The Fusion Illusion…

The Wheat From The Chaff…

In this world of ever hastening technological change and innovation, it’s often hard, especially as an innovator, investor and entrepreneur to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, the real from the illusion, the assurances of revolutionary change and untold wealth apart from the world of promises that are always seemingly within reach but just a few more short years away from fruition.

Investing in Paradigm Shifts

My thesis is to be able to invest in revolutions that will change the current paradigm and make an impact for at least the duration of a single investor’s lifetime.

Some of the opportunities I devote time and resources to will transform agriculture, some will change the way health care is delivered, and some will take us to the boundaries of the solar system and beyond.

Yet there’s one technology that’s captivated my imagination ever since I was a child, and still, for some reason, is always on the ever-elusive precipice of being close, but not quite there, in delivering on it’s promise of limitless clean energy.

Fusion Energy: Always 10 Years Away

Since the 1950’s, and regardless of the advances revealed and the 10’s of billions spent in labs all around the world to bring it to reality, it always seems to be an annoyingly frustrating 10 years away from delivering on the dream.

Fusion.

I have no delusions. I know that it’s no small task to replicate and contain the power of the sun within the confines of a reactor on our own small planet, but for a technology that started at the same time as the development of the atomic bomb, and initially for much the same reason, to defeat the enemies of democracy, this one continually presents itself in much the same way as a mirage across the desert sands of the Sahara. Always seemingly tangible and within reach, but always of no more substance than the heat waves that dance across the dunes once you draw near.

But I’m an optimist, a futurist, a humanist, a glass is always half full kind of person, and I will admit that it’s very exciting to hear about any potentially world-changing breakthroughs for fusion energy and achieving the key steps needed in the decades-long quest for limitless clean power.

Of course, on the other side of any breakthrough fusion announcement, is the long running joke amongst even the most dedicated fusion scientist that goes something along the lines of,

“Fusion is the energy of the future, and it will always remain that way…”

The Evolution of Power Generation

In the 1600’s, the world’s first great global superpower had a problem. With an empire that stretched east across most of Europe to the Philippines and India, and west across the Atlantic to the Americas, Spain was dominant and ambitious in its plans for conquest, expansion, cultural significance, and wanting to reap all of the vast benefits of its meteoric rise to power that started in the early 1500’s.

However, and as many empires that have risen and fallen can attest, it takes a lot of money to drive and sustain a global presence, and much of Spain’s wealth was derived from within the depths of the Earth, pulled from the ground in the form of gold and silver and tons upon tons of other valuable ores and minerals. 

But underground mining is dangerous and tricky, and once the tunnels penetrate even a couple of hundred feet, it gets harder and harder to extract the valuable contents as toxic gasses soon fill the air and water seeps in virtually everywhere making further digging all but impossible and forcing proven and rich veins to be left abandoned.

With the nation’s coffers slowly but steadily growing thin, and the wealth needed to sustain it often agonizingly mere feet away, a solution was drastically needed.

That’s when, in 1606, a Spanish mining administrator named Jeronimo de Ayanz invented and patented a steam powered injection system – essentially a steam boiler with a narrowing pipe sticking out of it – that would inject steam into a larger pipe creating a pressurized system capable of sucking out airborne gases and propelling water from the flooded silver mines under his management.

In the context of our present world, it doesn’t seem like much, but it was an ingenious solution to a huge problem that affected virtually every underground mine where tunnels were dug right around the planet. It allowed ores and minerals to be extracted with greater ease and significantly less danger, and by many accounts allowed the Spanish empire to flourish for another 75 years.

The invention worked so well that it wasn’t until 100 years later, in 1711, that Thomas Newcomen devised a better way of draining mines, that also used steam, but this time by driving a piston connected to pumps placed at the bottom of the shafts and allowing for deeper depths to be achieved and more materials to be extracted.

For another 50 years, that was the pinnacle of the world’s technological prowess using steam.

Then, in 1765, James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker, added a condenser to Newcomen’s machine that allowed the steam cylinder to be maintained at a steady temperature with a constant pressure and this dramatically increased its functionality.

For 11 more years, the enhanced machine remained unchanged, until one day Watt partnered with Matthew Boulton, who envisioned uses for steam technology that went far beyond draining mines.

With these new ideas in mind, one year later in 1777, one of Watts’ employees, William Murdoch, invented the sun and planet gearing system that converted reciprocating, linear motion into rotative motion.

This change from a strictly up and down to a circular motion allowed for the invention of the modern steam engine that lead to the creation of massive ironworks, factories, and manufacturing plants, as well as the creation of engines for trains, boats, railways, and even early airships.

This steam revolution sparked the industrial age, changing the planet and propelling civilization as never before seen into the 20^th century and beyond.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that if you were asked to sum up the last 400 years of human history, you’d be right to say that it’s been defined by our pursuit of coming up with new ways to boil water.

And, on a planet where 71% of its surface is covered in the stuff, that probably makes perfectly good sense.

The Modern Energy Crisis

But think about this, we carry supercomputers in our pockets more powerful than all of the combined computing power available to launch humankind to the moon and back, but 400 years later, making steam is still what powers our civilizations. In fact, steam-based power generation presently produces between 77 and 84 percent of all of the world’s electricity.

From wood, to coal, to nuclear, and all the other iterations such as the vast concentrating solar power plants in the Mojave desert that focus sunlight from over 300,000 mirrors onto giant boilers fitted within large power towers to create high temperature steam, all that’s really changed over time are the initiating energy formats used to fuel the transition from water to vapour to turbine to electricity.

Making steam cost-effectively is what has lead to our dependence on cheap and abundant coal and other relatively near-the-surface fossil fuels, and this has caused us to go off the rails insofar as the unfolding climate catastrophe and the havoc that it wreaks.

As our limited atmosphere fills with the toxic bi-products of the hydrocarbon transition to steam and invariably chokes us all of our ability to function, grow and prosper, its no wonder that there’s an urgent imperative for a new way to generate power as cleanly and as efficiently as possible.

The very endurance of our species depends on it.

Let’s step away for a moment.

I enjoyed the film, “The Social Network”. It’s an interesting story about start-ups and innovation. At one point Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker discusses with Mark Zuckerberg, portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, how they should enact their plan for changing the world by unleashing a never before seen computer application known as, “The Facebook”.

As they conceptualized the size, shape, and scope of what “The Facebook” might look like, Parker constantly presses Zuckerberg to think bigger.

“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars!”

In much the same way, in the government-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one hour east of San Francisco, where scientists have spent six decades pursuing a seemly never-to-be realized pipe dream of clean, super-powerful, inexhaustible energy, a relentlessly chanted similar mantra can be heard bouncing off of the walls inside it’s laboratories.

“Nuclear fission isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Nuclear fusion!”

The Quest for Fusion

And on December 5th, 2022, the world was for the first time introduced to a whole new reality of nuclear cool when fusion was ignited and more energy was produced than the amount that was needed to create it.

In many ways it was awe-inspiring.

To recognize the momentous milestone, DOE Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm said,

“Last week, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, scientists at the National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition — that is, creating more energy from fusion reactions than the energy used to start the process. It’s the first time it has ever been done in a laboratory anywhere in the world — simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.”

Nuclear fusion is the fusing together of hydrogen atoms. It occurs when two atomic nuclei combine to form a single, heavier nucleus – with the result being energy production – only releasing vastly more energy output than it took to generate it. It also has the advantage of being essentially “clean” in that it only produces a very small amount of short-lived radioactive waste, and much of that is able to be recycled.

You want a real world example of nuclear fusion, look to the sun. In fact, look to the stars. In fact, look to just about the whole of everything that we can see and most of what we can’t beyond the limits of our planet, and especially as we look up through the heavens and peer into the night time sky.

What the team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the National Ignition Facility (NIF) have been trying to do since the 60’s when they first realized that lasers could be used to generate fusion ignition, is to replicate the very forces that drive the universe, within the confines of a very tiny little thimble, with the hope of creating clean and limitless energy as the result.

The labs had made 200 previous attempts at assembling a substantive fusion reaction over the last 13 years, failing every time. Colleagues teased NIF scientists and called their lab the Not Ignition Facility, the Never Ignition Facility, and, more recently, the Near Ignition Facility, in a mocking nod to the lack of progress that they were making.

But there were brief and fleeting glimpses of something happening even before this most recent and definitive test, such as when the labs in September and November of 2014 also announced that they had generated a small amount more energy than they had put in when it’s 192 lasers generated what seemed to be a 1% return on energy output as compared to the energy input needed.

This was especially fortunate for the lab because in 2012, had it failed to achieve its projected deadline for achieving its main goal of thermonuclear ignition, in which the reaction was self-sustaining and produced as much energy as it took to operate the lasers, it was going to have its funding cut off by Congress.

So it was essentially saved by the bell and had its lifeline extended.

Then another 10 years passed and the question about whether the LLNL had become a boondoggle, essentially too big to let fail, but running out of support and funding assurances made its most recent announcement especially vital when it seemingly hit pay dirt.

The size and the scope of the undertaking is enormous, and in a nutshell it kind of works like this, although, and please bear with me, I’m going to try to keep the explanation enormously simplified.

It all starts in the NIF, in a laser and ignition building that’s 85 feet tall and 3 football fields long. It needs to be this big because it houses the world’s largest and hottest lasers (the “most energetic”) and a target bay. This arsenal was built for almost $5 billion to let the researchers study and try to replicate the atomic properties of the energy at the center of stars.

The lasers located in the building are separated into two parallel bays, each containing 96 beam lines, for a total of 192 lasers.

Now, when most of us think of lasers typically we envision the cute pen-sized ones that professors or lecturers use to point at some spot or image or calculation on a giant white board or screen projection, or that a lot of people use to amuse their cats as the animals dash around on slippery tile floors, crashing into counters and doors, as they try to catch the spot created by the beam.

But if you took those pin-sized beams and moved them up to the size and scale of the beams used at the NIF needed to capture their enormous energy, then our cats would be the size of the Burj Khalifa, because at full size each of the lasers used to create a part of the fusion process grow to be square and 40 centimeters (16 inches) wide.

The fusion process starts in the master oscillator room, where a very low energy pulse laser is created. This pulse is only 20 billionths of a second in duration, which is a beam of light about 20 feet long.

It’s amplified and then split into 48 laser pulses, which are then carried over to the two laser bays in the ignition and targeting building through small fiber optic cables.

Here the 48 pulses are further amplified in a pre-amplifier by a factor of about 10 billion. Then they’re further split into 192 pulses and sent into the main laser assembly system.

In these laser bays, electrical energy is dumped into flash lamps that are charged by enormous capacitors. These convert their energy into light that’s absorbed by the laser glass that’s stored in the amplifiers. When the newly formed lasers pass through the glass lined amplifiers, they extract that energy and add it themselves.

In a continuing process of amplification within the main amplifier system, light passes 4 times through 11 sets of amplifiers, further boosting the lasers with more and more energy each time they pass through. 

Optical components in this process ensure that the beams maintain their pulse shape, quality, and spatial uniformity.

On their final pass through the system, the laser is allowed to exit and travel through another power amplifier as it makes its way to the switchyard.

In total, from first beginning as low energy pulses, the power of the laser beams are increased a quadrillion times as they travel more than 1,500 metres from the master oscillator room to the target chamber.

In the switchyard the parallel bundles of square beams are rearranged into a conical configuration so that they can be compressed and focused into the centre of the target chamber and eventually into the target assembly.

But first the 8 beams are spilt into 2 groups of 4 beams each, with one group heading up and the other group heading down, moving towards equidistant entry ports leading into the target chamber.

The beams lastly pass through the final optics assemblies that convert the now very narrow original infrared laser light into ultraviolet light beams which next converge onto the insides of a tiny 10 millimeter metal canister target assembly that resembles a tiny sewing machine bobbin and no larger than a multivitamin.

The ultraviolet light beams next bounce off the insides of this target chamber, where its gold plated interior transforms the ultraviolet light into x-rays.

There’s a teensy target shell located inside the centre of the canister. It’s almost perfectly round and is so tiny that you barely can see it in the palm of your hand. It’s formed out of diamond by vaporizing carbon at 430 degrees below zero, and this houses hydrogen atoms. The sphere’s surface is 100 times smoother than a mirror, because even a microscopic flaw would derail any fusion reaction.

“We think these target shells are among the most perfect items that we have on earth,”

Michael Stadermann, who leads the target-making team, told Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes.”

What happens next is that this hydrogen-comprised mini-bb is completely swamped over by the x-rays created within the metallic bobbin Hole Rod and causes it to implode and ignite in a controlled, self-sustaining fusion reaction.

And voila, measurable fusion!

The same process that powers our sun and the stars.

Livermore scientists claim that the results were peer-reviewed and verified by outside parties. It was confirmed that a little over 2 million joules of energy went into achieving ignition of the rare hydrogen isotopes, and that a little over 3 million joules of energy came out.

A stunning achievement, and by all accounts you’d think we should now be well on our way to limitless, clean energy…

But wait, here’s where we hit a little problem or two with the experiment.

First, there’s a slight-of-hand bit of mathematical trickery at play.

Why Is Fusion So Hard?

You see, the microburst output created, that was a of a billionth of a second long, was calculated using an “absolute” number and didn’t take into account the energy utilized before the lasers actually charged up and struck the small containment vessel.

Because while only 2 million joules of energy went into the reaction chamber, it took over 200 million joules of electricity, that further used at least 600 million joules of raw coal or natural gas, or some other needed power-plant fuel, to produce.

So the actual output-to-input number is really considerably different, but for the scientists, they were basing their output number on the “what if” assumption that the process had been up and running, and that if this were the case, that this output is what would have happened in a sustained reaction.

In our present real world, with suppositions and hypotheticals aside, 600 million joules in, 3 million joules out – or about enough energy to boil your water for a cup of coffee – isn’t exactly on its own much of an achievement.

However, as a proof of concept and a vital step forward in the development of Inertial Confined Fusion, it’s historical.

But never mind just looking at the energy components needed, even making the Hydrogen isotope BB pellets that sit in the centre of the Hole Rod canisters is a complicated task.

NIF researchers make 1,500 of these tiny shells in a year to yield just 150 nearly perfect containers, and they’re so small that they need to glue them together using a cat whisker in the final assembly.

With these, the NIF can do about one laser “shot” a day in their testing facilities.

A commercial power plant, to be even close to being viable, would need to run 10 shots per second.

This would require 900,000 nearly perfect, diamond-covered shells every single day, and the fusion reaction would have to yield 100 times the output that the NIF scientists just achieved.

So it’s easy to see why turning this recent success into practical commercial use will once again fall back on the old axiom of that it’ll take at least 20 years or more for fusion to happen, even according to what Livermore officials say.

The Biden administration is targeting 10 years.

But from a dose of reality perspective, to even have a chance at success it’s going to take multiple tens of billions of dollars or more to achieve the next key steps.

The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s total budget for all of it’s pursuits amounts to just $1.5 billion a year, and in the real world that’s grossly insufficient and nowhere near the amount needed to achieve the task.

But wait!

Hold on.

You see there’s another way to create fusion ignition, and it’s a whole lot different from what the NIF is doing and it’s showing such enormous potential that there’s a bunch of private companies entering the race to be the first to develop it and turn it into viable commercial power plants.

The Business of Fusion

It’s called Magnetic Confinement Fusion.

Just as is the case with the current developments in the conquest of space, private individuals and companies have decided that this new technology is viable enough for them to enter the fusion race because they know that there’s a real shot that significant money can be made.

In fact, venture investors having recently poured at least $6 billion into a passel of tech startups.

Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the man who, by his own admission, may well have started the process of dooming the human species through the advent of unchecked A.I., Sam Altman, the creator of OpenAI, have now also invested billions into companies like Altman’s own Helion Energy Inc., as they too try to unleash and harness the energy of the stars.

Other companies in the field have appropriately fusion-sexy names, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Electric Fusion Systems, EX-Fusion, Fuse, General Fusion, Helical Fusion, LPP Fusion, Marvel Fusion, Realta Fusion, and Renaissance Fusion.

It sounds promising in that private companies are often more efficient than governments at large project developments that aren’t purely research based, but fusion is still a large nut to crack.

But the technological advances and the science seems to be there.

Using the latest in superconductors to create magnetic fields, these companies think that they can create and sustain fusion reactions within essentially donut-shaped reactors that use limited energy input while unleashing and sustaining fusion ignition within their circular cores to generate limitless clean energy outputs.

There are obvious challenges, such as trying to contain the heat of the sun within human-made metal enclosures.

Even the microsecond reaction at Livermore created a fusion reaction that sparked temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun, at over 27 million degrees.

But by using newly developed magnetic high field containment tapes to encapsulate the fusion ignition and confine it within a defined space, then building parts of the metal containment casings out of liquid Lithium flowing field walls to absorb the intense heat generated by the ignition and then redirecting it back into the fusion reaction process as cooler usable materials, these private companies believe that they’ve cracked the fusion code.

Driven by the pressing need for alternative power supplies, the U.S. government is also investing over 46 million into the private sector fusion creation through its Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. Already 8 private companies including; Tokamak Energy Inc. (Bruceton Mills, WV), Commonwealth Fusion Systems (Cambridge, MA), Focused Energy Inc. (Austin, TX), Princeton Stellarators Inc. (Branchburg, NJ), Realta Fusion Inc. (Madison, WI), Type One Energy Group (Madison, WI), Xcimer Energy Inc. (Redwood City, CA), and Zap Energy Inc. (Everett, WA) have already tossed their hats and technologies into the ring and have received significant grants, because they believe that they can commercialize the process by 2038, in line with reaching the President’s goal of achieving a net-zero U.S. economy by 2050.

But even with private interest, investment, and involvement, I’m having serious déjà vu and a here we go again feeling about the whole 10 years in the future thing, as it once again seems to rear it’s ugly head over and over again when it comes to fusion energy.

The Future of Fusion: Hopes and Concerns

No doubt with private companies in the mix that there are added motivators such as large and institutional investors demanding ROI with defined timelines and expectations, and that this is what puts innovation into hyper-drive and will make or break these companies in record time.

Yes, of course, and just as is the case with A.I., there’s a large fear within many academics and the general public that a runaway reaction, potentially unleashing a star in the centre of the Earth, is a valid possibility even though scientists seem to universally agree that this type of energy generation will pose no such safety concerns.

But history has shown us otherwise in other areas.

However, if the scientists are to be believed, and the technology proves safe and viable, then this is good news when compared to the more than 100 incidents of varying size that have occurred at fission nuclear power plants (the type we currently use) all around the world over the course of the last 70 years, with some of the biggest Grade 1 failures being at Chernobyl and Fukushima, with the former releasing at least 10 times more radiation into the atmosphere and environment than its Japanese counterpart.

As we’ve had these types of plants in operation for many, many decades, and we’ve grown accustomed to them, we know that, at the very least, they produce dangerous radioactive waste in fuel rods that need to be stored away remotely and securely for thousands of years, and we’ve come to learn to live with the fear that catastrophes can and do happen every few years.

But even a “China Syndrome” meltdown is still less menacing than the possibility that a private company, afraid of their stock return levels, might never tell us that they’ve unleashed a star from a runaway fusion reaction.

And that’s the crux of it all. With every great technological advance come the doomsayers and the risk of something going wrong.

Of course if we never tried anything we’d still be standing in knee-deep water a few feet into potentially massive gold and silver mines and be forced to turn away from the fortunes and the futures within our grasp.

But all the fear may be for nothing. If history has taught us anything, it’s that fusion is a large endeavour that may never be able to be achieved and that it may well be an energy source always relegated to the future.

The reaction at the Livermore Labs lasted one-billionth of a second, created enough energy to boil two pots of coffee, cost more than 10 billion dollars to generate and took over 60 years to create.

Should I Invest in Fusion?

Is this an investment that I can realistically get behind and hope to see some ROI on?

I’m an optimist and I believe in a future where humanity rises to greater heights and enjoys unparalleled prosperity for everyone, but I think it might take a few more years, or maybe even another 10 years before I’ll be able to make a fair appraisal and decide.

I’ll keep an active eye on it to be sure, and I’ll be ready to invest once I see the players get more defined and narrow a bit, because with the advent of A.I. and other advances I’m confident that technological progress is about to hit another stride never before imagined and drive our evolution as never before.

Yet still the words echo that,

“Fusion is the energy of the future and will always remain that way.”

But I also know that what’s happened is monumental and I’m not going to discount the achievement.

Because hey, it’s a start and every revolution starts somewhere…

– Written by a human.

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Michal Prywata: Inventor, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary engineer with a focus on frontier technologies. Founder of ventures in healthcare, agriculture, space, and AI. On a relentless quest to solve complex problems and extend the boundaries of human potential.