“I am optimistic and I think that we will see the commercial merger in the electrical network in 10 or 15 years”
researchers of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (founded by the University of California in 1952), which houses the National Ignition Facility (NIF), have achieved for the first time nuclear fusion with net energy gain, “a historic scientific milestone”, as announced in the United States , because it opens the door to an inexhaustible source of clean energy. The announcement of the milestone was staged in the most solemn way possible, so that no one had any doubts: in an appearance called by the Department of Energy of the Government of Joe Biden, followed throughout the world, with the presence of investigators and the Secretary of US Energy, Jennifer Granholm.
Surely, the physicist from Oviedo Tomas Diaz de la Rubia (1960) followed the announcement like few others. Because many of the steps of the long road that have led the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to the present point are known. He worked there for 24 years, holding different positions until he became the Laboratory’s research director. His ties with Spain are great, since, as he recounts, “for more than 30 years I have great and important professional ties with the Polytechnic University of Madrid, with which back in the day, in 2010, we signed an agreement between LLNL and the Polytechnic to advance the creation of technologies associated with the future development of nuclear fusion plants.”
Currently, Tomás Díaz de la Rubia has returned to the academic world and has been working at the University of Oklahoma for almost a decade, where he is Vice President of Research.
Díaz de la Rubia, who assures that despite having been in the United States for 41 years, he has not stopped feeling Asturian, since he has “great lifelong friends in Oviedo and Gijón, and also family in Oviedo, Ponferrada, Zaragoza and Madrid who we see often”, attends LA NUEVA ESPAÑA, from the Prensa Ibérica group, to break down a little more the great step in nuclear fusion.
– What was your role in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and in the NIF with which this experiment has now been carried out? Being that he was the research director of the laboratory, does this mean that he participated in those years of the start-up of the project?
-Yes effectively. I was heavily involved in the development of the NIF, including research related to the NIF optics and also the fusion targets. Later I played a central role in developing a model for a future nuclear fusion plant based on ignition and energy gain in the NIF.
–It seems that for the first time something impossible to reproduce on earth has been achieved, a nuclear fusion process in which more energy has been generated than used. How do you assess achievement in general terms and how can we explain it, in a simple way, to readers?
–I think the achievement really represents a milestone in the history of science and technology of the last 50 years. I compare it to the discovery of the transistor or, more recently, the CRISPR-CAS9 method, which received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. These discoveries have had a great impact on society and I believe that this advance in fusion will be equally as important. great consequence globally.
Despite the milestone it represents, it seems that if one takes into account the Energy necessary to start those lasers and all the elements involved, the gain would not be such or not so clear. In other words, we are still a long way off (we are talking about several decades, about fifty years) to optimize our human reproduction of energy generation from the stars. Is it so? What is your opinion about the future of the merger and its expansion?
–I am optimistic and I think that we will see the commercial merger in the electrical network in 10 or 15 years. For decades, the scientific community has studied and planned what the engineering systems needed to create a fusion plant should be, so we started not from a vacuum but from a well-established scientific foundation. In fact, both LLNL and the Nuclear Fusion Institute at the Polytechnic University of Madrid have been instrumental in developing plans and designs for commercial plants based on inertial laser fusion.
So, will we really see a clean and inexhaustible source of energy in the reasonably near future?
–As I say, I am optimistic about the subject. I believe that, given the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, which has not changed much in the last 30 years, having a clean, safe, sustainable, baseload energy source that does not emit greenhouse gases would be a great advance for the humanity. This is the fundamental imperative that I believe compels us to do everything we can to accelerate the trajectory to commercialization of this most important scientific milestone.
–And what implications do you think it will have?
–From the point of view of geopolitics, the introduction of fusion energy in the global market will make it possible to provide clean and safe energy, without the danger of proliferation of nuclear materials and fuels, which will allow not only the generation of electricity for the grid but also also the creation of clean raw materials, without the generation of greenhouse gases, such as hydrogen, and also the desalination of seawater.
–Some say that this revolution, added to that of quantum computers and languages of Artificial intelligence, will totally change the world as we know it, our societies. Do you think so? What risks and what benefits await us?
–I think that, like all technological revolutions, we must be attentive to the social impact. In other words, it is necessary to ensure that the benefit for society reaches all corners of the planet, not only advanced and developed countries, but also those that most need clean and safe energy sources to advance their social and economic development.
–You work at the University of Oklahoma, where you are Vice President of Research. What is your field of activity and why did you return to teaching?
–In my work I am responsible for advancing the university mission of discovering and creating new knowledge, and its translation into technologies with a positive impact on society. In the United States, all the most important universities have as part of their mission, in addition to the transmission of knowledge to students, the creation of new knowledge.
Is it something that you would say we should learn from research in USA?
–That, creating and imparting these discoveries and new technologies to young people, who will be the future discoverers and inventors, is very important to me and is what really fascinates and attracts me about teaching.
-The city is now negotiating the conversion of the entire area of the old weapons factory in La Vega to turn it into a complex whose main activity is a bio-sanitary business pole. Do you, who work in this sector, consider that it is possible for a city like Oviedo to develop a biosanitary and biotechnological line with guarantees?
–The truth is that I do not know enough about the subject to answer. Here we work a lot in the field of biotechnology and the creation and manufacture of new drugs and therapeutic modalities against cancer, diabetes and other diseases. The work we are doing is a collaboration between our University Center for Health Sciences, Oklahoma City (the capital of Oklahoma) and the US Government. I think that Oviedo, given the great university medical center that it has and the great medical tradition that exists, could develop bio-health and biotechnology with great success.