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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
UW-Madison will build a $200,000 sorry $200,000 no it's more like a hundred million
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
thousand 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.
Both the CEO, Kieran Furlong, joins us now to explain the project and thanks for being
here.
Thank you very much for having me.
So from all-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, you know, 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, 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 energy, our 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, and 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 the sun and all the other stars in the universe.
So in many ways, it's the, it's the oor energy that we have in the universe.
The sun has the advantage of massive, massive scale.
So it's just so large, and its density gets us to the conditions that you can have fusion
occur.
So in 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 get them very, very
hot, hotter than the center of the sun.
And that itself is quite challenging.
What 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 HUAM machine
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
So plasma is the fourth state of matter, so you think, you know, 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 temperature is
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 in 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've got, 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 a, you know, very well placed from a manufacturing standpoint.
We believe to, you know, 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 to know how to build those and demonstrate that we can do that
cost effectively.
I think Wisconsin is a 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.
Karen, 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 Fryberg.
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