hazardous, meaning the outside air is unhealthy
for anyone, 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. Realta
Fusion, a company spun out from research done at
UW-Madison, will build a 200 zero zero zero square
foot research and development facility at the
long vacant Oscar Mayer 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. Realtor CEO
Kieran Furlong joins us now to explain the project. And
thanks for being here. >> Thank you very much for
having me. 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 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 fuze 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 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 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 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
infusion, 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 fuze 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. >> 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 WHAM
machine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So
plasma is the fourth state of matter. So you think,
you know, ice, water, steam. And 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
temperatures much hotter steel vessel, for example.
But we're making great progress with it. There's
still some work to do, and that's why we'll be doing
our R&D in this new facility.
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 great 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, the ability 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 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 hubs for fusion in the 21st