1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:13,460 Bob Weggel is a lifelong avid environmentalist and a trailblazer in the field of magnet design 2 00:00:13,460 --> 00:00:16,000 and magnetic shielding. 3 00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:23,240 His distinguished career spans stints at notable institutions such as MIT's Francis Bitter 4 00:00:23,240 --> 00:00:29,080 National Magnet Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory. 5 00:00:29,080 --> 00:00:35,200 Among his many accolades, Bob is credited with designing the magnet recognized for creating 6 00:00:35,200 --> 00:00:40,120 the world's highest sustained magnetic field. 7 00:00:40,120 --> 00:00:48,800 Bob's academic journey began at MIT, where he obtained his Bachelor's of Science in Physics. 8 00:00:48,800 --> 00:00:54,720 He then continued his studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Engineering and Applied 9 00:00:54,720 --> 00:00:57,640 Sciences. 10 00:00:57,640 --> 00:01:03,720 During his education, Bob embarked on his professional journey at the MIT National Magnet 11 00:01:03,720 --> 00:01:05,720 Lab. 12 00:01:05,720 --> 00:01:12,400 His talent and dedication swiftly elevated him to the position of assistant group leader 13 00:01:12,400 --> 00:01:15,820 of the magnet design group. 14 00:01:15,820 --> 00:01:24,040 His notable contributions to MIT's Alcatur A. Turgomak led to his inclusion in the 1980s 15 00:01:24,040 --> 00:01:31,000 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records for the world's most intense continuous magnetic 16 00:01:31,000 --> 00:01:33,440 field. 17 00:01:33,440 --> 00:01:39,580 Bob later held the position of senior magnet designer at Brookhaven National Lab, specializing 18 00:01:39,580 --> 00:01:49,920 in large cryogenic superconductive resistive hybrid solenoids of 20 Tesla or more. 19 00:01:49,920 --> 00:01:56,120 His impressive portfolio also includes senior roles as the senior engineer of particle beam 20 00:01:56,120 --> 00:02:03,000 lasers, Inc. and the senior magnet designer for Commonwealth Fusion Systems. 21 00:02:03,000 --> 00:02:10,080 In these capacities, Bob concentrated on the electrical and structural analysis of toroidal 22 00:02:10,080 --> 00:02:13,000 and poloidal field coils. 23 00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:20,880 Today, Bob joins us to share his rich tapestry of experiences from his stupendous dive into 24 00:02:20,880 --> 00:02:28,080 magnet design to his impactful work in particle accelerators and beyond. 25 00:02:28,080 --> 00:02:33,240 His insights into the evolution of magnetic technology combined with his philosophical 26 00:02:33,240 --> 00:02:40,200 reflections on science, society, and environment promise to make this conversation not only 27 00:02:40,200 --> 00:02:44,840 informative but profoundly inspiring. 28 00:02:44,840 --> 00:02:54,200 Bob brings unparalleled experience to his role as board advisor at Kronos Fusion Energy. 29 00:02:54,200 --> 00:03:00,200 Bob's experience and understanding play a pivotal role in the development of the smart 30 00:03:00,200 --> 00:03:04,280 fusion energy generator at Kronos. 31 00:03:04,280 --> 00:03:10,160 His invaluable contributions are instrumental in propelling Kronos towards a future of clean 32 00:03:10,160 --> 00:03:15,160 sustainable energy solutions. 33 00:03:15,160 --> 00:03:16,160 Here's Bob. 34 00:03:16,160 --> 00:03:17,160 Enthusiasm. 35 00:03:17,160 --> 00:03:18,160 Nice. 36 00:03:18,160 --> 00:03:23,120 What is Maine's first ship? 37 00:03:23,120 --> 00:03:25,560 What is that? 38 00:03:25,560 --> 00:03:32,360 It's a reconstruction of the ship built by the colonists at Fort St. George in 1607, 39 00:03:32,360 --> 00:03:33,360 1608. 40 00:03:33,360 --> 00:03:36,360 Oh my goodness. 41 00:03:36,360 --> 00:03:40,720 The colony was a contemporary with Jamestown. 42 00:03:40,720 --> 00:03:44,160 Jamestown survived. 43 00:03:44,160 --> 00:03:48,040 Fort St. George did not because the first leader died. 44 00:03:48,040 --> 00:03:50,120 He was the only one who did. 45 00:03:50,120 --> 00:03:57,480 But the second in command found that his brother had died. 46 00:03:57,480 --> 00:04:01,800 He inherited the family wealth and so he didn't need to come to the New World to try to make 47 00:04:01,800 --> 00:04:02,800 his fortune. 48 00:04:02,800 --> 00:04:09,120 And so he went back to England with all the remaining colonists, which only about half 49 00:04:09,120 --> 00:04:17,080 had stayed through the terrible cold winter, one of the coldest on record. 50 00:04:17,080 --> 00:04:18,560 That was the end of the colony. 51 00:04:18,560 --> 00:04:24,320 Archaeologically it was wonderful because anything we found was 1607, 1608. 52 00:04:24,320 --> 00:04:31,560 There was no overlay of subsequent civilization that destroyed the evidence. 53 00:04:31,560 --> 00:04:40,800 So we found the post holes from all the posts in the storehouse. 54 00:04:40,800 --> 00:04:50,520 We found beads and musket balls and shards of Bellarmine pottery and perhaps the most 55 00:04:50,520 --> 00:04:54,600 exciting one from a public relations thing. 56 00:04:54,600 --> 00:04:58,760 My wife and I found a shilling from 1595. 57 00:04:58,760 --> 00:05:05,920 Archaeologically it was not particularly significant because it probably had been moved a bit by 58 00:05:05,920 --> 00:05:09,800 the plow in the lower part of the plow zone. 59 00:05:09,800 --> 00:05:18,920 But it was exciting and we found or others at the site found evidence of smelting metal 60 00:05:18,920 --> 00:05:25,400 out there from bog or iron, something that they weren't sure they had done. 61 00:05:25,400 --> 00:05:29,280 A theory was that all the iron that they needed to build the ship and all the other things 62 00:05:29,280 --> 00:05:31,280 had been transported from England. 63 00:05:31,280 --> 00:05:37,440 Nope, some of it was transported from England as iron, but others were just bellows with 64 00:05:37,440 --> 00:05:44,960 which to raise the temperature of the charcoal fire enough to smelt bog iron. 65 00:05:44,960 --> 00:05:49,480 And so it was very instructive. 66 00:05:49,480 --> 00:05:52,000 You spend a lot of time in nature. 67 00:05:52,000 --> 00:06:00,000 I think when you first Googled it's all these foundations. 68 00:06:00,000 --> 00:06:05,840 Was that something that you started doing after you retired? 69 00:06:05,840 --> 00:06:11,440 I had a very early start in nature when my family took me out camping when I was in single 70 00:06:11,440 --> 00:06:12,440 digit years. 71 00:06:12,440 --> 00:06:17,920 That was great fun, tromping and fishing and hiking and such. 72 00:06:17,920 --> 00:06:26,040 But it went sort of dormant except when I would go to a technology conference I would 73 00:06:26,040 --> 00:06:32,400 try to tack on a week or two of sightseeing which more often than not involved either 74 00:06:32,400 --> 00:06:39,600 driving through the countryside or also hiking mountains of southern Germany and Switzerland 75 00:06:39,600 --> 00:06:42,200 and Austria and such. 76 00:06:42,200 --> 00:06:52,040 And then when I was laid off from Brookhaven in 2002 I had a lot of frequent fire miles 77 00:06:52,040 --> 00:07:00,320 so I went and used them in Costa Rica hiking for two weeks with a 40 pound pack, clean 78 00:07:00,320 --> 00:07:05,280 to our own aloe vera volcano which put on a good show for me. 79 00:07:05,280 --> 00:07:14,920 And then in 2004 I drove out to the west coast and biked Mount Whitney. 80 00:07:14,920 --> 00:07:21,840 In 2005 I took a rock climbing course which I've never used. 81 00:07:21,840 --> 00:07:23,680 What does your foundation do? 82 00:07:23,680 --> 00:07:30,120 Is that what you spend most of your day on with a specific foundation? 83 00:07:30,120 --> 00:07:41,720 No, no, that is simply authorizing my financial advisor to transfer $25,000 or $100,000 to 84 00:07:41,720 --> 00:07:43,760 these various charities. 85 00:07:43,760 --> 00:07:54,800 So no, it's actually even that more hours per month than I'd like to devote because 86 00:07:54,800 --> 00:07:57,600 I like magnet design. 87 00:07:57,600 --> 00:08:03,040 I have a house guest who's been with me for 14 months and he doesn't have any financial 88 00:08:03,040 --> 00:08:08,800 problems he doesn't need to write an income tax because he doesn't make enough money to 89 00:08:08,800 --> 00:08:09,800 file. 90 00:08:09,800 --> 00:08:10,800 I sometimes envy him. 91 00:08:10,800 --> 00:08:17,880 I've had a phase in my life where I was like that. 92 00:08:17,880 --> 00:08:19,280 I understand it. 93 00:08:19,280 --> 00:08:22,200 I understand the soul of this person. 94 00:08:22,200 --> 00:08:25,400 I almost admire it. 95 00:08:25,400 --> 00:08:32,480 I decided early in life that he would not be grubbing for money and he's a wonderful 96 00:08:32,480 --> 00:08:39,000 joke teller and personality so that I can see that I'm not the only family that's willing 97 00:08:39,000 --> 00:08:42,200 to invite him in and pick up the tab. 98 00:08:42,200 --> 00:08:44,920 He helps take care of Diana. 99 00:08:44,920 --> 00:08:52,960 So that's a service that gives me several hours a day of freedom that I might not otherwise 100 00:08:52,960 --> 00:08:53,960 have. 101 00:08:53,960 --> 00:08:54,960 Cool. 102 00:08:54,960 --> 00:08:59,560 Tell me tell me what what brought you to magnet design. 103 00:08:59,560 --> 00:09:04,680 What was the initial what was the initial aha moment that was like this is what I want 104 00:09:04,680 --> 00:09:06,320 to spend my time on. 105 00:09:06,320 --> 00:09:14,160 Which you'll believe utter serendipity that in the summer of my freshman year approached 106 00:09:14,160 --> 00:09:16,840 and I look for a summertime job. 107 00:09:16,840 --> 00:09:23,800 It happened that the there was a Nathan's National Magna Laboratory about to be created 108 00:09:23,800 --> 00:09:32,960 at the campus of MIT and the work sounded exciting certainly a lot better than the usual 109 00:09:32,960 --> 00:09:38,080 hamburger flipping that freshmen do. 110 00:09:38,080 --> 00:09:44,240 And yes it captivated me from day one. 111 00:09:44,240 --> 00:09:51,320 I had never gone to a job formal interview before and I learned later that my employer 112 00:09:51,320 --> 00:09:56,000 hadn't either he was just terrified that they're bringing me as I was being interviewed by 113 00:09:56,000 --> 00:09:57,000 him. 114 00:09:57,000 --> 00:09:59,000 It all went off fine. 115 00:09:59,000 --> 00:10:04,800 I had mathematical background from my studies in physics at MIT which emphasized applied 116 00:10:04,800 --> 00:10:10,360 mathematics whereas the math department at MIT was pure math interested in showing that 117 00:10:10,360 --> 00:10:14,400 there was a solution that it was unique and then they dropped interest. 118 00:10:14,400 --> 00:10:19,240 I as an engineer mentality I assumed there was a solution or I wouldn't be looking for 119 00:10:19,240 --> 00:10:20,240 one. 120 00:10:20,240 --> 00:10:24,640 I would be delighted if there were multiple solutions because that would then give room 121 00:10:24,640 --> 00:10:30,360 for optimization which I loved I always liked efficiency. 122 00:10:30,360 --> 00:10:39,080 And early on I was elbow to elbow with a few other engineers that were just at most a half 123 00:10:39,080 --> 00:10:42,880 a dozen of us. 124 00:10:42,880 --> 00:10:49,560 Designing world class things the first few months were rather routine analyzing iron 125 00:10:49,560 --> 00:10:55,320 magnets which were the name of the game back then except in a few laboratories. 126 00:10:55,320 --> 00:11:00,040 But then soon by the next year I was served right up there designing the coolant hole 127 00:11:00,040 --> 00:11:09,840 placements and magnet plates and choosing materials and generating all this cutting 128 00:11:09,840 --> 00:11:14,240 edge research technology that. 129 00:11:14,240 --> 00:11:24,400 So on the first day at MIT at this national lab was there already a vision of fusion energy 130 00:11:24,400 --> 00:11:27,600 or was it mostly magnet related initially. 131 00:11:27,600 --> 00:11:33,960 This was a solid state research magnets interested in generating very intense fields in small 132 00:11:33,960 --> 00:11:41,040 volumes steady state so that induced currents wouldn't be a problem in the materials. 133 00:11:41,040 --> 00:11:45,440 Those could be conductors whereas the pulse magnets which were the technique for generating 134 00:11:45,440 --> 00:11:49,160 really high fields back then still are. 135 00:11:49,160 --> 00:12:01,800 So it was not until the mid 70s or mid 70s that fusion began to be really considered. 136 00:12:01,800 --> 00:12:10,640 But when it was I was brought in as I analyzed the current density of redistribution in copper 137 00:12:10,640 --> 00:12:17,400 plates as these were cool to liquid nitrogen temperature in order to increase the conductivity 138 00:12:17,400 --> 00:12:24,120 of the copper by a factor of seven or eight at that temperature. 139 00:12:24,120 --> 00:12:27,760 And to analyze the stresses which would be high. 140 00:12:27,760 --> 00:12:33,760 And it was a very exciting project in that it was not being done anywhere else in the 141 00:12:33,760 --> 00:12:35,760 world at this technique. 142 00:12:35,760 --> 00:12:41,880 Elsewhere the fusion programs involved either resistive magnets that were limited because 143 00:12:41,880 --> 00:12:48,080 the power supply would need to be huge to generate an intense field over such a big 144 00:12:48,080 --> 00:12:51,080 volume. 145 00:12:51,080 --> 00:12:59,280 Whereas this because it was pulsed could involve not just the already big power supply at the 146 00:12:59,280 --> 00:13:05,120 magnet laboratory which was almost 10 megawatts but actually use it in overdrive mode in which 147 00:13:05,120 --> 00:13:15,480 they would speed the shaft revolutions from 360 revolutions per minute to something like 148 00:13:15,480 --> 00:13:16,480 400. 149 00:13:16,480 --> 00:13:25,160 And then now these would have the flywheels which were tens of tons each going and storing 150 00:13:25,160 --> 00:13:32,040 like 150 megajoules energy or more that could be extracted over a period of about five seconds 151 00:13:32,040 --> 00:13:35,400 meaning that the power consumption was about 30 megawatts. 152 00:13:35,400 --> 00:13:44,760 And the fact you could energize this to talk about up in fields of 10 tessels or more which 153 00:13:44,760 --> 00:13:50,600 was unprecedented because super vectors weren't able to generate that field back then and 154 00:13:50,600 --> 00:13:57,320 resistive magnets at room temperature, water-cooled power protectors, that sort of thing could 155 00:13:57,320 --> 00:14:02,400 generate field only a Tesla or two, most maybe three Teslas. 156 00:14:02,400 --> 00:14:07,280 We had several times that explored a regime then that was completely unknown and they 157 00:14:07,280 --> 00:14:16,600 discovered a confinement mechanism that had been unsuspected and the success was so great 158 00:14:16,600 --> 00:14:26,880 that the Alcatraz A was followed by an Alcatraz B design which was then before it was ever 159 00:14:26,880 --> 00:14:32,840 built, it was founded by an Alcatraz C. 160 00:14:32,840 --> 00:14:36,560 What year was Alcatraz A? 161 00:14:36,560 --> 00:14:40,800 That was the early to mid 70s. 162 00:14:40,800 --> 00:14:41,800 Mid 70s. 163 00:14:41,800 --> 00:14:42,800 And by then... 164 00:14:42,800 --> 00:14:45,920 By the 70s was the Alcatraz C. 165 00:14:45,920 --> 00:14:53,680 How long had we known that fusion could be enabled with magnets at this point? 166 00:14:53,680 --> 00:15:01,040 And another question, when you say rotating magnets, I imagine like an MRI machine because 167 00:15:01,040 --> 00:15:10,000 I saw an MRI machine without the shell and it was terrifying. 168 00:15:10,000 --> 00:15:13,940 And is that also how a particle accelerator then works? 169 00:15:13,940 --> 00:15:15,440 Is that a rotating magnet? 170 00:15:15,440 --> 00:15:18,000 Because I know you've worked on those before. 171 00:15:18,000 --> 00:15:27,320 To answer the first question, how far back was fusion energy envisioned? 172 00:15:27,320 --> 00:15:30,480 1960, I would say. 173 00:15:30,480 --> 00:15:39,680 Already people were building stellarators down at Princeton and the neuro devices. 174 00:15:39,680 --> 00:15:46,600 These were all attempts to define the plasma. 175 00:15:46,600 --> 00:15:53,840 And from the analyses of hydrogen bonds, it was noted that if you could heat it enough, 176 00:15:53,840 --> 00:15:59,560 confine it long enough, you would get out a hell of a lot of energy. 177 00:15:59,560 --> 00:16:02,960 And the key was getting the initial. 178 00:16:02,960 --> 00:16:10,000 We couldn't allow any fission bonds to be the match that led the process. 179 00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:11,000 Right. 180 00:16:11,000 --> 00:16:12,000 Yeah. 181 00:16:12,000 --> 00:16:16,920 There's a part of me that wants to follow that up by asking what the process is, but 182 00:16:16,920 --> 00:16:23,320 I also don't want to get my video flagged, so I'm not going to ask. 183 00:16:23,320 --> 00:16:25,360 But yeah, interesting. 184 00:16:25,360 --> 00:16:33,000 So how did you start working on particle accelerators from that? 185 00:16:33,000 --> 00:16:35,000 Was that also part of the... 186 00:16:35,000 --> 00:16:43,440 Particle accelerators was not in the picture until the National Magnet Laboratory closed 187 00:16:43,440 --> 00:16:49,320 down having lost the contest for being the next generation magnet laboratory. 188 00:16:49,320 --> 00:16:58,360 So that was not until 1996 that I consulted for Brookhaven on magnets to be components 189 00:16:58,360 --> 00:17:00,840 of particle accelerators. 190 00:17:00,840 --> 00:17:06,760 Let me understand a particle accelerator, Bob, just fundamentally. 191 00:17:06,760 --> 00:17:08,800 And where does the magnet come in? 192 00:17:08,800 --> 00:17:15,800 In the usual particle accelerator, the magnet does nothing more than steer the particle. 193 00:17:15,800 --> 00:17:18,880 A magnet cannot accelerate a particle. 194 00:17:18,880 --> 00:17:20,280 It only diverts it. 195 00:17:20,280 --> 00:17:24,360 The acceleration is transverse rather than longitudinal. 196 00:17:24,360 --> 00:17:35,240 So the acceleration comes from radio frequency microwave chambers that as the particle comes 197 00:17:35,240 --> 00:17:45,480 in, it's attracted by the electric field in the RF cavity. 198 00:17:45,480 --> 00:17:52,440 And as it transits the RF cavity, the phase of the radio frequency is so fast that the 199 00:17:52,440 --> 00:17:56,880 phase shifts that as it passes the mid plane of the cavity, the... 200 00:17:56,880 --> 00:18:02,920 Previously, there was an attractive force evolves to a repulsive force, injecting it 201 00:18:02,920 --> 00:18:11,880 out the front of the other side of the RF cavity with increased energy. 202 00:18:11,880 --> 00:18:18,120 And the problem is that if you have these RF cavities strung out in a straight line, 203 00:18:18,120 --> 00:18:22,520 you need millions of them to get the energies that they're seeking. 204 00:18:22,520 --> 00:18:26,200 This is a problem with electrons when you're trying to accelerate them. 205 00:18:26,200 --> 00:18:33,200 You can't bend a trajectory into circles because they radiate the energy away after you reach 206 00:18:33,200 --> 00:18:36,400 a threshold of energy that's really modest. 207 00:18:36,400 --> 00:18:43,960 So instead, you use a magnetic field to bend the trajectory of the particle, typically 208 00:18:43,960 --> 00:18:49,400 a proton, by a little bit with each magnet. 209 00:18:49,400 --> 00:18:55,080 You may have thousands of these magnets and by the time you're done, the trajectory has 210 00:18:55,080 --> 00:18:58,840 become a circle and you can reuse the RF cavity. 211 00:18:58,840 --> 00:19:05,120 In fact, you can use it thousands of times each time boosting its energy from what it 212 00:19:05,120 --> 00:19:07,080 was before. 213 00:19:07,080 --> 00:19:13,840 The acceleration comes from the electric field of the radio frequency cavity and the magnetic 214 00:19:13,840 --> 00:19:20,520 bending field, which is a steady field that just gradually ramps up and syncs with the 215 00:19:20,520 --> 00:19:30,720 particle energy so that the particle in a low energy accelerator increases in speed. 216 00:19:30,720 --> 00:19:38,800 But for the accelerators that are of interest nowadays, the speed is always very near, enters 217 00:19:38,800 --> 00:19:44,400 at very nearly the speed of light and what changes instead is the mass of the particle 218 00:19:44,400 --> 00:19:47,400 by Einsteinian relationship. 219 00:19:47,400 --> 00:19:57,880 So it goes around the same loop again and again, always with a magnetic field that's 220 00:19:57,880 --> 00:20:05,960 very nearly the same. 221 00:20:05,960 --> 00:20:10,680 Because the mass increases and the charge does not increase, you have to increase the 222 00:20:10,680 --> 00:20:16,880 magnetic field in proportion to the mass in order to get it to stay to the same radius 223 00:20:16,880 --> 00:20:18,840 of curvature of the orbit. 224 00:20:18,840 --> 00:20:30,200 These are the magnets that sweep gradually to full field over many minutes or even hours 225 00:20:30,200 --> 00:20:38,000 and then whenever all the particles are up to as high a speed as the accelerator is capable 226 00:20:38,000 --> 00:20:45,720 of and therefore the reason that the magnetic field is up at the maximum it's capable of, 227 00:20:45,720 --> 00:20:54,400 they tweak the field very briefly as the pulse, as the bunch of particles is sweeping by, 228 00:20:54,400 --> 00:21:03,480 tweak it so that it gets to the other side of the diverter and then act upon it by more 229 00:21:03,480 --> 00:21:11,160 magnetic fields that bend it away from the original circular orbit and toward a target 230 00:21:11,160 --> 00:21:20,000 where it hits something either a massive tungsten target or more commonly it hits particles 231 00:21:20,000 --> 00:21:29,280 that are coming in the other direction because you have really not one loop but two loops 232 00:21:29,280 --> 00:21:36,960 with reverse, one loop has the field vertically upward and the other has the field vertically 233 00:21:36,960 --> 00:21:41,040 downward the same magnitude so that the particles are going the opposite direction likewise 234 00:21:41,040 --> 00:21:46,640 get bent in the same direction to maintain the circular orbit. 235 00:21:46,640 --> 00:21:53,920 Then in the interaction region those two particles which are down some millimeter diameter micron 236 00:21:53,920 --> 00:21:59,440 size diameter have a significant probability of a proton hitting another proton coming 237 00:21:59,440 --> 00:22:08,240 from the other direction and through and steadying mass and energy equivalence generates all 238 00:22:08,240 --> 00:22:19,240 sorts of particles of huge mass and could be a different line instead of the protons 239 00:22:19,240 --> 00:22:23,880 they could be much more massive. 240 00:22:23,880 --> 00:22:32,920 So you can, so what I understand is you can then create new elements, you can create new 241 00:22:32,920 --> 00:22:36,800 isotopes through this particle acceleration process. 242 00:22:36,800 --> 00:22:43,960 You could, however typically they're used to create new subatomic particles rather than 243 00:22:43,960 --> 00:22:50,440 simply converting one isotope to another isotope. 244 00:22:50,440 --> 00:22:58,440 Mainly there are machines that still have that function that rare isotope generation 245 00:22:58,440 --> 00:23:08,720 in Michigan, financing Michigan as that pump function and they there are a few accelerators 246 00:23:08,720 --> 00:23:16,400 that are trying to do that efficiently and they create these isotopes for medical diagnostics 247 00:23:16,400 --> 00:23:25,680 or for medical treatment that takes in case of cobalt-60 where you irradiate the tumor 248 00:23:25,680 --> 00:23:32,480 with radiation coming from an isotope which doesn't exist in nature but was created. 249 00:23:32,480 --> 00:23:36,320 Tritium is used in medical as well as fusion. 250 00:23:36,320 --> 00:23:37,320 Yes. 251 00:23:37,320 --> 00:23:45,880 I know we've had a lot of meetings around this but is that how then tritium could be 252 00:23:45,880 --> 00:23:49,960 produced and why not helium-3? 253 00:23:49,960 --> 00:23:52,720 Can we produce helium-3 in a particle? 254 00:23:52,720 --> 00:23:53,720 Yes you can. 255 00:23:53,720 --> 00:24:00,800 And it's being looked at because it might be economic to do that. 256 00:24:00,800 --> 00:24:09,240 At the moment, helium-3 is extracted primarily from natural gas and my perception is that 257 00:24:09,240 --> 00:24:12,200 remains the economic way of doing it. 258 00:24:12,200 --> 00:24:18,920 Helium-3, tritium on the other hand does not exist in nature because it's half life, it's 259 00:24:18,920 --> 00:24:19,920 too short. 260 00:24:19,920 --> 00:24:28,440 So that you have to create and that there are a few fission reactors whose major function 261 00:24:28,440 --> 00:24:36,600 is creating tritium for well primarily the nuclear arsenal. 262 00:24:36,600 --> 00:24:48,080 Helium-3 being a fuel you need not mere grams, you really need kilograms and so whereas usual 263 00:24:48,080 --> 00:24:59,800 particle accelerators generate micrograms of reactants, if that, you need a particle 264 00:24:59,800 --> 00:25:13,360 accelerator unprecedented current that most particle accelerators have milliamps current 265 00:25:13,360 --> 00:25:23,480 going at very high energy, the creation of helium-3 or tritium would require amperes 266 00:25:23,480 --> 00:25:33,320 at physics at an energy level which is no longer of any interest to physics so it would 267 00:25:33,320 --> 00:25:40,720 be a dedicated machine for making tritium. 268 00:25:40,720 --> 00:25:46,280 And it's just we're talking about hundreds of megawatts of electrical energy in order 269 00:25:46,280 --> 00:26:01,840 to get this conversion because the electrical energy approaches the sort of, you need to 270 00:26:01,840 --> 00:26:08,440 generate the tritium is a non-insignificant fraction of this energy released when the 271 00:26:08,440 --> 00:26:21,400 tritium-3 decomposes into helium or hydrogen or deuterium or protons or neutrons. 272 00:26:21,400 --> 00:26:29,960 So theoretically has there then been talk on using a particle accelerator as an energy 273 00:26:29,960 --> 00:26:36,080 generator that slash particle accelerator so it would do both things, it would be like 274 00:26:36,080 --> 00:26:40,040 a self-sustained ecosystem perhaps? 275 00:26:40,040 --> 00:26:51,680 That had a guest quite a few months ago now who was proposing, he was looking into the 276 00:26:51,680 --> 00:27:01,000 feasibility of that and I think it boiled down to economics and it was marginal and 277 00:27:01,000 --> 00:27:09,120 un-evaluated that feeding off an existing particle accelerator is unlikely because they 278 00:27:09,120 --> 00:27:15,680 operate at energy levels higher than needed in particle numbers that are far, far less 279 00:27:15,680 --> 00:27:18,920 than needed to do the job. 280 00:27:18,920 --> 00:27:25,000 This mining of the moon is not out of the question I understand. 281 00:27:25,000 --> 00:27:26,000 It's not. 282 00:27:26,000 --> 00:27:28,880 I've spoken to quite a few people about it. 283 00:27:28,880 --> 00:27:35,760 Hopefully one of the other folks on our board, Dr. Kulsinski is on the board of two companies. 284 00:27:35,760 --> 00:27:42,920 One is with us and the other one is a company going to the moon to get helium-3 and it's 285 00:27:42,920 --> 00:27:46,160 funded by Jeff Bezos. 286 00:27:46,160 --> 00:27:50,760 It has a lot of potential. 287 00:27:50,760 --> 00:27:54,760 Hopefully there are future partners. 288 00:27:54,760 --> 00:28:03,240 My expectation is that the need to concentrate it at the moon because even there it's very 289 00:28:03,240 --> 00:28:07,480 low concentration, it's not insuperable. 290 00:28:07,480 --> 00:28:21,400 The moon is close enough that if you can launch things at thousands of dollars a pound, many 291 00:28:21,400 --> 00:28:25,800 thousands but it's not millions of dollars a pound and therefore you can bring it back 292 00:28:25,800 --> 00:28:34,480 and if it is worth millions of dollars per pound then it's not as far-fetched as air 293 00:28:34,480 --> 00:28:37,800 fraying strawberries from California once was. 294 00:28:37,800 --> 00:28:38,800 Right? 295 00:28:38,800 --> 00:28:39,800 Right, right. 296 00:28:39,800 --> 00:28:40,800 Yeah. 297 00:28:40,800 --> 00:28:51,000 There has to be a seed planted in the venture community on the upside of turning helium-3 298 00:28:51,000 --> 00:28:57,760 into a publicly traded commodity market. 299 00:28:57,760 --> 00:29:05,160 Were you to do that perhaps, yeah, why not? 300 00:29:05,160 --> 00:29:11,880 Those are the people at this point. 301 00:29:11,880 --> 00:29:19,480 Alcatore A, was that built around, would you call that the birth of fusion? 302 00:29:19,480 --> 00:29:26,160 I watched Oppenheimer so I understand that fusion was the original idea and then it kind 303 00:29:26,160 --> 00:29:31,920 of got sidetracked there a little bit for the better part of four to five decades and 304 00:29:31,920 --> 00:29:35,120 then there were you guys that revived it. 305 00:29:35,120 --> 00:29:41,920 It was Eater and then MIT is how I understand it. 306 00:29:41,920 --> 00:29:51,920 One could hardly point to any single device as being the birth of fusion that the moment 307 00:29:51,920 --> 00:30:02,600 that the physics, viability of the physics became clear, it would intrigue people but 308 00:30:02,600 --> 00:30:12,160 for the first several decades it was definitely research even when, well like Rigatron that 309 00:30:12,160 --> 00:30:23,800 Carl worked on in the early, mid-1980s that was intended to be commercial and the magnet 310 00:30:23,800 --> 00:30:36,480 side of it achieved its goals but the physics has been understood ever more to embody all 311 00:30:36,480 --> 00:30:45,680 sorts of complications that were first recognized so that the stellarators, oh, certainly the 312 00:30:45,680 --> 00:30:56,720 Russian invention of the tokamak, that certainly inspired a resurgence of interest in the field 313 00:30:56,720 --> 00:31:09,360 and Alcatore maintained or extended that interest because it found a new sort of stability mode 314 00:31:09,360 --> 00:31:18,960 that relaxed some of the concerns that might never be able to contain this plasma well 315 00:31:18,960 --> 00:31:24,760 enough, long enough, dense enough to get it hot enough to get more power out and went 316 00:31:24,760 --> 00:31:25,760 in. 317 00:31:25,760 --> 00:31:33,640 Alcatore never was envisioned as a predecessor of a prototype, a commercial machine because 318 00:31:33,640 --> 00:31:41,960 it was inherently pulsed, it took a lot of energy to get up the field, it was known very 319 00:31:41,960 --> 00:31:47,760 early in the game that there would probably have to be superconducting although the Rigatron 320 00:31:47,760 --> 00:31:59,840 was operating on the premise that it might not be, that these weren't supposed to be 321 00:31:59,840 --> 00:32:05,800 plug-in light bulbs that would eventually get radiated so much that they would be weakened 322 00:32:05,800 --> 00:32:09,760 and you'd have to toss them out but like a light bulb you replace it with a new one, 323 00:32:09,760 --> 00:32:16,880 if you generated 10 times as much power during its lifetime than you had needed to get the 324 00:32:16,880 --> 00:32:28,360 reaction going then it could perhaps be commercially viable and now the discovery of high temperature 325 00:32:28,360 --> 00:32:35,280 superconductors has certainly been a re-energized the commercial capabilities. 326 00:32:35,280 --> 00:32:42,200 The more money that's poured into ITER with its low temperature superconductor magnets 327 00:32:42,200 --> 00:32:52,040 more people realize that it's just too big, too costly, whereas high temperature superconductors 328 00:32:52,040 --> 00:32:59,240 can get a higher confinement field that's twice as great, maybe more, the machine can 329 00:32:59,240 --> 00:33:06,460 therefore be much smaller down to the scale where the limit is not the size of the reaction 330 00:33:06,460 --> 00:33:12,480 chamber but the thickness of the breeding wall, there needs to be one either to get 331 00:33:12,480 --> 00:33:19,560 the heat out or to breed the tritium if that's one of the fuels. 332 00:33:19,560 --> 00:33:33,680 Anyway it has an enthusiasm that's more widespread and deeper than ever before, a top scale that's 333 00:33:33,680 --> 00:33:43,600 sooner than the traditional 20 years has been from day one and sort of funding stream that 334 00:33:43,600 --> 00:33:53,520 may bring it online and as far as I know there have been no show stoppers discovered in the 335 00:33:53,520 --> 00:33:59,400 plasma physics, there of course was always a possibility that one will be found, that 336 00:33:59,400 --> 00:34:10,360 would be a disaster, but technologists can analyze things with depth and precision as 337 00:34:10,360 --> 00:34:17,120 never before and anticipate things and as more and more knowledge feeds the system we 338 00:34:17,120 --> 00:34:27,840 understand things better, we have AI to see patterns where human brain, escape the human 339 00:34:27,840 --> 00:34:35,560 brain, so a lot of things going for it, I hope to live long enough to see even more 340 00:34:35,560 --> 00:34:36,560 progress by then. 341 00:34:36,560 --> 00:34:45,320 I think you will, I think there are a lot of companies that are very close, we'll probably 342 00:34:45,320 --> 00:34:52,520 be sixth or seventh hopefully but I think there are a few companies, within the decade 343 00:34:52,520 --> 00:34:58,560 it looks like, within the next five years they should have proved things out. 344 00:34:58,560 --> 00:35:04,600 Tell us about your time at Harvard, what years were those? 345 00:35:04,600 --> 00:35:09,080 How was Harvard back then? 346 00:35:09,080 --> 00:35:21,280 That was from September of 64 through February of 67 and that was not the highlight of my 347 00:35:21,280 --> 00:35:28,000 life, for one thing Harvard had a different approach toward teaching more out of the box 348 00:35:28,000 --> 00:35:36,440 thinking required whereas MIT was more cookbook, you were taught recipes, principles and such 349 00:35:36,440 --> 00:35:43,600 and the talent was to combine these in new ways to solve new problems. 350 00:35:43,600 --> 00:35:52,280 I love that distinction, I don't think that's ever been clearly made to me, because I, you 351 00:35:52,280 --> 00:35:57,040 know, yeah, Harvard was the highlight of my life. 352 00:35:57,040 --> 00:36:04,360 I applied to MIT and did not get in so I think there's a difference between the way you and 353 00:36:04,360 --> 00:36:09,000 I think about this, interesting, wow, interesting. 354 00:36:09,000 --> 00:36:20,520 That you certainly have talents that are rather different from mine, you are an expert, administrator, 355 00:36:20,520 --> 00:36:30,760 executive, manager, I never excelled in that regime, I'm much more a loner, I can do it 356 00:36:30,760 --> 00:36:35,960 myself rather than farming it out, for me that's where the fun is. 357 00:36:35,960 --> 00:36:40,360 But we're a good team. 358 00:36:40,360 --> 00:36:46,600 Yeah, we need everyone, we need each other. 359 00:36:46,600 --> 00:36:54,440 Tell us about particle beam lasers, what are particle beam lasers? 360 00:36:54,440 --> 00:37:01,840 It's a company that employs half a dozen to a dozen people, almost always part time and 361 00:37:01,840 --> 00:37:12,640 most of them are semi-retired people who had important technical or managerial expertise 362 00:37:12,640 --> 00:37:18,480 when they were with the national magnet laboratories or elsewhere. 363 00:37:18,480 --> 00:37:29,880 It has been funded almost exclusively by small business innovative research grants, either 364 00:37:29,880 --> 00:37:36,600 nine months phase ones or two year phase two grants. 365 00:37:36,600 --> 00:37:41,680 The name is actually Ms. Nomer because only the very first project that they worked on 366 00:37:41,680 --> 00:37:48,360 back around 1980 had anything to do with lasers really. 367 00:37:48,360 --> 00:38:00,000 Ever since then it has done most things with magnets, early ones were low temperature super 368 00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:06,680 conducting magnets or some resistive magnets and then recently it's evolved ever more toward 369 00:38:06,680 --> 00:38:09,000 high temperature super conductors. 370 00:38:09,000 --> 00:38:18,800 It's been a design effort, no machine shop or anything like that so that we partner typically 371 00:38:18,800 --> 00:38:24,720 with Brookhaven National Magnet Laboratories Superconducting Magnet Division to do the 372 00:38:24,720 --> 00:38:35,720 fabrication, fabrication is required. 373 00:38:35,720 --> 00:38:42,440 It sounds like you've designed magnets that have a multitude of applications all over 374 00:38:42,440 --> 00:38:50,880 the world, how 40 years from now what are we going to be using magnets for if we were 375 00:38:50,880 --> 00:38:53,880 to go with the same trajectory here? 376 00:38:53,880 --> 00:38:57,200 Throw some AI and quantum computing in the mix? 377 00:38:57,200 --> 00:39:04,160 I really don't know but the trajectory is still up when I entered it was practically 378 00:39:04,160 --> 00:39:13,920 the ground floor and so my career has been one of growth excitement as magnets are used 379 00:39:13,920 --> 00:39:16,040 in more and more applications. 380 00:39:16,040 --> 00:39:25,760 Back in the early days there were magnets primarily iron magnets with energizing coil 381 00:39:25,760 --> 00:39:30,800 to consume 10 kilowatts so that sort of thing. 382 00:39:30,800 --> 00:39:35,840 Iron scale was a magnetic up so low that was able to generate seven Tesla's in a small 383 00:39:35,840 --> 00:39:48,600 bore by having something like a hundred kilowatts of energy and many tons of iron in the circuit 384 00:39:48,600 --> 00:39:58,600 and that's all gone by, was going by the late 60s as now you're being titanium first and 385 00:39:58,600 --> 00:40:10,120 then titanium took over generating fields routinely of seven Tesla's or so and then 386 00:40:10,120 --> 00:40:16,480 the bugs were worked out of titanium which was discovered about the same time as titanium 387 00:40:16,480 --> 00:40:26,000 but it was brittle existed only in tape form like HTS now but in spite of that they generated 388 00:40:26,000 --> 00:40:34,160 some impressive fields with Niobium-10 and now with Eater it has Niobium-10 of form that's 389 00:40:34,160 --> 00:40:42,560 much more handleable in terms of cables, round conductors, very fine filaments and such but 390 00:40:42,560 --> 00:40:47,080 it's still brittle, it has troubles. 391 00:40:47,080 --> 00:40:52,120 Niobium titanium is great you can treat it like an iron wire and can take stretching 392 00:40:52,120 --> 00:40:54,120 and bending and breaking. 393 00:40:54,120 --> 00:41:04,200 HTS is definitely going to take over, it's already taking over niche after niche except 394 00:41:04,200 --> 00:41:07,960 for the very low fields where Niobium-10 and iron go wrong. 395 00:41:07,960 --> 00:41:16,480 Because it can be made smaller, because HTS can enable a higher Tesla and a smaller compact. 396 00:41:16,480 --> 00:41:23,600 It can carry significant current up with temperatures in the teens rather than the difference between 397 00:41:23,600 --> 00:41:29,120 20 Kelvin and 4 Kelvin is quite significant. 398 00:41:29,120 --> 00:41:36,400 The carno efficiency of the cooling plant is the ratio of the temperatures and if you 399 00:41:36,400 --> 00:41:45,080 have 300 degree temperature you're trying to cool down to 20 that's only a factor of 400 00:41:45,080 --> 00:41:51,600 15 whereas if you go down to 3 degrees Kelvin that's a factor of 100 and takes there five 401 00:41:51,600 --> 00:41:57,840 times more energy to get there. 402 00:41:57,840 --> 00:42:08,880 So we're thinking hyper loops, we're thinking magnets in particle accelerators, particle 403 00:42:08,880 --> 00:42:11,920 beam lasers, fusion energy generator. 404 00:42:11,920 --> 00:42:21,960 So like 40 years from now I see like all of these technologies being more easily available 405 00:42:21,960 --> 00:42:25,840 than it is today because of magnets. 406 00:42:25,840 --> 00:42:31,440 I'm quite confident that 40 years from now we will have high temperature conductors that 407 00:42:31,440 --> 00:42:44,400 are at least as tolerant of bending as present day Niobium-10 and if we're very lucky there 408 00:42:44,400 --> 00:42:53,280 might be entirely new material which behaves like titanium and that would open up a realm 409 00:42:53,280 --> 00:43:01,080 of new applicability even if the temperature regime has not been greatly improved and certainly 410 00:43:01,080 --> 00:43:08,760 it's a possibility that the dream of room temperature superconductors will come to pass. 411 00:43:08,760 --> 00:43:14,920 So what is the application that you have designed a magnet for that you are most proud of Bob? 412 00:43:14,920 --> 00:43:17,560 Like what's the highlight here? 413 00:43:17,560 --> 00:43:24,360 Say fusion, it made me happy but be honest of course. 414 00:43:24,360 --> 00:43:33,280 The one that comes to mind is not really an application other than a very small niche 415 00:43:33,280 --> 00:43:38,680 in the research laboratories that's goal is to generate the most intense continuous magnetic 416 00:43:38,680 --> 00:43:39,680 field. 417 00:43:39,680 --> 00:43:47,000 To do this with the resistive magnets you need 10 megawatts or more, the Florida lab 418 00:43:47,000 --> 00:43:57,200 has 50 megawatts now and you need conductors that are strong and very crucially you need 419 00:43:57,200 --> 00:43:59,000 to keep them from melting. 420 00:43:59,000 --> 00:44:06,080 So at Florida lab they have the water supplied at 400 pounds per square inch pressure, about 421 00:44:06,080 --> 00:44:12,520 10 times the pressure that comes out of your faucet. 422 00:44:12,520 --> 00:44:24,480 And at the magnet laboratory we had only about 200 pounds per square inch and so our holes 423 00:44:24,480 --> 00:44:33,120 needed to be rather bigger than those in Florida and it seemed like that be a limitation on 424 00:44:33,120 --> 00:44:38,160 ever getting sort of power densities that you otherwise would be able to sustain inside 425 00:44:38,160 --> 00:44:39,160 the magnet. 426 00:44:39,160 --> 00:44:47,920 There was a technique which involved etching shallow grooves into magnet plates and the 427 00:44:47,920 --> 00:44:56,000 first attempt at generating 25 teslas at the magnet laboratory did involve a magnet that 428 00:44:56,000 --> 00:45:07,400 was able to generate 20.5 teslas with a insert magnet that did use this radio cooling but 429 00:45:07,400 --> 00:45:14,600 it was defective I found out by my analyses that the passages were much deeper than they 430 00:45:14,600 --> 00:45:15,600 ideally would be. 431 00:45:15,600 --> 00:45:26,400 They were fed by an annulus at the inside of the solenoid and the annulus was much too 432 00:45:26,400 --> 00:45:33,360 small, it had to be small in order not to carve away most of the magnet and so the water 433 00:45:33,360 --> 00:45:40,680 velocity in the annulus was much rather bigger than in the passages themselves so the pressure 434 00:45:40,680 --> 00:45:45,560 drop was primarily getting into and out of the annulus. 435 00:45:45,560 --> 00:45:51,920 I found that if you fed the magnet not just from one end but from both ends you could 436 00:45:51,920 --> 00:45:58,800 then taper the annulus from both ends which means that you would only need to be only 437 00:45:58,800 --> 00:46:07,560 half as high maximum and make the passages only about half as high as they used to be 438 00:46:07,560 --> 00:46:12,960 and you'd still get the same volume of water through which would put the magnet in the 439 00:46:12,960 --> 00:46:16,240 passages would be twice as fast as it had been. 440 00:46:16,240 --> 00:46:22,440 Now you'd have some repeat transfer that you'd need to get the very high power densities 441 00:46:22,440 --> 00:46:31,240 and that was the technique that was used in the hybrid magnet inserts that in 1977 generated 442 00:46:31,240 --> 00:46:40,360 30 Teslas with an insert that generated about 23 of those Teslas something that to try and 443 00:46:40,360 --> 00:46:45,080 do it by the conventional technique of axial flow of water would have sacrificed several 444 00:46:45,080 --> 00:46:49,000 Teslas in field. 445 00:46:49,000 --> 00:46:51,560 The record is 45 Tesla right? 446 00:46:51,560 --> 00:47:01,520 Yes that's what they're a magnet to a superconductor generates rather more field than we ever succeeded 447 00:47:01,520 --> 00:47:04,520 at the magnet laboratory. 448 00:47:04,520 --> 00:47:09,080 Is there a physics limitation? 449 00:47:09,080 --> 00:47:14,680 Sorry is there a limitation in terms of how high you can go? 450 00:47:14,680 --> 00:47:22,280 I mean I understand it's dependent on the quality of your rep coat tape and other ancillary 451 00:47:22,280 --> 00:47:33,240 things that go with it but can you build a 100 Tesla magnet is that possible? 452 00:47:33,240 --> 00:47:42,280 Probably not there is a 100 Tesla pulse magnet at Los Alamos that uses copper alloys copper 453 00:47:42,280 --> 00:47:50,720 back up by very strong stainless steel but that generates a field that is only for about 454 00:47:50,720 --> 00:47:57,120 10 milliseconds because the current density that you need in the coil to generate the 455 00:47:57,120 --> 00:48:03,800 field can be sustained only for milliseconds before it overheats. 456 00:48:03,800 --> 00:48:10,880 Interesting is that I've you know I've read of projects where magnets are being used to 457 00:48:10,880 --> 00:48:16,400 launch something into space and that's all you need you need 10 seconds what do you need 458 00:48:16,400 --> 00:48:17,680 that's all you need right? 459 00:48:17,680 --> 00:48:24,840 Yes and so you throw like a I mean for me if I would throw something into space it would 460 00:48:24,840 --> 00:48:31,480 be fusion energy generator components that I throw into space and have a robot catch 461 00:48:31,480 --> 00:48:40,600 it and put it together but 10 seconds is all you need Bob at a 100 Tesla and 10 seconds 462 00:48:40,600 --> 00:48:42,920 can we launch something in space perhaps? 463 00:48:42,920 --> 00:48:47,960 This magnet in Los Alamos is 10 milliseconds. 464 00:48:47,960 --> 00:48:51,640 Even so I mean that's all you need. 465 00:48:51,640 --> 00:49:03,640 Carl was designed a electromagnetic launcher that was a rail gun that achieved a major 466 00:49:03,640 --> 00:49:18,560 fraction of escape velocity that so the this was 40 years ago but it's intriguing to consider 467 00:49:18,560 --> 00:49:28,520 that and there are sorts of techniques that involve such things as taking the rail gun 468 00:49:28,520 --> 00:49:38,800 up to 90 percent of the atmosphere behind that will greatly decrease the losses aerodynamic 469 00:49:38,800 --> 00:49:51,280 losses launching it from there and certainly with new techniques which might involve magnets 470 00:49:51,280 --> 00:49:56,800 not only in the rail gun itself but in the power source that you could have a big Faraday 471 00:49:56,800 --> 00:50:08,160 disk rotating storing hundreds of mega joules of energy and that would be the energy source 472 00:50:08,160 --> 00:50:16,640 that would be transferred to the rail gun to achieve launch or another technique is 473 00:50:16,640 --> 00:50:27,000 a more sophisticated launching mechanism that is used now on some aircraft carriers that's 474 00:50:27,000 --> 00:50:34,520 electromagnetic rather than steam that these are magnets that are energized sequentially 475 00:50:34,520 --> 00:50:42,280 so that the airplane is well not the airplane itself but a magnet that's in the bore of 476 00:50:42,280 --> 00:50:54,280 these that interacts with the magnets in the back of the gun barrel to propel the hook 477 00:50:54,280 --> 00:51:03,880 that's on the plane electromagnetically rather than with piston and steam pressure and that 478 00:51:03,880 --> 00:51:17,200 by extending it to many hundreds of meters or kilometers you can get to escape velocity 479 00:51:17,200 --> 00:51:26,520 we had a little sketch back in the late 80s I think it was of when a co-founder of the 480 00:51:26,520 --> 00:51:34,080 magnet or Henry Colm worked on electromagnetic levitation and electromagnetic launch and 481 00:51:34,080 --> 00:51:42,960 they were to be showed a effectively a gun barrel going up a steep slope from near sea 482 00:51:42,960 --> 00:51:51,600 level to thousands of feet elevation that they would launch a projectile up at escape velocity 483 00:51:51,600 --> 00:52:02,400 right yeah it's all possible it's amazing what technology has done and is proposing 484 00:52:02,400 --> 00:52:12,760 as or presenting as possibilities worth considering right I mean when you so the I think we have 485 00:52:12,760 --> 00:52:22,160 as humanity we have so many space aspirations and the rocket equation is not so conducive 486 00:52:22,160 --> 00:52:29,360 for all of these aspirations we have and if we you know we've landed boosters now so that 487 00:52:29,360 --> 00:52:36,160 that was a big expense that we cut out but if we can yeah I mean there's a there's a 488 00:52:36,160 --> 00:52:47,000 lot of hope out there to use magnets especially I watched a net a documentary on Netflix about 489 00:52:47,000 --> 00:52:54,160 the JWSD telescope and how it was launched up there in a couple of pieces and there were 490 00:52:54,160 --> 00:52:58,720 these robotic arms like gathering them up and putting them together oh what a thing 491 00:52:58,720 --> 00:53:03,920 of beauty what a thing of beauty I'm sure we could have shot those into space rather 492 00:53:03,920 --> 00:53:17,400 than actually put it on something and my goodness the fuel on that and exciting future sure 493 00:53:17,400 --> 00:53:27,680 so Bob for a young engineer who wants to get into magnets what what's the advice why bother 494 00:53:27,680 --> 00:53:39,160 and what's the advice oh do what I did dive in that there's more promise now than ever 495 00:53:39,160 --> 00:53:51,680 I would say that the the future of magnetism was only suspected back then really there 496 00:53:51,680 --> 00:53:57,800 were the intriguing invest discoveries of superconductivity on scale that could lead 497 00:53:57,800 --> 00:54:04,960 to engineering devices rather than the superconductoring lead poked out long before it generated a 498 00:54:04,960 --> 00:54:21,040 field of any interest but now with the fusion as one of the obvious avenues for magnet expertise 499 00:54:21,040 --> 00:54:31,400 it's it's definitely worth getting into that article accelerators were coming along then 500 00:54:31,400 --> 00:54:41,240 but not not to be since they're still sustaining now and they're they're talking multi-billion 501 00:54:41,240 --> 00:54:49,600 dollar successors to the Large Hadron Collider and the Muon Collider would involve new types 502 00:54:49,600 --> 00:54:58,880 of magnet technology because whereas the Large Hadron Collider uses fields of about eight 503 00:54:58,880 --> 00:55:08,120 Tesla's now prospects for their designs for doubling that field using my intent but with 504 00:55:08,120 --> 00:55:16,240 high temperature superconductors you can go to 20 Tesla's 30 Tesla's and maybe even 50 505 00:55:16,240 --> 00:55:24,880 Tesla's of a solenoidal geometry that's needed for a different application entirely not not 506 00:55:24,880 --> 00:55:33,200 diverting the path of the muons but the charged particles focusing the charged particles to 507 00:55:33,200 --> 00:55:38,160 get them in a bunch that's tight enough that when it interacts with another bunch coming 508 00:55:38,160 --> 00:55:47,800 out as a direction the density of the insects swarm is high enough that one insect has a 509 00:55:47,800 --> 00:55:51,400 decent chance of running into another one. 510 00:55:51,400 --> 00:55:58,960 You know I spoke to a scientist out of Caltech about two years ago and he explained to me 511 00:55:58,960 --> 00:56:05,600 that the connection between muons and fusion and if you could have he said in the future 512 00:56:05,600 --> 00:56:12,320 you could have almost a tabletop particle accelerator that creates muons and feeds them 513 00:56:12,320 --> 00:56:20,240 into your fusion energy generator and it would help fuse your isotopes because they would 514 00:56:20,240 --> 00:56:27,160 be attracted to the muon and they would stick to it and it would enable fusion in the way 515 00:56:27,160 --> 00:56:32,920 where your generator would be that much smaller and then I asked him how likely is it can 516 00:56:32,920 --> 00:56:38,920 we that that we can create these muons and he goes maybe a hundred years away he says 517 00:56:38,920 --> 00:56:43,480 like what am I going to do with that now but yeah. 518 00:56:43,480 --> 00:56:50,120 It's a challenge that my first consulting job with Brookhaven National Laboratory was 519 00:56:50,120 --> 00:57:01,520 a 20 Tesla superconducting resistive hybrid magnet that creates 20 Tesla's in a 15 centimeter 520 00:57:01,520 --> 00:57:14,120 bore in which a proton beam smashing into a target of tungsten or mercury would generate 521 00:57:14,120 --> 00:57:24,000 pions which would get in a fraction of microsecond decay into muons which would then be accelerated 522 00:57:24,000 --> 00:57:32,000 which has to be done very quickly because they decay in two microseconds if we're not 523 00:57:32,000 --> 00:57:37,160 for Lorentzian time transformation which enables one to make it appear in the laboratory time 524 00:57:37,160 --> 00:57:45,040 frame is milliseconds but it's still it has to be done very quickly and focusing them 525 00:57:45,040 --> 00:57:52,240 is very problematic you have to send them through a low density material such as lithium 526 00:57:52,240 --> 00:57:59,600 or liquid hydrogen where they lose momentum in all three coordinate systems transverse 527 00:57:59,600 --> 00:58:07,040 and longitudinal then you restore the longitudinal momentum via RF cavity electric fields. 528 00:58:07,040 --> 00:58:14,560 It was a challenge so great that we never succeeded in solving it with the minimal manpower 529 00:58:14,560 --> 00:58:21,080 and funding that we had back then but it's back on the table again the particle accelerator 530 00:58:21,080 --> 00:58:30,720 priority panel just devoted that it was the at or near the top priority for America's 531 00:58:30,720 --> 00:58:32,720 particle accelerator project. 532 00:58:32,720 --> 00:58:37,200 Wonderful something else those young engineers can get into. 533 00:58:37,200 --> 00:58:38,200 Yes. 534 00:58:38,200 --> 00:58:47,440 Why does a magnet need to be shielded like why magnet shielding? 535 00:58:47,440 --> 00:58:48,440 There's the radiation. 536 00:58:48,440 --> 00:58:58,080 There's typically health reasons or safety reasons that magnetic field has to be held 537 00:58:58,080 --> 00:59:07,320 to not much more than five gauss or to avoid triggering pacemakers so they these hospital 538 00:59:07,320 --> 00:59:16,040 magnets typically are either in shielded rooms with people who need pacemakers don't get 539 00:59:16,040 --> 00:59:22,120 the treatment and the doctors and visitors aren't allowed in. 540 00:59:22,120 --> 00:59:28,200 More commonly now they are actively shielded that is the magnet itself has reverse windings 541 00:59:28,200 --> 00:59:37,920 on the outside that cancel the big fringe field of the magnet and that's adds to the 542 00:59:37,920 --> 00:59:47,960 cost but when you consider that the building room can be considerably smaller because outside 543 00:59:47,960 --> 01:00:05,320 the magnet is within short distance from the magnet the field are down to acceptable levels. 544 01:00:05,320 --> 01:00:15,440 The alternative course is iron shielding which the iron magnetizes so as to cancel the fringe 545 01:00:15,440 --> 01:00:18,320 field and otherwise would be there. 546 01:00:18,320 --> 01:00:24,600 What bridges theory and application in the magnet world Bob? 547 01:00:24,600 --> 01:00:31,800 And what factor decides whether something is ready for a real world commercial application 548 01:00:31,800 --> 01:00:38,400 and worth putting money into and what are the ideas that are brilliant as they may be 549 01:00:38,400 --> 01:00:43,040 are 80 years away and get put on the wayside because there isn't a financial incentive 550 01:00:43,040 --> 01:00:48,640 to build it so to speak? 551 01:00:48,640 --> 01:00:53,960 Of course the only need is to make money to have investors confident that they're going 552 01:00:53,960 --> 01:00:58,880 sufficiently confident to make money to that they risk money. 553 01:00:58,880 --> 01:01:05,200 Once I constrained that way the prestige of being the first to get the Nobel Prize is 554 01:01:05,200 --> 01:01:16,120 a driving force or military advantage of this would be very important. 555 01:01:16,120 --> 01:01:18,120 So money or defense? 556 01:01:18,120 --> 01:01:19,120 Yes. 557 01:01:19,120 --> 01:01:24,360 Patents or something those are the driving forces. 558 01:01:24,360 --> 01:01:28,840 I suspect that the transistor would never have made it into the marketplace as quickly 559 01:01:28,840 --> 01:01:39,280 as it did were it not for military applications and minimizing the size of devices that previously 560 01:01:39,280 --> 01:01:45,000 used vacuum tubes and consumed many kilowatts of power. 561 01:01:45,000 --> 01:01:57,360 And certainly computer chips that the commercial market for chips is now so huge that it will 562 01:01:57,360 --> 01:02:05,840 probably advance even without the military motivating force. 563 01:02:05,840 --> 01:02:16,280 And you hear more now of the military taking off the shelf devices for use in their devices 564 01:02:16,280 --> 01:02:21,400 because it's the logical way to go if it's available. 565 01:02:21,400 --> 01:02:22,400 Right. 566 01:02:22,400 --> 01:02:29,000 That was kind of my original thinking when I approached actually building Chromos into 567 01:02:29,000 --> 01:02:31,760 a company. 568 01:02:31,760 --> 01:02:40,600 So basically you know you look at GPS systems, internet, so drones, so many other things 569 01:02:40,600 --> 01:02:44,080 were born out of the military. 570 01:02:44,080 --> 01:02:53,000 It almost feels like that reasoning is so it's almost a formula for corporate success 571 01:02:53,000 --> 01:02:57,680 is to do something that either placates or appeases the military. 572 01:02:57,680 --> 01:03:02,440 And I started off that way and then there were people that I spoke to that shamed me 573 01:03:02,440 --> 01:03:03,440 about it. 574 01:03:03,440 --> 01:03:10,360 And so I didn't you know it's the military we live in a country we need defense so I 575 01:03:10,360 --> 01:03:14,760 get it from a pragmatic perspective I totally get it. 576 01:03:14,760 --> 01:03:20,680 But a lot of people shamed me and they said hey you're building things that are going 577 01:03:20,680 --> 01:03:25,880 to be killing human beings on this planet like how does that sit with you? 578 01:03:25,880 --> 01:03:30,480 You are building it in tokamaks you are building proposing the building of something that is 579 01:03:30,480 --> 01:03:31,480 saving millions. 580 01:03:31,480 --> 01:03:39,400 That's how I saw it but it seems like it seems like people there are people that kind of 581 01:03:39,400 --> 01:03:41,400 view it as like a very bad thing. 582 01:03:41,400 --> 01:03:43,400 I think it's a positive. 583 01:03:43,400 --> 01:03:54,560 Oh it's one of the things that inspires me to participate in the quest for energy that 584 01:03:54,560 --> 01:04:03,800 is inexhaustible by comparison to what we've had to deal with before with wood, dung, coal, 585 01:04:03,800 --> 01:04:12,480 oil, gas, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, wind. 586 01:04:12,480 --> 01:04:17,520 Whale oil yeah how long ago was whale oil like less than 150 years? 587 01:04:17,520 --> 01:04:24,640 These other techniques have either environmental concerns which are major or a combination 588 01:04:24,640 --> 01:04:34,160 of environmental concerns which are not negligible and economics that's unconvincing or difficulties 589 01:04:34,160 --> 01:04:35,160 of scale. 590 01:04:35,160 --> 01:04:44,000 Right and yep that's a good point like we talk about a levelized cost of energy and 591 01:04:44,000 --> 01:04:54,760 reaching a levelized cost of energy of under 50 cents for an energy technology to be commercialized 592 01:04:54,760 --> 01:05:02,160 but you look at the history of how humanity has been producing energy and we're not that 593 01:05:02,160 --> 01:05:04,480 long into it. 594 01:05:04,480 --> 01:05:09,160 You know we're not even that long into it and we've had this progression all of the 595 01:05:09,160 --> 01:05:17,720 fuels you mentioned has we've done that within the last 200 years. 596 01:05:17,720 --> 01:05:24,760 So when you then extrapolate that 200 years from now you almost think that the person 597 01:05:24,760 --> 01:05:31,120 that then kind of has a corner in the energy markets is the person that builds the best 598 01:05:31,120 --> 01:05:37,560 fusion energy generator because how does any other technology stand a chance when it comes 599 01:05:37,560 --> 01:05:46,520 to the output versus input of fusion energy and the cleanliness of it all. 600 01:05:46,520 --> 01:05:55,440 What drove you then to fusion energy when there was no you know before the high temperature 601 01:05:55,440 --> 01:06:03,680 superconducting magnets when we didn't have all the hope and I want to say commercial 602 01:06:03,680 --> 01:06:10,280 backing financial backing the things that we have the luxuries of in 2022. 603 01:06:10,280 --> 01:06:13,720 What kept you believing in fusion? 604 01:06:13,720 --> 01:06:23,400 I'm an environmentalist very strong environmentalist and so I look for things that will save will 605 01:06:23,400 --> 01:06:32,480 help the environment and without it was definitely a research machine it wasn't going to save 606 01:06:32,480 --> 01:06:39,480 the world through energy production but it would lead to knowledge that would facilitate 607 01:06:39,480 --> 01:06:51,880 that eventual transition and so I'm thrilled to be a part of it. 608 01:06:51,880 --> 01:07:06,840 Those who are involved in fusion seem quite universally to have a passion that is motivated 609 01:07:06,840 --> 01:07:11,520 not primarily by making money it's saving the world. 610 01:07:11,520 --> 01:07:18,400 Right right I've that was very refreshing for me this is the first industry I've really 611 01:07:18,400 --> 01:07:27,360 seen where people are so driven to do it for the right reasons and that resonates within 612 01:07:27,360 --> 01:07:32,640 the entire fusion energy community. 613 01:07:32,640 --> 01:07:40,560 Right yeah something to be really proud of like even even Eater back when America and 614 01:07:40,560 --> 01:07:48,800 Russia were deep into the Cold War they had a conversation about we need one project to 615 01:07:48,800 --> 01:07:54,080 just keep the relationship going like everything has failed but we need one thing that will 616 01:07:54,080 --> 01:08:04,400 keep us just talking to each other and that was Eater and that was fusion and so that's 617 01:08:04,400 --> 01:08:08,320 the fundamental story of fusion that's so beautiful. 618 01:08:08,320 --> 01:08:11,200 Yes great heritage. 619 01:08:11,200 --> 01:08:17,040 Right yeah coming from an algorithmic trading venture capital and management consulting 620 01:08:17,040 --> 01:08:24,240 world oh man this is the polar opposite I come from like a dog-eat-dog world where it's 621 01:08:24,240 --> 01:08:30,240 a revenue it's product going to market within two years generating revenue and if that's 622 01:08:30,240 --> 01:08:38,280 not possible then let's not fund it and to see people spend 30 years on things with no 623 01:08:38,280 --> 01:08:41,920 problem stuff revenue that's a beautiful thing. 624 01:08:41,920 --> 01:08:49,120 But there's the commercial carrot that if you build a better better mousetrap people 625 01:08:49,120 --> 01:08:56,160 will come to use it and most of what I've done through my life has been through on the 626 01:08:56,160 --> 01:09:04,360 path of least resistance taking a match of opportunities and 627 01:09:04,360 --> 01:09:11,720 I'm using my own guide. 628 01:09:11,720 --> 01:09:19,800 We've talked about like obstacles you know we talk about what has the biggest obstacle 629 01:09:19,800 --> 01:09:25,760 for fusion been what what are the huge problems that. 630 01:09:25,760 --> 01:09:40,000 The big problem I see is the absence of multi-kilowatt amp conductors with filamentary material that 631 01:09:40,000 --> 01:09:46,000 allows it to avoid anything like the flux jumps that so break the conductors back in 632 01:09:46,000 --> 01:09:56,280 the 60s and ideally robust mechanically so that they will withstand significantly more 633 01:09:56,280 --> 01:10:05,520 strain than present conductors because the problem of making a structure strong enough 634 01:10:05,520 --> 01:10:16,040 big though that is is torched by that making it stiff enough that the conductor isn't stretched 635 01:10:16,040 --> 01:10:24,520 to the point of breaking or at least to the point of losing much of its current capacity. 636 01:10:24,520 --> 01:10:27,120 Is that a material science. 637 01:10:27,120 --> 01:10:32,840 That's what you're in science issue then I see and and okay. 638 01:10:32,840 --> 01:10:43,320 You know the new material entirely or else a geometry that if you could convert the thin 639 01:10:43,320 --> 01:10:54,240 film into innumerable numbers of thin strands you might find that each strand could cope 640 01:10:54,240 --> 01:11:04,480 with strain bigger than the entire film which the moment appears to get microcracks propagate 641 01:11:04,480 --> 01:11:10,480 and or you know what you have the entire current path broken. 642 01:11:10,480 --> 01:11:18,440 Right yeah material science is like a big frontier as well. 643 01:11:18,440 --> 01:11:23,160 I think if I if I were to do it all over again I would get into material science and the 644 01:11:23,160 --> 01:11:28,280 deepest way possible. 645 01:11:28,280 --> 01:11:36,200 As Yogi Berra said predictions are very difficult especially of the future. 646 01:11:36,200 --> 01:11:44,280 I don't know where it's going I'm just glad to be a part of it of the energy and training 647 01:11:44,280 --> 01:11:46,680 contributes to it. 648 01:11:46,680 --> 01:11:56,600 I've outlived both of my parents by more than 20 years I'm robust so I perceive going on 649 01:11:56,600 --> 01:12:00,080 for well indefinitely. 650 01:12:00,080 --> 01:12:05,720 What did your parents do did they did they encourage you at a young age to pursue science 651 01:12:05,720 --> 01:12:11,520 like why why weren't you a farmer like what. 652 01:12:11,520 --> 01:12:14,560 My father was a civil engineer majoring in hydraulics. 653 01:12:14,560 --> 01:12:24,360 Wow and he was fascinated with quite a range of sciences and mathematics and one of the 654 01:12:24,360 --> 01:12:29,600 memorable events from childhood was teaching me how to take the square root or numbers 655 01:12:29,600 --> 01:12:37,240 via a technique that resembles long division and this was well before the grade school 656 01:12:37,240 --> 01:12:43,440 was even considering division they were back in the day addition subtraction and maybe 657 01:12:43,440 --> 01:12:46,120 multiplication. 658 01:12:46,120 --> 01:12:52,280 He taught me how to do it and I felt a satisfaction of knowing something that the other guys don't 659 01:12:52,280 --> 01:13:04,240 know and that carried on throughout my life and I'm driven by curiosity. 660 01:13:04,240 --> 01:13:17,440 That gets me going that's why I'm so compulsive about it so I can understand it. 661 01:13:17,440 --> 01:13:25,520 Did your father then I assumed he did that with Carl as well did he guide your career 662 01:13:25,520 --> 01:13:36,040 in any way or was that again like did he help you decide on like picking your major in college 663 01:13:36,040 --> 01:13:41,040 I asked for the parents I asked for me as a parent. 664 01:13:41,040 --> 01:13:48,920 Yes more or less that he was had a good bit of wanderlust that for example when he graduated 665 01:13:48,920 --> 01:13:56,280 from high school he got a well-paying job and this would have been in the depression 666 01:13:56,280 --> 01:14:03,640 but he left that job and a girlfriend because he said to himself if I stay here in Bay City 667 01:14:03,640 --> 01:14:08,560 I will die in Bay City. 668 01:14:08,560 --> 01:14:15,520 So he did not went to the University of Michigan got the engineering degree and then worked 669 01:14:15,520 --> 01:14:27,000 in various places Charleston South Carolina and Cleveland and Lantz, Ypsilanti Michigan 670 01:14:27,000 --> 01:14:39,040 and then in 1953 he was offered to be a partner in his little engineering firm and then he 671 01:14:39,040 --> 01:14:46,560 said if I accept this partnership I will die a member of this partnership without having 672 01:14:46,560 --> 01:14:56,720 seen the world so he turned down that offer sought and found a job with the armed forces 673 01:14:56,720 --> 01:15:01,960 settled he looked for one in with the Air Force in Germany but unsuccessful settled 674 01:15:01,960 --> 01:15:09,000 for one the army in France judging correctly that from that base he would be able to transfer 675 01:15:09,000 --> 01:15:21,040 to the one in Germany and so he introduced the three of us kids my sister to Europe for 676 01:15:21,040 --> 01:15:32,880 four years and that certainly a wonderful cultural addition it probably interfered somewhat 677 01:15:32,880 --> 01:15:40,720 my social development that was my age 10 to 14 is sort of one developmental years but 678 01:15:40,720 --> 01:15:50,840 unbalanced I certainly appreciate that but then he came back in 1957 because we were 679 01:15:50,840 --> 01:15:59,200 getting a college age my sister was would have been a freshman in college and we had 680 01:15:59,200 --> 01:16:05,720 we were then in sophomore year so we realized that Boston would be probably the best community 681 01:16:05,720 --> 01:16:14,000 for which to choose colleges so we went to Winchester for nine months and then Arlington 682 01:16:14,000 --> 01:16:21,200 for a couple years and yes indeed we had the choice of we could live at home which was 683 01:16:21,200 --> 01:16:34,480 economically valuable he was still not rich we never become rich and choice of MIT Harvard 684 01:16:34,480 --> 01:16:43,840 and Tufts MIT offered the bigger scholarship so much of MIT without really knowing much 685 01:16:43,840 --> 01:16:51,680 about the cultural difference between MIT and Harvard and Tufts and certainly appreciated 686 01:16:51,680 --> 01:17:02,680 the extent to which it's open doors for me and Boston's a great city Boston's just all 687 01:17:02,680 --> 01:17:07,200 over a great city that's a great place to get educated it's just a great city it's a 688 01:17:07,200 --> 01:17:22,600 great city amazing history yeah interesting you know there is a there's an experiment 689 01:17:22,600 --> 01:17:29,800 with with rats where they do the first round of experiments where they make the rat go 690 01:17:29,800 --> 01:17:36,520 through the tube and get food and then it does it you know it consistently the rat does 691 01:17:36,520 --> 01:17:42,720 it and they do this over a course of time and it gets consistent results and then they 692 01:17:42,720 --> 01:17:49,640 put like a cat on the other side of the tube before it goes to and it's doing this twice 693 01:17:49,640 --> 01:17:58,120 as fast now so it's not just like the the cheese you want in life the catalyst has to 694 01:17:58,120 --> 01:18:05,960 be fear and something has to push you from behind so the fear of living in a city and 695 01:18:05,960 --> 01:18:14,160 dying there not achieving what you would otherwise yeah that's it's a driving force I fear has 696 01:18:14,160 --> 01:18:17,240 been a driving force in my life as well. 697 01:18:17,240 --> 01:18:27,560 I'm being broke has kept me working like I get it I get it anyway that was it for me 698 01:18:27,560 --> 01:18:35,240 Bob anything else you'd want to say to us any any message you would like to leave us 699 01:18:35,240 --> 01:18:36,240 with? 700 01:18:36,240 --> 01:18:44,440 Oh a message that I've been incredibly lucky and I've had Kronos is a contributor to that 701 01:18:44,440 --> 01:18:58,800 long stream of luck and so I'm grateful for the opportunity to be able to do what I can. 702 01:18:58,800 --> 01:18:59,800 That's awesome. 703 01:18:59,800 --> 01:19:05,720 Thank you.