12.17.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for RADIOI, and today I will
be reading National Geographic magazine dated November twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the first article

(00:22):
titled Inside the Colossal Quest for limitless Energy by Michael Finkel.
Around the world, the race is on to harness the
near infinite power of nuclear fusion. In a small town
in the south of France, a scientific mega project of
extraordinary dimension is an inching closer to solving our global

(00:43):
energy needs forever by building a star on Earth. Real stars.
The ones in space are simple beats. Our Sun formed
some four point six billion years ago from a cloud
consisting of essentially one ingredient, hydrogen, the most basic an
abundant element in the universe. Gravity kneaded the cloud into

(01:04):
a big, rotating ball and kept squeezing from there, density
and warmth spiking until its core reached about twenty seven
million degrees fahrenheit. Hydrogen crumbles when collisions occur at this
temperature and pressure, creating the soupy jumble of atomic parts
known as plasma, the fourth state of matter after solid

(01:25):
liquid and gas. Though rare on Earth outside of lightning
bolts and neon signs, plasma accounts for over ninety nine
percent of the Solar System's mass, most of it stored
highly agitated in the Sun throughout the Sun's soup trillions
of times every instant, four hydrogen atoms locked together in

(01:47):
a series of steps to make helium with a much
higher fusion point. Helium bobs placidly amid the solar havoc,
a sturdy lifeboat, not even breaking a sweat at twenty
seven mills degrees, and there's enough hydrogen in the Sun
to keep forging helium for another five billion years. One

(02:07):
further process takes place in each of these nuclear fusion reactions.
A helium atom is just a speck lighter than four
hydrogen atoms, and the leftover bits of matter, unleashed and
energetic thrash through the plasma, shimmy gradually to the Sun's
surface and stream into space. Those headed in the right
direction deliver morsels of heat and light to Earth. Here's

(02:30):
how mighty our Sun is. The total energy it produces
every second would power the entire Earth gluttonously for hundreds
of thousands of years, and the process by which a
star does this seems tantalizingly easy. What if we could
create a smaller sun here on Earth and tap into
its power, Then theoretically we'd have a virtually unlimited source

(02:51):
of clean and cheap energy, emitting no carbon dioxide, potentially
halting global warming and environmental collapse. World would literally be saved.
It sounds improbable, but such an endeavor has long been
under way at a vast construction site in the south
of France, where both the heart science and the need
for human collaboration are precedented, unprecedented and unpredictable, and the

(03:16):
dream of a better future can be witnessed coming to life.
The artificial star is called etair Iter pronounced Eeter, the
Latin word for the whey and an acronym for the
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. The one hundred acre work area
Handcake Flat is an hour's drive inland from the Mediterranean Sea,

(03:40):
tucked amid pine forests and vineyards with craggy hills on
the horizon. Each weekday, more than two thousand people physicists
to welders arrive at the site, smaller crews toil at night.
Thirty three nations, represented half the world's population, are official
Eater members, and workers from ninety countries have been involved

(04:00):
in its creation. A web of cultures knitting a singular
machine in the middle of the job site, dominating the view.
A windowless cement edifice rises like a volcano. To enter
this structure, you must visit the attached dressing room and
swap your footwear for white clean room shoes. Then use
the electric shoes scrubber to ensure that any dirt or

(04:23):
contaminants are gone, and march in place on a sticky
bat to eliminate gunk on the soles. The machine being
built needs to be kept fastidiously pristine. A dropped pen
cap or stray fingerprint could cause damage. You also have
to wear a white lab coat, a hair nut, a
hard hat, protective eyewear, and white gloves. Once properly dressed,

(04:45):
you pass through a plastic strip curtain and unzip a
canvas flap like a tent door and zip it shut
behind you. Then walk down a narrow corridor fluorescently lit.
The walls, floor, and ceiling all the same bright white
as your shoes. The air is still and stifling. At
the end of the hallway, unzip and re zip another door,
Navigate a second white corridor, Climb up a layer of

(05:08):
scaffolding jungle gym style, and duck through one more zippered portal.
There is a claustrophobic sense of being lost in a labyrinth.
Traverse yet another dizzying white hallway, and open a further door,
and there you are inside the Great Machine Room. It's
an industrial ecosystem of ducks and pipes and metal slabs

(05:30):
on some wild scale that skews your bearings. Only when
you spot the white clad workers tethered to scaffolding amid
the overwhelming gadgetry ants on a hill does the enormity emerge.
The contraption fills a space the equivalent of a twenty
story building. It will eventually contain ten million parts, hundreds
of thousands of them, uniquely fabricated, and along with its housing,

(05:52):
weigh nearly four hundred fifty thousand tons. Eater is likely
the most complex machine humans have ever attempted build. A
lot of the metal is burnished to a brilliant shine,
many pieces plated in silver, an ideal material for deflecting
heat from sensitive components. Pipes run here and there in
parallel rows, like raked sand in zen gardens, winding through

(06:17):
the works. The heart of the machine is in the
form of a giant's sphere with a doughnut shaped hollow
where plasma may one day whirl. The device is called
a tokamak. There are few sharp edges on a tokamak,
and massive segments of Eater's machinery are sculpted with graceful
sandstone like curves. Eater is publicly funded billions of dollars

(06:39):
shouldered by dozens of governments, with no profit motive or
military aim. We are contributing to world peace, says Kijung Jung,
head of the project's South Korean unit, expressing an admirable
objective that is somewhat belied by decorated decades of international disputes.
The project is open source. If Eeter operates as planned,

(07:03):
any nation or private company can access its intellectual property
free of charge. This is not going to happen soon.
The quest for a mechanical star has been unfolding for
a century and still has years to go. But in
a world that can feel quick, tempered and fractious, Eater
appears to be a crazily ambitious, long term project rooted

(07:24):
in optimism and a desire for unity. The endeavor has
already extended across careers and lifetimes, with each step forward
seemingly offset by unanticipated setbacks. It will be a savior
for future generations, promises Dutch physicist Acco Mas, a twenty
five year veteran of Eater, speaking from his office overlooking

(07:46):
the teeming constructive area. A few scientists have observed that
Eter may be our era's version of the Egyptian Pyramids
or the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. Some visitors permitted to
see the machine have been moved to tears, for it
can seem a miracle that Eater exists at all. Other observers,
including some of the most powerful voices in science, have

(08:08):
not been swayed by Eater's charms. Three separate Nobel Prize
winners in physics, Pierre Jill de Gene of France, his
countrymen George Sharpak, and Masatoshi Koshiba of Japan, independently declared
that attempts to create a miniature sun to help Earth
help power the Earth are a waste of money and effort,

(08:29):
doomed to fizzle out and possibly dangerous. Despite such criticism,
in eature like facility, if completed and hooked to an
energy grid, would presumably be safer, cleaner, and more productive
than any nuclear power plant now in use. All of
the world's four hundred plus nuclear reactors operating across some
thirty nations rely on fission. Fusion and fission are similar

(08:55):
looking words, based on the same concept of creating energy
from excess matter in in atomic reactions, but otherwise they
are opposites. In a fusion plant, lightweight atoms hydrogen has
just one electron one proton and zero one or two neutrons,
are forced together with fission. Heavier elements such as uranium

(09:16):
or plutonium, each with a total of more than three
hundred electrons. Protons and neutrons are split apart. The great
advantage of fission is that reactions are easy to start
when good jolt and particles drop from the big atoms
like fruit from a tree. But fission is messy. Some
of the radioactive waste will be toxic to humans for

(09:37):
tens of thousands of years. Fusion two produces hazardous radioactive
byproducts but nothing remotely comparable. Also, fissile material like uranium
may be depleted within a century, while the type of
hydrogen best suited for fusion is almost endlessly abundant in
sea water. There is also fission's limited but unavoidable record

(09:59):
of catastrophe three Mile Island, Pennsylvania in nineteen seventy nine, Chernobyl, Ukraine,
then part of the USSR in nineteen eighty six, Fukushima,
Japan in twenty eleven. Fission reactions without careful control can
become explosive, prone to gallop off uncontrollably. With fusion, runaway

(10:19):
reactions and meltdowns aren't possible in a fusion plant, Any
accident or system failure, or even a small instability in
the plasma immediately causes the reaction to lose strength and
extinguish itself. Also, fusion produces four times as much energy
as fission with the same quantity of fuel, and fusion
is about four million times more energetic and vastly cleaner

(10:43):
than chemical reactions that burn oil or coal. Renewable energy sources,
including solar, wind, and geothermal, are, like nuclear power, largely
carbon free, but none of them appear capable of scaling
up to meet global demand. Fusion fills the bill of
energy savior, except that it's difficult to begin the reaction

(11:03):
and harder to maintain it. Atoms naturally repel one another,
and enormous forces are required to slam them together and
fuse them. Even then, plasma is skittish and fragile, constantly
seeking to dissipate. The largest detonation of all time, the
Big Bang, con maintained fusion for only three minutes before

(11:24):
it faded away. For the next hundred million years, Fusion
didn't exist in the universe until gravity muscled enough hydrogen
together for the first stars to ignite. Virtually every Layov
experiment involving fusion has consumed more energy than it has produced,
Contrary to the goal of a power plant. Fusion energy

(11:45):
currently sits at the maddening intersection of conceptual simplicity and
technological perplexity. Perplexity some fusion experts have concluded across several
decades now that controlling fusion is beyond the limits of
human in capability. Daniels Jasby, who worked at the Princeton
Plasma Physics LAP for twenty five years, wrote after his

(12:08):
retirement that a fusion plant would be too convoluted, requiring
endless maintenance, and cause more problems than it would solve.
The late Lawrence Lidsky, an associate director of m i
t's Fusion Center and founding editor of the Journal of
Fusion Energy, declared after a long career that fusion power
is a fantasy, noting that it's widely regarded as the

(12:30):
hardest scientific and technical problem ever tackled. Walter Marshall, former
chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, reportedly said
that fusion is an idea with infinite possibility and zero
chance of success. There's no shortage of scientists to support Eater.
Stephen Hawking once said that fusion was the single idea

(12:53):
with the greatest potential to advance humanity, but the project's
detractors mostly articulate the same idea. Eater's complexity can seem absurd.
The more you know about the machine, the less it
may appear to make sense. This is high risk, high reward,
says Catherine McCarthy, director of the United States Eater Bureau.

(13:13):
The idea is undeniably a long shot, possibly a wild
goose chase that might in fact exceed human capacity. But
for many who've dedicated their working lives to Eater, it's
precisely this uncertainty and absurdity that make the effort alluring.
How can we know our limits unless we try our
hardest to exceed them. A chief absurdity is the heat.

(13:36):
Of the three fusion requirements plasma, confinement, pressure, and heat.
Humans are most limited by pressure. A million earths could
fit inside the Sun, and this size difference is insurmountable.
The center of the sun is thirteen times denser than lead.
There's no known way we can create a squeeze like
that on our planet. To make up for this, a

(13:59):
lot of heat is the main source of Eater's heat
comes from a pair of giant laser like particle guns
called neutral beam injectors. Each gun is the size of
two city buses part and to end their barrels point
into the tokamak, they will fire one million bold particle
beams continuously for an hour. To power the guns and

(14:22):
other components, Eater has built a ten acre electrical switch
guard capable of drawing as much energy from the French
national grid as a city of one million people. Though
the machine, whence operational, should prove that this debt can
be repaid at least tenfold. When the guns open fire,

(14:42):
hydrogen gas in the tucamac will swirl through the doughnut,
increasing in velocity as the temperature rises one million degrees
fahrenheit two million, ten million. The atoms will move faster
than the speed of sound, then swifter still. As the
heat exceeds the twenty seven million degrees at the center
of the sun. That passes fifty million, one hundred million,

(15:04):
two hundred million, the force of accelerating particles in the
toucamac will equal that of two space shuttles launching at once.
Only at two hundred seventy million degrees ten times the
temperature of the Sun's core will hydrogen atoms in eater
collide in shed electrons, then fuse together as helium. How

(15:24):
do you contain something so hot? No known material could
do it. A toucamac made of pure diamonds would vaporize instantly,
But here the nature of plasma is healthful. The stew
of atomic parts includes a large number of positively charged
protons and negatively charged electrons. Since these particles are affected
by magnetic forces, the jar confining eater's plasma will be

(15:47):
formed of electromagnetic fields. Like many ideas being implemented at Eater,
the development of the electromagnetic system draws on the most
promising discoveries from years of research laboratories worldwide that have
nothing to do with nuclear fusion. The magnets at Eater
also absurd. Start with the central solenoid, which will fill

(16:11):
the whole of the donut. It's like a grain silo
six stories high and will become the backbone of the
world's most powerful magnetic system, generating forces that could lift
an aircraft carrier out of the water. Circling the machine
like hula hoops, will be six immense poloidal magnets, and
hanging vertically will be eighteen D shaped pteroidal magnets, each

(16:34):
over fifty feet tall, enclosing the plasma's loop. Together, the
magnets will weigh more than eleven thousand tons, and they
will be machined with extraordinary fiship precision, the margin for
air less than the thickness of a sheet of paper.
To create this, says one Eater worker, you have to
be a little crazy. These are all superconducting magnets, which

(16:55):
means that they can carry strong electrical currents without resistance,
allowing the intent fields required to corral Eater's plasma. For
superconductivity to work, these magnets must be kept extremely cold.
Eater has also built a cryo plant big enough to
house a soccer field, the most complicated refrigerator in the world,

(17:16):
as an Eater cryogenic engineer put it, that will circulate
liquid helium through the magnets. Eater's magnets need to be
cooled to negative fourgnd fifty degrees fahrenheit. This is just
a few ticks above absolute zero, the point at which
atomic energy has reached its minimum nearly motionless state. Perhaps

(17:37):
the ultimate absurdity of Eater is that it will contain
one of the hottest known places in the universe and
one of the coldest, little more than a body's length apart.
We are playing with Mother Nature's forces, says Alberto Luarte,
director of Eater's science division, jotting down a page of
mathematical calculations showing just how great these forces are. I

(17:59):
can't predict the difficulties we will face. We may learn
that we understand nothing. Here's how it's supposed to work.
The doughnut shaped area in the Tucamac will be pumped clear,
forming a vacuum. Any stray molecules can pollute the plasma.
The magnets will be super cold and activated. Then hydrogen
gas will be injected into the vacuum chamber at about

(18:21):
half a gram per second. This gas will be heavier
than common hydrogen. Eater's recipe calls for a combination of deutium,
which adds one neutron to the normally neutronless atom, and tritium,
which adds two. Without these isotopes, the tucamac would have
to be heated hundreds of millions of degrees higher. Yet

(18:43):
this efficiency also brings complications. Deutyium, though rear, can be
plecked out of sea water our oceans contain a many
million year global supply, but tritium doesn't naturally occur and
is slightly radioactive. So Eater will also be testing first
of a kind components that its hopes will permit machine

(19:03):
to safely breed its own tritium. Once the neutral beam
injectors have zapped the gas to the necessary two hundred
seven million, two hundred seventy million degrees, the resulting plasma
will glow faintly red like an aurora. The northern and
southern lights are also plasmas, and says an eater physicist,
emit a sound like the screech of an alley cat.

(19:26):
Newly fused helium atoms will drop out of the plasma
a sort of ash and collect in a huge dish
known as the diverter at the bottom of the toocomac.
Heavy hydrogen will continually be added, keeping the plasma fed.
Another benefit of using neuterium and trite tritium is that
about half of the fusion reactions by products are neutrons.

(19:49):
Neutrons well named are neutral, unaffected by magnetism. Loose neutrons
will fly through the plasma in all directions and crash
against the walls of the toocomac struke, picking what's called
the blanket. Eater's blanket not soft, as formed from hunks
of tungsten, steel, aluminium, and bronze designed to absorb this
hailstorm of neutrons hundreds of trillions per second and transfer

(20:15):
the heat of the particle's kinetic energy from inside the
tochomac to outside. In an actual fusion power plant, this
heat could be used to boil water, creating steam which
can spin turbines and generate electricity. The strange truth of Eater, however,
is that it will never produce power. The machine is
strictly an experiment to prove that all the steps are achievable.

(20:37):
Steam turbines, old technology well understood, will presumably be installed
in later generations of fusion plants that will be built
all over the world. This step could easily be more
than fifty years away. The time scale is not compatible
with our immediacy culture, says former Eater chief scientist Tim Lose,

(20:59):
but he implies this fusion energy may still arrive in
time to save us. All. Though Eater won't have energy
producing equipment, it will be outfitted with a wide array
of diagnostic tools to judge the effectiveness of every test run,
and while future plants may have to run almost continuously,
the stated goal of Eater is to maintain a burning,

(21:21):
energy rich plasma for four hundred seconds or a bit
less than seven minutes. More than a hundred years of
effort and money have already been devoted to achieving these minutes.
Painted across the lobby of the five story Eater headquarters building,
home to administrative offices and scientific think tanks, is a
timeline of fusion milestones. It begins in nineteen nineteen, when

(21:45):
French physicist Jean Perien hypothesized that stars produced energy through fusion.
This was definitely proved in the nineteen thirties, and soon
after the power of fusion was grasped, scientists set about
trying to kill people with it. The bombs drop on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August nineteen forty five only used fission.

(22:06):
After World War II, the global arms race escalated, and
the US initiated a project to weaponize fusion. On November one,
nineteen fifty two, the first hydrogen bob IV MIKE, a
two stage explosive using fission and fusion, completely eliminated one
of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, a blast equal

(22:27):
to seven hundred Hiroshimas. This was just the start. A
scientist swiftly realized that fission fusion hybrid bombs could be
boosted exponentially. The threat of destroying the planet with a
single weapon was real. Global powers attempted to change that trajectory.
In nineteen fifty three, US President Dwight Eisenhower delivered what

(22:48):
is known as the Atoms for Peace Address at the
United Nations in New York City, in which he called
on the entire body of the world scientists and engineers
to abandon the military use of atomic reactions and instead
adapt their studies to the arts of peace. Most scientists
focused on fission, but a handful of researchers, regarded by

(23:08):
some mainstream academics at the time as mavericks or dreamers
or con artists, realized that fusion was the ultimate world
change in prize and set about trying to utilize it.
The first generation of fusion machines, incorporating mirrors or lasers
or electric currents, all ended in miserable failure. Some simply
didn't work or were exposed as frauds, while others formed

(23:31):
plasma that lasted a fraction of a second before collapsing.
Plasma physicists learned was a fiendish subject substance containing it
has been compared to wrapping jelly and rubber bands. Volatilities
in plasma events that snuff the reaction were given descriptive
names kink, instability, sausage instability, bump entail. The list totals

(23:56):
more than fifty by the time of the second United
Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of atomic energy.
Held in Geneva, Switzerland, in nineteen fifty eight, world leaders
generally agreed that all nations nuclear energy research should be
declassified and shared. Soviet Union concurring disclosed a breakthrough that

(24:17):
was later given the name tokemac, shortening of the Russian
phrase to roidal chamber with magnetic coil. The tokmac was
an elegant design that could achieve hotter plasmas and longer
confinement times than anything before. No fusion device had ever
been more promising, and scientists calculated that bigger tokemacs would

(24:40):
provide the volume needed to maintain plasma in a stamp
stable and energetic state. By the late nineteen seventies, three
separate giant tokomacs were in development in Princeton, New Jersey, Oxfordshire, England,
and Naka, Japan. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent
on each one an optimism search, but years passed in

(25:01):
which none of these new machines came close to proving
that fusion was economically feasible. Fusion observers like to say
is twenty years away and always will be. At a
juncture when fusion could have easily been abandoned, it was
unexpectedly revived. In nineteen eighty five. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev

(25:21):
and U S President Ronald Reagan held a summit in Geneva,
their first ever meeting. The agreement they reached included a
declaration that the two nations and any other countries willing
to join them would work together to build a fusion
reactor for the benefit of all mankind, and thus from
the end game of the Cold War was born Eater.

(25:43):
Bickering and infighting commenced immediately. Eater is in human in scope, hot, cold, immense,
sub atomic, yet can also seem like the most human
thing ever bloated by geopolitics, red tape and hubris. Two
dozen European countries in Japan promptly joined the alliance, and
with no nation holding majority control, haggling began over Eater's

(26:05):
technical design and cost. The squabbling dragged on for years
through the break up of the Soviet Union in nineteen
ninety one. Russia remained with Eater and bureaucratically onward into
nineteen ninety eight, when the US, having spent three hundred
forty five million dollars on what some officials felt was
basically nothing quit the project. The remaining members soldiered on

(26:27):
and finished the design specs. Ter's machine will have five
times the volume of the next largest tokamak. Around the
time that the US government, urged by American academics, rejoined
the program in two thousand three. That same year, China
and South Korea also signed up, followed soon after by India.
EETER had become the United Nations of Science, a home

(26:49):
for the best and brightest from all over the world,
as One Eater executive Rosalie described it. In reality, though,
a disparate medley of cultures with rudderless governance meant that
the project was behind schedule and over budget. As a
matter of course, the battle over where to build the
machine consumed more years of politicking, ultimately coming down to

(27:11):
France or Japan. A compromise was reached and it was
decided that there would be a Japanese director General and
a French work site. Ground was broken in January two
thousand seven, a mere twenty one years after the Gorbachev
and Reagan accord in Geneva. Seven more years of preparatory
work ensued, clearing and leveling the site, then creating an

(27:32):
elaborate foundation fitted with shock absorbers to protect the machine
from potential earthquakes. Just over a decade ago, in twenty fourteen,
construction finally began on the monumental Tokomac housing, the centerpiece
of the thirty nine buildings and technical areas sprawled across
E Terras campus. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine.

(27:55):
For today, E reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening,
Keep on listening and have a great day.