Inside the Quest for Fusion, Clean Energy's Holy Grail

October 22, 2015 .com Science Inside the Quest for Fusion, Clean Energy’s Holy Grail

Start-ups are behind the new push

BY LEV GROSSMAN that that implies. The biggest one, the In- isn’t acquisition by Google followed by a ternational Thermonuclear Experimen- round of appletinis. It’s an energy source he machine lives in a white building tal Reactor, or ITER, is under construction so cheap and clean and plentiful that it in an Orange County office park so by a massive international consortium in would create an inflection point in hu- Tuninteresting-looking that not even the south of France, with a price tag of man history, an energy singularity that the person who’s supposed to be taking me $20 billion and a projected due date of would leave no industry untouched. Fu- there can find it. We literally drive right 2027. Fusion research has a reputation sion would mean the end of fossil fuels. It past it and have to double back. for consuming time, money and careers would be the greatest antidote to climate Though there are a few clues if you look in huge quantities while producing a lot change that the human race could rea- closely. A towering silo of liquid nitrogen of hype and not much in the way of ac- sonably ask for. Saving the world: that is out back. A shed that turns out to be full tual fusion. It has earned that reputation the endgame. of giant flywheels for storing energy. The many times over. Michl (you say it like Michael) Bind- machine, which is the size of a small But over the past 10 years, a new front erbauer is one of the co-founders of Tri house, draws so much juice that when has opened up. The same engine of rag- Alpha and its current chief technology of- they turn it on they have to disconnect ing innovation that’s been powering the ficer. He has a Ph.D. in physics from U.C. from the public grid and run off their rest of the high-tech economy, the start- Irvine. At 46, Binderbauer is charismatic own power to keep from shorting out the up, has taken on the problem of fusion. and ultra-focused: he can talk about plas- whole county. If you had X-ray vision you There is now a stealth scene of virtually ma physics, lucidly and without notes, might notice that all the iron rebar in the unknown companies working on it, do- apparently indefinitely. (We took a break building’s foundations has been pulled ing the kind of highly practical rapid- after two hours.) The logical force of his out and replaced with stainless-steel re- iteration development you can do only arguments is enhanced by his radiant bar, because iron is too magnetic. in the private sector. They’re not funded self-confidence, a trait that the fusion in- The machine is a prototype fusion by cumbersome grants; the money comes dustry seems to select for, and by his Aus- reactor. It is the sole product of a small, from heavy-hitting investors with an ap- trian accent—he grew up there—which secretive company called Tri Alpha En- petite for risk. These are companies most inevitably reminds one of the Terminator. ergy, and when it or one like it is up and people have never heard of, like General Binderbauer’s confidence is infectious. running, it will transform the world as Fusion, located outside Vancouver, and Tri Alpha is probably the best-funded of completely as any technology in the past Helion Energy in Redmond, Wash. Tri the private fusion companies—to date century. This will happen sooner than Alpha is so low profile, it didn’t even it has raised hundreds of millions, ac- you think. have a website until a few months ago. cording to a source close to the company, It’s not the world’s only fusion reactor. But you’ve probably heard of the people which is a lot of money but a tiny fraction There are several dozen scattered around who invest in them: Bezos Expeditions, of what’s being spent on the big govern- the globe in various stages of completion. Mithril Capital Management (a.k.a. ment-funded projects. Most of them are being built by universi- PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel), Vulcan One of the challenges for anybody ties and large corporations and national (a.k.a. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen), working on fusion is that people have governments, with all the blinding speed, Goldman Sachs. been talking about it way too much for sober parsimony and nimble risk taking The endgame for these companies way too long. The theoretical underpin- VINCENT FOURNIER FOR TIME Dr. Michl Binderbauer, Tri-Alpha Energy’s CTO, near the core of his firm’s fusion reactor in Foothill Ranch, Calif.

nings go back to the 1920s, and serious Fukushima—and produce huge quanti- like hydrogen, which is in fact the most attempts to produce fusion energy on ties of toxic waste that stays hazardously plentiful element in the universe. If Earth have been going on since the 1940s. radioactive for centuries. something goes wrong, fusion reactors Fusion was already supposed to save the Nuclear fusion is the reverse of nuclear don’t melt down; they just stop. They pro- world 50 years ago. “All of us fantasize fission: instead of splitting atoms, you’re duce little to no radioactive waste. They about such things,” Binderbauer says. “It squashing small ones together to form also produce no pollution: the by-product seems like it is the answer, so when some- bigger ones. This releases a huge burst of fusion is helium, which we can use to one says anything in that field, it usually of power too, as a fraction of the mass of inflate the balloons for the massive party very quickly exponentiates to a message the particles involved gets converted into we’re going to have if it ever works. of, Progress is already almost done. It gets energy (in obedience to Einstein’s famous Daniel Clery puts the contrast with hyped to a level I think is very danger- E=mc2). Fusion has a vaguely science-fic- conventional power starkly in his excel- ous.” (That’s one reason fusion scientists tional reputation, but in fact we watch it lent history of fusion, A Piece of the Sun: don’t love talking to journalists.) happen all day every day: it’s what makes “A 1-GW coal-fired power station requires Fusion also gets mixed up, for obvious the sun shine. The sun is a titanic fusion 10,000 tonnes of coal—100 rail wagon reasons, with nuclear fission, which is reactor, constantly smooshing hydrogen loads—every day. By contrast … the lith- the kind of nuclear power we have now, nuclei together into heavier elements ium from a single laptop battery and the though in fact they’re very different ani- and sending us the by-product in the deuterium from 45 liters of water could mals. Nuclear fission involves splitting form of sunlight. generate enough electricity using fusion atoms, big ones like uranium-235, into As an energy source, fusion is so per- to supply an average U.K. consumer’s en- smaller atoms. This releases a lot of en- fect, it could have been made up by a ergy needs for 30 years.” ergy, but it has a lot of drawbacks too. child. It produces three to four times as The running joke about fusion energy Uranium is a scarce and finite resource, much power as nuclear fission. Its fuel is that it’s 30 years away and always will and nuclear plants are expensive and haz- isn’t toxic, or fossil, or even particularly be. It’s not a very funny joke, but histori- ardous—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, rare: fusion runs on common elements cally it’s always been true. What makes fusion hard is that atomic A more common method for creating tokamaks. “In a university lab the name nuclei don’t particularly want to fuse. fusion is by controlling the plasma mag- of the game, the end product, is a paper,” Atomic nuclei are composed of protons netically. One of the few breaks physi- says Michel Laberge, founder of General (and usually neutrons), so they’re posi- cists catch in the quest for fusion is that Fusion in Vancouver, who has a Ph.D. in tively charged. And things with the same plasmas are extremely sensitive to elec- physics. “You want to get to making en- charge repel each other. You have to force tromagnetism, to the point where elec- ergy, but it’s not the primary goal. The the atoms together, and to do that you tromagnetic fields can actually be used primary goal is to publish a lot of papers, have to heat them up to the point where to contain and compress them without to go to conferences and understand very they’re moving so fast that they shake off physically touching them. It’s a feat most thoroughly all the little details of what is their electrons and become a weird cloud often performed using a device called going on.” Understanding is all well and of free-range electrons and naked nuclei a tokamak. (The word is a Russian acro- good, in an ideal world, but the real world called a plasma. If you get the plasma re- nym.) A tokamak is a big hollow metal is getting less ideal all the time. The real ally hot, and/or smoosh it hard enough, doughnut wrapped in massively power- world needs clean power and lots of it. some of the nuclei bang into each other ful electromagnetic coils. The coils create The driving force behind the founding hard enough to fuse. a magnetic field that contains and com- of Tri Alpha was a physicist at U.C. Irvine The heat and pressure necessary are presses the plasma inside the doughnut. named Norman Rostoker. Rostoker, who extreme. Essentially you’re trying to rep- Since they were developed in the Soviet died in 2014, was a plasma physicist with licate conditions in the heart of the sun, Union in the 1950s, tokamaks have come both a deep understanding of mathemat- where its colossal mass—330,000 times to dominate fusion research: in the 1980s ics and a flair for practical applications. that of Earth—creates crushing pressure, enormous tokamaks were built at Princ- He also had an indomitable will and and where the temperature is 17 mil- eton and in Japan and England, at a cost a pronounced independent streak—any- lion degrees Celsius. In fact, because the of hundreds of millions of dollars. Their body who talks about him ends up using amounts of fuel are so much smaller, the successor, the colossus of all tokamaks, is the word maverick sooner or later. Bind- temperature at which fusion is feasible being built in a small town in France out- erbauer was one of his protégés. on Earth starts at around 100 million de- side Marseilles. ITER, the International Even in the early 1990s, Rostoker was grees Celsius. Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, skeptical of the tokamak hegemony. In That’s the first problem. The second will be 30 meters tall and weigh 23,000 a tokamak, the particles in the plasma problem is that your fuel is in the form tons. Its staff numbers in the thousands. move in tight spiral orbits around lines of a plasma, and plasma, as mentioned It will hold 840 cubic meters of plasma. of electric current. But it’s hard to keep above, is weird. It’s a fourth state of mat- Its magnets alone will require 100,000 those particles from being bumped out ter, neither liquid nor solid nor gas. When kilometers of niobium-tin wire. Its stu- of their little orbits by electromagnetic you torture plasma with temperatures pendous cost is being paid by a global turbulence, and when that happens the and pressures like these, it becomes wild- consortium that includes the U.S., Russia, plasma becomes unstable and loses pre- ly unstable and writhes like a cat in a sack. the European Union, China, Japan, South cious heat. One way scientists fight this So not only do you have to confine and Korea and India. instability is by building bigger and big- control it, and heat it and squeeze it; you Because of their extreme size and com- ger tokamaks, but bigger means more have to do all that without touching it, be- plexity, and the political vagaries asso- complex, and more power-hungry, and cause at 100 million degrees, this is a cat ciated with their funding, fusion proj- more expensive. Rostoker thought there that will instantly vaporize solid matter. ects are bedeviled by cost overruns and had to be a better way. You see the difficulty. Essentially you’re missed deadlines. The NIF was finished He found one in particle accelerators, trying to birth a tiny star on Earth. “It seven years late for $5 billion, almost those colossal rings, like the Large Had- comes down to two challenges,” Bind- double the original budget. ITER’s esti- ron Collider, that crash subatomic parti- erbauer says. “Long enough and hot mated date for full power operation has cles into each other. In accelerators, parti- enough.” In other words: Can you keep slipped from 2016 to 2027, and even that cles travel on wide, conspicuously stable your plasma stable while you’re getting date is under re-evaluation. Its price tag orbits. Rostoker and Binderbauer won- it up to these crazy temperatures? The has gone from $5 billion to $20 billion; dered if you could do something similar severity of the challenge has given rise to for purposes of comparison, the Large in a fusion reactor. They spent a couple of some of the most complex, most extreme Hadron Collider cost $4.75 billion. years thinking about it and decided, short technology humans have ever created. The goal for all these machines is to answer, probably. “If you can bring accel- Take for example the National Ignition pass the break-even point, where the re- erator physics into the realm of fusion, Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore Na- actor puts out more energy than it takes you can actually make a better-behaved tional Laboratory, outside San Francisco. to run it. The big tokamaks came close plasma, one that can give you long tim- A 10-story building with a footprint in the 1990s, but nobody has quite done escales,” Binderbauer says. “Then you can the size of three football fields, the NIF it yet, and some scientists find the pace invest energy and heat it.” houses one of the most powerful laser frustrating. “Academics aren’t necessarily Rostoker’s other key insight had to systems in the world: 192 beams of ul- good at adhering to a schedule, promis- do with the flow of people and money traviolet light capable of delivering 500 ing something and delivering it, on bud- around the reactor: he thought the pri- trillion watts, which is about 1,000 times get and on time,” Binderbauer says. “The vate sector would be a better place to get as much power as the entire U.S. is using federal process doesn’t condition you to things done than a university lab. Essen- at any given moment. All that energy is live in that mind-set.” And even when it tially he recategorized fusion power from delivered in a single shot lasting 20 bil- does get up and running, ITER will never an object of lengthy, lofty scientific inqui- lionths of a second focused on a tiny gold supply a watt of power to the grid. It’s a ry to just another product to be shipped. cylinder full of hydrogen. The cylinder, science experiment, not a power plant. “Fusion is in the end an application, understandably, simultaneously ex- Proof of concept only. right?” Binderbauer says. “The problem plodes and implodes, and the hydrogen Fusion research is too slow, too cau- with fusion typically is that it’s driven by inside it fuses. This technique is called tious, too focused on lavishing too much science, which means you take the small inertial confinement fusion. money on too few solutions and too many steps. The most predictable next step, the one you’re comfortable with. So it doesn’t Tri Alpha’s reactor is very different In August, Tri Alpha announced that necessarily connect with what you want. from the towering tokamaks that domi- its machine had generated some very in- Norm said, You’ve got to look at the end nate the fusion skyline, or the supervil- teresting data. So far the company’s pri- in mind. You’ve got to unravel it, reverse- lain lasers of the NIF. You could think of mary focus has been on the long-enough engineer it. What would a utility want? it as a massive cannon for firing smoke problem, rather than the hot-enough What would make sense? And design rings, except that the smoke rings are ac- part; stabilizing the plasma is generally something from there, and be agnostic as tually hot plasma rings, and the gunpow- considered the tougher piece in this two- to how hard the physics might be.” der is a sequence of 400 electric circuits, piece puzzle. Now Binderbauer believes Raising money was a challenge: toka- timed down to 10 billionths of a second, that they’ve done it: in June the reactor maks were eating up all the grant money, that accelerate that plasma ring to just proved able to hold its plasma stable for and energy startups are expensive, risky under a million kilometers an hour. 5 milliseconds. long-term bets, especially to Silicon Val- And there are actually two cannons, ar- That’s not a very long time, but it’s an ley investors spoiled from flipping web ranged nose to nose, firing two plasmas eternity in fusion time, long enough that startups for quick paydays. Recruiting straight at each other. The plasmas smash if things were going to go pear-shaped, was tough too: building a fusion device into each other and merge in a central they would have. The reactor shut down requires a blended culture of physicists chamber, and the violence of the collision only because it ran out of power—at and engineers, two groups who don’t his- further heats the combined plasma up to lower power, and hence with slightly less torically mix well. For the first few years, 10 million degrees Celsius and combines stability, they’ve gone as long as 12 mil- the company ran on the brink of insol- them into a single plasma 70 to 80 centi- liseconds. “We have totally mastered this vency. “You have money for a year or two meters across, shaped more or less like a topology,” Binderbauer says. “I can now to develop something, deliver, and go get football with a hole through it the long hold this at will, 100% stable. This thing the next chunk,” Binderbauer says. “It’s way, quietly spinning in place. does not veer at all.” He didn’t live to see not the academic risk profile.” But a fusion reactor’s work is never it, but Rostoker was right. The cat is in the To keep the pace up they freed them- done. Positioned around that central sack. Tri Alpha has tamed the plasma. selves from the baggage of theory: as long chamber are six massive neutral beam Some other people may be right too. as something worked, they didn’t analyze injectors firing hydrogen atoms into the Where fusion is concerned, the private to death why. The idea was to stay prag- edges of the spinning cloud to stabilize it sector supports a robustly diverse range matic and iterate rapidly, spend as little and keep it hot. Two more things about of methodologies. In 2002, Laberge, an as possible and not fear failure. “This is this cloud: one, the particles in it are mov- intense redhead with a thick French- one of the failures of the governmental ing in a much wider orbit than is typical Canadian accent and a droll sense of hu- way of running it,” Binderbauer says. “It in, say, a tokamak, and hence are much mor, realized he’d spent enough of his didn’t create enough diversity of ideas, more stable in the face of turbulence. life designing laser printers. “I decided to and let those freely be pursued to failure. Two, the cloud is generating a magnetic start a fusion company,” he says. “Which Say, this is where we ultimately want to field. Instead of applying a field from is pretty insane, but that’s what I went go, what are the critical steps to get there, outside, Tri Alpha uses a phenomenon for. I guess, go big in life.” what are the risk elements of the path to called a field-reversed configuration, or Laberge too was skeptical of the mono- get there, and can I test for some of these FRC, whereby the plasma itself generates culture that dominated fusion science. risks without spending a hundred mil- the magnetic field that confines it. It’s “The thing in fusion is, when they started lion bucks?” an elegant piece of plasma-physics boot- they tried many different approaches, Some academics would disagree, but strappery. “What you get within forty and then there’s one or two that had a no one can deny that Tri Alpha has man- millionths of a second from the time you bit of success and whatnot, and then ev- aged to build a prototype fusion reactor unleash your first little bit of gas,” Bind- erybody jumped on those approaches,” quickly on a tiny budget. The company erbauer says proudly, “is this FRC sitting he says. “So it is a good hunting ground has a panel of advisers—including Bur- in here, fully stagnant, no more moving for new startup companies, to go and see ton Richter, who won the Nobel Prize axially, and rotating.” those abandoned efforts.” The approach for Physics in 1976, and Ronald David- The machine that orchestrates this he hit on is called magnetized target fu- son, past director of fusion labs at both plasma-on-plasma violence is something sion: crudely put, you create a spinning MIT and Princeton—and Binderbauer of a monster, 23 meters long and 11 me- vortex of liquid metal, inject some plas- has fond memories of unveiling his first ters wide, studded with dials and gauges ma into its empty center, then squeeze prototype to them in 2008. “There were and overgrown with steel piping and the vortex, thereby squeezing the plasma like jaws dropping. It was like, holy sh-t, thick loose hanks of black spaghetti ca- inside it and causing it to heat up and these guys actually did this? On this time ble. Officially known as C-2U, it’s almost fuse. frame? This is not possible. Then we had farcically complicated—it looks less like Laberge couldn’t get enough grant world-record data by August. That was a a fusion reactor than it does like a Hol- funding, so he took the idea to investors year basically from seeing dust to seeing lywood fantasy of a fusion reactor. It sits instead and founded General Fusion. physics data taken that’s better than any- inside a gigantic warehouse section of Tri Now General Fusion has 65 employees one else ever did.” Alpha’s Orange County office building and is one of a small handful of compa- Davidson confirms that impression, surrounded by racks of computers that nies racing Tri Alpha to the break-even though in less colorful language. “In the control it and more racks of computers point. To date it has raised $94 million framework of a Department of Energy that process the vast amounts of infor- and built prototypes of the reactor’s laboratory, and also in some universities, mation that pour out of it—it has over major subsystems, including a spheri- the level of regulations and restrictions 10,000 engineer control points that moni- cal chamber for the liquid metal vortex you have on how you do things is some- tor the health of the machine, plus over with 14 huge spikes projecting out at all what different than in the industry,” he 1,000 physics diagnostic channels pump- angles–the spikes are massive hammers says. “The industry can be quite nimble, ing out experimental data. For every five that do the squeezing. It looks, if possible, relatively speaking, in exploring ideas millionths of a second it operates it gen- even more like Hollywood’s idea of a fu- and testing them for the first time.” erates about a gigabyte of data. sion reactor than Tri Alpha’s. “The toka- mak people have a very long timeline, at a lower temperature than any other anything, is not intimidated by this ei- which I don’t like,” Laberge says, “so we’d option, a comparatively mild 100 million ther. His next move will be to tear down like to speed that up, and we think we degrees Celsius. ITER uses D-T fusion (as Tri Alpha’s current reactor and build a can move faster.” Predictions, like com- it’s known), as do the NIF, the National new one that will scale up to the neces- parisons, are invidious, but when coerced Spherical Torus Experiment at Princeton, sary temperatures. He points out that he says, “About a decade to producing en- Lockheed Martin, General Fusion and al- particle accelerators can create tempera- ergy would be a good timeline to have.” most everybody else. tures in the trillions. “Going to higher Helion Energy, another venture in Red- But there are catches. One is that tri- temperatures is not that hard,” he says. mond, is already on its fourth-generation tium is rare, so you have to make it. The “It sounds terrible, because it’s billions of prototype. Its approach also has two plas- other is that the reaction emits, along degrees, but it’s not. You use techniques mas colliding in a central chamber, but with an isotope of helium, a neutron, much like what you use in a microwave. it will work in rapid pulses rather than which is a problem because when you They’re very similar principles.” You sustaining a single static plasma. Helion throw a lot of free neutrons at something have to imagine the Austrian accent to is focused on developing a smaller-scale, it eventually becomes radioactive. That get the full effect. truck-size reactor, and doing it as fast as means you’re stuck regularly replacing Everybody in the fusion industry possible. The company’s website states parts of your reactor as they become too shares a worldview in which the trans- in no uncertain terms that it will have a hot to handle. Binderbauer is scathing on formation of the globe by fusion power is commercial reactor operational within the subject of D-T fusion. “Let’s say you imminent. I asked Binderbauer how con- six years. (Helion told us it was too busy have success on ITER,” he says. “You’ve fident he was that he would see a practi- building fusion reactors right now to par- still got another many decades of mate- cal fusion reactor in his lifetime, and his ticipate in this article.) rials research to try to make something answer was “Very. Scientifically I’m very And there are others. Industrial Heat that lasts more than six to nine months, confident. Now that we have this, this in Raleigh, N.C.; Lawrenceville Plasma in the hellish bombardment of neutrons is the foundation.” He thinks he under- Physics in New Jersey; Tokamak Energy it is going to have to live in.” stands theoretically what will happen as outside Oxford, England. Lockheed Mar- But there are engineering solutions to his machine claws its way up to 3 billion tin’s Skunk Works division is develop- the problem: that vortex of liquid metal degrees, and the theory tells him it’s pos- ing what it calls a compact fusion reac- in General Fusion’s reactor will be a mix- sible. “There should be no physics that tor, which it says will fit on the back of ture of lead and lithium, which will catch says it won’t be. But you gotta test it. This a truck. It also says it’ll have a working the neutrons. As a bonus, when you hit is the field where nature’s the ultimate ar- prototype within five years. (And it said lithium with neutrons, you get tritium. biter, so there’s some risk there.” that last year, so four to go.) So two birds, one stone. Binderbauer’s Austrian rigor restrains There’s a kind of cheeky underdog defi- Helion’s reactor will fuse deuterium him, barely, from making brash predic- ance in the attitude of the private sector and helium-3, which produces fewer tions about when all this is going to hap- to the public, but the attitude the other neutrons, though it requires more heat pen. “People tell you they’ll have a reactor way is a bit more collegial. “They’re very and raises the problem of finding enough in five years—I know it’s impossible. And interesting,” says Professor Stewart Prag- helium-3, which is also rare. Tri Alpha it’s not because I’m negative. I want this er, director of the Princeton Plasma Phys- plans to fuse protons (otherwise known too, and we work as fast as we can, but I ics Laboratory. “Some more than others. as hydrogen nuclei) with boron-11. This know it’s more than five years. It just is.” There’s a range. It’s definitely good to see reaction produces no neutrons at all, and Try to pin him down on a specific time- private investment in fusion.” Dennis both elements are plentiful and naturally line for Tri Alpha and he writhes like a Whyte, director of the Plasma Science occurring. “We’re always saying, if you superheated plasma. “It’s not true that and Fusion Center at MIT, understands want to buy our plant,” Binderbauer says, it takes 30 years and will always take 30 the impatience that drives the startups. “we’ll give you a lifetime supply of fuel years. It doesn’t. I’m not prepared to tell “Their argument is that if the science for free.” The reason hardly anybody else you, X is the number of years till we have breaks go their way, they will be able to is pursuing it is that proton-boron-11 fu- a commercial reactor here. But I will tell accelerate the pace of getting fusion en- sion requires much higher temperatures, you, we are truly about three to four years ergy on the grid, and I overall agree with insanely much higher: 3 billion degrees from the point where the risk changes that philosophy,” he says. “I’m part of Celsius. from a science risk to an engineering risk. the quote unquote Establishment that No one really knows how plasma will And I can certainly see that within a de- they’re railing against, but you can sense behave at that temperature, and virtually cade such things can mature to the point my frustration, because I’m not happy everybody I talked to was skeptical about where you can have the first commercial about the delays and so forth.” (He might Tri Alpha’s making it work, and consid- steps.” well be frustrated: Congress has cut fund- ered the engineering challenges of D-T There may be a lot of those steps. The ing for MIT’s fusion reactor, which will fusion to be vastly preferable. “Fusion is utilities will be the ones making the ac- cease operations next year. He’s currently hard already, even when it’s D-T, and you tual transition, and for fusion to be of focused on designing a smaller, modular have to realize how much harder this is any earthly use to anybody it will have reactor that takes advantage of recent ad- than D-T,” says Whyte. “It’s O.K. to take to make business and engineering sense vances in superconducting technology.) a physics leap, but you also don’t want it to them, because fusion plants will be Within the private sector, there’s a to be so big that you worry about its vi- expensive. Unlike solar or wind, fusion good deal of genial trash talk. The trash ability.” Laberge felt the same way: “It’s would provide energy constantly, not talk about Tri Alpha tends to focus on like learning to run before you can walk. intermittently, but there would have the question of fuel: When you’re do- Or somebody told me it’s like learning to to be enough of it. The gain (the ratio of ing fusion, which atomic nuclei do you fly before you can walk. You can argue energy-out to energy-in) of a commercial fuse? By far the most popular answer is that General Fusion is outrageously am- fusion plant would have to be in the 15- deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of bitious trying to do fusion, but Tri Alpha to-20 range; right now ITER’s target gain hydrogen. This is fusion’s low-hanging is outrageously outrageously ambitious.” is 10; to date no fusion reactor has yet fruit, because deuterium and tritium fuse Binderbauer, who is not intimidated by reached a ratio of 1, the break-even point. (#87780) TIME.com is a registered trademark of Time Inc. © October 22, 2015 Time Inc. TIME.com and Time Inc. are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of, the Licensee of this reprint. For more information about reprints from TIME.com, visit PARS International Corp. at www.timeincreprints.com. Then there’s the question of how exactly the November issue of the Atlantic. “We fusion in 10 years, but I think we’ll have to extract that energy from the reactor in need an energy miracle.” (He personally commercial fusion, fusion on the grid, in the form of heat, so that it can plug into has invested in TerraPower, a maker of the 2040s. It may sound like a long way the existing infrastructure. next-generation fission plants.) away, but in terms of mitigating climate But those steps would be giant leaps To assess the precise probability that change, fusion will play a very critical for mankind. Bill Gates is currently on fusion will or won’t be that miracle is be- role.” a global campaign trying to raise aware- yond the remit of a journalist without a Fusion may just turn out to belong to ness about how badly our addiction to Ph.D. in plasma physics, but as miracles that category of human achievement, energy is destroying the environment. go, it’s looking a lot more plausible than like powered flight and moon landings, He’s putting $2 billion of his foundation’s most. Even Prager, head of the Princeton that appeared categorically impossible money into it. “We need innovation that Lab, who considers the claims of the right up until the moment somebody did gives us energy that’s cheaper than to- private sector to be overconfident, still it. At the very least, a lot of very smart day’s hydrocarbon energy, that has zero believes it’s a question of when not if. “I people are betting their money and their CO2 emissions, and that’s as reliable as think it’s inevitable. And I don’t think I’m careers on it. As for the rest of us, we may today’s overall energy system,” he says in alone in that. You can’t get commercial already have bet the planet. n

(#87780) TIME.com is a registered trademark of Time Inc. © October 22, 2015 Time Inc. TIME.com and Time Inc. are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of, the Licensee of this reprint. For more information about reprints from TIME.com, visit PARS International Corp. at www.timeincreprints.com.