Got to put it out there I loved recording this podcast with Sehila Gonzalez de Vicente, because it was all about something I have been fascinated with since childhood…nuclear fusion.
Sehila heads up Fusion at the Clean Air Taskforce. And I know what you are thinking, it’s rubbish, wishful thinking or at best another 100 years away. But even I, the cynical journalist, now think it’s going to happen before 2050 and might even play a big role in getting us to net zero.
Let’s start at the start, literally of everything here on Earth, it’s the story of our Sun. As Sehila explained: “Fusion is happening every day because every second, every day the sun, the stars are powered by fusion. So it’s nothing strange to us. It’s a natural thing.
“The problem is to replicate that on Earth, because the conditions to reach fusion, to make a nucleus to fuse are extreme. You need a strong temperature. You need to have all the nucleus close to each other confined. And you need to keep that condition for long enough.
“So we are trying to develop a machine that meet all these conditions, to have enough temperature to keep that the nucleus close enough and to make it for long enough.”
The concept is simple, get some isotopes (forms) of Hydrogen and squish them together till they fuse, thanks to Einstein that releases masses of energy and away you go to the stars. In the Sun its core is super hot and the power of gravity makes the enormous pressure and of course that leads to fusion. On Earth we can replicate the heat but have to use magnets to create the confined space for the reaction.
And that has always been the problem – the amount of energy to get to fusion has outweighed the energy released… until now.
In 2022 the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in America achieved fusion. Now Sehila says we have proved the science works we just need to refine the process.
We can do it. And we have done. And then after that experiment in in Lawrence Livermore National Lab, they have replicated even more successfully. So it’s a reality.
So what’s the next stage? She says it’s commercialisation and industrial use but, the days of us using a cup of water to power a person’s energy use for their entire life is still a long, long way off. However she did talk about the use of AI to speed up fusion and even gave a presentation to COP29 delegates all about this.
Finally does fusion mean we can stop everything else? No says Sehila.
“You need to be clean. You need to be no emissions. You need to be sustainable because at the end it needs to be sustainable. This is what fusion is offering. But it’s not the only option.”
Listen now as we talk about a whole lot more and let me know your views.
