The Star Builders Read online

  Culham’s biggest machine currently holds the world record for fusion energy. Chapman has a plan to push it even further than before. “I’m hoping we can smash our record,” he has said.3

  Established star builders like Mark Herrmann and Ian Chapman face stiff competition from elsewhere: the Cambrian explosion of private fusion firms. Like the industrialists of the early twentieth century, these challengers are less concerned with the science than in making the machines work. They reject the “bigger is better” paradigm that is conventional wisdom in fusion physics. Instead, they’re developing smaller and, they argue, more practical machines. Increasingly, investors are committing their cash to this scaled-down, simplified approach—though of course no fusion device is without vast complexity.

  One such efficiency-emphasizing operation is Tokamak Energy. Although Tokamak Energy’s scientists and engineers are following the lead of Culham in using magnets to trap the stuff of stars, they believe their machine is a smarter way of doing it. Not only are they aiming to demonstrate that they can reach the conditions for fusion soon, they want to deliver power to the grid by 2030. This ambitious plan will involve mastering new intricacies in not just physics, but engineering and economics too. In 2020, Tokamak Energy received $13 million from the British government and another half a million dollars from the US Department of Energy to bring this plan to fruition.4

  Fusion start-ups such as Tokamak Energy are ending the dominance of physics, and physicists, in the field. Tokamak Energy’s chief executive, Jonathan Carling, is the quintessential engineer determined to turn fusion from a science project into a bona fide power source. On the day of my visit I meet him over tea and biscuits in a room cut out of Tokamak Energy’s industrial warehouse headquarters. Jonathan is unlike the incumbents in the star-building business in that he’s never worked in fusion before. But he has taken big, complex engineering designs into commercial production.

  “I came to be here because my background is in engineering and operations, and the business has reached a stage where it’s very focused on how we make this a commercial reality, not just how we demonstrate an energy gain of one-point-zero-something, but how we actually develop a commercial device.”

  His record speaks for itself. His career began when he apprenticed at Jaguar to work on car engines, but he says that his passion for making technology work began much earlier.

  “I became an engineer when I was about six,” he tells me. “We used to get drawing to do and I drew a car and my teacher would say ‘What’s that sticking out of the [hood]?’ and I said, ‘That’s a super-charger.’ At six years old, I was fascinated by machines, and I was always pulling things to bits and wanted to learn about them. So I did a mechanical engineering degree.”

  After Jaguar, Jonathan went to another high-end car firm, Aston Martin, and became the chief operating officer. Not content with the complexity of cars, not to mention people, he then switched to aerospace at Rolls-Royce. If you’ve ever been on a plane, there’s a really good chance that you’ve been jetted around by an engine that Carling had a hand in. At my insistence, he reels off a list: the Airbus 380, 350, and 330, the Boeing 747, 777, and 767.

  “Jet engines run hot all the time, and the intake temperature can be of the order of two thousand Kelvin, which is three hundred degrees or so above the melting temperature of the turbine that is extracting the power,” he tells me, going on to explain how such a feat is possible with clever engineering. If it sounds impressive, it’s nothing compared to what a working fusion reactor will need. So why did he swap two thousand degrees Kelvin for 150 million?

  “The world doesn’t need another luxury sports car as much as it needs fusion energy,” he says.

  There are start-ups pursuing the inertial confinement approach too, which as a reminder uses a trigger, often laser beams, to crush matter into a hot, dense blob that provides good conditions for fusion reactions to occur. One firm is on the other side of Oxford, just seventeen miles up the road from Tokamak Energy and in their own rather more swanky warehouse. They are First Light Fusion; their name refers to the light emitted by matter as it gets hot enough for fusion.

  Dr. Nick Hawker, the CEO and CTO of First Light Fusion, is another engineer steering fusion toward reality. He’s young, having founded First Light directly after completing his PhD at Oxford. He has a very different style from the older bureaucrats of fusion, like Mark Herrmann and Ian Chapman. Nick wears sneakers, chinos, and solid-color T-shirts with a blazer over the top. He’s sharp and a bit intense, with a restrained entrepreneurial energy. Someone who decides to take on not one, but two of the key roles in an organization might be conceited. Yet, unusually, Hawker’s company has managed to raise enough money for a four-year plan. And his generally older and more experienced staff look up to him with a hint of reverence. When I finally speak to him at the end of a long day at First Light’s headquarters, I’m full of anticipation. Hawker answers my questions in clipped sentences and rarely cracks a smile throughout our conversation; he’s all business.

  He tells me that, as CEO, his job is forging links with potential industrial partners and academia. But he seems to be involved with every aspect of the company and likes getting his hands dirty. His Twitter feed is full of results from First Light’s star machine, replete with video clips of experimental equipment exploding. One post shows a photograph of a thick metal plate with a hole punched right through, another a video of a 7 mega-ampere (25 million times more current than an old-fashioned filament bulb) short circuit.

  I ask him about his dual role, and he says that it’s all about managing the personalities on the team so that they’re pointing in the same direction. “I’m on the pitch too,” he quips, referring to getting directly involved in the science via his CTO role.

  And well he might get involved in the science. Nick has taken his work in Oxford’s engineering department, simulating extreme conditions in fluids, and made it the core of a new approach to fusion. That’s risky, but it also presents new possibilities for net energy gain that, he argues, might have been overlooked by the big laboratories, who tend to play it safe.

  Certainly, decades of mainstream magnetic and inertial confinement fusion have continually surprised scientists with problems that couldn’t have been anticipated. But technology has also moved on, and fusion scientists can now combine simulation and theory in ways that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. “The real goal is to validate the simulations,” Nick stresses, echoing what Jonathan Carling also told me. To keep up the funding to get their fusion schemes over the line, the start-ups need to show that they’re credible, and that means showing that their models are capable of describing reality.

  The big motivations for Nick seem to be those that have driven countless entrepreneurs before him: success and money. He believes that these will come faster in a private fusion venture.

  “I’m very glad that we did go private because look how far we got,” he tells me. Not only does Nick live this paradigm, he has championed entrepreneurship in the press and mentored others starting businesses. He really believes that when it comes to technological progress, his way is the best way.

  Nick Hawker is counting on getting to a net-energy-gain experiment by 2024. He tells me First Light Fusion is about to reach the temperatures where fusion reactions become detectable, a first step on the path to this ambition.5

  First Light Fusion fits into the inertial confinement fusion bucket. There are fewer start-ups using this approach, the most prominent examples being New Jersey’s LPP Fusion and Canadian-based General Fusion. The other start-ups using the magnetic field approach include Lockheed Martin, TAE Technologies, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Renaissance Fusion. They’re all looking to challenge the big players of NIF and Culham with their greater agility and more focused objectives.

  It doesn’t matter which star builder you talk to. All passionately believe that their scheme will be the first to deliver energy to the grid. But they can’t a
ll be right. Some are over-promising. And the path to fusion energy is littered with failed promises, so, in a way, it’s surprising not to hear more modesty.

  Despite having his own ambition to surpass records for fusion energy, Ian Chapman believes that the new competition is essential and inevitable: “I’m very supportive of all of their endeavors, and indeed we work with a lot of private companies.” But he does acknowledge that the start-ups can create problems and may not be as far down the road as they think they are.

  The government labs may still have a few tricks up their sleeve too. They’re not incapable of innovating, and they have lots of people with the right skills to do so. Both magnetic confinement fusion, at Culham, and inertial confinement fusion, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, have smaller, highly experimental fusion schemes.

  Perhaps the most impressive government “start-up” machine is the Wendelstein 7-X, recently opened by Angela Merkel in Greifswald, Germany. It’s run as part of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, which has eleven hundred employees and also operates a tokamak. W7X, as those in the know call it, has been making rapid progress by revisiting an idea right from the start of the fusion era, the stellarator (an Escher-like tangle of tubes that traps fusion fuel with twisting magnetic fields), with modern technology. Serving as the institute’s scientific director is Professor Sibylle Günter, an experienced academic star builder whose work on topics related to fusion began in the 1990s. It was the connection of fusion with her corner of northeast Germany that drew her in. When she discovered that W7X would be built near her hometown of Rostock, she decided to learn more.

  Sibylle steadily ascended the ranks, becoming head of theory (a position for which seriously strong mathematical ability is required), then a director, and finally, in 2011, the scientific director. “I saw how important good management is and how much it takes to secure a sufficient budget,” she tells me digitally as we cope with a coronavirus-induced lockdown. “By being the director I have many opportunities to influence our big projects and I can change those things I only complained about earlier.”

  Although she describes herself as a very impatient person, Sibylle is understated; the consummate professional scientist giving both sides of the argument and being honest about any limitations. When I ask how she feels about achieving fusion, she says, “The pressure is quite strong” but adds that, despite it, she still strives to ensure careful work and good scientific procedures. She thinks that, in the long run, the stellarator design of W7X could make a more viable energy-producing fusion reactor than tokamaks like Ian Chapman’s machine at Culham.

  Although everyone disagrees about how and who, star builders do agree that the fusion future we’ve all been promised for so long is (almost) here. Net energy gain especially. “The key message isn’t about us,” Jonathan Carling told me. “The key message is that fusion is coming much faster than most people think.”

  “It’s not science fiction; it’s going to be solved in the next decade,” Nick Hawker said. “ ‘Solved’ means it’s working. It’s going to take longer for a power plant, but the joke that fusion is ‘thirty years away’—no, it’s here. The thirty years are done and it’s going to be solved in the next decade.”

  Ian Chapman, who leads the UK Atomic Energy Authority, said: “Fusion will work. It will happen.”

  There’s just one more star builder I need to introduce you to: me. Well, former star builder: I worked on nuclear fusion research at Imperial College until 2015, when I left to become a researcher in economics in the public sector. Since then, I’ve been looking at star builders from the outside. In that time it has struck me that, more than ever, the rest of the world deserves to know what this motley bunch of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs is up to. This book is intended to help accomplish that.

  It’s clear from talking to the star builders that they aren’t just creating fusion devices to show that they can master one of the universe’s most fundamental reactions, as important a breakthrough as that might be scientifically. They’re doing it because taming nuclear fusion might just save the planet.

  CHAPTER 2 BUILD A STAR, SAVE THE PLANET

  “What problem do you hope scientists will have solved by the end of the century?”

  “Nuclear fusion. It would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy without pollution or global warming.”

  —Stephen Hawking, 20101

  The star builders we’ve met—Dr. Mark Herrmann at NIF, Professor Ian Chapman at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Jonathan Carling at Tokamak Energy, Dr. Nick Hawker at First Light Fusion, and Professor Sibylle Günter at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics—have many motivations, but there are a few that come up again and again. One is the sheer joy of pushing the boundaries of what human ingenuity can achieve. For the start-ups, success and money beckon. For scientists in government laboratories, it’s understanding the most powerful forces in the universe.

  But the big motivation that unites all star builders, the one that gets them out of bed in the morning, is saving the planet.

  Our home is a blue marble that sits in a thin protective layer of atmosphere. It’s currently hurtling through the Milky Way, following the star that has given it life. Earth has been witness to every joy that humans have known: every sight, every experience, every moment. (That’s if you don’t count the lucky few who have ventured into space.)

  As much as everyone agrees that we should preserve our planet, keeping it pleasantly habitable for future generations of plants and animals, the star builders are acutely aware that, as a species, we’re charting a course to do it irreparable harm. “We’re doing an experiment with the only ecosystem we have,” Mark Herrmann told me. “Bad things very much could happen.” And so they have.

  Simply put, Mark and the other star builders want to stop the human-caused climate change that is tipping the planet into a new and dangerous phase. Climate change threatens our way of life, especially our most vulnerable people. That’s the A-side; the B-side features the related challenges of pollution and habitat destruction.

  There’s clamor for change—though, so far, not a lot of concrete progress. Teenage climate campaigner Greta Thunberg is touring the world telling politicians and officials to do more. In the UK, the Extinction Rebellion movement has protested by blocking streets and gluing themselves to government buildings. They want net zero carbon emissions by 2025. In the US, Democrats have campaigned for a Green New Deal that includes a commitment to net zero by 2030. By 2019, fifteen nations had committed to reach net zero by 2050. But it’s one thing to promise net zero carbon emissions, it’s quite another to achieve them.2

  The star builders have an unusual plan to avert Earth’s unfolding climate catastrophe: they want to save the planet by building a star. Star power, they say, could help us avoid the worst of the planet’s climate crisis by providing an alternative source of energy. And it’s our relentless addiction to energy that has caused this unprecedented crisis.

  No other animal uses energy like humans do. Way back in our evolutionary history, we used energy to cook food to improve its nutritional value.3 And since Homo sapiens first used fuel for fires, our hunger for energy has inched higher and higher.

  We began to use energy as an input into technology, from baking ancient bricks in kilns to propelling steamers across the oceans. Over the last two hundred years, the increases in living standards that energy has enabled are astounding. Mastery of energy has seen us improve the quality of hospitals, communications, transport, and both the quality and quantity of our leisure time—to pick but a few examples. The average home is packed with labor-saving devices that would have been unthinkable three hundred years ago.4

  Each revolution in technology has meant successively higher energy consumption. In the UK, where the Industrial Revolution began, annual energy consumption increased eighty times between 1700 and 2019. Worldwide, it’s up thirty times since 1810.5

  We’ll almost certainly need more energy
in the future. Just as they have in the past, life-improving technologies to come will likely use more energy. And future gains in productivity, which ultimately underlie prosperity, are likely to come from energy-hungry technologies like robotics.

  More energy is needed right now just to even out existing inequalities in energy consumption. A large fraction of the world’s population doesn’t enjoy anywhere near the extensive energy consumption, and the benefits it brings, that people in developed nations do. The hope is that poorer countries catch up as quickly as possible. When they do, the scale of the increase we’ll need is huge: for example, energy consumption per person in Bangladesh is around eleven times smaller than in the UK, although the population is roughly twice the size.

  The population of the planet is increasing too, especially in developing countries. Population growth gets bad press, but actually it means more brains creating more wonderful things across art and science.6 Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, experienced an astonishing growth rate of 45 percent between 2005 and 2019, compared to the US’s 11 percent for the same period.7 The overall rate of population growth is predicted to slow only gradually in the coming decades before stabilizing at around 10 billion people.8 We will need energy for those new arrivals.

  It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we have a big energy problem. “Frankly, any projection you look at says you need more energy,” Ian Chapman told me. “We’re going to need half as much energy again as we use now—50 percent more, it’s a huge amount more. In this country, if we had demand go up 15 percent we couldn’t cope.”

  Energy is measured in joules. Remember, a single joule is roughly the energy it takes to lift an apple one meter. Over the course of a year, the average US citizen uses three hundred gigajoules, with a gigajoule being a thousand million joules. There are 330 million people living in the US, so, to account for the energy use of the entire country, or an entire planet, an even more extreme unit of measurement is called for: the exajoule. A single exajoule is a thousand million gigajoules.