You
As electricity use tips up
between staying indoors with air
conditioning due to smoky air
and heat, the issue of
energy and where to get it is a
hot topic here and around the
country.
And this week it was announced that
a massive nuclear fusion research
center is coming to Wisconsin.
Realtor Fusion, a company spun
out from research done at
UW-Madison, will build a
$200,000, oh, sorry,
$200000.
No, it's more like 100 million.
Thank you.
As electricity use tips
up between staying indoors with
air conditioning due to smoky
air and heat, the issue
of energy and where to get it is
a hot topic here and around the
country.
And this week it was announced that
a massive nuclear fusion research
center is coming to Wisconsin.
Realtor Fusion, a company spun
out from research done at
UW-Madison, will build a
200,000 square foot research
and development facility at the
long vacant Oscar Meyer plant
on the north side of Madison.
The move means the company will be
headquartered there, and the
workforce is expected to increase
from 50 employees to
600.
Along with $60 million from
private investors, the state
of Wisconsin gave nearly $40
million in tax exemptions,
with the city of Madison kicking in
nearly $3 million in financing.
Realtors CEO Kieran Furlong
joins us now to explain the project
and thanks for being here.
Thank you very much for having me.
So from old time hot dogs
to futuristic generation
of energy, what is
the promise of nuclear fusion energy
in this increasingly kind
of electricity hungry world?
Yeah, I mean, I think fusion really
is the future for humanity, right?
It's the source of energy that
we need.
If we're going to provide enough
food, water, materials,
mobility for 10 billion people,
we need fusion.
We're not going to dig or drill our
way out of this, and we can
build all the renewables plants
we can manage,
but we're still going to need more
energy, and fusion holds that
promise.
Well, give us kind of the nuclear
fusion for dummies description.
Sure.
Yeah, so fusion is another form of
nuclear energy as it involves
reactions with the nuclei of atoms,
but it's the opposite process
from what most people will think of
when they think of conventional
nuclear fission.
That's where you take a large heavy
atom like a uranium atom and
split it.
With fusion, we take very small
light atoms and fuse them together,
basically smooshing them together.
And we take different flavors of
hydrogen, push those together and
form helium, the same stuff that you
would find in party balloons.
But when we do that, you get a small
amount of the
mass gets converted into a massive
amount of energy.
So I've read that researchers have
been trying since the 1930s
to generate electricity through
nuclear fusion,
described as the same process that
powers the sun.
Why is it so hard?
Correct. So it was first postulated
back in the early 20s by
researchers looking at, well, what
powers the sun?
And so fusion is what powers sun and
all the other stars in the universe.
So in many ways, it's the oor
energy that we have in the universe.
The sun has the advantage of
massive, massive scale.
So, it is just so large,
and its density gets us to the
conditions that you can have fusion
occur.
So when fusion, we have something
that's known as the, you know, you
basically need something called the
triple product.
We basically need to get those
elements we want to fuse together
hot enough, dense enough,
for long enough.
We don't have the advantage of the
sun's density, so we need to them
very, very hot, hotter than the
center of the Sun.
And that itself is quite
challenging.
Do you feel as though your
scientists have cracked the code to
generating electricity through
fusion?
We're on the way there.
And in fact, just recently we
announced an experiment we did
where we demonstrated we could pull
electricity directly from the
plasma that we're operating in the
HWAM machine at the University of
Wisconsin Madison.
So plasma is the fourth state of
matter. So you think ice,
water, steam.
The next step up would be plasma.
So we need to get a plasma.
We can hold that in a magnetic cage.
Essentially, because we need to get
it to temperatures much hotter than
you could hold in a steel vessel,
for example.
But we're making great progress with
it, there's still some work to do,
and that's what we'll be doing, our
R&D, in this new facility.
What kind of gamble is it
with all this money and the retrofit
involved?
So I think the first thing is we're
not trying to defy any laws of
physics, so I'm a
great believer in the ingenuity of
humans. We will find a way forward.
There's an old joke about fusion
that folks will say, oh, it's 20
years in the future and always will
be. That kind of ignores the
effort that's needed to get there,
and now we're making the effort.
So there's more investment coming
into fusion. We've got more people
working on the problem.
I'm 100% convinced humanity
will solve fusion.
The question is when.
What do you think about when?
So we're targeting the 2030s,
so, you know, early to mid 2030s is
when we intend to have a first
commercial operation based
on our technology.
Does this project put Wisconsin on
the map for fusion in a major
way and why Wisconsin?
Yeah, I think so, in terms of
putting it on the map.
And that's really been kind of one
of our intentions from the start.
So the University of
Wisconsin-Madison is already one of
the top institutions for research in
this field of plasma physics and
fusion.
The state is very
well-placed from a manufacturing
standpoint, the ability to
do precision and advanced
manufacturing.
Fusion industry is essentially
bringing those two things together.
We've got the scientific research to
show, well, here's the kind of
machine we need to build, and then
we need know how to build those and
demonstrate that we can do that cost
effectively.
I think Wisconsin is very well
placed to do that.
That was one of the factors in
deciding to set up our R&D
facility and corporate headquarters
here.
And I think, Wisconsin absolutely
will be one of the
main hubs for fusion in the 21st
century.
All right. Well, we appreciate you
being here, Kieran, for a long
thanks.
Thank you very much.
For more on this and other issues
facing Wisconsin, visit our website
at pbswisconsin.org
and then click on the news tab.
That's our program for tonight.
I'm Frederica Freyberg.
Have a good weekend.
Thank you.