Nucleon, nuclear power car, once under development by Ford

When greentech investing was in sort of a bubble in 2007/2008, it wasn’t all that uncommon for a former web or computing entrepreneur to take on a crazy dream in the energy sector. But now, after the recession and a difficult year for greentech, it’s quite a bit less common. However that’s not stopping entrepreneur Russ Wilcox who is the former CEO and co-founder of display-maker E Ink, and according to Boston.com, has just joined next-gen nuclear startup Transatomic Power as its CEO.

Transatomic Power is a startup designing a new type of nuclear reactor that can run off of nuclear waste and also produce significantly less waste than the traditional lightwater nuclear reactor. Called the “Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor” or “WAMSR,” the reactor uses liquid fuel and molten salt — in contrast to solid fuel rods — and also has a more safe way to power down the system than a traditional lightwater nuclear reactor.

Happy, low waste, nuclear

In a TED talk video (see clip below) Transatomic co-founders Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie — both PhD students at MIT’s nuclear engineering department — point out how there’s been little innovation in the nuclear tech space over the years, partly because it’s hard for nuclear developers to adopt new technology in a world dominated by the lightwater nuclear reactor. Another reason for some slow periods of nuclear innovation was the nuclear incidents, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island (and probably add Fukushima to that list).

However, decades ago, there was a brief era of innovation for nuclear in the U.S., says Massie, who showed a slide of a nuclear powered automobile once under development by Ford called the Nucleon. Nowadays, though, new nuclear technology will likely be deployed first outside of the U.S., particularly in China, where there are dozens of new nuclear sites proposed and under development.

Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor

Transatomic is only in the early stages of research and development. The company has raised less than a million dollars to start work on a prototype. Building full scale nuclear reactors can cost in the hundreds of millions to billions range.

Partly because of the high costs, and also because of the long time tables, there’s only a handful of new nuclear startups out there, and most focus on waste and safety says Dewan. TerraPower is a Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures-backed nuclear startup building a so-called traveling wave nuclear reactor that can also use waste fuel for fuel. Kurion is a startup developing nuclear waste cleanup tech; Hyperion is a startup developing a micro-scale nuclear reactor; and NuScale is another startup building small scale nuclear power.

Most next-gen nuclear technology is being developed by scientists and old-school power execs. But some former web and computing entrepreneurs have found their way to nuclear. Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold made their fortunes off of Microsoft. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has invested in nuclear fusion startup General Fusion. Perhaps the fortunes made off of computing and the web will be large enough to spark innovation in nuclear.

Images courtesy of Transatomic’s TED talk.

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That process for turning waste (from nuclear and other substances) into glass is called vitrification, and it’s the widely accepted best practice for how to clean up and store nuclear waste. Kurion already owned some aspects of this technology, and Kurion’s business model is to make the nuclear clean up process more distributed, more flexible and more low cost. Traditionally vitrification has been a more centralized process.

Workers Controlling the Remote Cleaners at Fukushima

Kurion owns another nuclear clean up tech called “ion specific media,” which is a material that basically soaks up nuclear particles in water and liquids and shrinks the materials down to a small enough size so that it can be turned into glass. Kurion used its ion specific media to remove 70 percent of the radioactivity from the waste water at the Fukushima nuclear plant after last year’s disaster.

Winning a seat at the table for helping clean up Fukushima was a huge win for Kurion. It was the only startup involved in the water cleanup process — other firms included France’s AREVA, Japan’s Toshiba and Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy — and it also dominated the cleanup process.

Four-year-old Kurion is already profitable, is based in Irvine, Calif., and is backed by Lux Capital and Firelake Capital Management.

The GeoMelt technologies were originally developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Labs, have been used commercially since the 1990′s and have treated more than 26,000 metric tons of waste, says Kurion. The GeoMelt tech is also under consideration for use at the sizable nuclear clean up site the Hanford Tank Farm.

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Above is the final design, and to the right, one of the prototypes. The final design includes:

• Extensive logging capabilities
• The ability to work in scenarios where Internet and power have been out for days
• A sensor that can detect all three forms of radiation.

(It doesn’t have a radio (wireless capabilities).)

Huang says he doesn’t plan on manufacturing the Geiger counter, but has donated the design to the community (and open-sourced it), and that means a long-time Geiger counter maker International Medcom will be able to commercialize the product if they choose. Huang says it cost $3,000 to make the design and the two prototypes. Not bad.

Some of the designs that Huang abandoned I’ve included below:

Images courtesy of Bunnie Huang.

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The anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, which claimed the lives of 19,000 and left another 325,000 without permanent housing, was observed on Sunday with a moment of silence and prayer at 2:46pm, the time at which the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck.

In the wake of the disaster, Japan reassessed its energy policy, alongside many nations which have reevaluated their nuclear power programs. Germany decided to shutter all of its nuclear plants, which provide 23 percent of the country’s electricity, by 2022. Even China took action, putting a temporary freeze on nuclear approvals and reducing its nuclear energy targets.

Japan gets 30 percent of its power from nuclear energy but as of the one year anniversary of Fukushima, just two of the countries 54 nuclear reactors are up and running. The rest are shut down, many undergoing testing, with the common belief that the trauma of Fukushima will result in most of these reactors never again coming online.

At a recent conference, I ran into the head of the Japanese office of a global investment bank and we paused to consider the consequences of suddenly shutting off 30 percent of the power for the world’s third largest economy. He didn’t think we’d see many of those 54 nuclear reactors online again anytime soon, and when the conversation turned to acquisitions, I asked if he had considered many of the solar companies that have been so beat up, their valuations at all time lows. He just smiled and said, “Yes, we’re on it.”

There’s a massive cleantech opportunity right now in Japan, and one small way to commemorate those who lost their lives in Fukushima is to create safe and renewable sources of energy fed into a reliable grid infrastructure. Last year’s landmark Japanese renewable energy bill, passed in August, set up a feed-in-tariff system similar to what’s employed in Germany and Italy. Though over five months later, major Japanese companies that are planning solar farms, like Mitsui, Toyota and Hitachi, still await clarification on policies stemming from the bill, like what exactly the feed-in-tariff will be priced at.

There have been other gestures, like the one from Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of the Japanese telecom, Softbank, who has set up a renewable energy foundation with a modest billion yen ($12.2 million). Softbank will invest another couple hundred million in a renewable energy power generation business.

Son is betting on the future deregulation of the utility market in Japan and has gone as far as calling for a pan-Asian smart grid that would link Japan’s grid with those of other Asian countries through an undersea cable system. What’s more likely going on is that Son sees a high cash flow business, similar to telecom, on the horizon with utilities getting guaranteed rates for renewable energy.

Son’s not the only one eyeing a Japanese smart grid. Tokyo Electric Power, which operated the Fukushima plant, will begin the first smart meter rollout targeting 3 million customers this year with the goal of getting 17 million smart meters installed by 2019. Japan remains behind smart meter rollouts in the U.S. and Europe, but it could quickly catch up.

Japanese companies have been eyeing smart grid assets as well. Toshiba spent $2.3 billion and reportedly outbid GE to acquire global smart meter maker and grid management software provider Landis+Gyr last May. And more recently, Hitachi invested $30 million in smart grid networking company, Silver Spring Networks, an early stage strategic investment that could help Hitachi maintain a strong position in the implementation of the Japanese smart grid.

These are early days of change in Japan, a country that prior to Fukushima was the third largest producer of nuclear power, and remains the world’s largest importer of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and coal. Looking at 2009 figures, 84 percent of Japan’s energy consumption came from oil, coal, and natural gas. And the dream for Japan’s energy future had always been to move nuclear power, as a share of electricity generation, from 24 percent in 2008 to 50 percent by 2030.

What was so attractive about nuclear for Japan was that the country has almost none of its own hydrocarbon resources. Despite the outrage in Japan over Fukushima and the general feeling that nuclear power should be decommissioned, there will be a creeping desire to return to nuclear as the most practical solution.

Ultimately that debate will divide the country at a time when what is required is a new vision for Japan’s energy policy. The Japanese government should move more quickly to articulate renewable energy policies alongside a strong push for government investment in cleantech. Moves over the past year indicate that the private sector in Japan is eager to step up on both the grid side and the power generation side to get clean power to the market. What Japan needs now is stronger leadership on its energy policy.

Image courtesy of flickr user Paul J Everett.

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Nuclear waste cleanup startup Kurion (which I once called the most successful greentech startup you haven’t heard of) says it’s responsible for removing 70 percent of the radioactivity from the waste water at the Fukushima nuclear plant after last year’s disaster. Kurion says, since it shipped its technology to Japanese utility TEPCO last summer, the Kurion system has processed 36 million gallons of contaminated waste water and removed 9.4 million curies of cesium (see graphic below).

Kurion has developed a material it calls “ion specific media,” which basically soaks up nuclear particles and then shrinks the materials down to a small enough size so that it can be turned into glass, which is a process called vitrification. It’s the standard process used by the nuclear industry to encapsulate waste, but Kurion has created a more modular process, so the cleanup technology can be quickly shipped to a contaminated site, then the waste can be safely shipped elsewhere for storage.

Kurion was one of a group of companies selected by the beleaguered utility to clean the seawater that had been pumped into the reactors to cool them down. Other companies that made up the cleanup crew included France’s AREVA, Japan’s Toshiba and Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy; Kurion was the only startup included. Kurion is a profitable four-year-old, 15-person, startup based in Irvine, Calif., which was backed by Lux Capital and Firelake Capital Management.

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Fusion is indeed a stunningly potent source of energy that falls firmly on the reality side of the science fiction divide — unlike unicorns. Indeed, fusion has been achieved (sub break-even) in the lab, and in the deadliest of bombs. On the flip side, fusion has been actively pursued as the heir-apparent of nuclear fission for over 60 years. We are still decades away from realizing the dream, causing many to wonder exactly what kind of “dream” this is.

Our so-far dashed expectations seem incompatible with our sense of progress. Someone born in 1890 would have seen horses give way to cars, airplanes take to the skies, the invention of radio, television, and computers, development of nuclear fission, and even humans walking on the Moon by the age of 79. Anyone can extrapolate a trajectory, and this trajectory intoned that fusion would arrive any day — along with colonies on Mars. Yet we can no longer buy a ticket to cross the Atlantic at supersonic speeds, and the U.S. does not have a human space launch capability any more. Even so, fusion remains “just around the corner” in many minds.

I am sympathetic to delayed predictions, and the fact that fusion has failed to deliver on the promise that it’s “just around the corner” for decades does not mean that it will never arrive. I can compare this to Malthus’ insight that exponential population growth was on a collision course with finite agricultural capability, or to various warnings about collapse along the way. Just because the predictions have not yet been satisfied does not mean that they will not be someday. In fact, the two divergent predictions become related. If we can manage to hold it together this century and maintain a high-tech civilization during our forced transition off of fossil fuels, it becomes far more likely that we will get to the point of employing fusion. If, on the other hand, we overshoot and collapse, we may descend too far to viably pursue fusion this century.

Fusion by the Numbers

What’s fusion all about, anyhow? Let’s come at it with numbers. We saw in the post on nuclear fission that allowing a heavy nucleus like uranium to split into two comparable pieces resulted in the sum of the resultant masses being less than the initial mass. The missing mass emerges as (kinetic) energy according to E = Δmc², where Δm is the change in mass, and c ≈ 3×10⁸ m/s is the speed of light. In essence, some of the nuclear binding energy invested the heavy nucleus — which actually reduces the net mass of the nucleus — has been liberated.

To understand this better, consider the fact that a single neutron has a mass of 1.08665 atomic mass units (amu: 1.66×10⁻²⁷ kg), and a neutral hydrogen atom (one proton plus one electron, minus a trivial amount of electromagnetic binding energy: just 14 parts per billion) has a mass of 1.007825 amu. To make ²³⁵U, we take 92 hydrogen atoms, add 143 neutrons, and stir. Without considering nuclear binding energy, the sum would be 236.96 amu. Yet the neutral ²³⁵U atom has a mass of 235.044 amu. The “missing” 1.92 amu is the nuclear energy that would be released by building (fusing) this ensemble.

Think of it this way: when a nucleus grabs hold of a passing neutron, the deathly-strong nuclear grip slams the neutron into the nucleus, momentarily giving it kinetic energy. Initially, the nucleus jiggles like jello in an excited state, before releasing this energy (via gamma ray, or fast electron in beta decay, etc.) back to the world. In releasing this energy, its mass must decrement in deference to Einstein’s most famous relation. In this way, every nucleon added (proton or neutron) contributes its direct mass to the nucleus, but then subtracts about 0.008 amu of binding energy, on average — in effect weighing in at only 0.992 amu-a-pop.

Of fundamental importance in appreciating the energy gains inherent in fusion and fission processes is the chart of binding energy per nucleon. The graph below plots the binding energy per nucleon in units of MeV, where 1 MeV = 1.6×10⁻¹³ J and is equivalent to 0.00107 amu via E = mc². Or, roughly speaking, 1 MeV is one-thousandth the mass of a single nucleon. The horizontal axis of the plot is the total number of nucleons—protons plus neutrons—in the nucleus.

Higher binding energy translates to smaller net mass, compared to the dumb sum of constituent masses. So the higher on the curve, the more energy can be given up in building that nucleus. Iron sits at the top (with plenty of company in neighbors like nickel). On the left side, adding pieces together constitutes a net energy gain (fusion), while on the right, one must tear nuclei apart (fission) to climb up the hill. Thus it is said that fusion yields net energy for atoms smaller than iron, and that fission yields energy for atoms heavier than iron.

But let’s refine that point. If I tried to split ⁸⁶Kr, for instance, at 8.71 MeV/nuc into two ⁴³Ca atoms at 8.60 MeV/nuc, I have not climbed up the binding energy hill. In practice, one must have mass number above about 100 before fission into two equal pieces will release net energy. But the point is almost meaningless, given that the only three nuclei susceptible to slow-neutron fission have 233, 235, and 239 nuclei — well above the threshold for energy gain.

You may have noticed by now that if climbing the hill is the goal for energy gain, we have a lot more climb available on the left (fusion) side than on the right (fission) side. In particular, notice ⁴He sitting pretty atop a local spike. ⁴He is such a tightly-bound nucleus that heavy nuclei undergoing radioactive decay often eject one of these hard nuggets like a boxer spitting out a tooth, called alpha decay. ²³⁸U, for instance, will typically spit out 8 “teeth” and 6 electrons (beta) in its journey to become ²⁰⁶Pb. In any case, ⁴He is unique among nuclei, and bears the special name of alpha particle.

For example, building a ⁴He nucleus out of four protons—as our Sun is so talented at doing—we gain 28.3 MeV (7.07 MeV/nuc times four nucleons). Second-best would be starting with two deuterium (²H, or D) nuclei to build ⁴He. In this case, we go from two nuclei bound at 1.112 MeV/nuc (times two nucleons each; then times two deuterons for 4.45 MeV total) to 28.3 MeV for a total climb of 23.85 MeV. Still pretty darned good: not much penalty starting with D. Another relevant starting point is combining D with tritium (³H, or T), popping out the unwanted neutron. In this case, we start at 7.88 MeV total, for a net climb of 20.4 MeV.

Compared to fission, where each split releases about 200 MeV of energy, it might appear that this fusion stuff is comparatively wimpy — seeming out of kilter when we look at the steeper slope for fusion on the binding energy plot. The discrepancy is the number of nucleons involved. Mirroring the example in the nuclear fission post, ²³⁵U, at 7.6 MeV/nuc splits into ⁹⁷Rb and ¹³⁷Cs at about 8.4 MeV/nuc each. Although the slope is meager (a mere 0.8 MeV/nuc step), multiplying by the nucleon number yields a binding energy gain of 97×8.4 + 137×8.4 − 235×7.6 = 180 MeV.

On a per mass, or per nucleon basis, fusion wins hands-down: one gram of deuterium results in 10¹² J of energy, or 275 million kcal. Fission gives a comparatively small 20 million kcal per gram of ²³⁵U. So fusion is over ten times as potent. Keep in mind that chemical energy like that in fossil fuels is capped around 10 kcal/g. Note the conspicuous absence of the word million. On the energy scale, then, nuclear in either form is outrageously more potent than chemical energy.

Fusion Fuel Options

The two fusion schemes for which we can produce the requisite fuel are D-D and D-T, involving deuterium and/or tritium. Deuterium comprises 0.0115 percent of natural hydrogen, and is thus abundant in anything containing hydrogen — e.g., water. Tritium, on the other hand, is virtually non-existent in the natural world because it is unstable and decays with a half-life of 12.3 years. But as it happens, the requirements on D-T fusion are less impossible than for D-D, so all current efforts are focused on a technique for which there is no natural resource available.

Okay, so the pointy-heads aren’t that stupid. There is a way to create ³H by smacking lithium (either ⁶Li or ⁷Li) with a neutron and knocking out a tooth—er, ⁴He—leaving either ³H or ⁴H (in the latter case promptly dripping a neutron to become tritium).

I find it helpful to consult a chart of the nuclides when considering such shenanigans. Here is the bottom-end of the chart, which is basically the physicist’s version of a periodic table.

The number of neutrons increases from left to right, and the number of protons increases vertically. Thus all helium nuclei will be on the same row, for instance. Gray shading indicates a stable nucleus (stable well beyond the age of the Universe), light blue is semi-stable, and yellow less so. Each block contains the name of the nucleus/isotope, the fractional abundance (if stable), the half life (if unstable), the mass of the neutral atom in atomic mass units, and the decay path (arrows). Decays can be beta-minus (blue, transition to upper left), beta-plus (magenta to lower right), alpha (long yellow arrow to lower left), neutron drip (green arrow to left), or proton drip (red arrow down) These are the chess-board rules. Incidentally, it is possible to reconstruct binding energies from the mass numbers in each block.

We can use the chart to follow the two reaction types:

D + D → ⁴He

The D-D reaction is pretty straightforward. Marrying two nuclei together, each with one proton and one neutron, the result has two protons and two neutrons. No extra neutrons are generated in the bargain.

For D-T, we must first create the tritium from either flavor of lithium:

⁶Li + n → ⁴He + T, or

⁷Li + n → ⁴He + ⁴H → ⁴He + T + n

In either case, the “decay” chain is not the natural one, but is jarred out of the nucleus in the impact. Nominally, adding a neutron to ⁶Li just yields the stable ⁷Li, and adding a neutron to ⁷Li makes ⁸Li, which beta-decays in about a second to ⁸Be and then instantly splits into two alpha particles (⁴He). But in smackdown mode, one can conjure tritium, possibly yielding an extra neutron, depending on the isotope of lithium used. Then we have:

D + T → ⁵He → ⁴He + n

Note the extra neutron. This is handy, since we need neutrons to convert lithium to tritium. But note also that using ⁷Li generates two neutrons per D-T reaction, while ⁶Li only generates the one. Neutrons will be lost to other parasitic causes, so it’s handy to have extras around. On the other hand, neutron capture by the containment vessel makes it radioactive and will also damage its structural integrity, so we want to be careful about how many extra neutrons there are. Unfortunately, natural lithium is 92.4% ⁷Li, so tuning the ⁶Li/⁷Li mix to give the critical number of neutrons implies some sort of lithium enrichment on the front-end.

We aren’t exactly swimming in lithium, so did we make a bad trade in picking this horse? Each lithium atom converted to tritium will end up yielding about 20 MeV of thermal energy, so that we need 1.3×10³² Li atoms annually to produce our world consumption of 4×10²⁰ J. That’s about 1500 metric tons of lithium annually, or about 5% of current lithium production. Proven world reserves give us 9000 years, and estimated resources give us 22,000, according to the U.S.G.S. Mineral Commodities Summaries.

For fun, let’s look at how much water each person needs to supply each year to provide enough deuterium. The average American demands 10,000 W of continuous power, or 3×10¹¹ J of energy per year. At 20 MeV per whack, each person needs 10²³ reactions per year. In the D-D case (requiring twice the deuterium as D-T), this means we need 2×10²³ deuterium atoms—coming from 2×10²⁷ hydrogen atoms at a fractional abundance of 0.01 percent. Sounds like a lot, but it’s 3,300 moles — amounting to 60 kg of ordinary water. 60 liters is similar to the amount of water used in a typical American shower. It’s hard to emphasize enough the extent to which deuterium availability poses no problem: there is enough deuterium in the ocean to provide our current energy demand for billions of years.

I think now you’re seeing a big part of the reason why fusion makes our eyes sparkle. Even given lithium limitations, I place D-D and D-T fusion in the “abundant” box.

What Makes Fusion Hard

A simple obstacle stands between us and fusion. It’s called the Coulomb barrier. Protons hate to get near each other, on account of their mutual positive charge and concomitant electrostatic repulsion. And they must get very close—about 10⁻¹⁵ m—before the strong nuclear force overpowers Coulomb’s vote. Even on a perfect collision course, two protons would have to have a closing velocity of 20 million meters per second (7 percent the speed of light) to get within 10⁻¹⁵ m of each other, corresponding to a temperature around 5 billion degrees! Even if the velocity is sufficient, the slightest misalignment will cause the repulsive duo to veer off course, not even flirting with contact. Quantum tunneling can take a bit of the edge off, requiring maybe a factor of two less energy/closeness, but all the same, it’s frickin’ hard to get protons together.

Yet our Sun manages to do it, at a mere 16 million degrees in its core. How does it manage to make a profit? Volume. The protons in the Sun are racing around at a variety of velocities according to the temperature. While the typical velocity is far too small to defeat the Coulomb barrier, some speed demons on the tail of the velocity distribution curve do have the requisite energy. And there are enough of them in the vast volume of the Sun’s core to occasionally hit head on and latch together. One of the protons must promptly beta-plus decay into a neutron and presto-mundo, we have a deuteron!

Deuterons can then collide to make helium (other paths to helium are also followed). A quick and crude calculation suggests that we need about 10³⁸ “sticky” collisions per second to keep the Sun going, while within the core we get about 10⁶⁴ bumps/interactions per second, implying only one in 10²⁶ collisions needs to be a successful fusion event.

Deuterons have an easier time bumping into each other than do lone protons, mainly because their physical size is larger. In fact, a deuteron’s relatively weak binding makes them even puffier than the more tightly bound tritium nucleus (go tritons!). At a given temperature, deterons will move more slowly than protons, and tritons more slowly than deuterons.  All flavors contain a single proton—and so exert the same repulsive force on each other—but the increased inertia from extra neutrons exactly counters the slower speed, so that each has the same likelihood of trucking through the Coulomb barrier. Then we’re left with size. Deuterons are bigger than tritons, so D-D bumps will be more common than D-T bumps.

But there’s a catch.  As soon as D and T touch, they stick together. Conversely, when D touches D, a photon (light) must be emitted in order for them to stick, which doesn’t usually happen. It is therefore said that D-T has a greater cross section for fusion than D-D.  Estimates for the critical temperature required to achieve fusion come in at 400 million Kelvin for D-D fusion, and 45 million K for the D-T variety. But these temperature thresholds depend on the density of the plasma involved, so should not be taken as hard-and-fast. Still, we need our fusion reactors to be hotter than the center of the Sun because we do not have the luxury of volume and density that the solar core enjoys. Does this fact give you pause?

Confinement

Overcoming the Coulomb barrier requires enormous kinetic energies of the particles, translating into enormous temperatures — well beyond any container’s ability to hold. No material resists melting above a mere 5000 K. 50 million degrees is not even funny.

At these temperatures/energies, electrons are not able to hold onto their rides, so we get a completely ionized plasma zipping this way and that. At 100 million degrees, for instance, deuterium nuclei have an average velocity of about one million meters per second. Left alone, the plasma would explode to the size of a football field in 0.1 milliseconds. Recall that we can’t get fusion to happen without these ridiculous velocities, so we’re stuck having to herd these hyper-fast particles without the help of Ritalin. It has been found that plasmas at the requisite temperature suffer instabilities from turbulence that we have been unable to tame. It becomes like a game of whack-a-mole, according to my colleague George Fuller: clamp down on one pesky behavior, and another one pops up.

The main scheme being pursued in the world today is magnetic confinement in a plasma containment vessel called a tokamak. Charged particles follow curved arcs in a magnetic field, so that strong fields confine the particle paths to tight curls. The radius of the path is proportional to the particle velocity, which spans a large range of values in a thermal plasma. One must produce a magnetic field strong enough to contain the fast tail of the velocity distribution, else the plasma has a leak at the high-velocity end and depletes itself rather quickly. Every particle collision resets velocities, so a leaking fast tail is constantly re-populated. At a field strength of 10 Tesla (near the upper end achievable), the mean-velocity deuteron at 50 million K has a 2 mm path radius. ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is a tokamak design being built in France under international support. The current timeline calls for achievement of a 480 second burst of 500 MW power in the year 2026, although there is no plan to capture the generated heat for the production of electricity (note the “Experimental” in the project name).

The other primary scheme gives up on trying to confine the plasma in some steady state, instead following a path similar to the philosophy behind fusion bombs: force an implosion of the fuel to extraordinarily high densities and temperatures, and let the cursed thing explode. This scheme goes under the name inertial confinement, since one relies on the inertia of the implosion to bring nuclei close together. In the U.S., the National Ignition Facility (NIF) focuses 192 high-power laser beams onto a small pellet to initiate a symmetric crunch. The idea for a power plant would be that pellets are loaded one after the other, detonated, and the effluent heat collected to make steam. As far as I know, there is no current plan to harness any heat generated at the NIF—being experimental, like ITER.

Flies in the Ointment

The ITER experiment, if it adheres to its schedule and projected budget, will cost something like $20 billion to build and produce pops of unharnessed thermal power by 2026. I should note that most large experimental projects have slipping schedules, and it would be a fantastic irony if a fusion experiment violated this trend! In any case, we could imagine another several decades before commercial fusion tentatively steps onto the scene, putting us at mid-century. The projects will undoubtedly be very expensive, require intimate involvement of the highest level of expertise, and will likely not catch on in a big way until investors see a track record of profitability—if that ever comes to pass. So that’s fly number one: we’re looking at very long term.

Fly number two is that D-T fusion necessarily involves neutrons, which do not respond to magnetic or electrostatic confinement and therefore hurtle off to the walls of the containment vessel. In doing so, they knock into the atoms comprising the vessel, dislocating them within the lattice and causing structural damage. The integrity of the containment vessel will degrade like plastic in sunlight. The neutron flux from a D-T reactor is substantially higher than for a conventional fission reactor.

Fly number three is also related to neutrons: after doing their damage in the containment walls, the neutrons will marry a nice, plump nucleus and settle down. But the marriage is often radioactive, so that the container becomes radioactively “hot.” In fission, we get two radioactive daughters for each 200 MeV produced. For D-T fusion, if we are able to utilize most of the neutrons for conversion of lithium into tritium (and use enriched ⁶Li), we might be able to lose less than 0.2 neutrons per 20 MeV reaction (pure, uninformed guess on my part), which comes out to the same number of radioactive products per unit of energy. But at least materials choices for the container walls offers some control over the menagerie of radioactive products—unlike the randomness of fission. All told, the radioactive toll from a D-T fusion reactor may be comparable to that of a fission reactor, though with shorter half-life.

Then there is the extremely finicky nature of achieving fusion.  Getting something to work in the lab is much different from having it operate reliably for years on end.  Any significant departure from optimal conditions will see the fusion yield diminish.  ITER aims for a thermal output ten times that of the input energy.  In an eventual self-running mode, siphoning 10% of the output power in electrical form requires pulling out about 30% of the thermal power to run the heat-engine generator.  This makes for a 3:1 net energy gain, which could quickly transition to a net energy drain if things are not maintained in tip-top condition through the years.

Another possible fly is that the superconducting magnets used to generate the extreme magnetic fields for confinement could lose cryogenic cooling, “go normal,” and explode. An explosion that damaged the tokamak could result in a radioactive release to the environment. Even though the probability is small, we routinely go to great expense to mitigate low-probability catastrophic events, and so a massive, expensive containment building would likely be required.

Each fly translates into cost. In the end, it is unclear whether a fusion plant—even after the physics is tamed—would be economically viable, and attractive enough for investors to take on endeavors of this scale, complexity, and risk.

A Solar Perspective

A few days after watching a television show on fusion, I had an epiphany while walking to the bus. Why are we enamored with fusion? Because the fuel supply is virtually unlimited; the energetics represent the epitome of what physics has to offer; the primary emission is useful helium; the radioactive waste is shorter-lived than for fission (damning with faint praise?); fusion plants could presumably be sited anywhere; surely it’s one step closer to warp drive. But then I realized that the Sun (being its own fusion reactor) also provides billions of years of energy, well in excess of our current demand. And my refrigerator and other appliances already are run by this source in a modest PV/battery installation at my home. I personally can’t ignore the asymmetry between the promise of future technology and technology that sits on my roof! If we removed the storage barrier for solar, would fusion still be viewed as the holy grail?

This prompts two questions. First, what is the relative funding expenditure for fusion research and for battery/storage research? Second, what are the appeals offered by fusion that could leave solar in the shade?

A cursory investigation reveals that the U.S. spends approximately $450M per year on the NIF, and chips in about $32M per year to ITER (though expected to escalate to about $350M/year during the construction phase from 2014–2016). Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy Hub for Batteries and Energy Storage plans to operate at $24M per year, with a similar expenditure in Fuels from Sunlight. It’s about as I thought.

I can only muse about the appeals of fusion over solar. I think area is one: fusion plants could be comparatively compact. I think location-dependence is another. Most people don’t realize that the worst site in the continental U.S. (Olympic peninsula) delivers fully half as much annual solar energy as the Mojave desert. Given a good storage solution, solar becomes useful almost anywhere. I think in part, we are driven by the sense of progress/conquest. Cracking the fusion problem matches our precious narrative. But I am left wondering if these reasons are compelling enough to keep us reaching for the gold that may continue to disappoint when we have other options whose viability may be closer at hand.

Naturally, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. I support research whatever the direction. But I want to make sure we aren’t falling victim to irrational hangups and expectations. We at least need to evaluate this notion: to know ourselves.  One may object that I’ve simply replaced one holy grail (fusion) for another (storage).  Which one is voted more likely to succeed?

Fusion Prospects

No one can truly say whether we will achieve fusion in a way that is commercially practical. If teams of PhDs have spent over 60 years wailing on the problem while spending tens of billions of dollars, I think it’s safe to use our fusion quest as the definition of hard. It’s a much larger challenge than sending men to the Moon. We have no historical precedent for an arduous technological problem on this scale that ultimately succeeded to become a ho-hum commercial reality. But for that matter, I don’t think we have any precedent for something on this scale that has failed. In short, we’re out of our depths and can’t be cocky about predictions in either direction.

I am hopeful that fusion can one day become a practical reality. I certainly understand it to be feasible in principle. My misgivings mainly lie in the extreme complexity of the challenge. It may take a year of intense study to become an expert on a coal-fired plant, to the point of being a go-to resource for troubleshooting and maintenance. A nuclear fission plant may take five years to master—it took about that long to get the first break-even performance after discovery of fission. But after a century of development (by the time any commercial fusion reactor sees the light of day), how long must one study plasma physics in order to have a firm handle on operation of a fusion plant? The NIF uses two lasers occupying a floorspace the size of a Wal-mart store (no exaggeration). How many PhDs will it take to keep a state-of-the-art laser of this magnitude operating? I know that the 2 W laser I use in my research causes this PhD enough trouble!

I became interested in energy because I sensed that we are approaching a phase change in society as the age of fossil fuels begins to ebb. So much of what we have become can be attributed to cheap and abundant surplus energy. Our energy future is highly uncertain. Commercial fusion may come along decades down the road—mid-century at the earliest—but even then it is yet another source of heat that we can use to make electricity. Another step (mobile storage) must accompany fusion development to replace petroleum functions, and even then at significant disadvantage in energy density using current technologies. So yeah—I hope it helps us out one day. But I’m not sure we can wait that long.

I thank Bob Hirsch for his review and comments.

Image courtesy of Jurvetson, Blyzz, DavideProd,

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Workers Controlling the Remote Cleaners at Fukushima

While 2011 was filled with dreary news of solar bankruptcies, electric car companies shutting their doors and U.S. politics demonizing clean power, I’ve been searching for untold stories of successful cleantech startups that have been flying under the radar. Here’s one that’s been at the top of my mind: nuclear waste cleanup startup Kurion.

The profitable four-year-old, 15-person, startup based in Irvine, Calif. won the mother of all nuclear clean up deals in 2011: Fukushima, one of the largest nuclear disasters in history. While Kurion’s CEO John Raymont wouldn’t comment on the financials of Kurion’s deal to help cleanup

Sampling of water in the spent fuel pool of Unit 4, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station

Fukushima in an interview with me, the entire site will likely cost tens of billions of dollars over decades to be cleaned up by a variety of contractors and government workers.

This summer, about eight weeks after an earthquake and tsunami created the infamous events that led to the emissions of nuclear contaminants into the air and water at the Fukushima reactors, Kurion started shipping its nuclear water clean up technology to Japanese utility TEPCO.

Kurion was one of a group of companies selected by the beleaguered utility to clean the seawater that had been pumped into the reactors to cool them down. Others companies that made up the cleanup crew included France’s AREVA, Japan’s Toshiba and Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy; Kurion was the only startup included.

Nuclear waste to glass

Dispersing Dust Protectant, Common Pool Area

Kurion has developed a material it calls “ion specific media,” which basically soaks up nuclear particles and then shrinks the materials down to a small enough size so that it can be turned into glass, which is a process called vitrification>. It’s the standard process used by the nuclear industry to encapsulate waste, but Kurion has created a more modular process, so the clean-up technology can be quickly shipped to a contaminated site, then the waste can be safely shipped somewhere for storage.

Since the summer, Kurion’s technology has been used as part of what Raymont calls “an unprecedented external reactor water cooling system,” designed to replace the in-plant reactor

Sampling of water in the spent fuel pool of Unit 4, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station

water cooling system that normally would purify and recycle reactor water to keep the reactor cool. The entire water cleaning system, which has cleaned and cooled some 50 million gallons of water at the site, includes an oil and debris removal system from Toshiba, the cesium removal system from Kurion, a decontamination system to polish the Kurion effluent from AREVA, and a desalinization system from Hitachi.

Until the nuclear cores of the reactors are removed, they’ll continue to discharge nuclear particles, so a water cooling and cleaning system will have to be in place for maybe a decade. TEPCO originally thought it would use the cleaning system from Kurion and the others only temporarily, but TEPCO has now decided to keep the temporary system in place for at least a year, and Kurion has a continuing contract to ship its materials and technology to TEPCO.

Future of Kurion

Having one of the world’s largest nuclear cleanups under its belt puts Kurion in a prime position. However, Fukushima wasn’t Kurion’s first cleanup deal; back in the day, the technology was used to help clean up the U.S.’s own Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. But the cleanup effort at Fukushima effort has been far faster and far larger (at least 100 times the amount of water was cleaned at Fukushima).

In 2012, Kurion plans to use its success to double its staff to at least 30 people, and is currently on a hiring spree. While Kurion has the backing of Lux Capital and Firelake Capital, it has raised only a small amount of money, and down the road could potentially be looking to raise more rounds.

This year, Kurion also plans to develop its vitrification (glass encapsulating) technology more — to become a one-stop nuclear waste clean up shop — and be able to go after any contract in the world, says Raymont. Basically, it wants to compete with the big guys, and instead of being the sole startup amongst the large public firms cleaning nuclear waste sites, it will eventually aim to get a bigger piece of the pie.

Images courtesy of TEPCO.

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If you have Bill Gates as your liaison, doors tend to open. The company was also reportedly in talks with Japanese giant Toshiba to jointly develop a small nuclear reactor. TerraPower also has high-profile investors including Khosla Ventures — Vinod Khosla’s venture fund — Charles River Ventures, Gates himself and the investors at Intellectual Ventures, which is an invention think tank founded by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold (here is my “From Microsoft to nuclear, 10 questions for Nathan Myhrvold”).

TerraPower is actually a spin-off from Myhrvold’s incubator, and the company is building nuclear traveling wave reactor technology, which is a relatively new type of small nuclear reactor design that can use the waste byproduct of the enrichment process, or waste uranium, for fuel. Traveling wave nuclear reactors have been under development since the 1990s, but TerraPower is one of the first companies to develop a practical design for the technology. (See “6 nuclear power startups to watch” and “Nuclear power by the numbers.”)

The benefits of the traveling wave reactor design are that the reactor doesn’t have to be refueled or have its waste removed until the end of the life of the reactor, which is theoretically a couple of hundred years. Using waste uranium reduces the amount of waste in the overall nuclear life cycle and extends the available supply of the world’s uranium for nuclear by many times. According to a presentation by TerraPower CEO John Gilleland, “operation of a traveling wave reactor can be demonstrated in less than ten years, and commercial deployment can begin in less than fifteen years.”

Not surprisingly, with its Microsoft connection, TerraPower has leaned heavily on supercomputing to design and model the reactor and the life cycle of the fuel. The TerraPower team is using “1,024 Xeon core processors assembled on 128 blade servers,” which is a cluster that is “over 1000 times the computational ability as a desktop computer.”

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This week we’ve analyzed the state of cleantech venture capital and used data to discern myth from reality. In summary, we’ve found that:

• There will be sufficient late-stage capital in the next few years to feed the ’06-’08 “baby boom” of cleantech start-ups, but there may be a corresponding dearth of Seed/Series A money.
• Contrary to conventional wisdom, cleantech VC is not sucking wind compared with VC overall. The two are performing about the same on an interim basis and cleantech investment has actually overdelivered on IPOs.
• Half of successful cleantech start-ups stumble on the way to the finish line, enduring a down round that disproportionately hurts founders and employees. Entrepreneurs should approach fundraising with a long-term orientation and be wary of sky-high valuations.

A few parting thoughts as I muse on these points:

• It’s still really early. Cleantech venture capital investment only became substantial in 2006, and the average VC-backed start-up takes eight years from founding to exit. That means the real fruits of this labor are yet to come. If there is ever to be a cleantech IPO boom, one would expect it to start in the middle of this decade.
• Limited partners should reassess early-stage cleantech. More and more cleantech venture capital is earmarked for late-stage growth equity deals. As a result, these investment rounds are likely to engender price competition that depresses returns. In contrast, Seed/Series A cleantech financing looks to be cyclically underserved, and the enhanced return profile that accompanies scarcer capital could help offset early-stage technology risk. If I were at an LP institution right now, I’d be looking for the sharpest early-stage cleantech investment team that can zig while most investors zag.
• New company founders should weigh alternatives to VC. While CEOs at late-stage firms will have adequate financing options in the next few years, new cleantech founders will find themselves fiercely competing for capital. Think of it this way: Since 2009, about 50 cleantech ventures per year receive Seed/Series A funding. Do you want to place all your bets on being one of the fifty? There are plenty of other underexploited options for cleantech entrepreneurs – including grants from agencies like ARPA-E during initial technology development (case study: FastCAP Systems), funding from a large corporation in exchange for a preferred license or other IP rights (case study: Liquid Metal Battery Corporation with Total), and early sale to a corporation with an executive job in the bargain (case study: Zensi with Belkin).
• The optimal investment vehicle remains to be figured out. I pointed out in the second post that VC firms have, so far, mostly restricted their funding to companies that fit in the venture “box” – i.e., $10-30 million invested over the life of a technology company, all in equity, for an outcome in five to 10 years. By definition, this excludes big-payoff categories with mondo capital requirements (like nuclear fusion), fields that have acceptable capital needs but stretch the timeframe (like advanced materials), adjacent investment opportunities in cleantech value chains (like land deals for biofuel feedstocks), and financing the deployments of technologies versus the technologies themselves (an odd one, since more value tends to get created downstream). All of these omissions leave money on the table.

A number of VC firms – mine included – are blazing a trail by shaving these square pegs for the venture model’s round hole, and flexible alternative investors like family offices, superangels, and corporations have a window of opportunity exploit. Despite this, I can’t shake the suspicion that a truly purpose-built cleantech investment vehicle lies in the future, not the present.

Thus ends our whirlwind tour of cleantech venture capital. Studying a fuzzy topic like this keeps a person humble, because most of the predictions you make are likely to be wrong! Please don’t hesitate to contact me with your own, especially if they differ.

Matthew Nordan (@matthewnordan) is an energy VC investor at Venrock, one of the oldest and best-performing VC firms. Earlier, he co-founded and led the energy tech analyst firm Lux Research and forecasted technology futures at Forrester. There’s more where this came from at mnordan.com.

Image courtesy of RSinner.

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Dispersing Dust Protectant, Common Pool Area

Nuclear waste startup Kurion only came out of stealth back in November to discuss its plan to modularize the process of turning nuclear waste into glass (the generally accepted way of dealing with the waste). Now this morning Reuters reports that the beleaguered Japanese utility that owns the nuclear reactors at Fukushima, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), plans to start treating contaminated water at its reactors this Summer with technology from Kurion, Toshiba, Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, and Areva.

TEPCO tells Reuters that the amount of water that it has pumped into its reactors to stop them from overheating has reached about 87,500 tons. That water, which is contaminated with radioactive materials, needs to be cleaned, and the group’s technology can “adsorb and isolate radioactive elements, then the treated water would be re-used to cool down the reactors,” reports Reuters.

Kurion’s technology and business plan is to make the process of vitrification — or turning nuclear waste into glass — modular, which makes it cheaper, faster and more efficient. Vitrification essentially permanently encapsulates nuclear waste, and while it’s still radioactive, the waste can be stored and transported more easily. Kurion has also developed a better vitrification pre-treatment process.

Josh Wolfe, a partner with Lux Capital that invested in Kurion along with Firelake Capital, explained to me in an interview late last year that Kurion’s process called the “Modular Vitrification System (MVS),” “brings the technology to the waste tanks, instead of taking the waste to a massive centralized treatment plant.” “Our technology flips the vitrification process on its head,” said Wolfe, “making vitrification an order of magnitude less expensive.”

Kurion has completed other milestones over the past several months, including small scale testing of its technology, and has moved into “a long series of tests on simulated waste streams.” Kurion also says it has a contract with engineering firm CH2MHill to test out its tech to manage uranium metal bearing sludges at a site in the U.S.

Nuclear waste management is a problem that hasn’t seen a whole lot of innovation over the past few decades. Wolfe told me that $1 out of every $4 from the Department of Energy’s budget goes toward nuclear waste management, so there is a sizable opportunity to help the DOE cut that expense. Now with the Japanese nuclear disaster — which was recently raised to the threat level of Chernobyl — there’s also an immediate short term market.

Image courtesy of TEPCO.

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