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MARIA ZUBER: Well, there's a big push right now,
in decarbonizing the grid with renewables; solar, wind.
But at some point, probably around 2040,
we're going to max out with renewables.
And we won't be able to decarbonize further.
We're going to need another zero-carbon option.
DENNIS WHYTE: Decarbonization is this immense task
in front of us.
Fusion, if we can get it going fast enough,
will play a unique role in pushing us
towards decarbonization.
ROBERT MUMGAARD: Fundamentally, what fusion is,
is trying to put a star in a bottle.
And tokamak is basically the simplest type of bottle.
And in this case, it's a magnet that
holds the plasma inside of it, and it
insulates the fuel, the plasma.
So it can get very, very, very hot.
Fusion energy is effectively the universe's choice
for how it generates energy.
DENNIS WHYTE: The reason we don't have fusion power
plants right now today, was largely one of scale,
is SPARC, which is a particular design.
Its mission is to show that you can
make net energy from fusion.
If you want to hold something at very high temperatures,
but you can't use a physical object to hold it,
then you need a force at a distance.
And this is essentially what the magnetic field does.
We embed it in a magnetic field.
These very, very, very hot particles cannot escape.
And then you put it in the right configuration,
and then it gets hot enough for those conditions to occur.
ROBERT MUMGAARD: And I remember distinctly,
when HTS, the new type of superconductor,
was coming into its own.
We've known this material existed for a while.
It's been conjectured that you could turn it into magnets
at relevant parameters.
But it's been somewhat disagreed upon
of how long that would take.
To double the field, who knows how long that will take.
And what we've done, we've doubled
the field in three years.
MARIA ZUBER: So when you do a complex, technological project,
I always ask the question, how many miracles do we need?
And these miracles are the real tall poles in the tent.
And in the creation of a fusion power plant,
arguably, the biggest miracle is the demonstration
of the magnets.
And that's where we are today.
DENNIS WHYTE: This new magnet technology
allows us to make fusion so much smaller with known science,
that we're going to be able to get there so much
sooner than people has thought previously possible.
That's really as simple as that.
MARIA ZUBER: We innovated, not only on the technology,
but we innovated organizationally
to team with a startup in order to be
able to get the results of this work out to the world
as quickly as possible.
In the case where we are now with climate change,
we're running out of time.
We felt that MIT needed to stand up as an institution
and say so.
ROBERT MUMGAARD: We built this so
that the magnet was the really difficult thing to do.
And then if you had the magnet, the next step
would be much easier.
And that's where we are now.
DENNIS WHYTE: If we can make this magnet work,
this puts fusion within reach on a time scale that was not
thought possible before.
And we bring economic viability for fusion much, much sooner.
MARIA ZUBER: While we are going to continue
to be working on the science, SPARC is not a science project.
It's a commercial entity.
ROBERT MUMGAARD: We like to be optimists.
Imagine the world in 2050, where you've got 10,000 fusion power
plants producing 20% of the global energy use
without emitting any carbon, that would
be really good for everybody.
DENNIS WHYTE: Our Kitty Hawk moment in fusion
is seeing this hot plasma fuel make net energy
for the first time.
Our goal is to do that by mid-decade.
It's the trajectory that comes with mankind
starting with fire, that understanding
they can control fire.
And we've been through many different fundamental energy
sources.
Fusion is going to be the next and last one because it's
literally the power of the universe in our hands.
MARIA ZUBER: I'm looking forward to the point,
sooner rather than later, that there will be fusion power
plants on the grid, and we'll be in
a decarbonized electric system.
And I believe at that time we'll look back and think about when
it was that we realized that this
was going to become a reality.
When I really believed that this would work
was with the demonstration of the magnets.
And that time is now.
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