EMILY KWONG: You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.
REGINA BARBER: Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here with science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel. Hey, Geoff.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL: Hi, Gina, how are you?
BARBER: I'm doing pretty good. I'm super excited because we're going to be talking about fusion. Let's get straight into it.
BRUMFIEL: I'm going to start with a joke. Have you heard the classic joke about nuclear fusion energy?
BARBER: No. I'm hesitant, but go ahead. Tell me the joke. [LAUGHS]
BRUMFIEL: The joke is-- fusion energy is the power of the future, and it always will be.
BARBER: I don't get it.
BRUMFIEL: Ah!
BARBER: [LAUGHS]
BRUMFIEL: Well, because it turns out that people have been promising this brand-new source of power that's going to solve all the world's problems--
BARBER: Oh, yes, OK. [LAUGHS]
BRUMFIEL: --for 50 years. And yet, it never seems to quite work out.
BARBER: When I was in undergrad, it was still being promised. You're right.
BRUMFIEL: But that may be about to change. Because at the moment, there's a lot of investment, actually, flowing into the idea of building a commercial fusion power reactor, and the payoff could be huge.
DAVID KIRTLEY: We can generate electricity at, theoretically, much lower costs than we currently can generate it now and do it without fossil fuels, without risk of nuclear weapons, or any of those kinds of geopolitical issues, and do it quicker.
BARBER: Wow.
BRUMFIEL: That's David Kirtley. He's the CEO and co-founder of a company called Helion Energy, just outside of Seattle, Washington. And what he's talking about is a game-changer for literally everyone on the planet. The reason that we've been promised fusion for so long is because it's cheap, it's clean, no more greenhouse gas emissions, pretty much no long-term nuclear waste. I mean, there's literally no downside.
BARBER: Geoff, this sounds too good to be true, right? And based on your joke you just told, I'm guessing I'm not the only one that thinks that.
BRUMFIEL: Yeah, for sure. There's a bit of a checkered history with fusion research. But lately, billions of dollars from venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs have flowed into the field, and companies like Helion are making real progress.
BARBER: So today on the show, is the world on the brink of a commercial fusion-energy breakthrough? You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR. [INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]
BRUMFIEL: So Gina, we'll talk about some of these companies in a minute. But first, let's explain to our listeners what fusion actually is. And since you're the one with the PhD in physics, I'm going to make you do that part.
BARBER: I mean, my PhD is in physics, but I mostly studied stars, so let's start with that. OK, so fusion is a process that powers the stars, and it happens when lightweight elements fuse to make heavier ones. So for example, in our sun, four atoms of hydrogen, the lightest element out there, they get smashed together to make helium. And this process also gives off a lot of energy. That energy comes from a tiny amount of the hydrogen's mass that gets converted to energy in the reaction.
BRUMFIEL: Right, so this is Einstein's famous equation-- E equals mc squared.
BARBER: Right, right. So this is kind of the reverse of the nuclear plants we have right now. They use fission. And fission is where you have heavy atoms like uranium, and you split them apart, and this releases a lot of energy. And it's fine, but it generates long-term nuclear waste. And nuclear materials from this process can, in principle, be used for nuclear bombs. And fusion, what we're talking about in this episode, it doesn't create that waste. So that's the general idea and why fusion is so interesting. But Geoff, why don't you explain what makes it so tricky?
BRUMFIEL: Yeah, because I mean, as you just mentioned, in a way, we're already powered by fusion. Fusion is what makes the sun go, and so all life on Earth depends on fusion energy. But the sun has this real brute-force approach. I spoke to Carolyn Kuranz, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan. She says that hydrogen atoms, obviously, don't want to get together. Remember, at their cores are protons, positive charges that repel, and the sun's huge advantage is it has a lot of gravity.
CAROLYN KURANZ: Right. Basically, the sun weighs so much that it's able to squeeze these atoms together and fuse them.
BRUMFIEL: And here on Earth, there's no way that we can use gravity like that. So we have to come up with different ways to try to get the atoms to stick together. And that turns out to be a really tough problem.
KURANZ: It's really hard to do. [LAUGHS] Like, imagine putting the sun inside some sort of-- like, a gas tank or something.
BARBER: Yeah, so the sun would obviously melt the tank for starters, but Geoff, I know that, just recently, a facility in the United States did actually generate nuclear fusion, right? Like, using lasers?
BRUMFIEL: Yeah, that's right. It's called the National Ignition Facility, and it's out in California. And it used lasers to squeeze a bunch of fusion fuel together until it got it to start burning and very briefly created more fusion energy out of the fuel than it put in. But this facility is not able to produce net electrical power.
BARBER: It's a scientific facility. So it was never going to be some sort of a demonstration facility, which is kind of one of the steps you need to do to be able to demonstrate you can have electricity.
BRUMFIEL: And this laser approach, actually, has a really long way to go. Because even though the energy out was greater than the laser light that went in, as you know, lasers are not particularly efficient. So the power from fusion was something like 1% of the electricity from the grid the lasers needed to work. Now, there are many commercial companies who are trying to pursue Lasertec. There are more efficient lasers coming online all the time. But when I was visiting a few of these companies in Seattle, I saw a different approach.
BARBER: Right, so let's get into it. Tell me about these companies.
BRUMFIEL: Yeah, so these companies are just north of Seattle in Everett, near where Boeing and other big aerospace companies are. And the one I visited that maybe you've heard of is called Helion Energy.
BARBER: Yep.
BRUMFIEL: It's operating out of a giant warehouse. One section of the building has been partitioned into offices, but on the other side is this vast manufacturing space with gleaming white floors. Wow, this is maybe bigger than I expected.
KIRTLEY: So we moved the company up here about a year and a half ago, expanded our square footage quite a bit.
BRUMFIEL: That's David Kirtley, the CEO we heard from earlier. Kirtley was interested in Fusion as a physics student, but the more he studied it, the more he realized the solutions they were teaching him were still a really long way off.
KIRTLEY: The approaches for fusion that I was learning about in school weren't going to actually turn on and generate electrons on the grid in my lifetime at all.
BARBER: Wow.
BRUMFIEL: And so he formed Helion in 2013 with a really ambitious goal of getting fusion on the grid in a matter of years. Today, it's got more than 200 workers, and they're building a machine called Polaris.
BARBER: Oh, my gosh. OK, so I'm looking at a picture of this right now. It looks really intense. It kind of looks like the warp core of a starship. It's got rings of metal arranged symmetrically in a line and lots of wires, stuff sticking out of it. How does it work?
BRUMFIEL: So this machine uses electromagnets. And basically, what it does is it forms two donut rings of charged gas on the opposite ends of a really long tube. And the magnets, basically, hold the gas together and then, rapidly, the fields accelerate these rings into the center of the machine. It heats and crushes everything together all at once.
BARBER: Wow.
KIRTLEY: So the faster we go, the more we can compress it, the more we can heat it, the more fusion we get out of it.
BRUMFIEL: So this is basically just a very elaborate, magnetic hammer, it sounds like?
KIRTLEY: That's a good way to put it.
BARBER: OK, so it's like taking stuff, suspending it, smashing it together. It actually sounds more like a particle accelerator to me.
BRUMFIEL: And it's interesting because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission actually just classified these machines as particle accelerators.
BARBER: Oh, cool. [LAUGHS]
BRUMFIEL: So there is that heritage there. The really cool thing, for me, about Helion's approach is the kind of fusion they want to do uses an isotope of helium and an isotope of hydrogen to fuse. So this is not like what happens in the sun.
BARBER: No, yeah.
BRUMFIEL: It generates energy that can be directly harvested by the same magnets that sort of thump that fuel. So it's a concept that's fairly simple. Electricity goes into the magnets, magnets go thump, thumping makes energy, energy goes into magnets, and back into electricity. But the problem is it's not guaranteed to work because the hydrogen-helium fusion is very hard to do. It's one of the hardest forms of fusion to achieve, and so it's going to require huge temperatures to make it work.
BARBER: OK, so you said this was just one approach. Are there any others?
BRUMFIEL: Yeah, literally five minutes up the road, there is another company that's also pursuing fusion energy.
BARBER: Wow. I mean, I used to live by Everett. This is all in Everett?
BRUMFIEL: Yep, as I said, it's a Boeing hub. It's got lots of warehouse space, lots of high-tech workers, so it's a great place to pursue this stuff. And so the other company I visited was called Zap Energy. Ben Levitt, Zap's VP for research, showed me their setup.
BEN LEVITT: Yeah, OK. So yeah, we can walk by. Its guts are all open, and we're working on it, but fuse is operational right now.
BRUMFIEL: So Zap's machine actually looks like a very long, metal pipe. And inside, the company runs an electrical current through its fusion fuel, causing it to heat and compress all at once. I mean, you can almost think of it as lightning in a bottle.
BARBER: Wow.
BRUMFIEL: Now, this is one of the oldest approaches to trying to achieve fusion, but they think they can make it work. And if they can, it would potentially be good for a very compact, small power generator. Zap is working on multiple versions of this device. It's really racing towards its goals. And it's the sort of thing Levitt says can only happen in the private sector.
LEVITT: There's no red tape. We're properly funded for making bold decisions on engineering, and so we-- that's the thesis of the private fusion company is, if well-capitalized, can you advance fusion science on a rapid, industrial basis?
BARBER: OK, Geoff. So what Levitt is saying has got me really wondering, why is all this money going into fusion now?
BRUMFIEL: Yeah, it's a really great question. Helion has raised half a billion dollars in its last round in 2021. Zap has backing from the likes of Chevron and Shell and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is a private, venture-capital firm started by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Phil Larochelle is a partner with Breakthrough Energy Ventures. He says the time is right for private industry to invest, and that's because decades of sort of slow and steady work by governments has built up the knowledge to the point where it's possible to make a giant leap forward.
PHIL LAROCHELLE: We are now just getting to the point where we're getting to the big payoff of about 50-plus years of research.
BRUMFIEL: You know, a lot of this investing also happened back when interest rates were really low and investors had a lot of money to sink into ambitious projects like these. So that's another factor.
BARBER: OK, Geoff. This is actually kind of hopeful. I love it.
BRUMFIEL: Mm-hm.
BARBER: So that's where the money is coming from, but fusion is still a really tough problem. Like, physics really hasn't changed that much, so is this actually going to lead to anything?
BRUMFIEL: Yeah, I mean, you can put a half billion dollars into a project, and if the physics doesn't work, it doesn't work, right?
BARBER: Right, exactly.
BRUMFIEL: So I spoke to an independent scientist. He's an academic named Carlos Paz-Soldan at Columbia University, and he's been following all this. He does believe there's a lot of potential in fusion right now.
CARLOS PAZ-SOLDAN: I definitely think the field was ready for investment.
BRUMFIEL: And he's happy to see all these different companies have gotten funding.
PAZ-SOLDAN: Now, will any of them be successful? I think that's the bet that the venture capitalists are making. That's something we should all hope comes through, but it's TBD.
BRUMFIEL: And I mean, I have been covering fusion for a very, very long time, my entire reporting career. They used to call me "the fusion correspondent" at my old job.
BARBER: [LAUGHS]
BRUMFIEL: A lot of these concepts are actually being revisited. They're old ideas, but nobody's really tried them in decades. And so I think it's great because we're seeing new technology being poured into these old setups, and we're just going to have to see what kind of results they get. It's entirely possible one of them could work.
BARBER: OK, I'm going to be slightly more than cautiously optimistic, Geoff. Thank you so much.
BRUMFIEL: That's exactly where I wanted to land.
BARBER: [LAUGHS]
BRUMFIEL: I, too, am slightly more than cautiously optimistic.
BARBER: [LAUGHS]
BRUMFIEL: It's been great talking to you, Gina.
BARBER: This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Geoff checked the facts, and Maggie Luthar was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Collin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR. [INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]
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