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FUSION / a star, in a bottle

13 SLIDES · THE SCIENCE · THE PROJECTS · THE TIMELINE

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13 SLIDES · THE SCIENCE · THE PROJECTS · THE TIMELINE Key sections include: FUSION a star, in a bottle; 02 The basic reaction; 03 Why it’s hard; 04 Fission ≠ fusion; 05 Magnetic confinement · tokamaks; 06 Inertial confinement · lasers; 07 The private wave; 08 The magnet breakthrough; 09 What “Q” actually means; 10 The hard yards to a power plant.

Key sections

  • 01FUSION a star, in a bottle
  • 0202 The basic reaction
  • 0303 Why it’s hard
  • 0404 Fission ≠ fusion
  • 0505 Magnetic confinement · tokamaks
  • 0606 Inertial confinement · lasers
  • 0707 The private wave
  • 0808 The magnet breakthrough
  • 0909 What “Q” actually means
  • 1010 The hard yards to a power plant
  • 1111 An honest timeline
  • 1212 Why it matters
  • 13Where to keep going

Topics covered

catalogfuturefusion

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Slide outline
  1. 01FUSION a star, in a bottle
  2. 0202 The basic reaction
  3. 0303 Why it’s hard
  4. 0404 Fission ≠ fusion
  5. 0505 Magnetic confinement · tokamaks
  6. 0606 Inertial confinement · lasers
  7. 0707 The private wave
  8. 0808 The magnet breakthrough
  9. 0909 What “Q” actually means
  10. 1010 The hard yards to a power plant
  11. 1111 An honest timeline
  12. 1212 Why it matters
  13. 13Where to keep going
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Presentation Transcript

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Slide 01

FUSION a star, in a bottle

  • Lecture 01 · Plasma Physics
  • 13 SLIDES · THE SCIENCE · THE PROJECTS · THE TIMELINE
Slide 02

02The basic reaction

  • Pressed close enough together, light nuclei fuse — the strong force snaps them into a heavier nucleus, and the mass deficit becomes kinetic energy. The easiest reaction we know:
  • D + T → ⁴He (3.5 MeV) + n (14.1 MeV) + 17.6 MeV
  • Deuterium
  • ¹H + 1n · abundant in seawater, ~33 g/m³
  • Tritium
  • ¹H + 2n · radioactive, t½ ≈ 12.3 yr · must be bred
  • Energy
  • 17.6 MeV per fusion · ~4×10⁸ J / g of fuel
  • For comparison: 1 g of D-T fuel ≈ 8 tonnes of oil equivalent.
Slide 03

03Why it’s hard

  • Two positive nuclei repel via the Coulomb force. To get them close enough for the strong force to take over, you have to fling them at each other — thermally.
  • Plasma temperature
  • 108 K
  • More than 6× hotter than the core of the Sun. The Sun cheats by being absurdly massive (gravity does the confining); we don’t have that option.
  • Lawson’s triple product
  • n · T · τ ≥ 3×10²¹
  • density × temperature × confinement time
  • (keV · s · m⁻³)
  • You can trade among the three. Tokamaks run hot & long; inertial schemes run hot & dense for nanoseconds.
  • No solid material survives contact with a 100-million-degree plasma. The plasma must be held away from every wall — by magnetic fields, by inertia, or both.
Slide 04

04Fission ≠ fusion

  • They are different reactions with very different consequences. The marketing conflation costs fusion politically.
  • FissionFusion
  • Reaction²³⁵U + n → fragmentsD + T → ⁴He + n
  • Fueluranium / plutoniumhydrogen isotopes
  • Energy / kg fuel~8×10¹³ J~3.4×10¹⁴ J
  • Long-lived waste10⁵-yr actinidesnone from the reaction itself
  • Runaway riskchain reaction; needs controlplasma quenches if disturbed
  • Weaponizable byproductplutoniumtritium (limited; not a bomb fuel)
  • Fusion does produce activated structural materials from neutron flux — a real engineering problem, but on decade half-lives, not millennia.
Slide 05

05Magnetic confinement · tokamaks

  • Charged particles spiral along magnetic field lines. Bend the lines into a closed torus and the plasma stays trapped — in principle, forever.
  • Toroidal field — coils ring the donut, the dominant field.
  • Poloidal field — induced by plasma current itself, prevents drift.
  • ITER (France, first plasma slipped to ~2034) is a ~6.2 m major-radius tokamak built by 35 nations. Goal: Q ≥ 10.
  • The word tokamak is Russian shorthand for “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils.”
Slide 06

06Inertial confinement · lasers

  • Don’t hold the plasma — crush it. A peppercorn-sized capsule of D-T is hit symmetrically by a converging shock; for a few hundred picoseconds the fuel is denser than lead and hotter than the Sun’s core. By the time it blows apart, the reaction has run.
  • NIF · Lawrence Livermore
  • December 5, 2022
  • 192 lasers delivered 2.05 MJ to a capsule. The fusion reaction released 3.15 MJ. First net energy gain in a controlled fusion experiment in human history.
  • target gain
  • Q = 1.54
  • The pellet
  • ~2 mm diameter, frozen D-T layer inside a diamond shell, suspended in a gold cylinder (hohlraum) that converts laser light to a uniform X-ray bath.
  • A working power plant would need to do this ~10 times per second, every second, for years. NIF currently fires a few shots a day.
Slide 07

07The private wave

  • For 60 years fusion meant national labs and ITER. Since ~2018, $7+ billion of private capital has flowed into ~40 startups, each betting on a different shortcut.
  • Commonwealth Fusion · SPARC
  • MIT spinout. Compact tokamak using high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape. Targets Q > 2 in 2027. Sited in Devens, MA.
  • Helion
  • Pulsed field-reversed configuration. Burns D-³He. Direct electric conversion (no steam). Microsoft signed a 50 MW PPA for 2028 — aggressive.
  • TAE Technologies
  • Aneutronic p-¹¹B fuel. Hardest fuel cycle (needs ~10⁹ K) but cleanest output. Backed by Google.
  • General Fusion
  • Magnetized target fusion: pistons crash a liquid lithium liner around a plasma. Building demo in Oxford, UK.
  • Tokamak Energy
  • UK firm. Compact spherical tokamaks + HTS magnets. Reached 100 M K in ST40 (2022).
  • The bet
  • That faster iteration + new magnet tech beats one giant 30-year intergovernmental megaproject. Verdict pending.
Slide 08

08The magnet breakthrough

  • Tokamak performance scales steeply with magnetic field strength — roughly as B⁴. Doubling B shrinks the machine by ~16× for the same fusion power.
  • Old: NbTi / Nb₃Sn
  • ~5–6 T · cooled to 4 K with liquid helium · brittle, expensive
  • New: REBCO HTS tape
  • 20+ T · works at 20 K · thin, robust, manufacturable
  • Consequence
  • ITER-class performance in a building you can fit on a campus. This is why SPARC, Tokamak Energy, and others suddenly look credible.
  • CFS’s 2021 demonstration of a 20 T HTS toroidal-field coil at full scale was the moment serious people stopped dismissing private fusion. It happened. The magnet works.
Slide 09

09What “Q” actually means

  • Headlines say “NIF achieved net energy.” True — but only in a specific, narrow sense. Three different Qs matter:
  • WhatDefinitionNIF Dec ’22
  • Qscientific (target gain)
  • fusion energy out / laser energy on target
  • 1.54
  • Qengineering
  • fusion energy out / total wall-plug electricity in
  • ~0.01
  • Qcommercial
  • net electricity out / wall-plug in, after capture losses
  • NIF’s lasers drew about 300 MJ from the wall to deposit 2 MJ on target. So to get from a scientific milestone to a power plant we still need ~50–100× more. It is not a small gap. It is a real gap. Both things are true.
Slide 10

10The hard yards to a power plant

  • Beyond ignition, four engineering problems must be solved simultaneously:
  • 1 · Tritium breeding
  • World tritium stockpile is ~25 kg. A 1 GW plant burns ~56 kg/year. Plants must breed their own tritium from a lithium blanket struck by fusion neutrons. Required ratio > 1.0; nobody has demonstrated this in a real machine yet.
  • 2 · Materials
  • 14 MeV neutrons embrittle steel and create activation. First-wall tiles facing the plasma erode. New alloys (RAFM steels, tungsten) must survive ~150 dpa of damage over a plant lifetime.
  • 3 · Duty cycle
  • NIF: a few shots a day. ITER: 400 s pulses, then cool down. A plant needs months of continuous operation. Every component must work for that.
  • 4 · Economics
  • Even if it works, capital cost per kW must compete with solar+storage and fission. The unit economics are unproven; the regulatory path doesn’t exist yet.
Slide 11

11An honest timeline

  • The old joke — “fusion is 30 years away, and always will be” — has been roughly right since the 1950s. Here’s where reasonable people now disagree:
  • 2025NOW
  • 2027SPARC Q>2
  • 2030sOPTIMISTS
  • 2034ITER 1ST PLASMA
  • 2040sCONSENSUS
  • 2050+SCALE
  • Optimists (2030s)
  • HTS magnets + private capital + iteration. Helion, CFS, Tokamak Energy all guide to a demo plant by ~2030 and pilot grid power by mid-decade.
  • Consensus (2040s)
  • ITER scientific results late 2030s → DEMO designs → first commercial plant ~2045. The IAEA roadmap. The boring answer.
  • Skeptics (never)
  • Tritium breeding may not close. Materials may not survive 30 years. By then, solar + batteries + advanced fission may have eaten the niche.
Slide 12

12Why it matters

  • If fusion works at scale, it is the closest thing physics offers to a generic energy abundance:
  • Clean — no CO₂, no long-lived waste, no proliferation pathway.
  • Baseload — runs continuously, independent of weather. Solves the awkward 20% of the grid that solar+storage strains to cover.
  • Sited anywhere — fuel is hydrogen from water. No mining, no pipelines, no geopolitics of supply.
  • Dense — a single GW plant on a few hectares. No square kilometres of panels, no ridge-line wind farms.
  • Cheap, clean, abundant electricity is the upstream input to nearly every problem we want to solve — desalination, direct air capture, fertiliser, heat for industry, AI compute. It is not a niche fix. It is a civilisation-scale lever, if we can build it.
  • It is also not guaranteed, not soon, and not a reason to slow anything else down. Build solar. Build fission. Build fusion. All of them.
Slide 13

Where to keep going

  • further reading
  • Video — first principles
  • YouTube · “fusion energy explained”
  • Kurzgesagt, Real Engineering, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Veritasium all have solid intro tracks.
  • Video — NIF ignition
  • YouTube · “NIF ignition breakthrough”
  • LLNL’s own announcement, plus deep-dives on what gain Q=1.5 actually buys.
  • Books
  • The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion — L. J. Reinders
  • Sun in a Bottle — Charles Seife
  • The Star Builders — Arthur Turrell
  • Track the field
  • Fusion Industry Association annual report
  • ITER organization news
  • arXiv physics.plasm-ph
  • ⟡ END · 13 / 13 ⟡
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