Hi, I'm Clayton Myers. I'm a plasma
physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory
which is a National Laboratory operated
by Princeton University
and funded by the US Department of Energy.
I study
fusion energy research or nuclear fusion,
which is not currently
viable as a commercial
energy source,
but we're developing a technology so
that
in maybe 20/30/40 years that fusion
technology
will be a mainstay in the world energy.
In undergraduate I studied
engineering physics and was looking for
a research area that was exciting to me
So I tried a few things and ended up
in plasma physics, which
has its main application in fusion energy
and, so I
started energy fusion research in
undergraduate and
I did about a year and a half of that and
went to grad school looking for fusion program
and found sort of the USC of fusion, here in
Princeton. So fusion is
is a technology that requires
decades of development
and, therefore, is something that is not
funded
privately at this time, because it has such 
a long horizon
and so it is the Department energy and
federally-funded facilities that are
doing fusion research.
In the United States that means
places like Princeton
MIT, General Atomics in San Diego
are doing a federally-funded fusion
research and so, these graduate programs
crop up in these
large facilities and Princeton Plasma
Physics Laboratory
is the flagship National Laboratory for
fusion research in the Department of Energy.
There are about 400 or 500 employees at the
laboratory
and
150 of those are physicists and so,
we all work on a variety of experiments
mostly targeted at fusion research. Nuclear
fusion
is the exact opposite of nuclear fission.
In fission you have uranium atoms
that are very heavy
and you're splitting those atoms and
getting energy out.
Fusion is the exact opposite, where you're
taking two very light atoms,
sticking them together and getting energy
out. It seems somewhat
counterintuitive that you can
stick 2 atoms together and get energy out, but
the difference is that
the mass of the final atom is slightly
less than the mass of the two atoms you
put in.
And that slight difference by Einstein's
E=m*c^2 Equation
is converted to energy. So after
IRON on the periodic table when you fuse
you get energy out,
past iron  when you split
the material you get energy out.
So we're fusing light atoms
together
to get energy out of that process.
So plasma physics is my nominal field of
expertise, not
fusion. Fusion is application of plasma physics
and the reason we need plasma, which is
very very hot gas
So a gas that's so hot that the
electrons and ions in individual atoms
actually dissociate from each other.
So you have ions and electrons sort of
flowing around in a soup
and the reason plasma's fusion related
is because when you try to stick two
nuclea together there's
a repeling force - they're both positive
charges so, the Coloumb
force wants to keep them apart and
in order to get them to actually
stick together
and fuse, you have to have them coming at
such a high speed
that they actually overcome that Coloumb force
and to have high speed
you need it to be hot. So therefore, we use plasma.
In the approach that we study here in
Princeton which is called magnetic
confinement fusion
we use effectively a magnetic bottle to
contain this hot plasma
and try to get many many fusion
reactions inside the device.
There's also inertial fusion where a small
capsule is imploded and the
inertial energy of everything crashing
towards the middle causes fusion at the
center. So there are several approaches to
getting
fusion reactions but they all involve
plasma in one
way, shape or form, because the
temperatures required. Last 10 years
fusion has had sort of a plateau,
actually, so, in the 90s we
achieved
record fusion power outputs both here
in Princeton and the Coloumb laboratory in the
United Kingdom.
and the last decade has been about
developing
real time technologies and diagnostics
to feed back into these machines. So these
tokamaks,
which is the name for the device
that we do magnetic fusion in. It stands for
toroidal magnetic chamber. That's
the the containment vessel, looks like a
doughnut, and so the particles are
magnetically confined and just
fly around the doughnut. So a tokamak
is a toroidal or doughnut shaped device
that we use to magnetically confine plasma.
And it has thee circular magnetic field
coils wrapped around the doughnut
and they produce a magnetic field that
runs all around the doughnut.
And the reason you want a magnetic field,
say you have plasma
and you have a bunch of small ions or electrons
in your plasma,
they can zip whatever way they want,
completely random motion and that's not
very good for fusion
because you want your particles to be 
confined for a long period of time
So you happen to have a magnetic field in your
plasma,
these particles are confined like a bead on a
string
on the field line, so rather than be
able to run randomly throughout space
they are forced to go along the field line,
without contacting any physical vessel.
So something extraordinarily hot, we want to have
a non contact confinement scheme. So if you
happen to bend those field lines
into a doughnut, which is what we do in a tokamak,
the particles
are forced to follow these field lines
around the machine
and they just continuously whiz around
and around and around
as many times as they want and hopefully
stay confined
and produce continuous fusion power. And there
are many challenges to getting this
confinement scheme to hold up.
That's the basic idea of a tokamak. The main
challenge is that if we can
make a fusion device with a straight tube
we'd already have a fusion reactor. But if you do
the calculation on how long your tube would have to be,
it needs to be about the distance around
the globe, in order to actually have
straight cylinder. So when you bend it
into a circle, you introduce
nonuniformities in your magnetic field.
It is actually stronger on the
inside than it is on the outside
And that causes particles to want to leave
radially outward. So we have all kinds of
ways for compensating for the
radial drifts that are kicking particles
out and
the plasma's turbulent. If it wasn't
it would be wonderful, but it is
turbulent and so, particles can
travel through
turbulent eddies out.So the entire game
of
operating a tokamak is to try to minimize
all of these effects
that degrade confinement. We want the maximum
confinement possible, because that give you the
maximum fusion power.
We've come such a long way. When we started
back in
(I say we, my predecessors) the 50s
confinement was terrible. The amount
of fusion power we were getting out of
the device
with respect to how much we had to put in. It
was 10^(-6).
So many times below 1. We wanted to get to
the point, where we were
obviously producing more power than we
put in,
and we've come almost all the way to the point 
of 1. We're actually at about the half
right now. So we are very very close, but there
are actually 2 major issues
still standing in our way.
The first is what we call disruption. This
is where
your tokamak is moving along just fine and
there's an instabillity that comes
up and all the energy
stored in your plasma
crashes with a bang. And this is
something we haven't been able to avoid
in tokamak. This is, actually, what I'm gonna
be studying over the next few years -
Tokamak Disruption.
The second is Wall Materials.
You have this plasma, which you can consider
as a blowtorch nearby a wall,
which has to be made of something and there
are enormous issues with what material
you're using
as a material that is facing the plasma.
We call it the plasma-facing component.
So there's an enormous material science 
effort on the way, looking at
possible wall materials. And on the plasma
physics side
we're working at ways to keep the plasma
away from the wall
and using some buffer to make it less
damaging
to the materials that are nearby. So
both disruption issues, meaning you don't want
your power plant to turn off,
meaning no operation
and wall issues, meaning that is you want
this to be a powerplant for 30 years
you want to have materials that will
survive those extreme
conditions of the plasma for that amount of
time. So the materials that we use on our walls
right now are actually from the space program.
So we use effectively, the wall
material we're using at the moment
are spacial tiles. So what we developed
for the heat shields
in the early space program is what
we use on our
wall.
It's carbon-carbon or something like that.
Unfortunately, it is
not a great material for a reactor in
the end. It's good for experiments,
but not good for reactors. So we are
developing materials
that may eventually have some
transfer, but right now it's in such an
early-stage that
I would say they aren't being used
elsewhere.
So we have several of these devices here
in Princeton - one very large one,
few very small ones and this has been a
concept that has been around
since the mid 60s.It was originally
invented by the Soviets
and was brought here to Princeton also
in the sixties, and has been studied
since.
We've gotten better and better at controlling
the plasma in these
doughnut configurations. So the last 10
years have really been,
I would say, about plasma control and
learning to use a real-time system, so that
when the plasma's healthy
we just let it go, but it starts to
become unhealthy, we can actually detect
these sort of sicknesses in the plasma
and we have magnets that push back
and try to keep the bodies
inside the doughnut form growing, so the plasma
continues to
fuse. And so, these are our
biggest advances in past 10 years
and part of that has lead to new machines
that are being built, so it's a very
exciting few decades
on the way in the fusion program.
An ideal plasma would be
completely quiescent and it's particles
would whiz around
and it would be very very quiet. So when we
sense a fluctuations in the magnetic
field we would minimize those,
but the plasma, since we're trying to
hold all this thermal energy
in a bottle, the plasma is very clever,it wants
to find ways to get out
And so, instabilities are a way of taking the
thermal energy
and destroying our ability to bottle it
up. So when we say we have a sick
plasma there are
many many instabilities that crop up that
can destroy the plasma configuration
and our goal is to try to suppress these
instabilities and try to hold the whole thing
together
so that we can get energy out.
Energy is something that is universal
throughout the world.
everyone desires energy, everyone uses
energy
and we're all, I think, well aware
of the climate issues
and also the growing energy demand
with developing countries like China and
many other
places. So knowing that energy is
going to continue to be an enormous
problem and, actually, it's going to be a
growing problem over the coming decades
drives me to be in the field
it is working towards what we consider
to be clean energy
and fusion is very clean compared to
fossil fuels, compared to fission, actually,
and it's very safe. So though
it is difficult
it is worth the effort because
of the payoff in terms of meeting the
global energy demand as we continue through
the next few decades.
I am,
I think that the human civilization exists
because of our ability to survive and
part of that survival is happiness. I think
that when people are happy, we have a
better chance at survival
and since we are survivalists, people are going
to continue to be happy. There's going to
be good things and bad things,
but happiness is a part of our survival
and so I am optimistic
that we will have a happy prolonged
civilization and
make good decisions. The final goal of
my fusion research is to produce
world-scale energy, meaning an energy
source that is
long-lived, relatively safe
and can provide very large percentage in
the world power.
There is an economy of scale
with fusion, so
it's unlikely that we're going to produce
a bunch of very small power plants. It's
going to look something like
the structure today, where we have large
coal plants,
large fission plants - you're going to have
large fusion plants. They're producing, let's say
3 gigawatts
of thermal power and converting that
into about a gigawatt of electricity,
because it's distributed over a grid. So really
it is just changing
the heat source in your power plant. All the
stuff outside in the heat source -
the steam converters, the turbines, the
generators,
the distribution network is all
the same as what we have now. It's not
looking to replace that network,
it's just changing what is providing heat at
the center
and that'd be fusion reactions instead of
coal or fission. There is, actually,
an amazing number of technology, we refer
to it as technology transfer, that happens
from my laboratory for many other
laboratories
and the one example that's a good
one is
basically in nuclear detection.
So as part of the fusion program over
the past 50 years
we had to become experts in detecting
neutrons, because when we want to say how much
fusion power we have coming over to
our device,
you're measuring the new neutrons that
are coming out.
So we got very good at detecting
neutrons, while
that's also useful for detecting
nuclear warheads or
other radioactive waste or something
being moved. And so,
when you have a port in your country
that is wanting to scan and say "Do I
have not
certified nuclear weapons moving throung
the ports?", we detect those things. We
actually, have created several systems
at our lab
for nuclear detection and also for
warhead verification as something
we're doing
recently where you don't actually have
to know exactly the details of
the warhead, but you can verify that it
is in fact awarhead. That's called
a Zero-knowledge protocol.
This just happened last month actually,
in our laboratory. They've
started an experimental program for that.
So they're all the spinoff technologies
related to our nuclear science
experience
that are impacting other areas. So the joke
is that it's been 25 years away for the
past 50 years
and that's for some extent true, unfortunatelly-
that amount of fusion power we're capable
of producing
has gone proportional to the amount of
funding, because as I mentioned at the
beginning,
this is an internationally
government-funded
research and development effort as
opposed to a privatized
effort. And so, as politics changed all
the same thing about funding coming in
changes. And so,
like I said, the 90s were very big boom
time for fusion, because we had lots of funding
and we were able to set all kinds of records,
but the the funding's gone flap,
it hasn't gone away, but it's gone flap
over the past decade
and so we've made incremental progress,
but we're looking for game-changing
steps
and the pace at which we achieve those
game-changing steps is going to determine
ultimately how long it takes. Now, to put
a number on it
I think we're looking at 50 years.
Again, I mentioned economies've scaled, so
fusion power scales with the plasma 
volume, but the other thing that scales
is that right now in our tokamaks we
only have the center of the doughnut,
the very centre line around is hot enough
to actually produce fusion and all the rest
of the plasma volume
is the interface between the
walls of your vessel, which are room
temperature or close to it, and that
100 million degree center,
10 million degree center - very very hot
and if we can improve
the amount of the plasma that's filled
with very very hot gas
and not have such a long transition, we can
make the machine smaller.
So we're doing some things at Princeton. We 
try to make more
of the plasma volume actually producing fusion
power and then you don't need such a big device,
but just when you do out the scales of how
much plasma do you need
that's actually producing fusion power
you need a machine that big to get
up there, unfortunatelly. I think that
there's almost unrivaled chance
with fusion power for global impact.
There are two games in energy one is
electro-grid power and the other is
transportation energy. Fusion
is not a transportation energy.
It can be if you ran an electric car
economy,
but first to be clear, its producing grid
power, first and foremost.
But that's a huge game-changer for
climate change, because
fusion is capable of replacing
fossil fuels. Whereas you can
question whether solar and wind are
capable of producing enough energy
to takeover the base load on a grid.
Fusion is completely capable of doing that
and we hope we'll do that. So that's warm.
The second is the fuel.
So the primary fuel that goes in the fusion
deuterium,
which is an isotope of hydrogen, and is
actually naturally present in seawater.
So anyone with access to seawater, which
is almost everyone
can get their fusion fuel for almost free.
And so that changes the economy
enormously, globally
in terms of old who's hoarding natural
resources, who's rich in fusion fuel,
who's not.
Hopefully, that changes the economy
massively. I think there are a few
technologies out there that have the
potential to reset the global landscape,
compared to this one, which
resets the entire
energy economy. The next 10 years
I think that,
I mean, do this through the means of energy,
as I have been doing everything else, but
energy demand is going up almost
exponentially in
places like China and the developing
world. That's a scary thing from
the standpoint of 10-year exponentially
increasing
the environmental impacts from
building massive amounts of coal plants
and I think that's going to be a
big challenge
even in the next 10 years. I don't think
this is something that's  50 years away,
like fusion maybe. I think this is
something that is very near-term
and energy demands are going to
continue to drive
geopolitical factors maybe even more so
than they already have. There's 2 ways to go
about this - one is to say that there are some
frightening technologies on the
horizon,
whether it be (they're definitely exciting),
but things like artificial intelligence
and things like that, genetic
engineering
and all the moral quandaries associated
with that.
The other way to look at it, and this
is a fear,
not so much of science and technology,
but for science and technology.
It is one of the most important things we can do
as a society, is to invest in science and
technology. We are given
as a species the incredible capacity
to innovate and use
the world, in which we live, to make lives
better
for society. And so by fears for
science and technology, we
don't maximize the potential for
innovation
from our species by underinvesting whether it
be on the federal level, the private
level
or investing too much in menial
technologies that
make someone wealthy, but don't maximize
our potential for innovation,
so I would say my fear is underinvestment,
honestly, in the sciences.
So I think
the obvious quality is natural curiosity-
you have to be curious about what you
encounter
in the world and this extends
far outside of the laboratory.
It's in gaining knowledge about what's
out there
and wanting to understand and
categorize what you see.
That's something that is just a
natural feature of a scientist, you have
to be curious and
desire information. And science is all
about
studying a very specific area, but
gaining information and gaining
understanding
and so that's the natural desire to do
that. Another thing about
science that I think is undervalued
are communication skills.
And it's very important to, obviously,
discover things, but if you cannot
communicate what you discovered,
then it will not have the impact on
society that
it otherwise could have. And so,
especially,
as we continue to become a globalized world
and a globalized society, where we're doing
science across
international boundaries and projects
like ITER that I mentioned, where you have
half the world's population involved,
from a nation's standpoint, in this project.
Really
communication
is almost as important as the
science itself.
Again through the means of energy
,because it's what I'm focusing on,
everyone needs energy, not just
in the CERNs and
the Princetons of the world that
need energy and so,
I would advise that the local
politics, the local infrastructure that you
have in Bulgaria is
a very important thing for your
country.
And to get involved in the energy future
and as fusion develops or as fission is
adopted,
Bulgaria's going to be making those
decisions, just like every other country,
in terms of where we take our energy
portfolio,
how we invest in our infrastructure
to deliver
energy more efficiently or as we move
into the 21st century
more and more technologies require more
energy, so
every nation is going to have to be
building better infrastructure for this,
so getting involved in the local
decision processes
in Bulgaria, and engineering, and research,
and all those things, it's not something
that
happens only in a few places in the
world. Energy is something that is needed
everywhere and demanded everywhere. This
something we see in the United States for sure,
it's what im familiar with, but
infrastructure investment has
the highest returns per dollar, in
terms of back to
the society in which makes that
investment, not just energy, but
roads
and bridges, and all these things. I
absolutely advise you to get
involved in those careers, in the sense
that you
are maximizing your contribution to
your society and making an impact, both
global and local,
by being involved in infrastructure things.
