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As electricity use tips up between staying indoors with air conditioning due to smokey 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 real to fusion a company spun out from research done at

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UW-Madison will build a $200,000 sorry $200,000 no it's more like a hundred million

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this week it was announced that a massive nuclear fusion research center is coming to Wisconsin real to 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 the

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thousand square foot research and development facility at the long vacant Oscar Meyer plant

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on the north side of Madison.

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The move means the company will be headquartered there and the workforce is expected to increase

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from 50 employees to 600.

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Along with $60 million from private investors, the state of Wisconsin gave nearly $40 million

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in tax exemptions, with the city of Madison kicking in nearly $3 million in financing.

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Both the CEO, Kieran Furlong, joins us now to explain the project and thanks for being

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here.

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Thank you very much for having me.

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So from all-time hot dogs to futuristic generation of energy, what is the promise

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of nuclear fusion energy in this increasingly kind of electricity-hungry world?

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Yeah, I mean, I think fusion really is the future for humanity, right?

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It's the source of energy that we need.

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If we're going to provide enough food, water, materials, mobility for 10 billion people,

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we need fusion.

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We're not going to dig or drill our way out of this and, you know, we can build all the

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renewables, plants we can manage, but we're still going to need more energy and fusion

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holds that promise.

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Well, give us kind of the nuclear fusion for dummies description.

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Sure.

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Yeah, so fusion is another form of nuclear energy, it involves reactions with the nuclei

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of atoms, but it's the opposite process from what most people will think of when they

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think of conventional nuclear fission.

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That's where you take a large, heavy atom like a uranium atom and split it.

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With fusion, we take very small, light atoms and fuse them together, basically smooshing

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them together, and we take different flavors of hydrogen, push those together, and form

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helium, the same stuff that you would find in party balloons.

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But when we do that, you get a small amount of the energy, our small amount of the mass

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gets converted into a massive amount of energy.

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So I've read that researchers have been trying since the 1930s to generate electricity through

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nuclear fusion, and described as the same process that powers the sun.

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Why is it so hard?

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Correct.

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So it was first postulated back in the early 20s by researchers looking at, well, what

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powers the sun?

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And so fusion is what powers the sun and all the other stars in the universe.

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So in many ways, it's the, it's the oor energy that we have in the universe.

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The sun has the advantage of massive, massive scale.

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So it's just so large, and its density gets us to the conditions that you can have fusion

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occur.

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So in fusion, we have something that's known as the, you know, you basically need something

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called the triple product.

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We basically need to get those elements we want to fuse together, hot enough, dense enough

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for long enough.

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We don't have the advantage of the sun's density, so we need to get them very, very

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hot, hotter than the center of the sun.

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And that itself is quite challenging.

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What do you feel as though your scientists have cracked the code to generating electricity

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through fusion?

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We're on the way there.

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And in fact, just recently we announced an experiment we did where we demonstrated we

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could pull electricity directly from the plasma that we're operating in the HUAM machine

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at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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So plasma is the fourth state of matter, so you think, you know, ice, water, steam, the

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next step up would be plasma.

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So we need to get a plasma.

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We can hold that in a magnetic cage essentially because we need to get it to temperature is

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much hotter than you could hold in a steel vessel, for example.

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But we're making great progress with it.

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There's still some work to do, and that's what we'll be doing in our R&D in this new

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facility.

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What kind of gamble is it with all this money and the retrofit involved?

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So I think the first thing is we're not trying to defy any laws of physics.

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So I've got, I'm a great believer in the ingenuity of humans.

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We will find a way forward.

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There's an old joke about fusion that folks will say, oh, it's 20 years in the future

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and always will be, that kind of ignores the effort that's needed to get there.

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And now we're making the effort.

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So there's more investment coming into fusion.

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We've got more people working on the problem.

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I'm 100% convinced humanity will solve fusion.

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The question is when.

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What do you think about when?

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So we're targeting the 2030s.

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So, you know, early to mid 2030s is when we intend to have a first commercial operation

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based on our technology.

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Does this project put Wisconsin on the map for fusion in a major way and why Wisconsin?

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Yeah, I think so in terms of putting it on the map.

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And that's really been kind of one of our intentions from the start.

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So the University of Wisconsin-Madison is already one of the top institutions for research in

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this field of plasma physics and fusion.

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The state is a, you know, very well placed from a manufacturing standpoint.

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We believe to, you know, do precision and advanced manufacturing.

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Fusion industry is essentially bringing those two things together.

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We've got the scientific research to show, well, here's the kind of machine we need to

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build and then we need to know how to build those and demonstrate that we can do that

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cost effectively.

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I think Wisconsin is a very well placed to do that.

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That was one of the factors in deciding to set up our R&D facility and corporate headquarters

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here.

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And I think Wisconsin absolutely will be one of the main hubs for fusion in the 21st

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century.

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All right.

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Well, we appreciate you being here.

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Karen, for a long thanks.

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Thank you very much.

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For more on this and other issues facing Wisconsin, visit our website at pbswisconsin.org and

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then click on the news tab.

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That's our program for tonight.

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I'm Frederica Fryberg.

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Have a good weekend.

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