Inside Fusion’s Turning Point

TROY CARTER CLIP
"Ten years ago, I would not have expected us to be here."

MATT MILES CLIP
"We're moving from an R&D approach to a demonstration approach."

TROY CARTER CLIP
"There's a lot of excitement around fusion - and for good reason."

MATT MILES CLIP
"Our goal is to put fusion energy on the grid."

[MUSIC]

KASE:

Hello everyone, and welcome to The Sound of Science - the podcast highlighting the voices behind the breakthroughs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

MORGAN:
We're your hosts, Morgan McCorkle.

KASE:

And Kase Clapp.

MORGAN:
This is the third episode in our nuclear miniseries. So far, we've talked about the momentum around nuclear energy in East Tennessee, and we've explored the nuclear fuel cycle.

KASE:
And now we're talking about fusion - which seems to be quickly moving from "always decades away" to possibly the future of energy.

MORGAN:
Fusion is the process that powers stars. Instead of splitting atoms apart like fission, fusion combines light atoms together and releases enormous amounts of energy.

KASE:
The catch is that making fusion happen on Earth is incredibly hard. You have to create and control matter at temperatures hotter than the center of the sun.

MORGAN:
We actually did a full fusion explainer episode a few years ago, so this episode isn't really about the basics.

KASE:
We wanted to explore why the conversation around fusion suddenly feels different.

MORGAN:
Because something has definitely shifted in the last few years. There's major private investment. New companies. Utilities making plans.

KASE:
And East Tennessee is at the center of the action.

[MUSIC]

MORGAN:
One of the people helping lead Oak Ridge's fusion work is Troy Carter of the lab's Fusion Energy Division.

KASE:

One of Troy's main points is that fusion has moved from scientific aspiration to a credible reality.

MORGAN:

So how exactly did we get here?

TROY CARTER:
Well, there's been a lot of, it's a convergence of many things, is what I'd like to say. I mean, it's the starting point is just decades of investment by the federal government, really across the world and international collaboration to get us to the point where we have understanding and predictive capability of the plasmas at the heart of fusion devices.

That's been a big one. And that led to game changers, the NIF result, getting ignition multiple times now. Being able to get to high performance in magnetically confined devices like the Joint European Torus, which had a record of fusion energy production. That's key.

MORGAN:

Different experiments around the world have helped validate key pieces of fusion science.

KASE:

At the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scientists produced more energy than the laser delivered directly into the target.

MORGAN: Meanwhile, magnetic confinement experiments in Europe demonstrated record plasma performance and stability.

KASE: None of these are commercial power plants.

MORGAN: But together, they showed that fusion concepts that once seemed purely theoretical are becoming experimentally real.

KASE: All this progress has been a powerful motivator for people working in the field. And they're ready to move past the scientific demonstration phase.

CARTER: It's also been kind of a coming together of the community, the several reports that have come out that where the community feels like we're ready for an energy goal. And so having kind of a prioritized plan for how we get from where we are now to, you know, fusion energy on the grid.

MORGAN:
One thing I found interesting talking with Troy is that he didn't point to one single breakthrough responsible for fusion's momentum.

CARTER:
I should add another one is technologies - this is science, but also some technology. So high temperature superconducting magnets, you know, advances in other enabling technologies. And all these things come together at once.

KASE:
It's more like a bunch of puzzle pieces finally clicking into place at the same time.

MORGAN:
Right. The science has advanced. The technology has advanced. And now investors and private companies are looking at fusion differently.

CARTER:
And the big one is the investment. So that given the progress has been made, the investor community recognizes the opportunity that we're poised to be able to get to an energy source.

KASE:
One of the wildest things to me is just how much private money has suddenly entered this space.

MORGAN:
In 2020, private fusion companies had raised under two billion dollars globally. Now it's more than nine billion.

KASE:
That is a huge shift for a field that people used to joke was always thirty years away.

MORGAN:
Troy said even ten years ago, he wouldn't have expected the field to be where it is today.

CARTER:
This is a new place to be for me, for sure.

[MUSIC TRANSITION]

KASE:
One company trying to turn fusion into an actual commercial power source is Type One Energy.

MORGAN:
The startup company moved its headquarters to East Tennessee in 2024 and is working with TVA on plans for a fusion power plant at the Bull Run Energy Complex.

KASE:
We talked with Matt Miles, senior vice president of external affairs for Type One Energy.

MATT MILES:

We have put together a team to design the world's first fusion power plant in the form of a stellarator. Stellarator is a device that uses magnetic confinement. It's once said it was a cousin of a tokamak, but a world leading expert said they're more like siblings as far as the physics.

KASE:
Ok -- quick fusion vocabulary break…

MORGAN: And fair warning that every fusion explanation eventually turns into a discussion about donuts.

MILES:
Let's get into the pastries. Right. This is always the analogy. If you think of a tokamak you think of a donut. And it's very symmetrical.

KASE: And the stellarator?

MILES: Think of a cruller, you know, a twisted donut, right? Or a big cinnamon twist that you would twist around. That's what a stellarator at its core looks like. It's just this repeating wave that goes around.

MORGAN:
So tokamaks and stellarators are types of fusion machines that use magnetic fields to hold superheated plasma in place.

KASE:
But the big difference is how they keep the plasma stable.

MORGAN:
A tokamak is simpler in shape - basically a big magnetic ring.

KASE:
But the plasma inside naturally wants to wiggle around - making it unstable.

MORGAN: That's because containing plasma with magnets is like trying to put rubber bands around Jello.

KASE: So the machine has to constantly mitigate these plasma disruptions to avoid losing energy or damaging components.

MORGAN:
A stellarator is more complicated physically - all those twists and curves are designed very carefully -

KASE:
-but the payoff is that the plasma naturally wants to stay stable on its own.

MORGAN: Despite the differences, Matt said Type One Energy is still taking advantage of decades of fusion research.

MILES: So everything that has been learned, almost everything, about 95% of what it's been discovered in tokamaks is, from a physics standpoint, it's also related to stellarators. So we essentially are building off of 70 years of tokamaks and stellarator technology that have been demonstrated in one form or another, different parts of the world.

MORGAN:
Type One Energy is putting all that knowledge into a project called Infinity One.

KASE:
It's the machine they'll use to test whether all the pieces of the stellarator design work together the way they expect to.

MORGAN:
Not just the plasma physics - but the materials, the exhaust systems, maintenance, manufacturing… all the practical things you'd need for an actual power plant.

KASE:
Because ultimately, their goal isn't just to build a successful experiment.

MORGAN:
It's to build Infinity Two - a commercial fusion power plant connected to the grid.

MILES: We're a company that is, that is built to put fusion energy on the grid and not to do experiments for the sake of, learning more about fusion for the sake of fusion. This is to everything we do is driving to a point to where we can design and construct and operate a power plant that the market wants.

MORGAN:
One thing that kept coming up in our conversations was how interconnected the fusion landscape is.

KASE:
Fusion companies don't exist in a vacuum. They need manufacturing expertise. Utilities. Universities.

MORGAN:
And that's part of why Type One Energy landed here.

MATT MILES
We looked at four different states, 18 different locations, and kept coming back to this part of the country. We're 10 to 15 minutes from Y-12, 10 to 15 minutes from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the expertise with US ITER is based here, also the University of Tennessee, the oldest nuclear engineering program in the country. It made a lot of sense for us to be here.

KASE: That proximity has already led to a number of collaborative endeavors.

MORGAN: Earlier this year, ORNL, Type One Energy and University of Tennessee announced plans to build a new high-heat flux facility to evaluate how materials react under fusion's extreme conditions.

MILES: When we looked around the world and we needed to verify some of the design margin, we said, hey, how where can we test these materials. And we were limited, right. And just so happened Oak Ridge was thinking about the same thing.

It's going to be a world class material testing capability. We're also building that at Bull Run. It's going to go in a machine shop that kept that plant running for 60 years.

KASE: And that image really captures the transition happening in fusion right now.

MORGAN: A former coal plant is becoming a proving ground for the materials that could power the next generation of fusion reactors.

MUSIC

KASE: Materials are a big deal in the race to build a commercially viable fusion power plants.

MORGAN: Because fusion environments are incredibly extreme.

KASE: We're talking temperatures hotter than the center of the sun.

MORGAN: Particles moving at enormous energies.

KASE: And materials being bombarded constantly.

MORGAN: So before you can build a commercial fusion reactor, you need to answer a basic question:

KASE: How can you be sure materials will survive in these crazy conditions?

MORGAN: That's where another ORNL project called the Material Plasma Exposure eXperiment - or MPEX - comes in.

TROY CARTER CLIP
MPEX is going to be a plasma flamethrower.

MORGAN:
The idea behind MPEX is basically to recreate some of the brutal conditions materials would experience inside a fusion power plant.

CARTER:
It's going to subject materials to intense heat and particle fluxes. Using a flexible device that can mimic the conditions found in a wide range of these, fusion concepts, and try to explore how those materials behave, how the material erodes, how it responds.

MORGAN:
And that matters because different fusion designs put different stresses on materials.

KASE:
You can have a beautiful design on paper, but if the machine erodes too quickly -

MORGAN:
-or traps fuel in the walls -

KASE:
-or components fail constantly -

MORGAN:
-it's not commercially viable.

CARTER:
You can't be replacing the wall of your device every two months or something.

MORGAN:
That this is exactly the kind of challenge national labs are built for.

KASE:
Because private companies can move fast and take risks-

MORGAN:
-but they usually can't build every major research capability from scratch.

CARTER:

It's a daunting challenge to really take that on as well as everything else that they're trying to do to enable their concept. So, I mean, if you want the companies to proceed at a lot of risk, you can leave it all on their plate and let them try to do it.

We want the industry to succeed, and we want us to position ourselves at the lowest possible risk to get the US to capture the fusion industry. The best way forward is to leverage all the capability of the national labs and the universities. And we all work together with private sector, to try to find solutions to these technologies.

KASE:
And Oak Ridge has a lot of those capabilities already in one place.

CARTER:
Materials in particular, but in plasma physics, and then, you know, you look across the lab, there are things, you look at those pieces, the engineering pieces, the fusion materials and technology, the breeding blankets, that draws from capabilities that are already here in nuclear fission and isotopes.

And, you know, the capabilities exist in other places, advanced manufacturing, the MDF. And then these big facilities like HFIR, for example, SNS, these are capabilities and MPEX once it's built. These are capabilities that are uniquely found at a place like Oak Ridge, and the capability to use them in concert with simulation, making use of Frontier.

KASE:

MPEX is being assembled right now and Troy says they hope to have it operational by 2028.

MORGAN:
So while private companies are designing future power plants-

KASE:
ORNL is helping answer the question of whether the materials those plants depend on can actually survive.

MUSIC TRANSITION

KASE:
We wanted to hear from Troy and Matt whether this moment really feels different for fusion.

MORGAN:
Because fusion has had waves of excitement before.

KASE:
And Troy has been in the field long enough to remember some of them.

CARTER:
We've learned to temper our excitement in the fusion field. But I think this moment is very different. I mean, the fact the progress is real, what we've learned, again, through decades of federal investment, has really poised us on the verge of being able to push forward towards that energy source and the fact that we have alignment from the private sector. We have a lot of support from the administration, bipartisan support in Congress for this. It's a very different feeling about where we are right now. Now, there's still risk. We still have a lot to do. But there's a lot of excitement around fusion and for good reason.

MORGAN:
Matt sees that shift too - especially from the commercial side.

MILES:
I feel like we're moving from an R&D approach to a demonstration approach here.
The first half of the 2030s is our plan for getting fusion on the grid here in the Valley. It's ambitious. I don't think it's farfetched. I mean, if you look back at different types of programs, you can look to the Space X program, the success of that program, you know, it's a different focus.

KASE:
This timeline is bold.

MORGAN:
People are talking about fusion now in terms of manufacturing, construction schedules, supply chains and power markets.

KASE:
Not just theory.

MORGAN:

That doesn't mean fusion is solved.

KASE: Now the question is starting to shift from whether fusion can work to who's going to get there first.

CARTER:
We are kind of in a race to see if the U.S. is going to be the one that is the first to commercialize fusion and kind of own that industry.

MORGAN: And as fusion moves from theory toward industry, Oak Ridge is helping lay the groundwork for what comes next.

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KASE:
This has been the Sound of Science. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

MORGAN
And if you want to learn more about ORNL's fusion research, we'll have links in the show notes.

KASE:
Thanks for listening.

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