Original subtitles

What I wanted to do first is to give you an image

of what drives me forward in fusion.

Imagine you're reaching up and you're grabbing the sun,

something of the order of a 100 million degrees Celsius,

and you want to put the sun in a bottle.

And we have ways of doing that. We create a magnetic model.

Compared to anything that mankind has ever done in the past,

be it walking on the moon, be it decoding DNA,

this is a great challenge.

We, as humans, we're lazy.

In the sense that if we have a choice of going

a very easy path or very complicated path,

we would always go the easy path.

And that's what we're doing with energy.

We're burning fossil fuels,

coal, natural gas, crude oil,

and that is changing the environment.

We're similar to, I hate to say it, to yeast,

where the yeast basically multiply, multiply, multiply,

eat up all of the flour and the dough

until basically they die off from their own excrement,

uh, because they've just eaten up all their resources,

and they've died from their own pollution that they've created.

We have to find a clean source

that's going to be available for lifetimes,

and that's what fusion is.

I really feel that if we don't crack fusion, we are doomed,

to be honest.

What we're trying to do here is to make

a artificial star.

Stars have some things we don't have on Earth,

size and mass.

The Sun, for example, is a very nice fusion reactor

that enjoys considerable public support,

and it works on the basis of gravity

plus its magnetic field, uh, to confine the plasma.

Now, the sun is really big,

800,000 miles, something like, across.

Uh, we clearly don't want anything that big,

so we have to rely on the magnetic fields alone.

That turns out to be doable,

but technologically difficult to do on a large scale.

And so we've been learning how to do this

for about 40 or 50 years.

What's amazing about work in that era is we didn't know

what the energy process that drove stars was.

Hans Bethe, the nuclear physicist,

uh, was at a seminar,

and the next day he was gonna give a talk

where he talked about a fusion fuel cycle for the stars.

But he had a date that night, and so they went out for a walk.

And he came out with what has to be the best line ever,

which is, "Aren't the starts beautiful tonight?

And right now, I'm the only guy in the world who knows why."

In the sun's core,

when these particles are accelerated to high speeds

and collide...

they fuse.

Fusion fuel is in, essentially, infinite supply

and is available to all countries at negligible cost.

The fuel, or fusion... is in common water.

Fusion will produce no noxious chemical combustion products,

and there will be absolutely no chance of a runaway reaction.

And fusion will not involve materials

that could be stolen or used for clandestine purposes.

When I came into this project almost 20 years ago,

there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.

Everyone was confident of success.

In the Zeta apparatus,

we have produced temperatures

which are about one-third of those

at the center of the sun.

But this enthusiasm

was a kind of ignorant enthusiasm.

As fusion researchers have painfully discovered,

it's just not that simple.

After this initial enthusiasm,

then came a decade of caution and skepticism.

And now, after 20 years, we're back to enthusiasm.

In the early 1980s, we expect to create

many thermal megawatts

of fusion energy for the first time.

So the whole planet needs a lot of energy.

And so far, we've been running mostly on fossil fuels.

Been a good run.

It got us to where we are, but we have to stop.

So we are trying different types of energy now,

alternative energy.

But it proved quite difficult to find something

that's as convenient and as cost-effective

as oil, gas, and coal.

Now, we know of two way of making, er, nuclear energy:

Fission and fusion.

Now, in fission, you take a big nucleus,

you break it in part, in two, and it makes lots of energy.

This is how the nuclear reactor today works.

Works pretty good.

And then there is fusion.

Now, I like fusion. Fusion's much better.

So you take two small nucleus, you put it together,

and you make helium.

And that's very nice. Makes lots of energy.

And if the whole planet would run on fusion, it would run...

We could extract the fuel from the ocean,

it would run for billions and billions of years.

Now, if fusion is so great, why don't we have it.

Where is it?

Well, there's always a bit of a catch.

Fusion is really, really hard to do.

Physics-wise, fusion is the, the fusion, ha-ha,

of two nucleus.

Usually, you use a hydrogen nucleus

or isotope of hydrogen.

And when they touch each other, they fuse together,

and they make helium

and release a lot of energy in the form of a fast neutron.

So this is the, the nuclear reaction in the center.

Now the problem is those two nucleus,

they're electrically charged, they're both positive,

so they don't want to stick together.

They go like this, whoo, shoo,

and they never fuse.

So in order to fuse, you have to throw them at great speed.

And speed in a gas is the temperature.

So you have to heat the gas so the thermal agitation

is fast enough so the nucleus can touch each other.

And that temperature is a 150 million degrees C.

That's pretty hot. And this is how the stars work.

The-The stars are very hot

and inside the star, there is this fusion reaction.

So on the Earth here, we need to heat the gas

to 150 million degrees C.

And the other problem is a gas that hot wants to cool down.

So it cools down really quickly.

So you put some energy in there to heat it up,

and then the heat escape.

And when it's hot enough, it makes some reaction,

it makes some fusion, it makes some energy.

So the name of the game is to try to get

more energy out than you put in.

The world's most ambitious attempt

to harvest fusion as a source of power

is taking shape in France.

The project is costing 13 billion pounds

and it's being backed by a whole swathe of countries

around the world.

ITER's going to be built from about a million pieces,

so it's a real nightmare

to know where pieces are and don't lose them,

know which piece goes where,

wh-what is this piece that I'm looking at.

We build the tokamak from the bottom up,

so you can only build it in a certain way.

So if a certain piece is missing,

we'll have to wait for it.

So it's key... At the moment, what we're doing

is a very large planning effort with all the members

to make sure that each piece is delivered to us

in good time and at the right time.

The parties all want to learn all the technologies,

which means you not giving one component to a party,

you're giving a piece of a component, and the other party

wants another piece of the same component

so that they all can learn the technology.

It is luckily not so that we have seven pieces

- of each component that it will be too difficult...

but we have sometimes three or four pieces

of each component, and that means...

We have to talk to our partners, to the members,

in all the... as you say,

in all these countries around the world,

in Korea, in Japan, in Russia, China, US, India.

You have not one guy to deal with.

You have three or four guys to deal with

for the same component.

We are pushing the edge of technology

and therefore, sometimes we run into problems

and we have to solve these problems.

Critics point out that the costs have trebled in five years.

They say the whole project is a gamble

that won't pay off.

Will we be able, with our complex structure,

and the money we have, to be in time?

This is actually the most, uh, difficult thing at the moment,

to stay in time.

What's slowly taking shape here

in the southern French countryside

could provide the answer to the world's energy crisis,

or it might prove one of the most expensive failures

in scientific history.

So I'm gonna try to go through quickly.

I wanna give you an idea of the realistic schedule.

I received an email this morning of a new first plasma date,

which is different from the first plasma date

that you will see, uh,

or which was the first plasma date of about two weeks ago,

which is different from what you'll see.

So there's three iterations behind the first plasma date.

When ITER organization came about in 2006,

we said that we would be producing the first plasma

in 10 years.

And if you guys do the math real quickly,

you realize that we're not ready for first plasma next year.

Not sure where I'm gonna put this guy.

It's a toad.

- Where was that? - He was inside the compost.

So he digs underneath... in the compost pile

to stay warm.

My problem is that I turn the compost all the time,

so I don't want him to go in there again.

I'm gonna put him underneath here.

Back when I started in fusion,

back in the 19... mid-1980s,

the idea was that fusion was gonna be successful,

and we would have fusion on the grid

in about 50 years.

And now, it's, uh, 35 years into my...

30 years into my career now.

Up until about 2000, the year 2000,

we were just advancing and advancing

at really a fast rate.

And now, the problem is is that, uh,

in order to make the next step,

we just need to go to a bigger machine

and unfortunately, bigger machines

take longer to build, are much more complex.

I know that I will be retiring before ITER's successful,

so I'm like the guy building a cathedral,

who have... knows that he's gonna be putting this brick on,

this brick on, and this brick on,

and he's gonna be spending his whole career

putting bricks together,

but he'll never see the end piece, the cathedral,

that will take hundreds of years to build.

My name is Evgeny Velikov,

and now my main position is honorary something.

Are you optimistic, Mister President.

I'm always optimistic.

I was gonna ask, do you want me to explain the gyrotron real quick?

Yeah, I can do it very quickly and really cool.

If you take... I don't have a Coke bottle...

If you take a Coke bottle and you blow across

the top of the Coke bottle...

Do you mind... Can you get me a Coke bottle downstairs?

It's down over there.

I have four minutes, no? How much? Yes, four minutes.

Four minutes? Is that okay? It's downstairs.

-Do you know where the coffee machine is? -Yes.

The gyrotron works pretty much like a Coke bottle.

Except instead of blowing across the top of the Coke bottle

and changing the resonance,

uh, it-it... you-you do a electron beam.

You have basically a little...

filament down here, like in a light bulb.

It heats up,

and this beam of electrons comes up,

and you get a resonance.

So just as you take your Coke bottle, you blow across the top of it,

and the wind is creating a compression wave

and making a resonance, making the sound go up higher,

this thing is passing an electron beam,

and it creates an electromagnetic resonance.

You can almost imagine it like a bunch of little laser beams,

that you combine them into a single coherent beam,

which is the gyrotron beam.

And then once this ignites the plasma,

the plasma itself heats it and keeps going.

That makes sense, kind of.

Oh, no, doesn't it have to be a glass one? Oh, man!

- Well... - We lose the analogy.

What do you do with the can?

- No, not a can. - A bottle, a bottle.

Oh, you wanted a bottle?

Yeah, because you can blow across the top of the bottle

to make it resonate.

And you call yourself a physicist.

The greatest challenge is to align these huge pieces

to the millimeter tolerance, to the accuracy that we need.

It's really the magnets,

the-the... what we call the toroidal field magnets.

These magnets make the main magnetic field of ITER.

They're the things that hold this magnetic bottle,

hold the plasma inside the machine,

and keep it away from the walls.

And the accuracy that we can install these magnets

really is how smooth the plasma will be

and therefore how well it performs.

So the better we do and the closer we get

to the required position for these magnets

will really affect, for decades,

the future performance of ITER.

So that's a great challenge for us.

Well, you need some area, of course, to absorb...

- Yeah, yeah. - The excess material.

For sure.

You cannot avoid that.

I'm curing them. I'm curing with my hand.

Ahhh!

It is not a work for emotionally weak people,

because you need to be very strong and confident

because otherwise... you will never do anything.

You'll just be so scared.

Although ITER is called

the largest scientific enterprise,

international collaboration on Earth at the moment,

nobody knows about us.

ITER is, um...

is working with public money,

so the whole project is jointly funded

by all these nations under the ITER roof,

and so, in fact it's the taxpayer

who pays for what we do, right?

So this is not a private organization

or a private enterprise.

This is one of our top benchmarks,

that we develop this project

and this fusion reactor for the benefit of everything.

And we want everybody to share and to join in

and to be proud of this, right?

So transparency and having an open-door policy

is one of our top priorities in ITER communications.

A lot of people talk about a magnetic model,

and I don't feel there's a good understanding

of how the magnetic field ties

-with this idea of trapping a particle. -Mm-hmm.

And then I want to go into the challenge of ITER.

The question is, well, how come we're taking a long time?

They made a study back in 1976

that showed that depending upon how you fund fusion,

you can either get a fusion device

generating electricity somewhere in the 1990s

out to 2006 all depending upon how much money you put in

as a functional time.

And then I'm going to overlay this

as what the US has actually been funding.

And the funding has gone up.

It peaked around 1978

and then has dropped well below, based on today's dollars.

It's very understandable, very honest,

but I won't do this because we have the US here on Monday,

uh, physically, and...

it's a very touchy thing in the US.

Because here you're picking out the US from the...

We have to be careful we don't,

in official presentation, want to criticize, right?

We can say it's difficult. Right?

Because, um, in the 70s, the funding was wow.

Everybody wanted fusion to happen now.

-Then everything dropped again. Right? -Poof! Yeah.

We survived. We managed to survive, and we're here now

building the world's largest fusion device.

But it's hard, and it only happens,

and we say we can deliver, uh,

around the mid of the century...

provided that we have somebody sort of...

-Funding us in the back. - funding us in the back. Right?

And so to me, before we basically die

in our excrement like yeast molecules,

we need to realize that we need another energy source.

We need to be... It may not be for our generation.

I mean, the good news is we're, we're okay.

But it's the next generation or the generation after that

or the generation after that.

Yeah, I'm actually surprised how low the funding is.

Would you be able to have, er...

better progress, faster progress if you had better funding?

I think so. There was a study made in one country...

I'm not gonna name the country...

Back in the 70s.

And they said if you keep the level of the order

of, let's say, I think it was about

800 million euros per year,

you would be able to achieve an ITER-like machine,

uh, within about 20 years.

Then if you drop it down to about 500 million,

it would be extended out to about 30 years.

And there is a point of no return,

where basically if you invested 300 million euros

on a year-to-year basis,

you would actually... It would take infinity

to achieve a reactor.

Because there you had to keep the supporting technology base,

the administrative funds.

If you go below 300 million, you'll never get fusion.

Well...

that country has never invested

more than something like 200 million euros.

The more money you put into it, the faster the return.

And-And we really have been putting in peanuts.

I don't think there's a broad public acceptance

of hydrogen fusion in the United States at this stage.

Uh, people back in the US still in general

don't understand the differences

between uranium fission,

which is the process that's been used in nuclear power plants

for over 40 years now,

and hydrogen fusion,

uh, which is believe is the process of the future.

You have to keep in mind a couple of things, you know.

First, this is one of the grand challenges of engineering.

And solving a grand challenge on a fixed price

is, is a challenge in and of itself.

Now, by the same token,

you have to be very cost and schedule conscience... conscious,

because the sponsors of this project have to,

you know, continue to maintain their sponsorship

and believe strongly

that the cost is worth the investment.

I actually got interested in fusion as a child.

Uh, my mom, when I was eight,

got me what I think was my first science book,

which was about the sun.

And I still remember vividly this illustration

of this hundreds of millions of miles long coal train

delivering all the coal that equaled the energy

that the sun's fusion created in a single second.

By the time I graduated,

I actually didn't intend to go into fusion

because this was the high point of the enthusiasm

about the tokamak device,

which is still the most funded device in fusion.

And I thought, "Well, I guess this is solved,"

and I got interested instead

in astrophysics and other things.

But, um...

pretty soon it became clear, nope,

it wasn't solved.

The first error that was made by the government programs

back in the 1970s

was to put all their eggs in the tokamak basket.

Now, 40 years later,

people would have to say, objectively we do not know

which route will lead to practical fusion,

and we certainly don't know which route will lead

to the most economical fusion.

What you have to do is take a crash program approach,

a broad-based approach

in which, if there are 20 good ideas out there...

And by good ideas, I don't mean ideas

that I think will work.

I mean ideas that I can't prove won't work.

This is an important vital question for humanity:

What is an energy source that can replace fossil fuels,

that can be safe, clean, unlimited,

and more economical,

cheaper than anything we have today?

I used to live on Bowen Island,

so the commute was great.

So I could get on my bike

and it was, like, a 10 minute bike to the garage.

The part will arrive, and I would assemble all the parts,

and I will actually do all the experiments myself.

There is only one guy here. It's a one-guy show.

So that was actually quite fun. I enjoyed that.

And then I would build this machinery,

and then I will fire it up, and then I would get bad result,

which is most of the time you get that.

And then I will tweak it and adjust with a little click

and some transfer somewhere.

And then I started to get some neutron coming out of this thing.

So I was very excited about my neutrons.

Then, eventually, I went out

and tried to raise more money with that thing.

The company got bigger and more successful,

but the fun went downhill since then.

Now, after my PhD, sadly, I did not manage

to find a job in fusion.

So I got a job at a local company doing laser printer,

because I was kind of good with lasers.

Turns out that what I was trying to do

was trying to make printing so cheap that we could cut the forest

and jam you with junk mail, you know.

So that was not very satisfactory.

And I was looking at the energy situation on the planet,

and it was pretty bad.

I think we're going 100 miles an hour towards a brick wall,

and nobody seems to be paying much attention, you know.

And it was actually on my birthday, the 40-years-old birthday,

and I decided I had a terrible midlife crisis,

and I say, okay, I-I-I will change.

I will not do this job anymore, and I will do fusion.

In the center of the machine, there's a big sphere

and in that sphere, there is liquid metal.

Now the liquid metal is pumped by some pumps

in those pipes over there,

and it's made up to swirl.

So the-the liquid is injected near the edge like this,

and it swirls around.

And because it swirls around, it appear in the center,

like a centrifugal force keep the liquid out

and near the center... Up near the center of the thing.

So we fire those 14 pistons all at the same time,

and they're quite well-synchronized.

It's gonna go clonk, clonk, clonk!

And then the acoustic waves squash the liquid,

and it collapse the vortex over the plasma.

And the plasma, when you compress it, will get hotter.

And hopefully we will hit 150 million degrees C,

which is the temperature required

to make the nucleus to fuse.

It's piston, and it's rings.

It's, uh, it's metal and pipes. It's plumbing.

Turning that into a power plant will actually be

not that complicated.

I have, I have a saying here at General Fusion

I told all my engineer, "If you can't find it at Home Depot,

it doesn't go in the machine."

So the tokamak and the laser fusion have

more chance of working than what we do here,

because the physics of compressing the plasma

with a magnetic field is new.

However, their chance of turning out a power plant

that's cost effective is low,

because their machine is so complicated.

I-I'm quite confident that we can make this work,

and I'm a little concerned

that we might run out of money before we make it work.

We have everywhere problems.

We have had problems in the TF coils,

uh, and it was solved.

Uh, we-we could go into the envelope

with the help of Japan, Europe, and so on.

So, many things we could bring

into a reasonable envelope of schedule,

but we cannot make miracles.

Time lost is lost. I cannot recover.

It can only be better from now on.

The problem that I don't understand is

how are you gonna get there 10 years from now?

'Cause we heard this morning

there's a problem with the vacuum vessel,

tooling issues, all kind of things.

I don't see what the plan is.

But I thought you have a much better plan,

uh, when it comes to the technologies,

engineering the solutions.

Whatever that is, I mean, convince us

that I think we can get there within 10 years.

This morning when I asked the DG,

what was the failure of this whole problem was,

and wasting 10 years,

he said he was a manager.

Right?

Is there any change? Doing anything?

There's a lot depending on ITER, right?

So the whole fusion research going on all around the world,

whether it's in China, in Europe, in the US,

they all depend on ITER.

So if ITER is closed down,

a lot of people will not only lose their jobs,

but, um, fusion will be dead

forever or at least for a very, very long time.

Nobody will ever bet on fusion for a long time.

So this is our facility where...

You know, storage facility, which is actually quite cheap.

The key thing is,

more money has to go into fusion research.

It has to go for many other devices,

obviously including our own.

We and our neighbors are shielded against the neutrons

by three feet of concrete.

It's also shielded by this copper mesh

that radio waves can't get through.

Now, the main bang trigger is basically a big switch.

When we're at full power, all 12 will be hooked up.

These instruments are actually our thermometer.

If you wonder how can you measure

one or two billion degrees, this is it.

Maybe there's some way you could tape this so that

- it's out of the line of sight. - Okay.

Even though we're a very tiny group,

science is a collaborative effort,

and we're collaborating through the scientific literature

with people all around the world.

- Hey! - Oh, sorry.

You're on camera.

This is an important member of the team.

This is Tom, who's the landlord here.

Hey, guys.

People ask, "How can you succeed

with so few resources?"

You know, are you saying you're a thousand times smarter?

No.

We're saying we've got an easier route.

A plasma,

which is what most of the universe consists of,

is electrically conducting matter,

matter in which the electrons are stripped away

from the atoms and can freely move about.

What we today call the "pinch effect"

forms instabilities within the plasma,

basically pinching the plasma

into a lot of filamentary structures.

The conventional attitude towards the instabilities

is to suppress them.

As we put it, to make the plasma sit still like a good dog.

The problem with that is the plasma doesn't want

to sit still.

And trying to confine the plasma for long enough

for the fusion reactions to take place

becomes sort of like confining a can of worms

without the can.

What we do is to imitate nature.

In nature, on a scale of... solar flares,

quasars, entire galaxies,

these filaments organize and structure the universe.

What's your trigger pressure?

It's 12.36.

So when the machine fires,

we get a ion beam

that goes down this drift tube.

Once the machine fires,

then it's the job of all our instruments

to find out what actually happened.

Everybody ready?

Power on. Charging.

So what we do in the plasma focus

is we don't try and fight these instabilities,

we try to use them to compress the plasma

and to confine them.

Twenty...

thirty.

Set. Fire.

That means the device can be much smaller.

The energy can be much more concentrated,

and that makes the device much cheaper.

Now, that was a free fire.

Didn't you hear that?

I just want to make sure it's not self-firing.

There was a slight ticking noise in there

I couldn't identify.

The scope still set?

They're dry.

Power on.

Charging.

Ten...

twenty...

thirty.

Set. Fire.

Nope.

We know of no reason why this is physically impossible.

And more, no one has told us

a reason why they think this is physically impossible.

And this project is a very public project.

We've published in peer-reviewed papers...

that are among the leading journals in our field.

We've gotten a lot of press coverage.

People have a lot of opportunity to take potshots at us.

Some people say this is a long shot,

this is way out.

Well, ultimately, they're just expressing their feeling.

I do say that compared with all the other...

private fusion efforts...

our results at present are the best.

So, here-here... Tom just became our latest shareholder.

Yeah.

Okay...

It's my pleasure to welcome all of you.

I introduce myself.

I'm the director-general of the ITER organization.

It is really my honor and pleasure

to address you here today in this role.

This little project as you know is a very promising project,

which now gathers seven large parties.

All of them as you know,

they're representing over 85 percent

of the gross national product in the world,

and all of them are very keen to understand

how they will get their energy supply in the long term.

All of you know that there is renewable energies,

and we are very keen to see these renewable energies

to move on, to progress.

But for the time being, it is clear

that it will not be able

to fulfill the expectations of the world.

Oh, sorry.

I will... I will say stop.

Hello?

Sorry.

We are always interconnected, so...

As you know, renewable energy is good for...

I think we all have great respect

for what he's trying to do here,

what he has to do.

We are all standing behind him, to help him to...

to get the big puzzle together.

It's different, right?

I mean, the first two director-generals were Japanese

and certainly, um,

different cultures have different approaches

to... to work with,

uh, different priorities,

and Mr. Bigot is a European.

So for us Europeans, it's certainly easier,

right, to understand what he wants.

But if it is possible to demonstrate

and it will work for, okay,

thousand and thousand of euros,

I'm ready to wait for 20 years.

Is not my problem.

No, no, no, you know, the sun is not obsolete

even after five billion of years.

Well, I think there is something

inherently difficult about fusion.

That it is, uh, an attempt to harness

some of the most difficult- to-harness forces in nature.

You have to get something

at tens or hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin

into a tight package, and nature resists that.

So tha-that is inherently hard.

But on top of that, um...

there seem to be political pressures

trying to blow apart any large project.

That once you have to gather many, many people

from different countries to combine resources,

especially over decades and decades,

the different political wills, the different goals,

uh, all clash with each other

and eventually you wind up with infighting,

with cost overruns,

and things begin to fall apart after several years.

And this is what we saw with ITER round one,

and the same thing seems to be happening again,

uh, with round two.

I am often asked the question,

how do you maintain a sense of urgency

on a project that takes 20 years or more?

Yeah? And so the answer is that globally...

'Cause for this crowd, the Apollo Project

is what they always think about as the...

That if we think about how short for most of us

20 years ago really seems and all that has happened...

The Secretary of Energy was asked specifically

to make a recommendation by the second of May this year

on that topic, a progress report on ITER,

and should the US stay in or should they not.

Yeah, I think that it's quite clear

that, uh, things are moving in a positive direction,

but we were digging out of a fairly significant hole,

and so progress was really necessary.

It's up to the American Congress to make the decision,

you know, if the project will deliver.

Sub-Committee on Energy will come to order.

And we wanna welcome you to today's hearing entitled,

"An Overview of Fusion Energy Science."

Is it ee-ter or eye-ter?

- Ee-ter. - Ee-ter. Hmm. Okay.

Tokamak. I keep wanting to say "Tomahawk,"

and I know that's...

that's not right.

With the complexity of a multi-national collaboration like ITER,

this project has faced more challenges than most.

Fortunately, today, we have the opportunity to hear

from the director-general of the ITER project directly,

Dr. Bernard... Is it Bee-go?

Uh, I do believe if we have the proper management,

we will be able to deliver on time.

We have spent how much money

over the last ten years, the United States?

When the US signed up for the project,

you know, the representation was made

that this project was ready to go

to an extent that, in retrospect,

probably wasn't the case.

When you think about what we spent on imported oil alone...

I just want to understand the dimensions of the cliff

that we're playing near when we talk about the US pulling out.

If you're gonna have to lay odds on, on all the engineering

and all these things coming together,

uh... what are your odds?

I do believe this project could be so beneficial

to the world, that it is really worth

to try and to demonstrate.

- And again... - Let me mention this.

There are a lot of wonderful things we can do in this world.

- I know. - Wonderful things.

- And... - Including ITER.

Yeah, um, okay. And ITER may be one of them,

but what we do is we judge each one based on the cost

and the chances of success.

Because, in theory, it's such a beautiful and simple idea.

Yet, throughout, people have found

as soon as they get around the next corner,

there is yet another hurdle.

Um, and nature seems to have this way

of throwing up, um,

blockade after blockade after blockade that makes

scientists' optimism, uh, look naive.

My favorite fusion conman,

uh, was Richter from Argentina.

He was a German or Austrian expat...

We actually know very little about him...

Who moved to Argentina

and managed to convince Juan Peron

that he had figured out a method

of, uh, harnessing the sun

and called it thermotron.

And so they built this secret lab on an island.

And this crazy expat was running around

pouring gunpowder in experiments,

blowing doors off his lab,

writing fusion on ticker tapes everywhere,

convincing everyone for a matter of months and years

that he has solved the world's energy problems.

Until he was finally found out as a fraud and wound up in jail.

One of the things that's interesting about his story

is that the physicists

who first thought about magnetic fusion

were inspired by his story.

They saw a front page New York Times claim

about fusion energy in Argentina,

and the scientists here were thinking,

how could that be done?

My wife and I were planning to leave for Aspen,

and my father, he said,

"Well, I understand the Argentines have, uh,

have gotten ahead of you in the fusion program."

He'd seen the New York Times article

that a fellow named Richter had released fusion

in a controlled manner in Argentina,

and Peron made quite a thing of it.

I read the New York Times article.

Then we got on a train down to Aspen.

It was during the intervals out there, when we weren't skiing,

I was thinking about this.

How would one do it if one were trying to?

I worked out some of the general ideas

that I later developed into the stellarator.

So Spitzer came up with this cool device

called the stellarator.

Stellarators are a complicated machine,

and they have worse confinement in general.

But there's no such thing as disruption in a stellarator.

And so stellarators for the past decade

have just been more and more complicated.

They look like squid fighting each other at this point.

You can specify what magnetic field configuration you want.

So then you give the computer the job of iterating

through a bunch of possible different coils

until it gets to the right magnetic field configuration.

And you end up with something weird, like this.

It's cool, right?

All right, any other questions before we move on to the tokamak?

Okay, let's bust a move.

So W7-X is a really cool experiment.

It's a stellarator which has

a lot of advantages over a tokamak.

The biggest advantage is that it can just run.

It just... You know, for hours hopefully.

And once you can do that, you can build a power plant.

Um, and so tokamaks right now have a problem

where they just, they can't run continuously,

but this experiment is designed to show that

it can be done continuously

at parameters that are good enough for fusion, so...

I came here, and I came to know about stellarators

and somewhere along the line, I switched

from believing in tokamaks to more in stellarators,

and I thought, yeah,

maybe this is the future of energy and fusion.

This project would not have been possible

without the reunion of Germany.

It is co-financed by Europe to a big extent.

But still the project team is in our hands.

We had to take care that we have young people

being able to do physics now with the new machine

and really to make this a team.

Wendelstein is a highly optimized stellerator device,

three-dimensional design.

It goes back about 20 years.

And, um, to build this, to get the support to build this,

they had to build it in the then-reuniting Germany.

It's a crucial part of the story.

So they started a completely new institute

from nothing up here.

And they had to go into building something that had never been built before.

Now, unsurprisingly, it ended up being more complex

and expensive and difficult than they planned.

Big emotion. Big emotion, you know.

I do believe it's really a landmark

in the history of fusion to see with these stellarators

it works right away.

Very good.

She's a really great scientist,

and she know how to organize the work of this people

to give good priorities,

and I really believe she deserve

full recognition for her achievement.

Well, this fusion business

has been going a little slower than we were all hoping

when we started this company.

We started with great gusto,

"Yeah, we're gonna whisk that up."

And then we ran into difficulties,

so it's a little longer than what we wanted.

So it's a little bit more challenging.

But we-we're still optimistic that we're doing good progress.

It's going a little slower than I'd like,

but it's-it's advancing forward.

So we're not kind of stopped.

So mood is okay, but now we're, we're kind of gearing up

for a bit more of a long run than a, than a quick success.

We're certainly not the startup anymore,

like we used to be a real scruffy little startup,

but now we're getting more people,

it's a bigger shop, and been here for a few years.

We have shown some result.

This is 1,500 microseconds.

The compression time is only

180 microseconds, a little time here.

So the magnetic field is going up and up and up.

This is good. This is what we want when you compress magnetic field.

But then again you see all those oscillations,

both on the outside sensor and the inside sensor

and then the plasma crash,

like it-it dies here.

What we want it to do is to go up, up, up, up, up,

probably to about this height here.

So, we're clamping it now, um, Claude,

so stop flowing. Stop flowing!

- Okay! - Okay.

This is always a stressful event,

because if we let air into the chamber,

it's filled with moisture, and it will ruin the quality of our vacuum.

It will take weeks and weeks to recover.

Ooh, gosh.

All right, go on, cut the flow in... now.

Cut it now.

Very good. Thanks.

We did it.

Five years ago when we were staring up

and building our first machines,

we were having things blow up every day.

It was... People were scared.

The siren really made people frightened.

There's no point building the wrong thing though.

I got it. Yeah, absolutely. I know. I know.

But the flip side of that is that that can go on

- for a while, right? - Mm-hmm.

I know you got a good handle on it, but just I gotta ask.

But-But I'm not against actually restarting our...

I... well...

Because in my opinion, we should try all the available targets.

- Got it. However... - Because you don't know

what the hell would work or not.

It it decided that we have a pot of work,

and we're trying to fill... we're trying to put people in those pots.

No, no, no. We don't have enough people to fill in those pots,

so we wanted to get people to put into those pots

but what we have done...

- is make an extra pot. - Is made a new pot.

- Be careful of that. - Yes, I understand the problem.

Good.

I-I like... I'm a,

I'm a practical physicist,

an experimental physicist.

It is true that at work I don't do the work anymore.

Now, all my guy do the work, and we just...

I push paper and answer emails.

Sometime I go into the lab and turn some screws just because I like it.

But yeah, this is one of the hobby that I have.

I put my hat. That's my mother hat.

She knitted this one.

Oh, long time ago. Must be at least 30 years.

She passed away now.

She won't knit me a new one.

My name is Mark Uhran.

I was previously the director

of the International Space Station division

at NASA headquarters, and I spent 28 years

working on the space station program,

and I now work for the US ITER project.

What struck me the strongest from the very first year

as I began to meet the people

that were engaged around the world

was how much this was like

the International Space Station program.

Uh, ITER, when I joined, was right around the end

of their final design phase.

And today they're on the cusp

between final design and construction.

And the space station program

toward the end of the final design phase

was really quite chaotic.

Uh, they had not yet reached a point

where the decision-making process

was being done

in accordance with practices of systems engineering.

It took two to three years

to accomplish that turnaround,

because this was a project that spanned five partners

and involved on the order of five to ten thousand people

around the world.

Oh, it's like trying to change the course

on a supertanker.

So when I joined ITER four years ago,

the process was similarly chaotic

and certainly in need of

a regimented and disciplined systems engineering approach.

And over the past four years,

I've seen progress in that direction.

This-This is a real test

of human civilization.

And it's a test that we can't afford to fail.

We have to prove that we have the intelligence...

to prevent our own extinction.

To be able to work on fusion, I think is for me

is a dream come true,

but it's not just us.

It's actually you guys as well,

because your support, or your taxes,

are putting force to this,

to the dawn of the fusion age.

And so, to a large extent, I thank you guys,

one, for your curiosity in coming,

but also for your support for fusion.

So, thank you.

- I'm Chuck Flanigan. - Hi, Chuck.

Hi.

Back during the engineering design phase,

I was the deputy manager for the US team.

- Oh, fantastic! - That was a long time ago.

I've been retired since 95, so...

The Munich television people come out.

They wanted to know, "How can you be working on something

that's going to last 50 years into the future?"

And Ken said, "Have you ever been into the cathedral?"

Yeah, exactly.

Those people never saw the final product.

-No, no, they passed away, but they also... -Good job.

- People like Spitzer, same way. - Yeah. Right. Exactly.

- Thank you. Also thank you... - Yeah, thanks.

For laying the foundation in the road to get to where we are today.

I came on February 14, 19... Uh, 2008.

I left CRPP Lausanne, Switzerland one day

and showed up here the next day to start working.

This is cool.

I get to go on-site.

I've never gone beyond this point.

This is like Frodo, you know.

I've never been... This is like, you know,

a first step on the site.

This is cool, isn't it?

Go this way?

I look at this and I see...

what is gonna happen in five, ten years.

So even though I haven't been down there,

I know what it is in my brain.

I can see the vessel.

I can see inside the vessel.

I can see everything, but I can't see the plasma side.

That one, that one I'm looking forward to seeing.

Okay?

Let's go. I wanna get down there.

You guys are holding me back.

This is pretty cool, when you think also that we're, uh...

gonna be about 30 meters underground.

It's weird to be here.

And to think that in about...

ten years' time, there's going to be about

100 million degrees Celsius above... sitting above us.

And another four and a half meters up is the level 1,

the ground floor... launchers.

The next level up, level 2,

the diagnostics, the heating systems,

the ion cyclotron, electron cyclotron.

It's all there.

Just give it some time. It will come.

I think that ITER will probably work,

and it will demonstrate that fusion is doable.

I think that as a project it's very difficult

because it's international,

so there's all sort of project management issue there.

So they're gonna blow their budget

and their schedule big time.

It's just become such a Tower of Babel in there,

it will burn money at twice the rate that you need to do it.

But we'll, we'll plow through it.

It will get built, and it will work.

And this will, in my opinion, give a big shot

in the arm of fusion because here is a machine

that showed it can be done.

However, as a power plant,

I don't think it's very practical.

It's a machine that's very complex,

very expensive,

a little unreliable, there's those disruption in there

that happen that can damage the machine.

It's-It's difficult to conceive

that such a machine can become a reliable

day-to-day power plant.

But, you know, it's-it's like the Wright brothers, you know.

Like that plane didn't have to take a 100 passengers

across the Atlantic,

but it evolved when somebody showed that you can fly.

After that, lots of investment and money goes in.

After that, the excitement in fusion will go up,

because right now,

there's not much excitement about fusion.

If you look at the alternative energy concept,

you ever hear about fusion?

Ah, windmill, solar, tide, chicken shit, whatever,

but never fusion.

Uh, this is the Port Mann Bridge.

It's brand new actually.

It's one of those cable-stayed ones.

It's actually quite nice.

A billion dollar... to build such a thing.

It's about 20 billion for 20 years.

A billion a year. Fusion, I mean.

One bridge a year to try to develop a new energy source

that will replace all the fossil fuel

and the pollution and the global warming.

Let's do it, you know.

One bridge a year. Peanuts.

Hopefully, we can crack this nut very soon.

I will work on this thing all my life until it works.

This is my great dream in life, you know.

I want to make fusion happen.

♪ When I think of all the worries ♪

♪ People seem to find

♪ And how they're in a hurry

♪ To complicate their minds

♪ By chasing after money

♪ And dreams that can't come true ♪

♪ I'm glad that we are different ♪

♪ We've better things to do

♪ May others plan their future

♪ I'm busy loving you

♪ One two three four

♪ Sha la la la la la live for today ♪

♪ Sha la la la la la live for today ♪

♪ And don't worry 'bout tomorrow, hey ♪

♪ Sha la la la la la live for today ♪

♪ Live for today...

And I have to say that I was starting to be

a little nervous on the money situation

before, uh, the Malaysian came in

because, you know, the money in the bank was going down,

and it was getting, "Uh, uh, we're gonna run out,"

and then they came in and then all the investor put more money in it.

So now we're having actually the longest runway

in front of us that we had ever.

♪ Have pleasure while we can

♪ Two three four

♪ Sha la la la la la live for today ♪

♪ Sha la la la la la live for today ♪

♪ And don't worry...

You hear that? That's a glowing recommendation.

♪ Baby, I need to feel you inside of me ♪

♪ I got to feel you deep inside of me ♪

♪ Baby, please come close to me ♪

♪ I got to have you now please please ♪

♪ Please please gimme some a-lovin' ♪

♪ To gimme some a-lovin'

♪ To gimme some a-lovin'

♪ To gimme some a-lovin'

♪ Baby gimme some a-lovin'

♪ Gimme some a-lovin'

♪ Got to have all your lovin'

♪ Gimme some a-lovin'...

At current levels of financing?

Approximately the age of the universe.

♪ Sha la la la la la live for today ♪

♪ Sha la la la la la live for today ♪

♪ And don't worry 'bout tomorrow, hey ♪

♪ Sha la la la la la live for today ♪

♪ Sha la la la la la live for today ♪