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.