July 6, 2024 • 13 mins
Many experts believe fusion energy is the future of limitless clean energy - and one Wellington-based team aims to help New Zealand access this.
OpenStar Technologies is working on a 'levitated dipole' fusion reactor prototype, designed to recreate the process where hydrogen atoms 'fuse' to make helium and release energy.
Founder Dr Ratu Mataira was drawn to the possibilities that come with fusion energy.
"Fusion has the advantage of being incredibly useful, and the challenge of our time is climate change. So we need to continue to look at every possibility to help fight that challenge, and I think fusion is one of those options."
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB right Now.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
A few weeks ago, listening to Say and James, I
heard a listener raving about the work being done by
Kiwi company open Star, So we went digging. Open Star
was founded by physicist doctor Ratu Metida, and the company
has an ambitious goal to recreate the holy grail of energy,
nuclear fusion on Earth to power the planet. Last year,
the company received ten million in private investment to reach
(00:36):
their goals, with Rutuo being talked up as the most
ambitious Kiwi founder since Peter Beck. So to learn more
about these goals and the future of nuclear fusion, doctor
Ratu Mettider joins me now. He is the founder and
CEO of open Star.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Good morning, Good morning, Francesca.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
So good to have you with us. Tell me why
did you start open Star? What is it about nuclear
fusion that excites you?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
What is it that excites me? It's for pure potential
of it. So I think if I had been born
in a decade or a couple of decades ago, I
could have spent my physicist career working on things that
were kind of purely interesting, but fusion has the advantage
of being incredibly useful. And the challenge of our time
(01:22):
is climate change, and so we need to continue to
look at every possibility to help fight that challenge, and
I think fusion is one of those options.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
This is an ambitious project, isn't It.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Is the definition of ambidities. I can't deny that, because
I think.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
I've heard it sort of said that nuclear fusion is
something that will take fifty years, in a sort of
saying it will take thirty years, but you're pretty confident
it might only take ten.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah. And the reason for that is welst open Star
is a new company. We're picking up on ideas that
have been worked on over those many decades, and so
some of the ways of doing fusion might not make
the difference or might not go over distance, but the
technologies that have been developed as part of it can
be used in other ways of doing fusion, and eventually
(02:12):
one of these pathways will succeed. And so while open
Star is relatively young, we think the several decades of
progress so far has set up a foundation that this
is the next step of the journey and is on
that shorter time Horizon.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I did see talked about open Star is the most
exciting project in New Zealand at the moment, would you agree?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Certainly for me and my team, that's simply because you know,
we're in the throes of it day by day. But yeah,
I will try not to be too Yeah, not not
too much hubris there.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I think scientists around the world have been trying to
achieve this the decades. Why haven't we cracked it yet?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Well, frankly, it is extremely difficult to achieve and one
of the reasons for that is the sun creates fusion,
that's where the energy comes from. But in order to
do so, you have to get the material extremely hot.
And I don't mean thousands of degrees melt metal hot.
I mean millions of degrees melt literally anything. And so
(03:19):
we have to build these very sophisticated magnets to kind
of hold on to these very hot plasmas, but hold
on to them without actually touching them and just getting
that right, holding onto it in a way that a
stable allows you to make it incredibly hot has just
taken a lot of time and effort, and technology has
had to improve to get here. But we're trying to
(03:42):
recreate the fundamental energy source of universe, and no one
said it would be easy.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Why is it so hard to create fusion on Earth? Rato?
Speaker 3 (03:52):
So the reason being that the sun is actually one
way to put it is the Sun is actually a
very bad fusion reactor. If you were to reach your
hand into the Sun and just grab a lump of
it would be producing a little bit of fusion, but
not that much. The amount of energy a clump of
sun produces is about the same as your compost in
(04:15):
your home, just slowly being eaten by bacteria. The reason
why the Sun provides all the energy that it does
is simply because of its size. So the Sun is
effectively an enormous pile of compost. Now, to be useful
for humans, we have to do what the Sun does
and then do it better. Because if all I was
proposing was to build a big pile of compost, none
(04:37):
of the investors would be very interested.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Not so much. No, are you the only ones in
New Zealand doing.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
This, working on a direct concept like this. So the
reason why we're based in New Zealand is because we
come from a research institute called Robinson and Robinson works
on a lot of the input technologies that other fusion
companies are also interested in, and so they're working with
the UK Atomic Energy Authority, they're working with companies like
(05:04):
Commonwealth Fusion Systems based in States, and they're working closely
with us as well. And we've recruited a lot of
graduates out of Robinson and that's where I did my PhD.
And so open Star is the only company working on
a full reactor concept, but there are plenty of people
in New Zealand who are starting to look at and
have been looking at the different input technologies involved with fusion.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
What does that mean? What kind of input would you have?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
So the big one that New Zealand turns out to
be very good at is the superconducting magnets that are involved.
So there's basically a new generation of magnet technology that
has really come to fruition over the last ten years.
And that's gone from discovering new materials to scaling those
(05:53):
materials to create useful products and then solving the problems
to create useful systems. And Robinson has been at the
forefront of that probably for at least for the last
three decades. At each step of the way they move
up the value chain. So they start off on materials
and these days they're working on hybrid electric aircraft, fusion,
(06:15):
advanced sensing, but with a strong focus on that magnet technology.
And that's kind of a heart that's enabling so many
of his new fusion companies around the world, is that
we can build more powerful magnets which are better at
holding onto these hot plasmas.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
You mentioned that different people have taken different pathways over
the decades. Which pathway are you taking? How are you
trying to create nuclear fusion?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
So for listeners, I would say.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Imagine I'm five, talk to me like I'm yeah right.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
So the best way to explain it is to reference
things that exist in the world. And so if you
look at our planet Earth, the Earth has a magnetic field.
If you have a compass, points towards north. Now that
magnetic field extends all around the Earth and it creates
what we call magnetosphere, and that's really just particles that
(07:09):
have come all the way from the Sun. I think
many of your listeners will have been lucky enough to
see the aurora about a month ago, which was those
particles hitting the Earth. But the magnetic field of the
Earth actually catches these particles and it holds onto them,
and so we get a plasma. It's not very hot,
but that plasma has been around the Earth since Earth
(07:31):
has had a magnetic field. If that plasma wasn't there,
the solar wind would have actually blown away the atmosphere
of Earth and we would be a barren rock just
like Mars. Actually, so life on Earth exists because of
this magnetosphere. What we're doing at open Star is we're
taking that same concept of capturing plasma using a simple
(07:56):
dipole shaped magnet. And you know, you're five, so I'm
going to teach you what a dipole is. It's just
a simple bar magnet.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Of its sun.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, But the really interesting thing about using that kind
of confinement is that the plasma is actually stable, just
like the magnetosphere above our heads. These plasmas are long lived,
they're stable, they don't disrupt, and when you're building a
really complicated machine that has to get this plasma really
really hot, starting off at that stable point is a
(08:27):
very useful foundation. It means that the machine's not going
to get too complicated as you try to scale the technology.
So what we're trying to do is recreate a magnetosphere
inside a laboratory, and that's been done twice in the
world already by two other experiments in academia, and we're
taking the next step to incorporate new technologies in order
to do that. So we've got this magnet it can
(08:49):
hold onto the plasma. It looks like the magnetosphere, and
because we're not actually touching that plasma, we can actually
get it really really hot, and eventually it gets hot
enough to actually start fusing the ions or the hydrogen
that we put inside. By fusing that material us heat
and producing heat, then the story becomes quite dull. You
(09:11):
take that heat, you boil water, you drive a steam turbine.
Really we're rebuilding coal power plants, but without the coal.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So what resources go into this to create it? You
mentioned hydrogen, then.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yeah, so there are different isotopes of hydrogen, and so
this three one is the everyday hydrogen. There is the
majority of what we see, and so water is mostly
this kind of hydrogen. The second is what we call
heavy hydrogen. It's called deuterium technically, and that's actually abundant.
It's only in trace amounts, but if you actually take
(09:48):
a bath tub full of sea water. There is enough
deuterium in that sea water to provide enough energy for
one person for their whole lifetime, and so there's not
a lot of it. But fusion is just such a
great way of making energy that it's very resource efficient,
and so we think you can get all vegetarium that
humanity will ever need by extracting vegetarium from seawater. And
(10:12):
then lastly, there's another isotope called tritium, which is not
as abundant, and you have to create it inside the machine,
and we create it from lithium. So if you actually
look at the trucks that turn up to the fusion
power plant of the future, one is actually probably an
uber driver carrying a small bottle of deetarium because that's
all you need. And then the other is actually lithium.
(10:35):
So you input lithium, we turn the lithium into tritium,
and then we fuse the tritium to create energy.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Is it safe you talk about this plasma and how
hot it's going to get. Are there any dangers around
this process?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
That's a really good question. So heat is an interesting thing.
The plasma is very, very hot in terms of temperature.
But the nice thing about it iss not very much
of it at all, and a full scale power plant
there's only ever one gram of plasma at any given time,
and so the amount of energy that's actually stored in
that plasma is a lot when you're talking about a machine,
(11:15):
but when you're talking about risk to you know, the surroundings,
it's essentially nothing. And so we have to be careful
that we build machines that don't destroy themselves. But that's
actually on the same magnitude of risk that any large
industrial process has to deal with. So any kind of
existing power plant or any kind of steel mill, you know,
(11:38):
anything with big, heavy, hot things, has the same kind
of risk factors. And that's one of the reasons why
physicists are so excited about fusion is because it's fundamentally
safe a way than some of the other alternatives.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Who or what has inspired you to take on such
a large challenge and work.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
On this A backpedal from making it sound like I'm
obsessed with taking on big challenges at a personal level.
I just wanted to work on something that I thought
might only exist if I worked on it, and I
think that's something I should resonate with anyone creative you know,
any artist or musician you know is trying to create
something that's only there because they made it. That's my
(12:20):
actual drive in terms of who inspired me to take
it to this degree. I'm really lucky to be able
to draw inspiration from my grandmother, who played a huge
role in revitalizing today Omari and so saving that from extinction.
And I consider that to be equally as preposterous a
(12:40):
task to give, you know, a person to do. And
if she could take that on, then what excuse could
I find not to take on the biggest problem kind
of presented to me. But we take our jobs at
Open Star step by step with humility. We just ask
ourselves for question, can we take the next step? What's
(13:01):
in our way? Is there any reason we can't do this?
And if we can't find a good reason not to
do it, we're going to try take that next step.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Ah, look something we should all live by. Thank you
so much for your time today, and we'll keep in
touch with you and see how things are going. That
was doctor Ratu Matida there from Open Star talking about
nuclear fusion, and I hope if you've got a bit
of a gist of what nuclear fusion is and how
it all works. I definitely needed to be explained to
it like I was five, and I think that WHO
(13:30):
did a very good job.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB right Now.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
A few weeks ago, listening to Say and James, I
heard a listener raving about the work being done by
Kiwi company open Star, So we went digging. Open Star
was founded by physicist doctor Ratu Metida, and the company
has an ambitious goal to recreate the holy grail of energy,
nuclear fusion on Earth to power the planet. Last year,
the company received ten million in private investment to reach
(00:36):
their goals, with Rutuo being talked up as the most
ambitious Kiwi founder since Peter Beck. So to learn more
about these goals and the future of nuclear fusion, doctor
Ratu Mettider joins me now. He is the founder and
CEO of open Star.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Good morning, Good morning, Francesca.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
So good to have you with us. Tell me why
did you start open Star? What is it about nuclear
fusion that excites you?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
What is it that excites me? It's for pure potential
of it. So I think if I had been born
in a decade or a couple of decades ago, I
could have spent my physicist career working on things that
were kind of purely interesting, but fusion has the advantage
of being incredibly useful. And the challenge of our time
(01:22):
is climate change, and so we need to continue to
look at every possibility to help fight that challenge, and
I think fusion is one of those options.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
This is an ambitious project, isn't It.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Is the definition of ambidities. I can't deny that, because
I think.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
I've heard it sort of said that nuclear fusion is
something that will take fifty years, in a sort of
saying it will take thirty years, but you're pretty confident
it might only take ten.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah. And the reason for that is welst open Star
is a new company. We're picking up on ideas that
have been worked on over those many decades, and so
some of the ways of doing fusion might not make
the difference or might not go over distance, but the
technologies that have been developed as part of it can
be used in other ways of doing fusion, and eventually
(02:12):
one of these pathways will succeed. And so while open
Star is relatively young, we think the several decades of
progress so far has set up a foundation that this
is the next step of the journey and is on
that shorter time Horizon.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I did see talked about open Star is the most
exciting project in New Zealand at the moment, would you agree?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Certainly for me and my team, that's simply because you know,
we're in the throes of it day by day. But yeah,
I will try not to be too Yeah, not not
too much hubris there.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I think scientists around the world have been trying to
achieve this the decades. Why haven't we cracked it yet?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Well, frankly, it is extremely difficult to achieve and one
of the reasons for that is the sun creates fusion,
that's where the energy comes from. But in order to
do so, you have to get the material extremely hot.
And I don't mean thousands of degrees melt metal hot.
I mean millions of degrees melt literally anything. And so
(03:19):
we have to build these very sophisticated magnets to kind
of hold on to these very hot plasmas, but hold
on to them without actually touching them and just getting
that right, holding onto it in a way that a
stable allows you to make it incredibly hot has just
taken a lot of time and effort, and technology has
had to improve to get here. But we're trying to
(03:42):
recreate the fundamental energy source of universe, and no one
said it would be easy.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Why is it so hard to create fusion on Earth? Rato?
Speaker 3 (03:52):
So the reason being that the sun is actually one
way to put it is the Sun is actually a
very bad fusion reactor. If you were to reach your
hand into the Sun and just grab a lump of
it would be producing a little bit of fusion, but
not that much. The amount of energy a clump of
sun produces is about the same as your compost in
(04:15):
your home, just slowly being eaten by bacteria. The reason
why the Sun provides all the energy that it does
is simply because of its size. So the Sun is
effectively an enormous pile of compost. Now, to be useful
for humans, we have to do what the Sun does
and then do it better. Because if all I was
proposing was to build a big pile of compost, none
(04:37):
of the investors would be very interested.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Not so much. No, are you the only ones in
New Zealand doing.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
This, working on a direct concept like this. So the
reason why we're based in New Zealand is because we
come from a research institute called Robinson and Robinson works
on a lot of the input technologies that other fusion
companies are also interested in, and so they're working with
the UK Atomic Energy Authority, they're working with companies like
(05:04):
Commonwealth Fusion Systems based in States, and they're working closely
with us as well. And we've recruited a lot of
graduates out of Robinson and that's where I did my PhD.
And so open Star is the only company working on
a full reactor concept, but there are plenty of people
in New Zealand who are starting to look at and
have been looking at the different input technologies involved with fusion.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
What does that mean? What kind of input would you have?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
So the big one that New Zealand turns out to
be very good at is the superconducting magnets that are involved.
So there's basically a new generation of magnet technology that
has really come to fruition over the last ten years.
And that's gone from discovering new materials to scaling those
(05:53):
materials to create useful products and then solving the problems
to create useful systems. And Robinson has been at the
forefront of that probably for at least for the last
three decades. At each step of the way they move
up the value chain. So they start off on materials
and these days they're working on hybrid electric aircraft, fusion,
(06:15):
advanced sensing, but with a strong focus on that magnet technology.
And that's kind of a heart that's enabling so many
of his new fusion companies around the world, is that
we can build more powerful magnets which are better at
holding onto these hot plasmas.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
You mentioned that different people have taken different pathways over
the decades. Which pathway are you taking? How are you
trying to create nuclear fusion?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
So for listeners, I would say.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Imagine I'm five, talk to me like I'm yeah right.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
So the best way to explain it is to reference
things that exist in the world. And so if you
look at our planet Earth, the Earth has a magnetic field.
If you have a compass, points towards north. Now that
magnetic field extends all around the Earth and it creates
what we call magnetosphere, and that's really just particles that
(07:09):
have come all the way from the Sun. I think
many of your listeners will have been lucky enough to
see the aurora about a month ago, which was those
particles hitting the Earth. But the magnetic field of the
Earth actually catches these particles and it holds onto them,
and so we get a plasma. It's not very hot,
but that plasma has been around the Earth since Earth
(07:31):
has had a magnetic field. If that plasma wasn't there,
the solar wind would have actually blown away the atmosphere
of Earth and we would be a barren rock just
like Mars. Actually, so life on Earth exists because of
this magnetosphere. What we're doing at open Star is we're
taking that same concept of capturing plasma using a simple
(07:56):
dipole shaped magnet. And you know, you're five, so I'm
going to teach you what a dipole is. It's just
a simple bar magnet.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Of its sun.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, But the really interesting thing about using that kind
of confinement is that the plasma is actually stable, just
like the magnetosphere above our heads. These plasmas are long lived,
they're stable, they don't disrupt, and when you're building a
really complicated machine that has to get this plasma really
really hot, starting off at that stable point is a
(08:27):
very useful foundation. It means that the machine's not going
to get too complicated as you try to scale the technology.
So what we're trying to do is recreate a magnetosphere
inside a laboratory, and that's been done twice in the
world already by two other experiments in academia, and we're
taking the next step to incorporate new technologies in order
to do that. So we've got this magnet it can
(08:49):
hold onto the plasma. It looks like the magnetosphere, and
because we're not actually touching that plasma, we can actually
get it really really hot, and eventually it gets hot
enough to actually start fusing the ions or the hydrogen
that we put inside. By fusing that material us heat
and producing heat, then the story becomes quite dull. You
(09:11):
take that heat, you boil water, you drive a steam turbine.
Really we're rebuilding coal power plants, but without the coal.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So what resources go into this to create it? You
mentioned hydrogen, then.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yeah, so there are different isotopes of hydrogen, and so
this three one is the everyday hydrogen. There is the
majority of what we see, and so water is mostly
this kind of hydrogen. The second is what we call
heavy hydrogen. It's called deuterium technically, and that's actually abundant.
It's only in trace amounts, but if you actually take
(09:48):
a bath tub full of sea water. There is enough
deuterium in that sea water to provide enough energy for
one person for their whole lifetime, and so there's not
a lot of it. But fusion is just such a
great way of making energy that it's very resource efficient,
and so we think you can get all vegetarium that
humanity will ever need by extracting vegetarium from seawater. And
(10:12):
then lastly, there's another isotope called tritium, which is not
as abundant, and you have to create it inside the machine,
and we create it from lithium. So if you actually
look at the trucks that turn up to the fusion
power plant of the future, one is actually probably an
uber driver carrying a small bottle of deetarium because that's
all you need. And then the other is actually lithium.
(10:35):
So you input lithium, we turn the lithium into tritium,
and then we fuse the tritium to create energy.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Is it safe you talk about this plasma and how
hot it's going to get. Are there any dangers around
this process?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
That's a really good question. So heat is an interesting thing.
The plasma is very, very hot in terms of temperature.
But the nice thing about it iss not very much
of it at all, and a full scale power plant
there's only ever one gram of plasma at any given time,
and so the amount of energy that's actually stored in
that plasma is a lot when you're talking about a machine,
(11:15):
but when you're talking about risk to you know, the surroundings,
it's essentially nothing. And so we have to be careful
that we build machines that don't destroy themselves. But that's
actually on the same magnitude of risk that any large
industrial process has to deal with. So any kind of
existing power plant or any kind of steel mill, you know,
(11:38):
anything with big, heavy, hot things, has the same kind
of risk factors. And that's one of the reasons why
physicists are so excited about fusion is because it's fundamentally
safe a way than some of the other alternatives.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Who or what has inspired you to take on such
a large challenge and work.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
On this A backpedal from making it sound like I'm
obsessed with taking on big challenges at a personal level.
I just wanted to work on something that I thought
might only exist if I worked on it, and I
think that's something I should resonate with anyone creative you know,
any artist or musician you know is trying to create
something that's only there because they made it. That's my
(12:20):
actual drive in terms of who inspired me to take
it to this degree. I'm really lucky to be able
to draw inspiration from my grandmother, who played a huge
role in revitalizing today Omari and so saving that from extinction.
And I consider that to be equally as preposterous a
(12:40):
task to give, you know, a person to do. And
if she could take that on, then what excuse could
I find not to take on the biggest problem kind
of presented to me. But we take our jobs at
Open Star step by step with humility. We just ask
ourselves for question, can we take the next step? What's
(13:01):
in our way? Is there any reason we can't do this?
And if we can't find a good reason not to
do it, we're going to try take that next step.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Ah, look something we should all live by. Thank you
so much for your time today, and we'll keep in
touch with you and see how things are going. That
was doctor Ratu Matida there from Open Star talking about
nuclear fusion, and I hope if you've got a bit
of a gist of what nuclear fusion is and how
it all works. I definitely needed to be explained to
it like I was five, and I think that WHO
(13:30):
did a very good job.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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