In this episode of our podcast, we dive deep into the realm of nuclear fusion with Amit Kumar Singh, CEO of Nearstar Fusion. Amit introduces us to an ambitious future where energy production could be as sustainable and accessible as drawing water from a tap. He discusses Nearstar Fusion's innovative approach to energy generation using hypervelocity plasma railguns—a concept that might sound like science fiction but could be closer to reality than we think.
Amit explains the technical workings of these railguns, which are used to accelerate projectiles into a target containing deuterium, a hydrogen isotope, to achieve fusion. This process, he notes, combines elements of both magnetic and inertial confinement approaches, aiming to efficiently generate energy by overcoming the immense challenges traditionally associated with sustaining fusion reactions.
Throughout the conversation, Amit highlights the potential and efficiencies of fusion power, emphasizing its capacity to provide substantial energy outputs with minimal environmental impact. He explains how fusion, unlike other forms of nuclear energy, is inherently safe due to its lack of chain reactions, and how the energy produced can be harnessed using molten salt to heat water, subsequently generating electricity.
Further in the discussion, Amit addresses the scalability and commercial viability of fusion energy. He discusses the operational realities of running a fusion power plant, which includes rapid, repetitive firing of fusion-inducing projectiles. This aspect of the technology underlines the intense and precise nature of managing such an innovative form of power generation.
Lastly, the episode explores the broader implications of fusion energy on the energy sector and global climate initiatives. Amit reflects on the integration of fusion within the current energy landscape, its potential to complement renewable sources like solar and wind, and the challenges of transitioning from experimental to commercial stages. This discussion provides listeners with a comprehensive view of the future of energy, driven by a fusion of cutting-edge technology and sustainable practices.
In this episode of our podcast, we dive deep into the realm of nuclear fusion with Amit Kumar Singh, CEO of Nearstar Fusion. Amit introduces us to an ambitious future where energy production could be as sustainable and accessible as drawing water from a tap. He discusses Nearstar Fusion's innovative approach to energy generation using hypervelocity plasma railguns—a concept that might sound like science fiction but could be closer to reality than we think.
Amit explains the technical workings of these railguns, which are used to accelerate projectiles into a target containing deuterium, a hydrogen isotope, to achieve fusion. This process, he notes, combines elements of both magnetic and inertial confinement approaches, aiming to efficiently generate energy by overcoming the immense challenges traditionally associated with sustaining fusion reactions.
Throughout the conversation, Amit highlights the potential and efficiencies of fusion power, emphasizing its capacity to provide substantial energy outputs with minimal environmental impact. He explains how fusion, unlike other forms of nuclear energy, is inherently safe due to its lack of chain reactions, and how the energy produced can be harnessed using molten salt to heat water, subsequently generating electricity.
Further in the discussion, Amit addresses the scalability and commercial viability of fusion energy. He discusses the operational realities of running a fusion power plant, which includes rapid, repetitive firing of fusion-inducing projectiles. This aspect of the technology underlines the intense and precise nature of managing such an innovative form of power generation.
Lastly, the episode explores the broader implications of fusion energy on the energy sector and global climate initiatives. Amit reflects on the integration of fusion within the current energy landscape, its potential to complement renewable sources like solar and wind, and the challenges of transitioning from experimental to commercial stages. This discussion provides listeners with a comprehensive view of the future of energy, driven by a fusion of cutting-edge technology and sustainable practices.
00:00:01 Amit Kumar Singh
Imagine a world where this bottle of water can power your house for three days. That's the future we're gunning for at near Star Fusion.
00:00:11 Chris Sass
Your trusted source for information on the energy transition. This is the insider's guide to Energy podcast.
00:00:24
Why don't you?
00:00:25 Chris Sass
Help me understand what near Star Fusion is doing.
00:00:28 Amit Kumar Singh
Here near star, we're building the future of fusion power plants using hyper velocity plasma rail guns.
00:00:34 Chris Sass
So that that's a pretty, that's a mouthful. Help me understand. First off, what is a hypervelocity railgun? That sounds dangerous. It might.
00:00:44 Amit Kumar Singh
Sound dangerous, but it's actually quite safe. Rail guns. A lot of people know them from the military, but those are what are called solid armature rail guns. Those are different than what we're talking about here.
00:00:56 Amit Kumar Singh
A plasma armature railgun is 1 where we're using plasma to accelerate the projectile. In our case it's a 50 gramme projectile like this and when I say hyper velocity we're talking speeds of 10 kilometres per second or six miles per second, which is roughly 30 times the speed of sound.
00:01:16 Chris Sass
And so you're you're taking a projectile.
00:01:20 Chris Sass
And I assume you're shooting it into something to make fusion.
00:01:23 Amit Kumar Singh
That's right. So we're shooting in it into what we call a fuel target, which would be roughly this size roughly the size of a golf ball. And inside of this is an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium. So our approach uses what's called deuterium, deuterium and what we want to do is combine those two hydrogen atoms.
00:01:43 Amit Kumar Singh
Create some helium, but more importantly, create lots of energy and the way we do that is we have that fuel target which is impacted by this projectile at that hyper velocity.
00:01:54 Amit Kumar Singh
And we add a little magic sauce of of magnetic field around the target and then the combination of that magnetic field and that impact creates fusion conditions which creates a miniature fusion bomb.
00:02:08 Chris Sass
Wow. OK, so how do you contain that fusion? How do you keep it in there? So you've just shot something at a high rate of speed into something. Got some sort of chain reaction reaction to take place.
00:02:21 Chris Sass
So how do you contain it and get to capture the energy?
00:02:24 Amit Kumar Singh
So the great thing about fusion is that it doesn't change react, so it makes it inherently safe. Yeah, and so.
00:02:31 Amit Kumar Singh
And we're using.
00:02:32 Amit Kumar Singh
Just a very little bit of fuel, very, very small. And So what happens is when that energy is released out of that fusion implosion, we have a what's called a molten salt.
00:02:43 Amit Kumar Singh
Which is a chemical that's very good at absorbing heat.
00:02:46 Amit Kumar Singh
And so that energy that's released out of that fusion implosion is captured by that molten salt and then pump through a heat exchanger to go boil water. And then that's the steam from that water turns the turbine and puts clean energy on the power grid.
00:03:02 Chris Sass
OK, so I've got the general picture.
00:03:05 Chris Sass
To continually generate energy.
00:03:08 Chris Sass
Wouldn't you have to shoot a lot of these things?
00:03:10 Amit Kumar Singh
Absolutely. So we would shoot shoot these roughly once per second. So that's called 1 Hertz. And so you can imagine a single power plant would shoot roughly 35 million shots per year, so yes.
00:03:24 Chris Sass
Now fusions been around for a long time. What are some of the other methods that someone might use to make fusion? Like how does this different than some of the other efforts going on to?
00:03:35 Chris Sass
Generate fusion.
00:03:36 Amit Kumar Singh
Yeah, in the world of fusion, there are primarily 2 camps of approaches. One is called magnetic confinement and the other is called inertial confinement and magnetic confinement. You're trying to keep plasma alive like a little miniature sun 24/7. That's that's called steady state plasma. And that's incredibly difficult to do.
00:03:56 Amit Kumar Singh
But when you hear of designs like a tokamak or stellarator, that's essentially what they're doing.
00:04:02 Amit Kumar Singh
There, on the other side of the spectrum is called inertial confinement, which is basically doing it impulses and some iteration. So it in our case it's happening once a second. But another approach is they're trying to do it maybe 10 times a second. So often when you hear things like laser, laser fusion, they're doing inertial.
00:04:23 Amit Kumar Singh
Confinement and today you might have heard of the Nif's success that happened about a year and a half ago, where they actually were able to get more energy out than they were able to put in using inertial.
00:04:36 Amit Kumar Singh
Comment what's unique about Near Star is that we're actually trying to take the best of both worlds. Not only are we doing the inertial confinement with the impact with these projectiles, but we're also putting a magnetic field on the fuel target, so we get the benefits that the magnetic approach has as well. So we believe that.
00:04:56 Amit Kumar Singh
By combining the best of both worlds that we can achieve fusion faster than our friends and the fusion industry.
00:05:04 Chris Sass
Now near star, I'm sitting in a facility that's been here for 10 years. So you guys have been working on this problem for a while. What? What? Aha moments have accelerated this to make we me think that we're closer to this than we were ten years ago.
00:05:16 Amit Kumar Singh
When you started well, there'll be a number of things. One is the impact. Fusion is nothing new. The concept has been around for.
00:05:25 Amit Kumar Singh
Quite some time, roughly 50 years or so. But what really changed is that in in the previous research, the impact fusion required something to be accelerated at 200 kilometres per second, which is just not achievable even with the technology that we have today.
00:05:43 Amit Kumar Singh
But what was discovered is that if you actually magnetise the target, the amount of kinetic energy you need to initiate that fusion interaction goes down by a magnitude or or more. So that put it into the realm of the technology that we are experts at, which is building these plasma guns. You couple that with the advances.
00:06:05 Amit Kumar Singh
In compute technology, so the ability to do computer models instead of weeks or months, you can literally do computer models in a matter of days and potentially an.
00:06:16 Amit Kumar Singh
Hours it changes the iteration of or it changes the speed of your learning, and we've learned so much more in the last 10 years, and that's why this approach is now becoming viable.
00:06:29 Chris Sass
To to make the kind of reactors or system that you're taking, you started the show by talking about getting a lot of power from something the size.
00:06:39 Chris Sass
Of a water.
00:06:39 Chris Sass
Bottle. How big are these things?
00:06:40
MHM.
00:06:42 Amit Kumar Singh
So in our design A the physical footprint of a power plant would be pretty long and skinny. So think about the length of a football field, but maybe as wide as like two or three conference rooms. So in each instance of that would be roughly A50 to 100 MW reactor.
00:07:03 Amit Kumar Singh
And so what's nice about that is if you wanted to serve a community that needed two or 300 megawatts, you could easily put them in parallel next to each other on the ground. And you know, service what right size, the power plant to the energy needs of that market.
00:07:22 Chris Sass
How quickly can you spin up base, load up and down based on this architecture? Is it different or is it pretty consistent in the power? Like can you ramp up very quickly to?
00:07:31 Amit Kumar Singh
Get the power. We believe so. I mean, time will tell as we start building out the the actual prototype plant and whatnot, but the the parasitic energy requirements for our design.
00:07:42 Amit Kumar Singh
Or relatively low compared to, you know, alternative approaches. So we're we're quite optimistic that we'll be able to get that up and running faster.
00:07:51 Chris Sass
All right, so we're talking a lot of futures. I hear a lot of futures. I've seen a lot of cool stuff sitting around the building that we're in.
00:07:58 Chris Sass
Where are we at today and where are we going and and how long?
00:08:03 Amit Kumar Singh
Well, I always want to let people know fusion is hard, right? There's there's the engineering risk. But more importantly, there's the physics risks. So.
00:08:13 Amit Kumar Singh
No one should be telling you that it's going to happen next year. This is gonna this is a 5 to 10 year process at a minimum.
00:08:20 Amit Kumar Singh
Where we are now is we're still early stage. We have our computer models that are proving or showing us that we can achieve what we want to achieve, but we need to run live experiments and that's what we hope to do later this year. We're actually going to rent a ballistic testing facility to do some of our live experiments.
00:08:40 Amit Kumar Singh
And at that point, we will have a much better idea.
00:08:43 Amit Kumar Singh
Of is is the physics that we are designing going to work or not going to work and from there we can, you know, we'll have a few more physics to de risk, but the first hurdle of doing some single shot experiments on prototype targets is a big one for us to really get moving.
00:09:01 Chris Sass
So we still in the science phase where things are more peer reviewed.
00:09:04 Chris Sass
Or are we at the commercialization phase where we kind of keep stuff to ourselves to try to get competitive advantage? Where are we?
00:09:09 Amit Kumar Singh
In fusion, both if that's a valid answer.
00:09:12 Amit Kumar Singh
They're, you know, they're roughly 45 private fusion companies worldwide. That doesn't include entities out of China. And so we, we always have to kind of keep our secret sauce to ourselves. At the same time, investors are owed, you know, honest information that, you know, they don't always have the ability to technically do the.
00:09:34 Amit Kumar Singh
Due diligence required, so putting out research that is peer reviewed is necessary to kind of build that confidence in the investor community. So we have to do both. We have to share results, but we also have to keep some of our secret sauce to ourselves.
00:09:49 Chris Sass
Is it mostly physicists than you employ?
00:09:53 Amit Kumar Singh
At the current time, it's mostly physicists, but as we grow, we're going to need Mechanical Engineers, electrical engineers, computer mathematicians. We're going to need a whole cadre of of staff to to do everything that we need to.
00:10:07 Chris Sass
Do eventually. So in our pre conversation before the interview we talked a little bit about supply chain.
00:10:11 Chris Sass
And things like that help me understand. Does a solution like yours change our supply chain demand or how do we scale this up if we're going to really fight global climate change and things like that? If that's one of your reasons for doing.
00:10:24 Chris Sass
This.
00:10:26 Chris Sass
What kind of supply chain do you envision when these things become a?
00:10:29 Amit Kumar Singh
Reality. Well, First off, by using deuterium deuterium fuel that's available in every body of water around the world. So as far as the source of fuel is concerned, we don't need to go to any foreign entity to get the fuel, which is really really nice.
00:10:46 Amit Kumar Singh
Our design, other than that uses mostly cots materials, things that are readily available, electrolytic capacitors, solid-state switches, things that you know often are made abroad, but can also be, you know, near short as well as needed. So we feel very confident that.
00:11:06 Amit Kumar Singh
All the technology and the materials that we need to build our power plant are readily available in North America, which provides us a much stronger ability to deliver energy independence as well as energy security.
00:11:20 Chris Sass
How big a?
00:11:20 Chris Sass
Role do the national labs play in fusion development?
00:11:26 Amit Kumar Singh
A huge role, I mean without them so much of the risky physics would not get researched and derisked. They're critical to the solution and at the end, like I said, there are many different approaches.
00:11:40 Amit Kumar Singh
And you know, we would love if the national labs had more funding to experiment with alternative methods as well.
00:11:48 Chris Sass
What's the biggest risk for a technology like the one you're?
00:11:50 Amit Kumar Singh
Describing so the biggest risk is actually making fusion happen in a consistent manner, right? And so, you know, Fusion doesn't by its very nature does not want to happen. 2 atoms do not want to join together and make a new atom.
00:12:07 Amit Kumar Singh
Fusion is what they say, powers, you know, is what powers the sun. And but the sun has a major advantage over the earth because the gravity on the sun is 28 times more than what we have here. So.
00:12:22 Amit Kumar Singh
To compensate for that, you have to get to create fusion conditions. Here you have to get to temperatures of 100,000,000°C, which is pretty hot, right? And so making that happen on a consistent method is really, really hard. So the physics.
00:12:42 Amit Kumar Singh
Risk around doing like doing that over and over and over again without.
00:12:47 Amit Kumar Singh
The the the power plant falling apart or, you know, overheating or whatnot, that's incredibly difficult and that's what most companies are working towards. Humans know how to do fusion. We've been doing that for, you know, over 70 years, but doing it in a controlled manner, that's what's really hard.
00:13:06 Chris Sass
All right and.
00:13:07 Chris Sass
The the the risk is containment, heat longevity like.
00:13:13 Chris Sass
All of the above.
00:13:14 Amit Kumar Singh
All above. So there's most fusion scientists will talk about something called the triple product or also known as the Lawson criteria, which is a combination of time, temperature and density. And so you have to get enough of these hydrogen atoms close enough together for enough for a long enough time.
00:13:34 Amit Kumar Singh
To make that fusion happen without that, fusion doesn't want to happen. It's just you just get it. You know, nothing happened, so.
00:13:43 Amit Kumar Singh
Making that is incredibly difficult and they're different approaches. Some are using superconducting magnets to force those hydrogen atoms together, others are using high-powered lasers to compress fuel targets. We just happen to be using our hyper velocity plasma railgun and magnetised.
00:14:02 Amit Kumar Singh
Good targets which we think is the fastest way to get there.
00:14:07 Chris Sass
So today there's a lot of talk about doing solar long term storage and wind.
00:14:13 Chris Sass
Is that a distraction and or funds get diverted from going to fusion? Or do you think we should do that first to buy the time?
00:14:20 Chris Sass
To get to fusion.
00:14:22 Amit Kumar Singh
I think we have to have multiple tools in our toolbox to solve the energy crisis. Solar and wind are are great technologies, but they're both geographically dependent as well as classic nuclear fission is also I mean a lot of people don't want a fission power plant in their backyard.
00:14:41 Amit Kumar Singh
So most of the renewable or all the renewables today are geographically constrained. Fusion energy is the one possible energy source that is not not geographically constrained and can also be used in space. So it's it has amazing potential to provide energy.
00:15:00 Amit Kumar Singh
All around the world, including space exploration.
00:15:04 Chris Sass
Fusions had a few false starts before, or perceived false starts. Are you finding that that makes it hard to get investors and folks interested in following fusion today?
00:15:15 Amit Kumar Singh
As far as investors are concerned, getting them to come on board, a lot of it is requires education of what is fusion, what is the timeline, what is the payoff? And that takes effort. But once they understand that, they seem more inclined then the the job becomes there's there's so many approaches.
00:15:35 Amit Kumar Singh
Out there, which approach is going to be the most likely to succeed?
00:15:40 Amit Kumar Singh
Because even the companies that have billions of dollars of funding, they haven't cracked the code yet, and I don't think anyone who's well versed in fusion would say that definitely this one solution is the way no one actually knows which solution is going to work in the end.
00:15:56 Chris Sass
So do you believe that a number of companies will will crack the code and we'll have?
00:16:01 Chris Sass
Several solutions come to life about the same time.
00:16:04 Amit Kumar Singh
My personal belief is that there'll probably be two or three different solutions that will crack the code and there will have different levels of commercial viability depending on what type of market they're serving. Some of the some of the designs are more geared towards very large energy markets on the GW scales, whereas others are geared towards.
00:16:24 Amit Kumar Singh
Very small markets, even micro markets. So I think we'll have winners in different sized markets. And so I think there'll be two to three eventually, probably all in the next.
00:16:37 Amit Kumar Singh
5 to 10 years.
00:16:39 Chris Sass
And is there public perception that this is like nuclear energy and dangerous, or is the perception that it's not so you you talked about having these in you know high populated areas and things like that. Why does that make?
00:16:51 Amit Kumar Singh
Sense. Well, public perception has changed greatly over the last couple of years.
00:16:57 Amit Kumar Singh
You know, people hear the word nuclear and they automatically think of the fission reactors, things like Chernobyl and three mile.
00:17:03 Amit Kumar Singh
Island and Fukushima. But I think there's been a great campaign to not only improve the image of just nuclear fission, but along with it that people have a very favourable view of fusion when once they get to know it, and so much so that even the US NRC last year ruled that they were going to regulate.
00:17:24 Amit Kumar Singh
Fusion under Part 30, which is essentially like.
00:17:27 Amit Kumar Singh
Regulating it as nuclear medicine, similar to an MRI machine in the hospital that could be a block away from your house. So the perception of fusion has improved, and mostly because it is so safe. As I mentioned earlier, Fusion doesn't want to chain react, so even if something went terribly wrong in a fusion power plant.
00:17:47 Amit Kumar Singh
It would just shut down and nothing would.
00:17:49 Chris Sass
Happen. So I was taught if it sounds too good to be true, it can't be. So what are some of the reality?
00:17:56 Chris Sass
That we should be thinking about that are out there cuz it can't.
00:17:59 Amit Kumar Singh
All be amazing. Sure. And it. I mean, they often called fusion the Holy Grail of energy and for for good reason. I think as far as some of the caveats to fusion, most approaches use a isotope of hydrogen called.
00:18:00
So.
00:18:06
4.
00:18:16 Amit Kumar Singh
Radium, which is actually quite expensive and slightly radioactive, not nearly as radioactive as uranium or plutonium, but it does come with some overhead required to make that.
00:18:29 Amit Kumar Singh
You know to to handle it and regulate it and whatnot, but the other I I think.
00:18:36 Amit Kumar Singh
Issue that people have to understand is that.
00:18:38 Amit Kumar Singh
We're trying to make consistent fusion happen, but then there's the second problem of making it economically viable, so going back to the NIF experiment, for example.
00:18:49 Amit Kumar Singh
They got roughly 50% more energy out than they put in, but to make it commercially viable power plant, you have to get roughly 20 times more energy out than you get in. So and that's from what what we call the wall plug, not just the scientific gain. There's actual economic gain that you have to think about. So that secondary engineering.
00:19:10 Amit Kumar Singh
Problem and economic hurdle is a real one, and one that.
00:19:15 Amit Kumar Singh
It would be difficult for some designs to achieve in the long run.
00:19:19 Chris Sass
Is that the next big milestone that we're hoping to see or what's the next milestone for Fusion?
00:19:24 Amit Kumar Singh
I think the next major milestone is to get to where the NIF was to get to that ignition event where you're getting more energy out than you're putting in and then increasing the gain to, you know, 20 to 100 or whatever the design requires.
00:19:41 Amit Kumar Singh
And making that happen at scale. So it's, there's still a lot, a lot of ways to go to, to commercialise it.
00:19:47 Chris Sass
What about near Stars design and architecture makes you think that you're on that track.
00:19:53 Amit Kumar Singh
Well, for starters, we always built this this design to be a power plant first and a science experiment second. So inherent in our design is all the thought of how do we build this at a very economic scale using you know things that are available today, electrolytic capacitors.
00:20:13 Amit Kumar Singh
All the state switches, things like that. So that when we finally do solve the physics problems that now we're not cornered into a box where we can't make it economically viable because.
00:20:24 Amit Kumar Singh
Because the materials don't exist or we can't get them at scale and it's it's difficult to to assemble. So you know we have we made it so that it's easy to maintain. It would be highly available and operating it would be simplified as well.
00:20:41 Chris Sass
Now if I took this concept the way you just talked about it, the accelerating process and go through that and take it to some of the mainstream fusion companies, well, they think I'm a little bit nutty about this. Or are they curious about what you guys are?
00:20:52 Chris Sass
1.
00:20:53 Amit Kumar Singh
Generally, they've shown a lot of curiosity. They think it's an interesting idea. They want to see the published research, like so many of their investors do, and I think the onus is on us to get us, get them that.
00:21:05 Chris Sass
Information and is that why you guys are kind of coming out of stealth mode right now and starting to talk about it?
00:21:09 Amit Kumar Singh
Yeah, yeah, we we were in stealth mode for a while and but we realised we were unique in what we can do with the the rail gun and that we have to kind of expose some of our.
00:21:22 Amit Kumar Singh
Are designed so that people understand and don't just give us money on a leap of faith, but actually believe in what we're doing and know that we'll succeed.
00:21:31 Chris Sass
I always like to end these interviews with a crystal ball question.
00:21:36 Chris Sass
And we're talking fusion, so I can't do the usual 12 months from.
00:21:39 Amit Kumar Singh
Now.
00:21:41 Chris Sass
So in the next five years.
00:21:44 Chris Sass
Where is your organisation and what do you guys have achieved?
00:21:48 Amit Kumar Singh
I think our organisation is in a much bigger facility. I think we'll have not only physicists working here, but lots of engineers working on building experiments that are increasing our gain. So hopefully we're at that point we are not only getting energy gain, but we're trying to improve the gain.
00:22:09 Amit Kumar Singh
So we can get to 2041 hundred gain so that we can make it even more profitable for a commercial entity.
00:22:17 Amit Kumar Singh
And we're having serious conversations with potential partners who want to build our power plants in the future. And that doesn't just limited to traditional power plant companies today, but even potentially automobile companies that can retool their factories to make the components of our power plant.
00:22:36 Amit Kumar Singh
In mass around the world.
00:22:38 Chris Sass
So you believe that electrification is the end game the long?
00:22:43 Amit Kumar Singh
It is, I believe it is. I mean, hydrocarbons are here for a while for sure, but that's just going to be an intermediary to get to electrification. And I mean cars industry, everything is moving in that direction and it's it will it's it's the way of.
00:22:58 Chris Sass
The future awesome. Well, I want to thank you so much for inviting us to your facility today.
00:23:02 Chris Sass
In sharing us, it's been a great conversation. Thank you.
00:23:06 Amit Kumar Singh
Thank.
00:23:06 Amit Kumar Singh
Chris.