Here & Now

Kieran Furlong on Realta Fusion's Energy R&D Deal in Madison

Frederica Freyberg:
As electricity use tips up between staying indoors with air conditioning due to smoky air and heat, the issue of energy and where to get it is a hot topic here and around the country and this week it was announced that a massive nuclear fusion research center is coming to Wisconsin. Realta Fusion, a company spun out from research done at UW-Madison, will build a 200,000 square foot research and development facility at the long vacant Oscar Mayer plant on the north side of Madison. The move means the company will be headquartered there, and the workforce is expected to increase from 50 employees to 600. Along with $60 million from private investors, the state of Wisconsin gave nearly $40 million in tax exemptions, with the City of Madison kicking in nearly $3 million in financing. Realta CEO Kieran Furlong joins us now to explain the project. And thanks for being here.

Kieran Furlong:
Thank you very much for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:
So from old time hot dogs to futuristic generation of energy, what is the promise of nuclear fusion energy in this increasingly kind of electricity hungry world?

Kieran Furlong:
Yeah. I mean, I think fusion really is the future for humanity, right? It’s the source of energy that we need if we’re going to provide enough food, water, materials, mobility for 10 billion people, we need fusion. We’re not going to dig or drill our way out of this. And, you know, we can build all the renewables plants we can manage, but we’re still going to need more energy and fusion holds that promise.

Frederica Freyberg:
Well, give us kind of the nuclear fusion for dummies description.

Kieran Furlong:
Sure. Yeah. So fusion is another form of nuclear energy as in it involves reactions with the nuclei of atoms. But it’s the opposite process from what most people will think of when they think of conventional nuclear fission. That’s where you take a large, heavy atom, like a uranium atom, and split it. With fusion, we take very small light atoms and fuse them together, basically smooshing them together, and we take different flavors of hydrogen, push those together, and form helium, the same stuff that you would find in party balloons. But when we do that, you get a small amount of the energy — er, a small amount of the mass gets converted into a massive amount of energy.

Frederica Freyberg:
So I read that researchers have been trying since the 1930s to generate electricity through nuclear fusion, described as the same process that powers the sun. Why is it so hard?

Kieran Furlong:
Correct. So it was first postulated back in the early ’20s by researchers looking at what powers the sun. And so fusion is what powers the sun and all the other stars in the universe. So in many ways, it’s the energy that we have in the universe. The sun has the advantage of massive, massive scale. So it’s just so large and its density gets us to the conditions that you can have fusion occur. So in fusion, we have something that’s known as the, you know, you basically need something called the triple product. We basically need to get those elements we want to fuse together hot enough, dense enough for long enough. We don’t have the advantage of the sun’s density. So we need to get them very, very hot, hotter than the center of the sun. And that itself is quite challenging.

Frederica Freyberg:
Do you feel as though your scientists have cracked the code to generating electricity through fusion?

Kieran Furlong:
We’re on the way there. And in fact, just recently we announced an experiment we did where we demonstrated we could pull electricity directly from the plasma that we’re operating in the WHAM machine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So plasma is the fourth state of matter. So you think, you know, ice, water, steam and the next step up would be plasma. So we need to get a plasma we can hold in a magnetic cage essentially, because we need to get it to temperatures much hotter than you can hold in a steel vessel, for example. But we’re making great progress with it. There’s still some work to do, and that’s why we’ll be doing our R&D in this new facility.

Frederica Freyberg:
What kind of gamble is it with all this money and the retrofit involved?

Kieran Furlong:
So I think the first thing is we’re not trying to defy any laws of physics. So I’ve got — I’m a great believer in the ingenuity of humans. We will find a way forward. There’s an old joke about fusion that folks will say, “Oh, it’s 20 years in the future and always will be.” That kind of ignores the effort that’s needed to get there. And now we’re making the effort so there’s more investment coming into fusion. We’ve got more people working on the problem. I’m 100% convinced humanity will solve fusion. The question is when.

Frederica Freyberg:
What do you think about when?

Kieran Furlong:
So we’re targeting the 2030s. So you know, early to mid-2030s is when we intend to have a first commercial operation based on our technology.

Frederica Freyberg:
Does this project put Wisconsin on the map for fusion in a major way and why Wisconsin?

Kieran Furlong:
Yeah, I think so in terms of putting it on the map. And that’s really been kind of one of our intentions from the start. So the University of Wisconsin-Madison is already one of the top institutions for research in this field of plasma physics and fusion. The state is a, you know, very well placed from a manufacturing standpoint, the ability to, you know, do precision and advanced manufacturing. Fusion industry is essentially bringing those two things together. We’ve got the scientific research to show, well, here’s the kind of machine we need to build, and then we need to know how to build those and demonstrate that we can do that cost effectively. I think Wisconsin is very well placed to do that. That was one of the factors in deciding to set up our R&D facility and corporate headquarters here. And I think Wisconsin absolutely will be one of the main hubs for fusion in the 21st century.

Frederica Freyberg:
All right. Well, we appreciate you being here. Kieran Furlong. Thanks.

Kieran Furlong:
Thank you very much.