Ma said as she pointed at the miles of mirrors which can amplify $14 worth of electricity into a force “a thousand times the power of the entire US electrical grid. But your lights don’t flicker at home when we take a shot because we’re taking a huge amount of energy and compressing it down into nanoseconds.”

The facility was all built with 20-year-old technology and Ma said that if they were to rebuild it today — or build a legitimate nuclear-fusion power plant — “you would use new technology that is a lot more efficient, could shoot at much higher rates, with higher efficiency and very high precision.”



The laser preamplifier module at the National Ignition Facility. - Damien Jemison/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

So far, the nuclear-fusion field has been mainly divided into those that use lasers to spark ignition like a series of firecrackers, and those that deploy magnets strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier to control streams of plasma flowing around a doughnut-shaped machine called a tokamak.

In 2021, scientists working near Oxford used the magnet method to generate a record-breaking amount of sustained energy for five seconds.

“In ten years, they will be where we were ten years ago,” Bruno Van Wonterghem, NIF’s operations manager, said — a sign of how competitive the growing fusion race is becoming.

Even before December’s successful shot, private investment in fusion technology tripled in 2021, with dozens of startups trying to tackle fusion’s infinite challenges in novel ways. One Vancouver startup is attempting to harness a whirlpool of liquid metal to control neutrons, while alumni of the Lawrence Livermore Lab have spun off an idea for small, modular fusion reactors and count Bill Gates and Shell Oil as investors.

Helion Energy is making the boldest promises of the startup lot, and attracting some of the biggest backers in tech, including a $375-million investment from Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI. Helion claims its prototype the shape of huge dumbbell will fire plasma rings at a million miles an hour and demonstrate the ability to produce electricity through fusion by next year.



Tammy Ma speaks at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on May 9. - CNN

After Microsoft announced on Wednesday a commitment to buy 50 megawatts of electricity from it in 2028, Helion says it will build their first plant in Washington state. But this the first-of-its-kind fusion power purchase agreement is a modest one, accounting for just around 0.04% of the clean power Microsoft bought in 2022.

The International Atomic Energy Agency doesn’t expect electricity from fusion to be produced until the second half of the century, and as difficult as it is to control sun-hot plasma, it’s been equally hard to control the cost of making it.

“At the moment, we’re spending a huge amount of time and money for every experiment we do,” Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College in London, told CNN. “We need to bring the cost down by a huge factor.”

Now that they have their Wright Brothers moment, Ma is convinced the world will eventually fly, work and live on fusion.

“If we, as the US, decide we’re going to do it, we can do it. It’s only a matter of time. It’s a matter of money,” Ma said. “It’s a choice we have to make together. And I do believe we will see it in the next few decades.

“For sure.”

Microsoft bets that a fusion power plant from Helion Energy will be operating this decade

Story by cboudreau@insider.com (Catherine Boudreau) • Yesterday 

Polaris is a prototype fusion reactor from Helion Energy. The startup announced a deal with Microsoft to provide the tech giant with electricity produced from fusion. Helion© Provided by Business Insider
Microsoft agreed to buy electricity from a fusion power plant being developed by Helion Energy.
Helion said the plant will be online by 2028, sooner than scientists thought fusion would be viable.
Fusion energy doesn't produce the greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the climate crisis.

The timeline for pumping fusion energy into the power grid might be closer than many believed.

Microsoft on Wednesday agreed to buy 50 megawatts of electricity — enough to power about 40,000 homes — from a fusion power plant being developed by Helion Energy. The startup's plant is expected to come online by 2028.

Fusion, a process that occurs naturally in the sun and stars, is considered the holy grail of energy production because it could be a nearly limitless source of power without creating greenhouse-gas emissions, which are fueling the climate crisis.

Scientists have long been trying to harness fusion energy, with some predicting that it won't be a viable power source for decades. Researchers had a breakthrough in December, when federal scientists in California reported they achieved the first net energy gain — a fusion reaction that produces more energy than it takes to create. But so far, the lab hasn't replicated the results, Bloomberg reported.

David Kirtley, the founder and CEO of Helion, told Insider that he's confident in the startup's 2028 target for several reasons. All six of Helion's fusion prototypes have set records for their energy output and the temperature at which they operate, recently exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius — an ideal threshold for a power plant. The seventh prototype, expected be completed this year, is set to be the first to convert fusion energy into electricity, Kirtley said.

"Helion is focused on doing fusion in a way that gets us close to electricity, rather than just energy in a generic sense," he said.

Related video: Nuclear Fusion Reactor For Cleaner Energy (Live Science)
Duration 3:12  View on Watch

Live Science Nuclear Fusion Reactor For Cleaner Energy
3:12


"One analogy I use is regenerative braking in electric cars," he added. "When you hit the gas, it takes energy from the battery and puts it into the motor. When you hit the brakes, that energy returns to the battery. That's what we do for fusion. We have energy in storage, we put it into the fusion reaction, and then we extract that back out directly."

Helion's novel approach to fusion involves injecting deuterium and helium-3 gas into a cylinder-shaped machine that heats up the gas up to form charged plasma on each side of the machine. These plasmas are then accelerated and compressed by an electromagnetic field until they collide to create a reaction.

Beyond the technology, Kirtley said that as of April, the regulatory environment was more certain. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it would use an existing framework to oversee the safety of fusion reactors and power plants. It opted not to impose the stricter rules applied to nuclear reactors. Fusion, unlike nuclear fission, doesn't come with concerns about radioactive waste or the proliferation of weapons.

"That means we should be able to build fusion systems much quicker, operate them safely — and at a lower cost," Kirtley said.

Still, building a first-of-its-kind power plant in five years is a major challenge.

Kirtley said that's why the deal with Microsoft and the transmission operator Constellation was so important. Constellation is experienced at building power plants quickly, and Microsoft is one of the largest corporate purchasers of renewable energy. The tech giant aims for 100% of its electricity consumption by 2030 to be matched by zero-carbon purchases.

If Helion doesn't deliver Microsoft the 50 MW of electricity from its fusion power plant, there will be financial penalties, Kirtley said. He declined to disclose more specifics about the agreement.

Helion had previously projected that it would start building a commercial fusion power plant by 2022 — if it obtained sufficient funding. That target got pushed back because it took longer to get the funds, a spokesman told Insider.

Helion has since secured what it needs, including a $500 million fundraising round last year led by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and Helion's largest investor.