FII ESG London - S09 | The Road to Fossil Fuel Reduction

Nuclear fusion is the power of the sun and the stars. Since a hundred years ago, when they untangled the mysteries of the atom, they discovered that you could carry out reactions—not chemical reactions with atoms, but nuclear reactions with subatomic particles. And they soon deduced that meant you could create energy, enormous amounts of energy, surprisingly in two ways. It surprised me when I learned it at college when I was doing physics: by splitting the atom or by merging atoms. Both ways make energy. As you know, quite shortly after they discovered that, within the first 10 or 15 years, it had horrific consequences. They used it—the atom bomb came from splitting the atom. Then there was a race to develop the H-bomb, which comes from merging the atom—two different, opposite processes. Within a few years, they had developed a way of controlling the power of splitting the atom. By 1951, they opened a fusion reactor. Instead of an explosion like a bomb going off, they controlled the explosion and turned it into power. And we have that power all over the world today. There's one problem with that power: it produces very long-lived, very dirty, and very nasty nuclear waste which lasts for like 100,000 years. And so even though fission works really well and doesn't produce any carbon, people are not willing to throw in their lot with fission. If you could get fusion to work, it doesn't produce any long-lived radioactivity at all. So why hasn't it been done? Well, it's an engineering problem. It's very, very difficult to control fusion. You have to create a temperature of hundreds of millions of degrees centigrade, and that is obviously very hard to do. If you did that in your bathroom, it would vaporize your bathroom, wouldn't it? So it's a hard thing to control. They've been working at this problem for 50 years—actually more than 50 years, 70 years. They've been making progress for 70 years, but they still haven't done it. Now I contend that the time to invest in fusion is now. I contend that after that 70 years, the horizon is coming into view. We are approaching the Wright Brothers moment. Flight was a dream of mankind for centuries. I'm sure that millions of people were standing around saying it couldn't be done for many, many years. Lots and lots of people—in fact, I gather from Googling this morning, there were quite a few people saying it couldn't be done several years after it had been done. There were still endless people who were skeptical. But look how quick the progress was once someone had demonstrated feasibility. When I was young, I lived in Oxfordshire, and the European project in Oakham, Cullen—the Joint European Torus—that was a European project designed to capitalize on the discoveries in Russia in the 1960s, which discovered that the best way, a great leap forward in fusion, could be pursued by creating a kind of giant doughnut about as big as this stage, except a doughnut-shaped one. And inside that doughnut, you had very, very powerful magnets, and that created a magnetic field. It used to be called a magnetic bottle. When I was young, when I was a teenager, I had no idea what a magnetic bottle could really be. But I guess you just have to think it's a set of magnets which create curved forces, and they keep inside, separately from the walls of the steel vessel, a plasma—which is a super, super heated state of matter—which can be heated up to a temperature whereby in the middle of it, the nuclei of deuterium and tritium and hydrogen start to fuse together, and this starts to generate power. What you need to do is control that process and extract power from it. In the end, I went into the city and spent 35 years being a hedge fund manager—still am a hedge fund manager—did very nicely for myself, thank you very much, so probably a good decision not to get into fusion. But I did keep an eye all those years on the fusion business. So the Joint European Torus started operation in 1984 in Culham. It was a tokamak. As I say, 'torus' means doughnut basically; 'tokamak' means doughnut with crunchy magnetic fields in Russian, basically. That's what it means—it's an acronym. And people have been building tokamaks all over the world ever since. There have been literally hundreds of tokamaks built in the world, in many, many countries. I was very disappointed when the ITER—the International Thermonuclear something or other—was set up in Grenoble in the south of France in 2004, 5, 6, 7. That device, which is the world's collaborative effort to try and build an experimental reactor, has been under planning since 1987. They built it in 2007; it's destined to go live in 2030. It's an inspiring project from the point of view of collaboration, whether it's an inspiring project from the point of view of achieving the fastest possible development of fusion power—some disagree. Some think that free competitive markets, private enterprise, the stimulus and power that comes from investment, competition, stress, and creativity—some people think that the fusion industry could be developed in the same way as the airplane industry, or the computer industry, or the car industry—the many industries which we've seen, even in our lifetimes, incredible progress in. And when I met a rather eccentric bunch of people who claimed to have a fusion project 10 years ago, I was rather skeptical as to whether they could really challenge the governments. But they explained to me that the science is moving on all the time, the technologies are moving on all the time. The invention of something called high-temperature superconductors, which happened after ITER was planned—that happened in the late 1980s. And since then, these high-temperature superconductors can operate at much, much higher temperatures and produce very powerful magnets indeed—much more powerful magnets, which are much less expensive to cool. The result is that the people I met said that the calculations were wrong for ITER, and that you could build a small fusion reactor. For those mathematicians in the audience, the size of the reactor—the volume goes to the fourth power of the magnet. So if you can double the strength of the magnet, you make the reactor 16 times smaller. And if you make it 16 times smaller, you're 16 times cheaper. Instead of building it in something the size of a football field, you can build it in a shed in Abingdon. And that's what my colleagues have been doing. I think I'm just about out of time. There are 15 more projects around the world. Lots of big money is investing now. The fusion race is on.