March 20, 2024 • 64 mins
Excited to share our latest Kronos Fusion Energy Podcast episode featuring Dr. Gerald Kulcinski, a visionary in fusion energy and a distinguished member of our team as a Board Member and Plasma Systems Engineer. With over fifty years at the helm of aneutronic fusion research, especially with helium-3, Dr. Kulcinski embodies the spirit of innovation that drives us at Kronos Fusion Energy.
In this episode, we delve into Dr. Kulcinski's extraordinary journey, from his foundational role at the Fusion Technology Institute to his pioneering work with our Kronos S.M.A.R.T. (Superconducting Minimum-Aspect-Ratio Torus) Aneutronic Fusion Energy Generators. His insights reveal the thrilling potential of helium-3 aneutronic fusion energy, not just as a concept but as a viable source of clean, efficient power.
A highlight of our discussion is the audacious goal of mining helium-3 from the moon within the next five years—a milestone that could redefine global energy strategies. Dr. Kulcinski takes us through the technical, logistical, and collaborative challenges of this venture and its vast implications beyond energy production, including in medicine and industry.
This isn't just a podcast; it's an invitation to explore the future of sustainable energy through the eyes of one of its greatest advocates. Dive into a narrative that intertwines scientific breakthroughs, lunar expeditions, and the shared dream of a cleaner, more sustainable world.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to an extraordinary episode of our podcast where we're privileged to engage
(00:09):
with Dr. Gerald Kulsinski, a beacon of innovation in the field of fusion energy with over 15
years dedicated to the advancement of a neutrality fusion energy, particularly helium-3. Dr.
Kulsinski stands at the forefront of a movement that could reshape our entire energy paradigm.
(00:33):
Dr. Kulsinski's journey through the landscape of nuclear engineering has been nothing short of
remarkable. Holding the esteemed position of Rainier Professor of Nuclear Engineering,
Emeritus, and having directed the Fusion Technology Institute, he has laid foundational stones in the
(00:55):
bridge toward sustainable energy. His extensive career, decorated with prestigious accolades
such as his election to the National Academy of Engineering and recognition by NASA, underlines
the critical role he has played in pushing the boundaries of what's possible. In today's
(01:19):
conversation, we dive into the transformative potential of helium-3 in neutron fusion energy.
Dr. Kulsinski shares his visionary insights from the early challenges of fusion research
to the modern-day feats that inches closer to a cleaner, more efficient energy future.
(01:40):
We explore the innovative strategies and collaborative efforts that have marked the
evolution of this field. But in the highlight of our discussion, and indeed the topic of monumental
significance, is the ambitious goal of bringing helium-3 down from the moon to enable large-scale
(02:03):
fusion energy commercialization. This audacious plan isn't just about sourcing fuel. It's about
unlocking a realm of possibilities for energy production that could lead to unprecedented
levels of sustainability and efficiency. In an era where the creators of destructive technologies
(02:28):
are often immortalized in Oscar-winning films, despite later remorse, true heroes like Dr. Kulsinski
walk among us. Dr. Kulsinski has devoted his exceptional talent and energy not to the instruments
of conflict, but to the pursuit of peace and sustainability when presented with the same choices.
(02:51):
Join us as we delve into the mechanics of fusion energy, the international collaboration shaping
its future, and the bold steps being taken towards harvesting extraterrestrial resources.
Dr. Kulsinski enlightens us on the technical and logistical challenges involved in lunar mining,
(03:17):
the potential applications of helium-3 beyond just energy production, including medical and
industrial uses, and the broader implications of all of this for humanity's future. Prepare to be
inspired, informed, and invigorated by a conversation that spans the gamut from atomic particles to
(03:45):
lunar landscapes and from current realities to future possibilities. Here's Dr. Gerald Kulsinski.
Dr. Kulsinski, thank you so much for doing this. We have a lot of people asking questions and
(04:08):
stories about fusion energy and the history of fusion energy and where we think fusion energy is
going. So any insight you can give us, we're very grateful. What inspired you to start your
career in nuclear engineering? Well, I got my degrees and masters and PhD in nuclear engineering,
(04:34):
so that was a pretty easy step. I worked a little bit, of course, as you know, at Los Alamos on
nuclear rockets. But when I went to Hanford, which is a facility in the state of Washington,
I was working more with the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons and other needs.
(04:57):
And we worked a lot with the Hanford nuclear reactors, which were built during World War II,
as you know, that's where the plutonium was made to be used in the bombs that they used in World War
(05:19):
II at the end, of course. But they got to a point when we started to think about fusion in the late
1960s, we could make plutonium a lot faster with fusion neutrons than we could with fission neutrons,
and I won't get into the details of that. But we were very seriously thinking about replacing the
(05:45):
three or four operating units at Hanford, fission units with fusion units, so we could produce
plutonium faster, but using fusion to do that. And the key, of course, was using 14 of the neutrons.
So that's what got us into the fusion side of the house. I left Hanford in 1971, I think it was,
(06:12):
yeah, 71. And when I came to the University of Wisconsin, I was in charge of the Fusion Technology
Institute, which is different than the fusion physics side. The physics side is where most of
the effort had been, both in the United States and at that time, Russia was the lead organization,
(06:38):
along with the United States. So we had some very close relationships with the Russians.
And when I got to Wisconsin, we started to look at the engineering side of fusion reactors,
not the physics. We were assuming the physics would work, and then we had to translate that
(07:06):
into an engineering system that was both reliable and made economic sense.
And that engineering system, was that TOKAMAC based?
Well, at that time it was. As you know, the fusion community has gone through several
(07:35):
configurations. Stellarators, which was one of the early approaches from Princeton,
and then Los Alamos did a lot of work in linear systems and pulse systems.
Los Livermore did a lot of work in inertial confinement fusion, but of course, that was more
(07:59):
weapons related because that's how a nuclear weapon would work. So we had a lot of
projects that we actually ended up designing, or were partners in the design of over 50
nuclear fusion power plants when I came to Wisconsin. That effort in nuclear fusion
(08:28):
engineering has sort of gone by the wayside now, and most of the effort is still put into the
plasma physics side of the house. But you're never going to make a system that's economical
without having an engineering that works. The physics is one thing, but the engineering is where you make your money.
(08:50):
That's definitely the big frontier now. I feel like more and more people recognize that.
When we talk about fusion energy commercialization, a lot of the conversation is around
materials and engineering. I think we need to figure those two things out.
(09:13):
How did you even hear about nuclear engineering? Did you know about it when you were 14? Did your parents tell you?
No, actually I found out about it when I was a chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsin
as an undergraduate. We built a fission system in the confines of the engineering campus
(09:43):
in the early 1960s. That's how I got into the nuclear side of the house.
My undergraduate training was in chemical engineering, and we have a very strong program in Wisconsin at that time.
It was an easy transfer from chemical engineering to nuclear.
(10:08):
I think I was the second person to graduate from the nuclear engineering program advanced degrees.
I got in on the ground floor, you might say.
Is nuclear energy, when we talk about the nuclear rocket program, is that for ignition or thrust or sustainable?
(10:31):
At what stage of the rocket would something like that be used? Is it fusion or fission?
The nuclear rockets originally were fission. What they did was take liquid hydrogen,
(10:52):
which is down around a few degrees Kelvin, pass it through a graphite core that had uranium or
plutonium in it, and it would heat it up to about 2,000 degrees Kelvin. The exhaust from the rocket
would push the rocket much faster than you could push it with chemical approaches in rocketry.
(11:18):
They were trying to cut down the time it would take to get from the Earth to Mars.
The fusion systems at that time would probably get you to Mars two or three times faster
than chemical systems would. Can we build fusion generators now for this? Would they be clean?
(11:42):
How do you harness the radiation from such a reaction?
Well, it depends on how you design it, obviously. The original design
was never really put into operation. We actually ran reactors in the Nevada desert
(12:05):
to go to Mars and back, but we never actually did it, of course, with a nuclear rocket.
We were using chemical rockets at the time. Now, if you want to do it by
converting fusion energy to electricity and then using the electricity to exhaust the propellant,
(12:33):
that's another way of getting to someplace faster than you can with chemical systems.
So nuclear was really meant in that regard to replace chemical rockets, but of course,
nowadays we've got the chemical rockets that get us to the Moon and back, and some
(13:00):
programs that get us to Mars and back, but not much more than that.
Cool. Switching gears a little bit, I'd love to know the story of ITER. You hear things about how
during the Cold War, there was a full-blown communications breakdown between us and the
(13:22):
Russians. They decided that in order to keep the relationship, the doors open for communication,
they would work on just one project together, and that was the ITER project. I know that you were
there on day one. What did that look like? What were those conversations like?
(13:45):
Well, there are two tracks here. One track is the scientist to scientist, and that worked out pretty
well. The political side is a little beyond my pay grade, so I'm not sure I would be a good person
to give you that side, but the scientific side, we worked very closely with the scientists.
(14:07):
The scientific side, we worked very closely with the Russians. Now, the Russians had a very strong program at that time.
They don't now. They've slipped to third or fourth in the world, but they were up near the top, and they
declassified their work and fusion very early in the game. They were the ones, obviously, that invented
(14:30):
the tokamak, and the tokamak actually was the survivor of a bunch of different designs that
we had worked on in the United States, and then we could talk in a lot of detail with the Russians,
(14:50):
had good friendships with the Russians, and I traveled to Russia several times.
We had some Russians that came to Wisconsin, and we were working on the same programs.
We don't anymore. That's all gone by the road now, but in those days, and well, actually,
(15:17):
probably in the 1970s, is where it really, really flowered a lot, 70s and 80s, and that was the
beginning of ITER. Now, that turned into a political thing, because the collaboration
between the United States and Russia was very good, and that was a good way to have good relations
(15:46):
with someone who we were antagonistic at times with. So, we worked together, and the site that we
worked at was Vienna, and it was under the auspices of the United Nations, and that's in the 70s,
(16:10):
was where we had meetings with the Russians. The Russians, Europeans, Japanese, and the United
States were the four groups that worked on the initial design of ITER. It was called INTOR,
(16:30):
was the name, but it evolved into ITER later on.
Nice. I like INTOR. It sounds like a robot. When you say we don't anymore,
the US and Russia are still part of the 35 or 36 ITER countries. We just don't actively do projects
(16:55):
anymore together, is what you mean. Yeah, the transfer of information is not anywhere close to
what it was in the 70s when we were really serious about building ITER. We were going to build ITER
by the turn of the century, and INTOR was the first design. There were 16 people who spent,
(17:20):
oh, I guess we spent a month or two together in Vienna designing the system, made a lot of progress,
made a lot of friends, and the scientific transfer in those days was very good.
Now it's not so good. It was very good then.
Wow. Was that before or after you were the director of the Fusion Energy Technology Institute?
(17:48):
It was coincident at the same time. Okay, very cool.
Because when I moved from Hanford, I moved out of the fission side of the house to the fusion side
of the house. We had one of the strongest programs, if not the strongest in the world,
(18:08):
in fusion engineering. We also had physics, a lot of physics people who worked on fusion, but
the engineering side was really put into play in the 70s and 80s.
(18:32):
Wow, interesting. Would you say in terms of physics for fusion energy, all of the key
components have been proved out? Is it really just a matter of engineering now or are there any
(18:53):
outstanding physics? How would you say that? Are there anything that have remained theories
and not been proved out? I know that we haven't had a sustained plasma field for a long period
(19:18):
of time, but is there anything in the baseline physics itself that stops you from doing that?
Or it's just possible if you throw more at it? Well, it depends on what you use for fuel.
The original physics work on fusion was done with deuterium and tritium, and that stems all
(19:39):
the way back to World War II because a lot of that came out of that program. We didn't
design systems in World War II for making electricity. We were designing things to end the
war. So the biggest difference there is the energy of the neutrons. Now we know a lot about
(20:05):
radiation damage from low-energy neutrons, the lowest, I mean million electron volts.
When you get to fusion, the neutrons are in the 14 MeV million electron volts, and the reaction
with the neutrons and the metallic structures of the power plants is quite different than it is
(20:31):
in fission. It's not just a factor of seven or eight, which would be 14 over 2 MeV.
There's a major difference in the physics of what goes on with a 14 MeV neutron than what goes on
with a fission neutron, and the biggest difference is with 14 MeV neutrons, you produce a lot of N
(20:57):
alpha reactions. That means neutron helium atom reactions, and helium is a bad actor in this sense
because it goes to the grain boundaries and makes the material very, very brittle. You get a lot more
(21:18):
helium production in a fusion reactor with DT than you do with a fission reactor using uranium
or plutonium, and that's the biggest difference, and we have not solved that problem. We thought
we were going to solve it early if we had built some test reactors. We never did build them,
(21:40):
and so that's still an uncharted area. We know that there's going to be a real problem with
deuterium and tritium, but people are, most of the money and the investment is going into the
plasma physics side of the house, and that determines whether you end up with a toroidal
(22:01):
system or a linear system or a pulse system versus steady state and so forth. So 99% or so of the
money that's invested in fusion is invested in the physics side of the house, and they're not,
they haven't solved those problems. They're getting close, getting close, but once they
(22:25):
solve those problems, they still have to get over the engineering hurdle, and that really,
if they use deuterium and tritium, is going to be a big hurdle because what we know about the
reaction of 14 MeV neutrons versus two and a half MeV neutrons is there's a big difference
(22:47):
in the lifetime of metallic structures that get bombarded. Now that also gives you
radioactivity, but that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is keeping the material so it
doesn't become brittle, and 14 MeV neutrons are a bad actor with respect to that.
(23:09):
Right. I was talking to somebody on the Eater podcast or Eater Communications team yesterday,
and they wanted to know my thoughts on a neutronic fusion fuels. And I think
one of the things that we've talked about and we like vehemently agreed on it was that for fusion to
(23:30):
be commercially viable, like meaning if you're going to build 1000 generators over the next
50 years or so, it would have to be a new tronic, there's just no other way to go about it. So do
you think some of these challenges, definitely the engineering, but then is the physics challenge also
(23:59):
something we have an answer for with a neutronic fuels? I know that a neutronic fuel
fuels automatically make the engineering aspects easier.
Well, that's true, but it's also harder to make the reactions take place. If you go from DT,
(24:23):
deuterium tritium, to say D helium-3, it's three times harder to make that reaction go. And it
might even require a different configuration than a tokamak toroidal system. But right now,
that's one of the biggest things. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is the helium-3,
(24:50):
helium-3 reaction, which has no neutrons. And that's the program that we were enthusiastic about
once we discovered, or we not we, but the Apollo program discovered the million metric tons of
(25:12):
helium-3 sitting on the moon. Prior to that, people knew about the reaction of deuterium
helium-3, but the answer always was, well, you're not going to do anything with a few
tens of kilograms. And the real breakthrough came through in 1986, when we put two and two together
(25:33):
between the Apollo program and the fusion program. And that story is a very interesting one.
We had, in that time period, President Reagan had a program called the SDI program. They were going
to try to shoot down missiles carrying nuclear weapons with an X-ray laser, and they needed
(26:01):
power for the X-ray laser. And we designed for the Air Force a 30 megawatt system electric that used
de-helium-3. And we had enough helium-3 to do that, because a war would only last perhaps a few hours
(26:21):
or a few days, but not enough helium-3 for the production of electricity. And so, after we
designed it for the Air Force, we said, well, it's not our job to do the military side. It's our job
to try to help society, ours meaning the University of Wisconsin. And so I took the group off campus
(26:50):
for about two weeks. We went to a motel outside of Madison, and we tried to figure out where we
could get enough helium-3 to use helium-3 as a fusion fuel. And we spent a week to two weeks
going down a lot of blind alleys until two of our people came up with the idea that, well, the sun
(27:16):
makes a lot of helium-3, and where does it go? Well, any place the solar wind would blow
on our solar system would be affected if the body that they were transported into either had a
magnetic field or an atmosphere, because the magnetic field would cause the helium-3 to be
(27:43):
moved outside the planet, and the systems would be with a gas environment. Couldn't penetrate that.
So people would always say, well, helium-3 is interesting, and you don't make as many neutrons,
(28:06):
and you don't make as many neutrons, or if you go to helium-3, helium-3, you make none. But there's not
enough helium-3 to make any difference, because helium-3 comes from the decay of tritium, and
tritium is basically man-made, as you know. So that was really how we got the tie-in between the
(28:29):
lunar helium-3 reserves, which are about a million metric tons of helium-3, well documented from the
Apollo and the Russian programs. And now the Chinese are moving very fast in that area,
too. They've landed in the high helium-3 concentrations on the moon. They don't advertise
(28:53):
it very much, but we're in a race with the Chinese. Right, it's become quite the global thing.
I was reading a story, I think, like yesterday, where they discovered rust on the moon, and
in order for that kind of oxidation, there needed to be oxygen, and there's obviously no oxygen.
(29:16):
So apparently they found out that every time there's a lineup where the Earth is right
between the Sun and the moon, the solar radiation from the Sun kind of pushes oxygen past the
magnetic field of the Earth, and there's a little bit of oxygen that gets on the moon. And so,
(29:40):
you know, it just kind of blows on there and stays on there. So it's kind of interesting.
Well, there is a lot of oxygen on the moon, but it's tied up chemically, so it's hard to get it.
Free oxygen is hard to get.
Breathable free oxygen, gotcha. But is it possible to then make with what's there?
(30:06):
Can we convert what's there to breathable oxygen and create an atmosphere?
Sure, sure, sure.
Maybe can we send robots to do that?
Oh, sure. I mean, the first application of lunar resources will be for life support,
(30:30):
and you'll use the solar energy to extract solar wind volatiles, nitrogen, hydrogen,
and oxygen and others from the lunar regolith. And there's a lot of hydrogen and a lot of oxygen,
some nitrogen, and that will support life support on the moon, because you know it's very expensive
(30:57):
to send food to the moon.
Right. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating stuff. I was watching a documentary on Netflix on how the
JWST telescope was sent up in a couple of pieces, and there were robots that kind of brought
themselves together and created it. And I was just, it inspired me to do the same thing with the
(31:24):
fusion energy generator. I know we've kind of talked about that before, but how would we,
I mean, if there were ways like, you know, space elevators, you know, rail magnets to throw it up
there or rocket boosters to get it up there, what would a fusion energy generator on the moon then
(31:48):
look like? Can it really just, could it process what's already there, generate the electricity,
make us some water, make us some oxygen, grow some plant, like power the robots to grow us some
plants and do that?
Well, the answer to that is yes, but of course, it's not as easy as it sounds. And the early
(32:17):
applications for technology on the moon is going to be to extract the oxygen, hydrogen,
and other minerals that you need for life support. And that'll happen quickly. I would expect in the
next five to 10 years, we will have units on the moon, we, meaning the world, not necessarily the
(32:43):
United States, will be able to extract the elements that you need for life support.
That same technology can be used to extract the helium-3, but you have to do it at a bigger scale.
And so we've been doing experiments here on the earth to see how we could get the
(33:08):
helium-3 out of the regolith, the very fine powder on the moon. And we found that agitation
can do it very well. So it reduces the energy required to get the helium-3 out of the
regolith. It's not zero, but it's better than thermal energy. But the thermal energy can be
(33:34):
used to get the components that you need for life support. And that'll be the first application.
Once they do that, then they will be able to have a lot of people on the moon have their own
food growing and so forth. And then that technology can be used to start extracting the helium-3.
(33:57):
Would we put them in canisters and send them back, or is there a way to send it in a solid form and
we just, you know, we do the process down here? Which one would happen?
No, they would do it on the moon. You'd do it on the moon and send the gas down?
(34:18):
Well, you wouldn't send the gas down. You'd use it on the moon.
And of course, you'd get a lot of helium-4, of course, and that'd be great for propulsion.
And the moon would be a very good place to stop before you go into Mars. And so you wouldn't have
(34:42):
to send things from the earth directly to Mars. You'd send a rocket to the moon, pick up your
material that you need for propulsion, and fusion propulsion will get you to the Mars very quickly.
So it'll be a two-stage process. Food first, energy second.
(35:12):
Very cool. Very cool. So the moon is just like a gas station. It's like we're going to turn it into
a big gas station. Yeah.
It's gigantic. Wonderful. I think I'm selfishly thinking about it from like a fusion energy
perspective on how we would be able to get that helium-3 down to earth.
(35:37):
But you're saying... That wouldn't be a problem.
That wouldn't be a problem, getting it down, because you'd be sending rockets going up,
carrying a lot more than carrying back the helium-3. And you would drop it off at satellites
around the earth and then come down from the satellite. So once you extract it,
(36:04):
getting it back to the earth is not going to be a big problem.
Oh, right. If you figured that out, this would be easier. That makes sense.
You know, by the way, the helium-3 on the earth right now is worth about $4 billion a ton.
$4 billion. Yeah, because it's a gas. So a ton would be a gigantic amount. We tried to...
(36:29):
We wanted to do some experiments with UCI, and we wanted to buy helium, and we were looking around.
And we saw that we could buy canisters from like a French company. And one tiny canister
was about $30,000. And we would have used that in our experiment. It would have taken us about
(36:52):
a millisecond for that entire amount to be gone. And so... And we saw that even though it was a
French company, it said the source was Russian. So I think that...
Yeah.
Yeah. Is it from tritium capture that they're letting it decay for 12 years?
(37:19):
Well, they're not letting it decay. Tritium...
Unless they're just capturing it.
Tritium decays with a 12.3-year half-life. And tritium, of course, is a major component of
the hydrogen bombs. And the Russians make a lot of that. But they can't stop the tritium from
(37:41):
being converted into helium-3. And so I think the... And I don't know the details, but I think the
French are actually getting the helium-3 from the Russians, buying it and then selling it at a larger
price around the world. And where our helium-3 would come from... And by the way, we have a
(38:05):
neighbor north of us who makes a lot of helium-3. And their can-do reactor.
I think there is a percentage of power plants that have the tritium capture systems, and then
there are the older generation ones that don't. I mean, why am I... You would know better than I do, but
(38:28):
I'm just... When you look at the numbers of fission generators being built in Russia, China versus
Canada and the US, if I put tritium capture systems on all of the new generators I was building,
then I would think that China and Russia would have a surplus of it, just as waste from their
(38:52):
fission systems. But I wouldn't know. Well, it depends whether they're using deuterium
at moderator. And the can-do reactors use deuterium. And our... The United States reactors,
it comes from the making of tritium in the fission system. And you don't make a lot.
(39:18):
You make some, and of course it's stable. So once you make it and if you extract it, it'll sit there.
It won't go away. But there is... The demand for helium-3 is only in a few kilograms per year
a level. And that doesn't last you very long in the power plant.
(39:43):
Right. None of this is sustainable for fusion energy, large-scale commercialization. The only
way to do it is go to the moon, but it's possible. Yeah. That's what the reserve is.
I feel like there will be a convergence of the two technologies in terms of when fusion energy
(40:04):
generators have passed the research stages and gotten to the point where helium-3 is useful,
then the helium-3 will be available. Anyway, so just moving on, I guess.
You've worked in a lot of countries, Dr. Kulsinski. What are the top four countries,
(40:31):
do you think, will have the first fusion energy commercialization? Is Germany ahead of China?
No. That's an interesting question because it depends on what timeframe you're talking about.
If you were talking about 20 or 30 years ago, it was the United States and Russia. If you're
(40:58):
talking about today, it's China and we're number two. That causes a lot of debate, of course, but
we're maybe at best tied with the Chinese. The Russians have dropped down to third or fourth.
(41:20):
That's Korea and Japan are probably passing up Russia right now. The Russians have really dropped
out of the main picture. The Chinese are taking it over. There's a big difference, but now what
(41:40):
a decision the standard will be 10, 20, 30 years from now is things that people can speculate on,
but we don't know. It depends on a lot of things. Right now, the Chinese are vying for number one.
(42:02):
I think I feel like I have faith in some of the commercial endeavors in America and I feel like
it'll be a SpaceX situation where I feel like America will win. Maybe that's because I'm an
(42:22):
American, so maybe it's more hopeful. Other than it's harder to fuse, but the physics has been
proved out, in less than a decade, we'll be able to fetch the helium-3 from the moon. What are some
of the other things then that are technological stop gaps for achieving a steady state helium-3
(42:55):
aneutronic fusion? Well, there are lots of alternate applications.
One, not necessarily the top one, but one that you might want to consider is using the helium-3 to
make 14 MeV protons, which can burn up the fission waste that we're burying in the ground right now.
(43:22):
That doesn't really contribute a lot to the business world, but it certainly would solve
a problem of getting rid of nuclear waste. Is that nuclear transmutation?
Yes. To make a cheap source of 14 MeV protons, not neutrons. That's one thing, but it's probably not
(43:49):
a commercial thing, but it has a big impact on society. What would we be using those protons for?
Is it possible to have some sort of direct energy conversion connect to that?
No. Is that what we're going?
Well, the 14 MeV protons, if you bombard a long-lived radioactive material, you can
(44:18):
change it to a very short-lived radioactive material and it'll go away, depending on the
half-life, of course. But some things that we're burying right now have a half-life in the thousands
to an even longer time, a time half-life, thousands of years, and then they're going to be around for
(44:44):
a lot longer than we are. So if you can convert them to very short-lived half-life materials,
that have half-lives on the order of a year or so, then it'll go away in about 10 years.
So that would be one application. The other is you can use it to make very short
(45:12):
time-scale half-life materials for medical use. There's a process now that people can detect
whether somebody is going to go into an epileptic fit on an operating table, but it requires oxygen
15, which has a two-minute half-life. And two-minute half-life is something you can't make and transport
(45:37):
very much because it goes away too quick. But if you made it in the next room to the operating table
and piped it in and combined it with a certain molecule, they can get a forewarning of when
somebody is going to go into an epileptic fit on the operating table, and of course they can be
prepared for it. Now, that's probably, I don't know about the economics of that, but the social impact
(46:04):
of that is pretty substantial because they can't do that now. So that's another use.
Right. So there will be multiple, multiple uses for everything fusion, eventually.
Yeah. Yeah, there will be. And I'm sure we haven't really more than scratched the surface of that
(46:29):
because right now that's not what people are worried about. But if you had a fusion system
operating on different fuels, anywhere from DT to DD to D-Elium-3 to P-BORN11, all the ones that we
are considering, you can start thinking about the non-electrical producing systems which can affect
(46:54):
the human society. That's down the road. Some of them could be very near-term.
Some of them will take a lot longer. But there isn't much money going into that research right now.
But there's money in other things, you know. I'm in the process of writing an article for just like
(47:14):
a LinkedIn article on using fusion energy, how you would need fusion energy for something like
cryptocurrency, how cryptocurrency, just the plans that people have, it's just not possible without
fusion energy. The drain on the grid is too much. I think cryptocurrency last year used more energy
(47:36):
than Idaho or something. So it's really just not sustainable. And even things like the advent of
AI and quantum computing and just the energy that all of that takes, it requires, you know,
(47:57):
I think it's almost not even possible to do at a sustainable scale if we don't figure out fusion.
So there are a lot of lucrative things that fusion will bring about that would offset the social
causes, so to speak. I think the use of space is another one where we have very long duration
(48:26):
space trips and you're going to need diagnostics if somebody has a cancer or something in the years
that they will be traveling from the earth to someplace else. And you can make those isotopes
that can be combined with imaging systems to show whether you have abnormalities in the human
(48:53):
person. But you know, I'm not sure that's an economic thing, but it certainly will keep
people who have 10-year, 20-year travels much healthier.
But they're not going to make any money out of that. I think it's just saving lives.
(49:18):
Right. I mean, if one system can, is breeding the right word when we say, when we talk about these
isotopes and elements we're going to make, when we create these systems to do them,
is it possible to use fusion for more than one isotope, whether it be medical isotope,
(49:42):
like so could we make deuterium, tritium, helium-3, helium-4,
all with an inertial or magnetic confinement fusion energy unit, but it would be the one unit
that makes all of them? Is that, is the physics? Yeah, that's right. That's right. Because it depends
(50:03):
on what you bombard, it does things. One, what are you making to cause a nuclear change? Is it a
neutron? Is it a gamma ray or some other form of radiation? And what is the half-life? And what is
its chemical proclivity so that you can combine it with certain molecules that will give you a
(50:29):
diagnostic? I mean, there's a whole medical area here that is untapped that would be, at least from
a science standpoint, be very interesting. Economically, I can't really project that.
I mean, if it's, if we can make a system where we can breed things like tritium, and tritium is
(50:56):
incredibly expensive, and so is deuterium, if we can build a system that can do 10 different isotopes,
then it would automatically be commercially viable, I would think. I mean, if we make a,
if you make two things that the pharma and the DOD industry can use, then you can make eight things
(51:16):
at a loss and still come up with a profit at the end of the day. Well, I mean, we talk about making
industrial heating units. I've been kind of beating down the idea of using fusion energy industrial
(51:37):
heat for liquid fuel manufacturing, steel manufacturing, and cement manufacturing.
And we recently spoke with a company that wants to make, wants to make jet fuel with biomass. And
all of that requires you to have heat of above a thousand, thousand two hundred degrees centigrade.
(51:59):
And we could use fusion generators to do that. I also spoke to a company that reached out,
they're a fission company, but they reached out and they said that they could make us our heat
extraction unit for our fusion energy generator at Kronos for that industrial heating purposes.
So that was 10% of something that I thought I would need to do that I don't have to do anymore.
(52:25):
So I'm very happy about that. We just like outsource that component. But, but we've had a lot of
conversations around hydrogen, hydro H2 production. And, but we, if we could have a clean heat source
for it at a thousand two hundred degrees, we could power cars. Hydrogen is almost better and more
(52:50):
sustainable for cars. So it was, it was just, there were just, these are all conversations in the ethos.
Yeah. Well, and I'm sure we really haven't gotten very deep into this because people have been 99.9%
focused on making electricity with fusion, but about 10 to 20 years ago, we started to think about
(53:15):
near-term applications and we identified 36 near-term applications. But we don't have the
bandwidth to cover them all. So, yeah, yeah. I think it's coming. I think we live in a time where
we live in a time where, you know, we just have to do it. We just have to do it. There is no other,
(53:45):
no other way out. And I think more and more people are recognizing that. And luckily for humanity,
the science is lining up, meaning the work that folks like you have been doing for the last like
50, 60 years without any proper vision of fruition, so to speak. I think all of that,
(54:09):
there's like a culmination of all of that work right now. And I feel like there's funding available
for it from new sources that didn't exist before. And by that, I mean the private equity and the
venture capital world is taking a more serious look at fusion. So I feel like it's really going
to happen. I'm hopeful, obviously, like that's my job. That's part of my job. But I feel from
(54:35):
a very pragmatic perspective, the world recognizes that technologically, some of the larger things
that we hope for in terms of space exploration or cryptocurrencies or any of these things,
we need some large fuel sources and we cannot do it the same way that we've been doing it before.
(54:56):
And from like a step back even, we feel like we've really been using fuels like this for 150 years.
That's like a blip of time in humanity. So there's nothing we cannot fix. I feel like if
the next two or three generations can build a proper foundation for fusion energy commercialization,
(55:24):
then anything is possible. Anyway, I have two last questions. One is, what was the largest
fusion energy challenge that you have ever seen? And how did you overcome it? Well,
(55:49):
again, it falls into physics versus engineering, because they're quite different. But they're both,
you have to solve both problems. Otherwise, it doesn't work. And I can only speak from the
engineering side at this point. And the largest problem, of course, is how do you control
(56:14):
the radiation damage and the large amount of radioactivity that you generate using deuterium
tritium fuels? That's a big challenge. It's one that's not very well thought out yet by the
community. But one way to get rid of that, of course, is to go to advanced fuels,
(56:37):
aneutronic systems, or at least systems that have very small amounts of nutrients emitted.
Because the neutrons cause radiation damage, which limits the life. And these designs for fusion
reactors are so complex, but if you have to change out the structures in a fusion reactor,
(56:59):
it's going to take you months, if not years, to do that. And you can't make any money out of that.
The electricity production would not be economical. So radiation damage from 14
MAV neutrons is probably the biggest issue from an engineering side. The handling of heat and
(57:25):
electricity production and distribution are things that the fission community is pretty well fixed
for us. And the fission community has also come up with pretty good regulations on radioactivity,
what you can handle and what you can't. I remember in the 60s when I worked at Hanford,
(57:52):
we had a 14 MAV neutron generator. And we had it inside a building that was about 100 yards from a
road. Every time we turned it on, we had to close the road. Because the 14 MAV neutrons are right
through the graphite moderator and out through the concrete walls and into the road. So, I mean,
(58:21):
though it's not an easy problem to handle. And we can learn a lot from the fission community,
because they've had some pretty good regulations. And so I think the key word here is A-neutronic.
You're probably going to have to use deuterium tritium to get to break even and beyond.
(58:44):
But beyond that, to make an economical fusion system, you're probably going to have to go to
A-neutronic fusion. Yeah, I 100% agree. It's just not scalable otherwise. Were your parents scientists?
(59:04):
No, no, they were not. They worked in the public sector, farmers as well,
fishermen on the Mississippi River, commercial fishermen when that was a
(59:27):
viable occupation. Nowadays, I don't think you could do it. But, yeah, I spent a lot of time
as in my youth working with them on the rivers. And we used to drive cars across the Mississippi
River in the winter. Wow, it freezes over that much? With water on both sides of us.
(59:51):
And I tell you, I always used to stand on when cars had running boards. I always used to stand
on the running board because I didn't want to be inside the car. And we only lost two cars.
Just two. But people did that sort of stuff. So you could jump off easier. What's a running
(01:00:15):
board? Is that the thing on the side that you would stand on? Never seen a running board.
I don't know anything about cars. It might not be a tithing thing. Yeah, they don't have them
anymore. But they had a little step on the door. And I used to stand on the running boards. And
(01:00:37):
that's how we got across the river. But they were not scientists or
educators. Although my children are in the education business and audiologists and so
forth. But things change. Yeah, so that was going to be my last question. Like you, you are more
(01:01:03):
than a researcher and a fusion energy pioneer. You're a teacher. How, how, what can we,
to close this off, what can we say to the young people that need to get into this field?
Because more than technology and physics and engineering, we need driven human beings
(01:01:28):
who are willing to research this stuff and bring it to fruition. How do we get them to do it?
Dr. Kulsinski. Well, you really hit the nail on the head there. Because what you need is young minds,
they're not afraid to fail. And so you have to teach students not to be constrained by prior
(01:01:58):
notifications from people that this can't be done. They need to be able to experiment and show why it
can be done. And that's, that's one of the main things that we try to do for advanced students,
is to get them to be thinking outside the box. And don't take even people who've been in the
(01:02:19):
business for a long time, the advice that you can't do that. There's a lot of things that people
have said you can't do that are economic today. So teaching students that is good. And students
come up with all kinds of ideas. Most of them are a little bit out. But they're but at least
(01:02:41):
they're thinking. I've had somewhere between 50 and 60 PhD students. And everyone was different.
And everyone brought something different to the research side of the house. And everyone has got
different jobs now. Some are generals in the army, some are directors of national laboratories,
(01:03:04):
some are industrialists, some are making money making medical isotopes. They all have gone off
in different directions. But the ones that are probably most successful are not the ones that
had the highest grade point, but the ones who had a way to think about things in a different
(01:03:27):
way than the previous generation and trying to teach people how to do that without hurting
themselves is as is a big challenge for us all. Yeah, agreed. Anyway, thank you again for doing
this. It was probably ask you another series of 20 to 30 questions and learn more about all of
(01:03:54):
the work that you have done. I'm sure you've heard this a million times before. But, you know,
we're all like, beyond grateful for all of the work that you guys have put in.
We're going to see some financial incentives from it, if not my generation, the next generation,
but it was really because of you guys that anything is even possible. And you worked hard at it when
(01:04:22):
people said, don't do fusion, do fission, you said, no, I'm going to do fusion. When people said,
do fission, it's more you'll make more money. You said, no, we should do fusion. So I'm very
grateful for you sticking to this and laying the groundwork so we can all build on it. So thank
you again. Dr. Kosinski. Thank you.
Welcome to an extraordinary episode of our podcast where we're privileged to engage
(00:09):
with Dr. Gerald Kulsinski, a beacon of innovation in the field of fusion energy with over 15
years dedicated to the advancement of a neutrality fusion energy, particularly helium-3. Dr.
Kulsinski stands at the forefront of a movement that could reshape our entire energy paradigm.
(00:33):
Dr. Kulsinski's journey through the landscape of nuclear engineering has been nothing short of
remarkable. Holding the esteemed position of Rainier Professor of Nuclear Engineering,
Emeritus, and having directed the Fusion Technology Institute, he has laid foundational stones in the
(00:55):
bridge toward sustainable energy. His extensive career, decorated with prestigious accolades
such as his election to the National Academy of Engineering and recognition by NASA, underlines
the critical role he has played in pushing the boundaries of what's possible. In today's
(01:19):
conversation, we dive into the transformative potential of helium-3 in neutron fusion energy.
Dr. Kulsinski shares his visionary insights from the early challenges of fusion research
to the modern-day feats that inches closer to a cleaner, more efficient energy future.
(01:40):
We explore the innovative strategies and collaborative efforts that have marked the
evolution of this field. But in the highlight of our discussion, and indeed the topic of monumental
significance, is the ambitious goal of bringing helium-3 down from the moon to enable large-scale
(02:03):
fusion energy commercialization. This audacious plan isn't just about sourcing fuel. It's about
unlocking a realm of possibilities for energy production that could lead to unprecedented
levels of sustainability and efficiency. In an era where the creators of destructive technologies
(02:28):
are often immortalized in Oscar-winning films, despite later remorse, true heroes like Dr. Kulsinski
walk among us. Dr. Kulsinski has devoted his exceptional talent and energy not to the instruments
of conflict, but to the pursuit of peace and sustainability when presented with the same choices.
(02:51):
Join us as we delve into the mechanics of fusion energy, the international collaboration shaping
its future, and the bold steps being taken towards harvesting extraterrestrial resources.
Dr. Kulsinski enlightens us on the technical and logistical challenges involved in lunar mining,
(03:17):
the potential applications of helium-3 beyond just energy production, including medical and
industrial uses, and the broader implications of all of this for humanity's future. Prepare to be
inspired, informed, and invigorated by a conversation that spans the gamut from atomic particles to
(03:45):
lunar landscapes and from current realities to future possibilities. Here's Dr. Gerald Kulsinski.
Dr. Kulsinski, thank you so much for doing this. We have a lot of people asking questions and
(04:08):
stories about fusion energy and the history of fusion energy and where we think fusion energy is
going. So any insight you can give us, we're very grateful. What inspired you to start your
career in nuclear engineering? Well, I got my degrees and masters and PhD in nuclear engineering,
(04:34):
so that was a pretty easy step. I worked a little bit, of course, as you know, at Los Alamos on
nuclear rockets. But when I went to Hanford, which is a facility in the state of Washington,
I was working more with the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons and other needs.
(04:57):
And we worked a lot with the Hanford nuclear reactors, which were built during World War II,
as you know, that's where the plutonium was made to be used in the bombs that they used in World War
(05:19):
II at the end, of course. But they got to a point when we started to think about fusion in the late
1960s, we could make plutonium a lot faster with fusion neutrons than we could with fission neutrons,
and I won't get into the details of that. But we were very seriously thinking about replacing the
(05:45):
three or four operating units at Hanford, fission units with fusion units, so we could produce
plutonium faster, but using fusion to do that. And the key, of course, was using 14 of the neutrons.
So that's what got us into the fusion side of the house. I left Hanford in 1971, I think it was,
(06:12):
yeah, 71. And when I came to the University of Wisconsin, I was in charge of the Fusion Technology
Institute, which is different than the fusion physics side. The physics side is where most of
the effort had been, both in the United States and at that time, Russia was the lead organization,
(06:38):
along with the United States. So we had some very close relationships with the Russians.
And when I got to Wisconsin, we started to look at the engineering side of fusion reactors,
not the physics. We were assuming the physics would work, and then we had to translate that
(07:06):
into an engineering system that was both reliable and made economic sense.
And that engineering system, was that TOKAMAC based?
Well, at that time it was. As you know, the fusion community has gone through several
(07:35):
configurations. Stellarators, which was one of the early approaches from Princeton,
and then Los Alamos did a lot of work in linear systems and pulse systems.
Los Livermore did a lot of work in inertial confinement fusion, but of course, that was more
(07:59):
weapons related because that's how a nuclear weapon would work. So we had a lot of
projects that we actually ended up designing, or were partners in the design of over 50
nuclear fusion power plants when I came to Wisconsin. That effort in nuclear fusion
(08:28):
engineering has sort of gone by the wayside now, and most of the effort is still put into the
plasma physics side of the house. But you're never going to make a system that's economical
without having an engineering that works. The physics is one thing, but the engineering is where you make your money.
(08:50):
That's definitely the big frontier now. I feel like more and more people recognize that.
When we talk about fusion energy commercialization, a lot of the conversation is around
materials and engineering. I think we need to figure those two things out.
(09:13):
How did you even hear about nuclear engineering? Did you know about it when you were 14? Did your parents tell you?
No, actually I found out about it when I was a chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsin
as an undergraduate. We built a fission system in the confines of the engineering campus
(09:43):
in the early 1960s. That's how I got into the nuclear side of the house.
My undergraduate training was in chemical engineering, and we have a very strong program in Wisconsin at that time.
It was an easy transfer from chemical engineering to nuclear.
(10:08):
I think I was the second person to graduate from the nuclear engineering program advanced degrees.
I got in on the ground floor, you might say.
Is nuclear energy, when we talk about the nuclear rocket program, is that for ignition or thrust or sustainable?
(10:31):
At what stage of the rocket would something like that be used? Is it fusion or fission?
The nuclear rockets originally were fission. What they did was take liquid hydrogen,
(10:52):
which is down around a few degrees Kelvin, pass it through a graphite core that had uranium or
plutonium in it, and it would heat it up to about 2,000 degrees Kelvin. The exhaust from the rocket
would push the rocket much faster than you could push it with chemical approaches in rocketry.
(11:18):
They were trying to cut down the time it would take to get from the Earth to Mars.
The fusion systems at that time would probably get you to Mars two or three times faster
than chemical systems would. Can we build fusion generators now for this? Would they be clean?
(11:42):
How do you harness the radiation from such a reaction?
Well, it depends on how you design it, obviously. The original design
was never really put into operation. We actually ran reactors in the Nevada desert
(12:05):
to go to Mars and back, but we never actually did it, of course, with a nuclear rocket.
We were using chemical rockets at the time. Now, if you want to do it by
converting fusion energy to electricity and then using the electricity to exhaust the propellant,
(12:33):
that's another way of getting to someplace faster than you can with chemical systems.
So nuclear was really meant in that regard to replace chemical rockets, but of course,
nowadays we've got the chemical rockets that get us to the Moon and back, and some
(13:00):
programs that get us to Mars and back, but not much more than that.
Cool. Switching gears a little bit, I'd love to know the story of ITER. You hear things about how
during the Cold War, there was a full-blown communications breakdown between us and the
(13:22):
Russians. They decided that in order to keep the relationship, the doors open for communication,
they would work on just one project together, and that was the ITER project. I know that you were
there on day one. What did that look like? What were those conversations like?
(13:45):
Well, there are two tracks here. One track is the scientist to scientist, and that worked out pretty
well. The political side is a little beyond my pay grade, so I'm not sure I would be a good person
to give you that side, but the scientific side, we worked very closely with the scientists.
(14:07):
The scientific side, we worked very closely with the Russians. Now, the Russians had a very strong program at that time.
They don't now. They've slipped to third or fourth in the world, but they were up near the top, and they
declassified their work and fusion very early in the game. They were the ones, obviously, that invented
(14:30):
the tokamak, and the tokamak actually was the survivor of a bunch of different designs that
we had worked on in the United States, and then we could talk in a lot of detail with the Russians,
(14:50):
had good friendships with the Russians, and I traveled to Russia several times.
We had some Russians that came to Wisconsin, and we were working on the same programs.
We don't anymore. That's all gone by the road now, but in those days, and well, actually,
(15:17):
probably in the 1970s, is where it really, really flowered a lot, 70s and 80s, and that was the
beginning of ITER. Now, that turned into a political thing, because the collaboration
between the United States and Russia was very good, and that was a good way to have good relations
(15:46):
with someone who we were antagonistic at times with. So, we worked together, and the site that we
worked at was Vienna, and it was under the auspices of the United Nations, and that's in the 70s,
(16:10):
was where we had meetings with the Russians. The Russians, Europeans, Japanese, and the United
States were the four groups that worked on the initial design of ITER. It was called INTOR,
(16:30):
was the name, but it evolved into ITER later on.
Nice. I like INTOR. It sounds like a robot. When you say we don't anymore,
the US and Russia are still part of the 35 or 36 ITER countries. We just don't actively do projects
(16:55):
anymore together, is what you mean. Yeah, the transfer of information is not anywhere close to
what it was in the 70s when we were really serious about building ITER. We were going to build ITER
by the turn of the century, and INTOR was the first design. There were 16 people who spent,
(17:20):
oh, I guess we spent a month or two together in Vienna designing the system, made a lot of progress,
made a lot of friends, and the scientific transfer in those days was very good.
Now it's not so good. It was very good then.
Wow. Was that before or after you were the director of the Fusion Energy Technology Institute?
(17:48):
It was coincident at the same time. Okay, very cool.
Because when I moved from Hanford, I moved out of the fission side of the house to the fusion side
of the house. We had one of the strongest programs, if not the strongest in the world,
(18:08):
in fusion engineering. We also had physics, a lot of physics people who worked on fusion, but
the engineering side was really put into play in the 70s and 80s.
(18:32):
Wow, interesting. Would you say in terms of physics for fusion energy, all of the key
components have been proved out? Is it really just a matter of engineering now or are there any
(18:53):
outstanding physics? How would you say that? Are there anything that have remained theories
and not been proved out? I know that we haven't had a sustained plasma field for a long period
(19:18):
of time, but is there anything in the baseline physics itself that stops you from doing that?
Or it's just possible if you throw more at it? Well, it depends on what you use for fuel.
The original physics work on fusion was done with deuterium and tritium, and that stems all
(19:39):
the way back to World War II because a lot of that came out of that program. We didn't
design systems in World War II for making electricity. We were designing things to end the
war. So the biggest difference there is the energy of the neutrons. Now we know a lot about
(20:05):
radiation damage from low-energy neutrons, the lowest, I mean million electron volts.
When you get to fusion, the neutrons are in the 14 MeV million electron volts, and the reaction
with the neutrons and the metallic structures of the power plants is quite different than it is
(20:31):
in fission. It's not just a factor of seven or eight, which would be 14 over 2 MeV.
There's a major difference in the physics of what goes on with a 14 MeV neutron than what goes on
with a fission neutron, and the biggest difference is with 14 MeV neutrons, you produce a lot of N
(20:57):
alpha reactions. That means neutron helium atom reactions, and helium is a bad actor in this sense
because it goes to the grain boundaries and makes the material very, very brittle. You get a lot more
(21:18):
helium production in a fusion reactor with DT than you do with a fission reactor using uranium
or plutonium, and that's the biggest difference, and we have not solved that problem. We thought
we were going to solve it early if we had built some test reactors. We never did build them,
(21:40):
and so that's still an uncharted area. We know that there's going to be a real problem with
deuterium and tritium, but people are, most of the money and the investment is going into the
plasma physics side of the house, and that determines whether you end up with a toroidal
(22:01):
system or a linear system or a pulse system versus steady state and so forth. So 99% or so of the
money that's invested in fusion is invested in the physics side of the house, and they're not,
they haven't solved those problems. They're getting close, getting close, but once they
(22:25):
solve those problems, they still have to get over the engineering hurdle, and that really,
if they use deuterium and tritium, is going to be a big hurdle because what we know about the
reaction of 14 MeV neutrons versus two and a half MeV neutrons is there's a big difference
(22:47):
in the lifetime of metallic structures that get bombarded. Now that also gives you
radioactivity, but that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is keeping the material so it
doesn't become brittle, and 14 MeV neutrons are a bad actor with respect to that.
(23:09):
Right. I was talking to somebody on the Eater podcast or Eater Communications team yesterday,
and they wanted to know my thoughts on a neutronic fusion fuels. And I think
one of the things that we've talked about and we like vehemently agreed on it was that for fusion to
(23:30):
be commercially viable, like meaning if you're going to build 1000 generators over the next
50 years or so, it would have to be a new tronic, there's just no other way to go about it. So do
you think some of these challenges, definitely the engineering, but then is the physics challenge also
(23:59):
something we have an answer for with a neutronic fuels? I know that a neutronic fuel
fuels automatically make the engineering aspects easier.
Well, that's true, but it's also harder to make the reactions take place. If you go from DT,
(24:23):
deuterium tritium, to say D helium-3, it's three times harder to make that reaction go. And it
might even require a different configuration than a tokamak toroidal system. But right now,
that's one of the biggest things. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is the helium-3,
(24:50):
helium-3 reaction, which has no neutrons. And that's the program that we were enthusiastic about
once we discovered, or we not we, but the Apollo program discovered the million metric tons of
(25:12):
helium-3 sitting on the moon. Prior to that, people knew about the reaction of deuterium
helium-3, but the answer always was, well, you're not going to do anything with a few
tens of kilograms. And the real breakthrough came through in 1986, when we put two and two together
(25:33):
between the Apollo program and the fusion program. And that story is a very interesting one.
We had, in that time period, President Reagan had a program called the SDI program. They were going
to try to shoot down missiles carrying nuclear weapons with an X-ray laser, and they needed
(26:01):
power for the X-ray laser. And we designed for the Air Force a 30 megawatt system electric that used
de-helium-3. And we had enough helium-3 to do that, because a war would only last perhaps a few hours
(26:21):
or a few days, but not enough helium-3 for the production of electricity. And so, after we
designed it for the Air Force, we said, well, it's not our job to do the military side. It's our job
to try to help society, ours meaning the University of Wisconsin. And so I took the group off campus
(26:50):
for about two weeks. We went to a motel outside of Madison, and we tried to figure out where we
could get enough helium-3 to use helium-3 as a fusion fuel. And we spent a week to two weeks
going down a lot of blind alleys until two of our people came up with the idea that, well, the sun
(27:16):
makes a lot of helium-3, and where does it go? Well, any place the solar wind would blow
on our solar system would be affected if the body that they were transported into either had a
magnetic field or an atmosphere, because the magnetic field would cause the helium-3 to be
(27:43):
moved outside the planet, and the systems would be with a gas environment. Couldn't penetrate that.
So people would always say, well, helium-3 is interesting, and you don't make as many neutrons,
(28:06):
and you don't make as many neutrons, or if you go to helium-3, helium-3, you make none. But there's not
enough helium-3 to make any difference, because helium-3 comes from the decay of tritium, and
tritium is basically man-made, as you know. So that was really how we got the tie-in between the
(28:29):
lunar helium-3 reserves, which are about a million metric tons of helium-3, well documented from the
Apollo and the Russian programs. And now the Chinese are moving very fast in that area,
too. They've landed in the high helium-3 concentrations on the moon. They don't advertise
(28:53):
it very much, but we're in a race with the Chinese. Right, it's become quite the global thing.
I was reading a story, I think, like yesterday, where they discovered rust on the moon, and
in order for that kind of oxidation, there needed to be oxygen, and there's obviously no oxygen.
(29:16):
So apparently they found out that every time there's a lineup where the Earth is right
between the Sun and the moon, the solar radiation from the Sun kind of pushes oxygen past the
magnetic field of the Earth, and there's a little bit of oxygen that gets on the moon. And so,
(29:40):
you know, it just kind of blows on there and stays on there. So it's kind of interesting.
Well, there is a lot of oxygen on the moon, but it's tied up chemically, so it's hard to get it.
Free oxygen is hard to get.
Breathable free oxygen, gotcha. But is it possible to then make with what's there?
(30:06):
Can we convert what's there to breathable oxygen and create an atmosphere?
Sure, sure, sure.
Maybe can we send robots to do that?
Oh, sure. I mean, the first application of lunar resources will be for life support,
(30:30):
and you'll use the solar energy to extract solar wind volatiles, nitrogen, hydrogen,
and oxygen and others from the lunar regolith. And there's a lot of hydrogen and a lot of oxygen,
some nitrogen, and that will support life support on the moon, because you know it's very expensive
(30:57):
to send food to the moon.
Right. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating stuff. I was watching a documentary on Netflix on how the
JWST telescope was sent up in a couple of pieces, and there were robots that kind of brought
themselves together and created it. And I was just, it inspired me to do the same thing with the
(31:24):
fusion energy generator. I know we've kind of talked about that before, but how would we,
I mean, if there were ways like, you know, space elevators, you know, rail magnets to throw it up
there or rocket boosters to get it up there, what would a fusion energy generator on the moon then
(31:48):
look like? Can it really just, could it process what's already there, generate the electricity,
make us some water, make us some oxygen, grow some plant, like power the robots to grow us some
plants and do that?
Well, the answer to that is yes, but of course, it's not as easy as it sounds. And the early
(32:17):
applications for technology on the moon is going to be to extract the oxygen, hydrogen,
and other minerals that you need for life support. And that'll happen quickly. I would expect in the
next five to 10 years, we will have units on the moon, we, meaning the world, not necessarily the
(32:43):
United States, will be able to extract the elements that you need for life support.
That same technology can be used to extract the helium-3, but you have to do it at a bigger scale.
And so we've been doing experiments here on the earth to see how we could get the
(33:08):
helium-3 out of the regolith, the very fine powder on the moon. And we found that agitation
can do it very well. So it reduces the energy required to get the helium-3 out of the
regolith. It's not zero, but it's better than thermal energy. But the thermal energy can be
(33:34):
used to get the components that you need for life support. And that'll be the first application.
Once they do that, then they will be able to have a lot of people on the moon have their own
food growing and so forth. And then that technology can be used to start extracting the helium-3.
(33:57):
Would we put them in canisters and send them back, or is there a way to send it in a solid form and
we just, you know, we do the process down here? Which one would happen?
No, they would do it on the moon. You'd do it on the moon and send the gas down?
(34:18):
Well, you wouldn't send the gas down. You'd use it on the moon.
And of course, you'd get a lot of helium-4, of course, and that'd be great for propulsion.
And the moon would be a very good place to stop before you go into Mars. And so you wouldn't have
(34:42):
to send things from the earth directly to Mars. You'd send a rocket to the moon, pick up your
material that you need for propulsion, and fusion propulsion will get you to the Mars very quickly.
So it'll be a two-stage process. Food first, energy second.
(35:12):
Very cool. Very cool. So the moon is just like a gas station. It's like we're going to turn it into
a big gas station. Yeah.
It's gigantic. Wonderful. I think I'm selfishly thinking about it from like a fusion energy
perspective on how we would be able to get that helium-3 down to earth.
(35:37):
But you're saying... That wouldn't be a problem.
That wouldn't be a problem, getting it down, because you'd be sending rockets going up,
carrying a lot more than carrying back the helium-3. And you would drop it off at satellites
around the earth and then come down from the satellite. So once you extract it,
(36:04):
getting it back to the earth is not going to be a big problem.
Oh, right. If you figured that out, this would be easier. That makes sense.
You know, by the way, the helium-3 on the earth right now is worth about $4 billion a ton.
$4 billion. Yeah, because it's a gas. So a ton would be a gigantic amount. We tried to...
(36:29):
We wanted to do some experiments with UCI, and we wanted to buy helium, and we were looking around.
And we saw that we could buy canisters from like a French company. And one tiny canister
was about $30,000. And we would have used that in our experiment. It would have taken us about
(36:52):
a millisecond for that entire amount to be gone. And so... And we saw that even though it was a
French company, it said the source was Russian. So I think that...
Yeah.
Yeah. Is it from tritium capture that they're letting it decay for 12 years?
(37:19):
Well, they're not letting it decay. Tritium...
Unless they're just capturing it.
Tritium decays with a 12.3-year half-life. And tritium, of course, is a major component of
the hydrogen bombs. And the Russians make a lot of that. But they can't stop the tritium from
(37:41):
being converted into helium-3. And so I think the... And I don't know the details, but I think the
French are actually getting the helium-3 from the Russians, buying it and then selling it at a larger
price around the world. And where our helium-3 would come from... And by the way, we have a
(38:05):
neighbor north of us who makes a lot of helium-3. And their can-do reactor.
I think there is a percentage of power plants that have the tritium capture systems, and then
there are the older generation ones that don't. I mean, why am I... You would know better than I do, but
(38:28):
I'm just... When you look at the numbers of fission generators being built in Russia, China versus
Canada and the US, if I put tritium capture systems on all of the new generators I was building,
then I would think that China and Russia would have a surplus of it, just as waste from their
(38:52):
fission systems. But I wouldn't know. Well, it depends whether they're using deuterium
at moderator. And the can-do reactors use deuterium. And our... The United States reactors,
it comes from the making of tritium in the fission system. And you don't make a lot.
(39:18):
You make some, and of course it's stable. So once you make it and if you extract it, it'll sit there.
It won't go away. But there is... The demand for helium-3 is only in a few kilograms per year
a level. And that doesn't last you very long in the power plant.
(39:43):
Right. None of this is sustainable for fusion energy, large-scale commercialization. The only
way to do it is go to the moon, but it's possible. Yeah. That's what the reserve is.
I feel like there will be a convergence of the two technologies in terms of when fusion energy
(40:04):
generators have passed the research stages and gotten to the point where helium-3 is useful,
then the helium-3 will be available. Anyway, so just moving on, I guess.
You've worked in a lot of countries, Dr. Kulsinski. What are the top four countries,
(40:31):
do you think, will have the first fusion energy commercialization? Is Germany ahead of China?
No. That's an interesting question because it depends on what timeframe you're talking about.
If you were talking about 20 or 30 years ago, it was the United States and Russia. If you're
(40:58):
talking about today, it's China and we're number two. That causes a lot of debate, of course, but
we're maybe at best tied with the Chinese. The Russians have dropped down to third or fourth.
(41:20):
That's Korea and Japan are probably passing up Russia right now. The Russians have really dropped
out of the main picture. The Chinese are taking it over. There's a big difference, but now what
(41:40):
a decision the standard will be 10, 20, 30 years from now is things that people can speculate on,
but we don't know. It depends on a lot of things. Right now, the Chinese are vying for number one.
(42:02):
I think I feel like I have faith in some of the commercial endeavors in America and I feel like
it'll be a SpaceX situation where I feel like America will win. Maybe that's because I'm an
(42:22):
American, so maybe it's more hopeful. Other than it's harder to fuse, but the physics has been
proved out, in less than a decade, we'll be able to fetch the helium-3 from the moon. What are some
of the other things then that are technological stop gaps for achieving a steady state helium-3
(42:55):
aneutronic fusion? Well, there are lots of alternate applications.
One, not necessarily the top one, but one that you might want to consider is using the helium-3 to
make 14 MeV protons, which can burn up the fission waste that we're burying in the ground right now.
(43:22):
That doesn't really contribute a lot to the business world, but it certainly would solve
a problem of getting rid of nuclear waste. Is that nuclear transmutation?
Yes. To make a cheap source of 14 MeV protons, not neutrons. That's one thing, but it's probably not
(43:49):
a commercial thing, but it has a big impact on society. What would we be using those protons for?
Is it possible to have some sort of direct energy conversion connect to that?
No. Is that what we're going?
Well, the 14 MeV protons, if you bombard a long-lived radioactive material, you can
(44:18):
change it to a very short-lived radioactive material and it'll go away, depending on the
half-life, of course. But some things that we're burying right now have a half-life in the thousands
to an even longer time, a time half-life, thousands of years, and then they're going to be around for
(44:44):
a lot longer than we are. So if you can convert them to very short-lived half-life materials,
that have half-lives on the order of a year or so, then it'll go away in about 10 years.
So that would be one application. The other is you can use it to make very short
(45:12):
time-scale half-life materials for medical use. There's a process now that people can detect
whether somebody is going to go into an epileptic fit on an operating table, but it requires oxygen
15, which has a two-minute half-life. And two-minute half-life is something you can't make and transport
(45:37):
very much because it goes away too quick. But if you made it in the next room to the operating table
and piped it in and combined it with a certain molecule, they can get a forewarning of when
somebody is going to go into an epileptic fit on the operating table, and of course they can be
prepared for it. Now, that's probably, I don't know about the economics of that, but the social impact
(46:04):
of that is pretty substantial because they can't do that now. So that's another use.
Right. So there will be multiple, multiple uses for everything fusion, eventually.
Yeah. Yeah, there will be. And I'm sure we haven't really more than scratched the surface of that
(46:29):
because right now that's not what people are worried about. But if you had a fusion system
operating on different fuels, anywhere from DT to DD to D-Elium-3 to P-BORN11, all the ones that we
are considering, you can start thinking about the non-electrical producing systems which can affect
(46:54):
the human society. That's down the road. Some of them could be very near-term.
Some of them will take a lot longer. But there isn't much money going into that research right now.
But there's money in other things, you know. I'm in the process of writing an article for just like
(47:14):
a LinkedIn article on using fusion energy, how you would need fusion energy for something like
cryptocurrency, how cryptocurrency, just the plans that people have, it's just not possible without
fusion energy. The drain on the grid is too much. I think cryptocurrency last year used more energy
(47:36):
than Idaho or something. So it's really just not sustainable. And even things like the advent of
AI and quantum computing and just the energy that all of that takes, it requires, you know,
(47:57):
I think it's almost not even possible to do at a sustainable scale if we don't figure out fusion.
So there are a lot of lucrative things that fusion will bring about that would offset the social
causes, so to speak. I think the use of space is another one where we have very long duration
(48:26):
space trips and you're going to need diagnostics if somebody has a cancer or something in the years
that they will be traveling from the earth to someplace else. And you can make those isotopes
that can be combined with imaging systems to show whether you have abnormalities in the human
(48:53):
person. But you know, I'm not sure that's an economic thing, but it certainly will keep
people who have 10-year, 20-year travels much healthier.
But they're not going to make any money out of that. I think it's just saving lives.
(49:18):
Right. I mean, if one system can, is breeding the right word when we say, when we talk about these
isotopes and elements we're going to make, when we create these systems to do them,
is it possible to use fusion for more than one isotope, whether it be medical isotope,
(49:42):
like so could we make deuterium, tritium, helium-3, helium-4,
all with an inertial or magnetic confinement fusion energy unit, but it would be the one unit
that makes all of them? Is that, is the physics? Yeah, that's right. That's right. Because it depends
(50:03):
on what you bombard, it does things. One, what are you making to cause a nuclear change? Is it a
neutron? Is it a gamma ray or some other form of radiation? And what is the half-life? And what is
its chemical proclivity so that you can combine it with certain molecules that will give you a
(50:29):
diagnostic? I mean, there's a whole medical area here that is untapped that would be, at least from
a science standpoint, be very interesting. Economically, I can't really project that.
I mean, if it's, if we can make a system where we can breed things like tritium, and tritium is
(50:56):
incredibly expensive, and so is deuterium, if we can build a system that can do 10 different isotopes,
then it would automatically be commercially viable, I would think. I mean, if we make a,
if you make two things that the pharma and the DOD industry can use, then you can make eight things
(51:16):
at a loss and still come up with a profit at the end of the day. Well, I mean, we talk about making
industrial heating units. I've been kind of beating down the idea of using fusion energy industrial
(51:37):
heat for liquid fuel manufacturing, steel manufacturing, and cement manufacturing.
And we recently spoke with a company that wants to make, wants to make jet fuel with biomass. And
all of that requires you to have heat of above a thousand, thousand two hundred degrees centigrade.
(51:59):
And we could use fusion generators to do that. I also spoke to a company that reached out,
they're a fission company, but they reached out and they said that they could make us our heat
extraction unit for our fusion energy generator at Kronos for that industrial heating purposes.
So that was 10% of something that I thought I would need to do that I don't have to do anymore.
(52:25):
So I'm very happy about that. We just like outsource that component. But, but we've had a lot of
conversations around hydrogen, hydro H2 production. And, but we, if we could have a clean heat source
for it at a thousand two hundred degrees, we could power cars. Hydrogen is almost better and more
(52:50):
sustainable for cars. So it was, it was just, there were just, these are all conversations in the ethos.
Yeah. Well, and I'm sure we really haven't gotten very deep into this because people have been 99.9%
focused on making electricity with fusion, but about 10 to 20 years ago, we started to think about
(53:15):
near-term applications and we identified 36 near-term applications. But we don't have the
bandwidth to cover them all. So, yeah, yeah. I think it's coming. I think we live in a time where
we live in a time where, you know, we just have to do it. We just have to do it. There is no other,
(53:45):
no other way out. And I think more and more people are recognizing that. And luckily for humanity,
the science is lining up, meaning the work that folks like you have been doing for the last like
50, 60 years without any proper vision of fruition, so to speak. I think all of that,
(54:09):
there's like a culmination of all of that work right now. And I feel like there's funding available
for it from new sources that didn't exist before. And by that, I mean the private equity and the
venture capital world is taking a more serious look at fusion. So I feel like it's really going
to happen. I'm hopeful, obviously, like that's my job. That's part of my job. But I feel from
(54:35):
a very pragmatic perspective, the world recognizes that technologically, some of the larger things
that we hope for in terms of space exploration or cryptocurrencies or any of these things,
we need some large fuel sources and we cannot do it the same way that we've been doing it before.
(54:56):
And from like a step back even, we feel like we've really been using fuels like this for 150 years.
That's like a blip of time in humanity. So there's nothing we cannot fix. I feel like if
the next two or three generations can build a proper foundation for fusion energy commercialization,
(55:24):
then anything is possible. Anyway, I have two last questions. One is, what was the largest
fusion energy challenge that you have ever seen? And how did you overcome it? Well,
(55:49):
again, it falls into physics versus engineering, because they're quite different. But they're both,
you have to solve both problems. Otherwise, it doesn't work. And I can only speak from the
engineering side at this point. And the largest problem, of course, is how do you control
(56:14):
the radiation damage and the large amount of radioactivity that you generate using deuterium
tritium fuels? That's a big challenge. It's one that's not very well thought out yet by the
community. But one way to get rid of that, of course, is to go to advanced fuels,
(56:37):
aneutronic systems, or at least systems that have very small amounts of nutrients emitted.
Because the neutrons cause radiation damage, which limits the life. And these designs for fusion
reactors are so complex, but if you have to change out the structures in a fusion reactor,
(56:59):
it's going to take you months, if not years, to do that. And you can't make any money out of that.
The electricity production would not be economical. So radiation damage from 14
MAV neutrons is probably the biggest issue from an engineering side. The handling of heat and
(57:25):
electricity production and distribution are things that the fission community is pretty well fixed
for us. And the fission community has also come up with pretty good regulations on radioactivity,
what you can handle and what you can't. I remember in the 60s when I worked at Hanford,
(57:52):
we had a 14 MAV neutron generator. And we had it inside a building that was about 100 yards from a
road. Every time we turned it on, we had to close the road. Because the 14 MAV neutrons are right
through the graphite moderator and out through the concrete walls and into the road. So, I mean,
(58:21):
though it's not an easy problem to handle. And we can learn a lot from the fission community,
because they've had some pretty good regulations. And so I think the key word here is A-neutronic.
You're probably going to have to use deuterium tritium to get to break even and beyond.
(58:44):
But beyond that, to make an economical fusion system, you're probably going to have to go to
A-neutronic fusion. Yeah, I 100% agree. It's just not scalable otherwise. Were your parents scientists?
(59:04):
No, no, they were not. They worked in the public sector, farmers as well,
fishermen on the Mississippi River, commercial fishermen when that was a
(59:27):
viable occupation. Nowadays, I don't think you could do it. But, yeah, I spent a lot of time
as in my youth working with them on the rivers. And we used to drive cars across the Mississippi
River in the winter. Wow, it freezes over that much? With water on both sides of us.
(59:51):
And I tell you, I always used to stand on when cars had running boards. I always used to stand
on the running board because I didn't want to be inside the car. And we only lost two cars.
Just two. But people did that sort of stuff. So you could jump off easier. What's a running
(01:00:15):
board? Is that the thing on the side that you would stand on? Never seen a running board.
I don't know anything about cars. It might not be a tithing thing. Yeah, they don't have them
anymore. But they had a little step on the door. And I used to stand on the running boards. And
(01:00:37):
that's how we got across the river. But they were not scientists or
educators. Although my children are in the education business and audiologists and so
forth. But things change. Yeah, so that was going to be my last question. Like you, you are more
(01:01:03):
than a researcher and a fusion energy pioneer. You're a teacher. How, how, what can we,
to close this off, what can we say to the young people that need to get into this field?
Because more than technology and physics and engineering, we need driven human beings
(01:01:28):
who are willing to research this stuff and bring it to fruition. How do we get them to do it?
Dr. Kulsinski. Well, you really hit the nail on the head there. Because what you need is young minds,
they're not afraid to fail. And so you have to teach students not to be constrained by prior
(01:01:58):
notifications from people that this can't be done. They need to be able to experiment and show why it
can be done. And that's, that's one of the main things that we try to do for advanced students,
is to get them to be thinking outside the box. And don't take even people who've been in the
(01:02:19):
business for a long time, the advice that you can't do that. There's a lot of things that people
have said you can't do that are economic today. So teaching students that is good. And students
come up with all kinds of ideas. Most of them are a little bit out. But they're but at least
(01:02:41):
they're thinking. I've had somewhere between 50 and 60 PhD students. And everyone was different.
And everyone brought something different to the research side of the house. And everyone has got
different jobs now. Some are generals in the army, some are directors of national laboratories,
(01:03:04):
some are industrialists, some are making money making medical isotopes. They all have gone off
in different directions. But the ones that are probably most successful are not the ones that
had the highest grade point, but the ones who had a way to think about things in a different
(01:03:27):
way than the previous generation and trying to teach people how to do that without hurting
themselves is as is a big challenge for us all. Yeah, agreed. Anyway, thank you again for doing
this. It was probably ask you another series of 20 to 30 questions and learn more about all of
(01:03:54):
the work that you have done. I'm sure you've heard this a million times before. But, you know,
we're all like, beyond grateful for all of the work that you guys have put in.
We're going to see some financial incentives from it, if not my generation, the next generation,
but it was really because of you guys that anything is even possible. And you worked hard at it when
(01:04:22):
people said, don't do fusion, do fission, you said, no, I'm going to do fusion. When people said,
do fission, it's more you'll make more money. You said, no, we should do fusion. So I'm very
grateful for you sticking to this and laying the groundwork so we can all build on it. So thank
you again. Dr. Kosinski. Thank you.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.