Evelyn Reynolds

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    Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products

    MIT chemical engineers have devised an efficient way to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, a chemical precursor that can be used to generate useful compounds such as ethanol and other fuels.

    If scaled up for industrial use, this process could help to remove carbon dioxide from power plants and other sources, reducing the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere.

    “This would allow you to take carbon dioxide from emissions or dissolved in the ocean, and convert it into profitable chemicals. It’s really a path forward for decarbonization because we can take CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, and turn it into things that are useful for chemical manufacture,” says Ariel Furst, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and the senior author of the study.

    The new approach uses electricity to perform the chemical conversion, with help from a catalyst that is tethered to the electrode surface by strands of DNA. This DNA acts like Velcro to keep all the reaction components in close proximity, making the reaction much more efficient than if all the components were floating in solution.

    Furst has started a company called Helix Carbon to further develop the technology. Former MIT postdoc Gang Fan is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society Au. Other authors include Nathan Corbin PhD ’21, Minju Chung PhD ’23, former MIT postdocs Thomas Gill and Amruta Karbelkar, and Evan Moore ’23.

    Breaking down CO2

    Converting carbon dioxide into useful products requires first turning it into carbon monoxide. One way to do this is with electricity, but the amount of energy required for that type of electrocatalysis is prohibitively expensive.

    To try to bring down those costs, researchers have tried using electrocatalysts, which can speed up the reaction and reduce the amount of energy that needs to be added to the system. One type of catalyst used for this reaction is a class of molecules known as porphyrins, which contain metals such as iron or cobalt and are similar in structure to the heme molecules that carry oxygen in blood. 

    During this type of electrochemical reaction, carbon dioxide is dissolved in water within an electrochemical device, which contains an electrode that drives the reaction. The catalysts are also suspended in the solution. However, this setup isn’t very efficient because the carbon dioxide and the catalysts need to encounter each other at the electrode surface, which doesn’t happen very often.

    To make the reaction occur more frequently, which would boost the efficiency of the electrochemical conversion, Furst began working on ways to attach the catalysts to the surface of the electrode. DNA seemed to be the ideal choice for this application.

    “DNA is relatively inexpensive, you can modify it chemically, and you can control the interaction between two strands by changing the sequences,” she says. “It’s like a sequence-specific Velcro that has very strong but reversible interactions that you can control.”

    To attach single strands of DNA to a carbon electrode, the researchers used two “chemical handles,” one on the DNA and one on the electrode. These handles can be snapped together, forming a permanent bond. A complementary DNA sequence is then attached to the porphyrin catalyst, so that when the catalyst is added to the solution, it will bind reversibly to the DNA that’s already attached to the electrode — just like Velcro.

    Once this system is set up, the researchers apply a potential (or bias) to the electrode, and the catalyst uses this energy to convert carbon dioxide in the solution into carbon monoxide. The reaction also generates a small amount of hydrogen gas, from the water. After the catalysts wear out, they can be released from the surface by heating the system to break the reversible bonds between the two DNA strands, and replaced with new ones.

    An efficient reaction

    Using this approach, the researchers were able to boost the Faradaic efficiency of the reaction to 100 percent, meaning that all of the electrical energy that goes into the system goes directly into the chemical reactions, with no energy wasted. When the catalysts are not tethered by DNA, the Faradaic efficiency is only about 40 percent.

    This technology could be scaled up for industrial use fairly easily, Furst says, because the carbon electrodes the researchers used are much less expensive than conventional metal electrodes. The catalysts are also inexpensive, as they don’t contain any precious metals, and only a small concentration of the catalyst is needed on the electrode surface.

    By swapping in different catalysts, the researchers plan to try making other products such as methanol and ethanol using this approach. Helix Carbon, the company started by Furst, is also working on further developing the technology for potential commercial use.

    The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars Program, the MIT Energy Initiative, and the MIT Deshpande Center. More

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    Lessons from Fukushima: Prepare for the unlikely

    When a devastating earthquake and tsunami overwhelmed the protective systems at the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear power plant complex in Japan in March 2011, it triggered a sequence of events leading to one of the worst releases of radioactive materials in the world to date. Although nuclear energy is having a revival as a low-emissions energy source to mitigate climate change, the Fukushima accident is still cited as a reason for hesitancy in adopting it.

    A new study synthesizes information from multidisciplinary sources to understand how the Fukushima Dai’ichi disaster unfolded, and points to the importance of mitigation measures and last lines of defense — even against accidents considered highly unlikely. These procedures have received relatively little attention, but they are critical in determining how severe the consequences of a reactor failure will be, the researchers say.

    The researchers note that their synthesis is one of the few attempts to look at data across disciplinary boundaries, including: the physics and engineering of what took place within the plant’s systems, the plant operators’ actions throughout the emergency, actions by emergency responders, the meteorology of radionuclide releases and transport, and the environmental and health consequences documented since the event.

    The study appears in the journal iScience, in an open-access paper by postdoc Ali Ayoub and Professor Haruko Wainwright at MIT, along with others in Switzerland, Japan, and New Mexico.

    Since 2013, Wainwright has been leading the research to integrate all the radiation monitoring data in the Fukushima region into integrated maps. “I was staring at the contamination map for nearly 10 years, wondering what created the main plume extending in the northwest direction, but I could not find exact information,” Wainwright says. “Our study is unique because we started from the consequence, the contamination map, and tried to identify the key factors for the consequence. Other people study the Fukushima accident from the root cause, the tsunami.”

    One thing they found was that while all the operating reactors, units 1, 2, and 3, suffered core meltdowns as a result of the failure of emergency cooling systems, units 1 and 3 — although they did experience hydrogen explosions — did not release as much radiation to the environment because their venting systems essentially worked to relieve pressure inside the containment vessels as intended. But the same system in unit 2 failed badly.

    “People think that the hydrogen explosion or the core meltdown were the worst things, or the major driver of the radiological consequences of the accident,” Wainright says, “but our analysis found that’s not the case.” Much more significant in terms of the radiological release was the failure of the one venting mechanism.

    “There is a pressure-release mechanism that goes through water where a lot of the radionuclides get filtered out,” she explains. That system was effective in units 1 and 3, filtering out more than 90 percent of the radioactive elements before the gas was vented. However, “in unit 2, that pressure release mechanism got stuck, and the operators could not manually open it.” A hydrogen explosion in unit 1 had damaged the pressure relief mechanism of unit 2. This led to a breach of the containment structure and direct, unfiltered venting to the atmosphere, which, according to the new study, was what produced the greatest amount of contamination from the whole weeks-long event.

    Another factor was the timing of the attempt to vent the pressure buildup in the reactor. Guidelines at the time, and to this day in many reactors, specified that no venting should take place until the pressure inside the reactor containment vessel reached a specified threshold, with no regard to the wind directions at the time. In the case of Fukushima, an earlier venting could have dramatically reduced the impact: Much of the release happened when winds were blowing directly inland, but earlier the wind had been blowing offshore.

    “That pressure-release mechanism has not been a major focus of the engineering community,” she says. While there is appropriate attention to measures that prevent a core meltdown in the first place, “this sort of last line of defense has not been the main focus and should get more attention.”

    Wainwright says the study also underlines several successes in the management of the Fukushima accident. Many of the safety systems did work as they were designed. For example, even though the oldest reactor, unit 1, suffered the greatest internal damage, it released little radioactive material. Most people were able to evacuate from the 20-kilometer (12-mile) zone before the largest release happened. The mitigation measures were “somewhat successful,” Wainwright says. But there was tremendous confusion and anger during and after the accident because there were no preparations in place for such an event.

    Much work has focused on ways to prevent the kind of accidents that happened at Fukushima — for example, in the U.S. reactor operators can deploy portable backup power supplies to maintain proper reactor cooling at any reactor site. But the ongoing situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex in Ukraine, where nuclear safety is challenged by acts of war, demonstrates that despite engineers’ and operators’ best efforts to prevent it, “the totally unexpected could still happen,” Wainwright says.

    “The big-picture message is that we should have equal attention to both prevention and mitigation of accidents,” she says. “This is the essence of resilience, and it applies beyond nuclear power plants to all essential infrastructure of a functioning society, for example, the electric grid, the food and water supply, the transportation sector, etc.”

    One thing the researchers recommend is that in designing evacuation protocols, planners should make more effort to learn from much more frequent disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes. “We think getting more interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary knowledge from other kinds of disasters would be essential,” she says. Most of the emergency response strategies presently in place, she says, were designed in the 1980s and ’90s, and need to be modernized. “Consequences can be mitigated. A nuclear accident does not have to be a catastrophe, as is often portrayed in popular culture,” Wainright says.

    The research team included Giovanni Sansavini at ETH Zurich in Switzerland; Randall Gauntt at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico; and Kimiaki Saito at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. More

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    Future nuclear power reactors could rely on molten salts — but what about corrosion?

    Most discussions of how to avert climate change focus on solar and wind generation as key to the transition to a future carbon-free power system. But Michael Short, the Class of ’42 Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT and associate director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), is impatient with such talk. “We can say we should have only wind and solar someday. But we don’t have the luxury of ‘someday’ anymore, so we can’t ignore other helpful ways to combat climate change,” he says. “To me, it’s an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ thing. Solar and wind are clearly a big part of the solution. But I think that nuclear power also has a critical role to play.”

    For decades, researchers have been working on designs for both fission and fusion nuclear reactors using molten salts as fuels or coolants. While those designs promise significant safety and performance advantages, there’s a catch: Molten salt and the impurities within it often corrode metals, ultimately causing them to crack, weaken, and fail. Inside a reactor, key metal components will be exposed not only to molten salt but also simultaneously to radiation, which generally has a detrimental effect on materials, making them more brittle and prone to failure. Will irradiation make metal components inside a molten salt-cooled nuclear reactor corrode even more quickly?

    Short and Weiyue Zhou PhD ’21, a postdoc in the PSFC, have been investigating that question for eight years. Their recent experimental findings show that certain alloys will corrode more slowly when they’re irradiated — and identifying them among all the available commercial alloys can be straightforward.

    The first challenge — building a test facility

    When Short and Zhou began investigating the effect of radiation on corrosion, practically no reliable facilities existed to look at the two effects at once. The standard approach was to examine such mechanisms in sequence: first corrode, then irradiate, then examine the impact on the material. That approach greatly simplifies the task for the researchers, but with a major trade-off. “In a reactor, everything is going to be happening at the same time,” says Short. “If you separate the two processes, you’re not simulating a reactor; you’re doing some other experiment that’s not as relevant.”

    So, Short and Zhou took on the challenge of designing and building an experimental setup that could do both at once. Short credits a team at the University of Michigan for paving the way by designing a device that could accomplish that feat in water, rather than molten salts. Even so, Zhou notes, it took them three years to come up with a device that would work with molten salts. Both researchers recall failure after failure, but the persistent Zhou ultimately tried a totally new design, and it worked. Short adds that it also took them three years to precisely replicate the salt mixture used by industry — another factor critical to getting a meaningful result. The hardest part was achieving and ensuring that the purity was correct by removing critical impurities such as moisture, oxygen, and certain other metals.

    As they were developing and testing their setup, Short and Zhou obtained initial results showing that proton irradiation did not always accelerate corrosion but sometimes actually decelerated it. They and others had hypothesized that possibility, but even so, they were surprised. “We thought we must be doing something wrong,” recalls Short. “Maybe we mixed up the samples or something.” But they subsequently made similar observations for a variety of conditions, increasing their confidence that their initial observations were not outliers.

    The successful setup

    Central to their approach is the use of accelerated protons to mimic the impact of the neutrons inside a nuclear reactor. Generating neutrons would be both impractical and prohibitively expensive, and the neutrons would make everything highly radioactive, posing health risks and requiring very long times for an irradiated sample to cool down enough to be examined. Using protons would enable Short and Zhou to examine radiation-altered corrosion both rapidly and safely.

    Key to their experimental setup is a test chamber that they attach to a proton accelerator. To prepare the test chamber for an experiment, they place inside it a thin disc of the metal alloy being tested on top of a a pellet of salt. During the test, the entire foil disc is exposed to a bath of molten salt. At the same time, a beam of protons bombards the sample from the side opposite the salt pellet, but the proton beam is restricted to a circle in the middle of the foil sample. “No one can argue with our results then,” says Short. “In a single experiment, the whole sample is subjected to corrosion, and only a circle in the center of the sample is simultaneously irradiated by protons. We can see the curvature of the proton beam outline in our results, so we know which region is which.”

    The results with that arrangement were unchanged from the initial results. They confirmed the researchers’ preliminary findings, supporting their controversial hypothesis that rather than accelerating corrosion, radiation would actually decelerate corrosion in some materials under some conditions. Fortunately, they just happen to be the same conditions that will be experienced by metals in molten salt-cooled reactors.

    Why is that outcome controversial? A closeup look at the corrosion process will explain. When salt corrodes metal, the salt finds atomic-level openings in the solid, seeps in, and dissolves salt-soluble atoms, pulling them out and leaving a gap in the material — a spot where the material is now weak. “Radiation adds energy to atoms, causing them to be ballistically knocked out of their positions and move very fast,” explains Short. So, it makes sense that irradiating a material would cause atoms to move into the salt more quickly, increasing the rate of corrosion. Yet in some of their tests, the researchers found the opposite to be true.

    Experiments with “model” alloys

    The researchers’ first experiments in their novel setup involved “model” alloys consisting of nickel and chromium, a simple combination that would give them a first look at the corrosion process in action. In addition, they added europium fluoride to the salt, a compound known to speed up corrosion. In our everyday world, we often think of corrosion as taking years or decades, but in the more extreme conditions of a molten salt reactor it can noticeably occur in just hours. The researchers used the europium fluoride to speed up corrosion even more without changing the corrosion process. This allowed for more rapid determination of which materials, under which conditions, experienced more or less corrosion with simultaneous proton irradiation.

    The use of protons to emulate neutron damage to materials meant that the experimental setup had to be carefully designed and the operating conditions carefully selected and controlled. Protons are hydrogen atoms with an electrical charge, and under some conditions the hydrogen could chemically react with atoms in the sample foil, altering the corrosion response, or with ions in the salt, making the salt more corrosive. Therefore, the proton beam had to penetrate the foil sample but then stop in the salt as soon as possible. Under these conditions, the researchers found they could deliver a relatively uniform dose of radiation inside the foil layer while also minimizing chemical reactions in both the foil and the salt.

    Tests showed that a proton beam accelerated to 3 million electron-volts combined with a foil sample between 25 and 30 microns thick would work well for their nickel-chromium alloys. The temperature and duration of the exposure could be adjusted based on the corrosion susceptibility of the specific materials being tested.

    Optical images of samples examined after tests with the model alloys showed a clear boundary between the area that was exposed only to the molten salt and the area that was also exposed to the proton beam. Electron microscope images focusing on that boundary showed that the area that had been exposed only to the molten salt included dark patches where the molten salt had penetrated all the way through the foil, while the area that had also been exposed to the proton beam showed almost no such dark patches.

    To confirm that the dark patches were due to corrosion, the researchers cut through the foil sample to create cross sections. In them, they could see tunnels that the salt had dug into the sample. “For regions not under radiation, we see that the salt tunnels link the one side of the sample to the other side,” says Zhou. “For regions under radiation, we see that the salt tunnels stop more or less halfway and rarely reach the other side. So we verified that they didn’t penetrate the whole way.”

    The results “exceeded our wildest expectations,” says Short. “In every test we ran, the application of radiation slowed corrosion by a factor of two to three times.”

    More experiments, more insights

    In subsequent tests, the researchers more closely replicated commercially available molten salt by omitting the additive (europium fluoride) that they had used to speed up corrosion, and they tweaked the temperature for even more realistic conditions. “In carefully monitored tests, we found that by raising the temperature by 100 degrees Celsius, we could get corrosion to happen about 1,000 times faster than it would in a reactor,” says Short.

    Images from experiments with the nickel-chromium alloy plus the molten salt without the corrosive additive yielded further insights. Electron microscope images of the side of the foil sample facing the molten salt showed that in sections only exposed to the molten salt, the corrosion is clearly focused on the weakest part of the structure — the boundaries between the grains in the metal. In sections that were exposed to both the molten salt and the proton beam, the corrosion isn’t limited to the grain boundaries but is more spread out over the surface. Experimental results showed that these cracks are shallower and less likely to cause a key component to break.

    Short explains the observations. Metals are made up of individual grains inside which atoms are lined up in an orderly fashion. Where the grains come together there are areas — called grain boundaries — where the atoms don’t line up as well. In the corrosion-only images, dark lines track the grain boundaries. Molten salt has seeped into the grain boundaries and pulled out salt-soluble atoms. In the corrosion-plus-irradiation images, the damage is more general. It’s not only the grain boundaries that get attacked but also regions within the grains.

    So, when the material is irradiated, the molten salt also removes material from within the grains. Over time, more material comes out of the grains themselves than from the spaces between them. The removal isn’t focused on the grain boundaries; it’s spread out over the whole surface. As a result, any cracks that form are shallower and more spread out, and the material is less likely to fail.

    Testing commercial alloys

    The experiments described thus far involved model alloys — simple combinations of elements that are good for studying science but would never be used in a reactor. In the next series of experiments, the researchers focused on three commercially available alloys that are composed of nickel, chromium, iron, molybdenum, and other elements in various combinations.

    Results from the experiments with the commercial alloys showed a consistent pattern — one that confirmed an idea that the researchers had going in: the higher the concentration of salt-soluble elements in the alloy, the worse the radiation-induced corrosion damage. Radiation will increase the rate at which salt-soluble atoms such as chromium leave the grain boundaries, hastening the corrosion process. However, if there are more not-soluble elements such as nickel present, those atoms will go into the salt more slowly. Over time, they’ll accumulate at the grain boundary and form a protective coating that blocks the grain boundary — a “self-healing mechanism that decelerates the rate of corrosion,” say the researchers.

    Thus, if an alloy consists mostly of atoms that don’t dissolve in molten salt, irradiation will cause them to form a protective coating that slows the corrosion process. But if an alloy consists mostly of atoms that dissolve in molten salt, irradiation will make them dissolve faster, speeding up corrosion. As Short summarizes, “In terms of corrosion, irradiation makes a good alloy better and a bad alloy worse.”

    Real-world relevance plus practical guidelines

    Short and Zhou find their results encouraging. In a nuclear reactor made of “good” alloys, the slowdown in corrosion will probably be even more pronounced than what they observed in their proton-based experiments because the neutrons that inflict the damage won’t chemically react with the salt to make it more corrosive. As a result, reactor designers could push the envelope more in their operating conditions, allowing them to get more power out of the same nuclear plant without compromising on safety.

    However, the researchers stress that there’s much work to be done. Many more projects are needed to explore and understand the exact corrosion mechanism in specific alloys under different irradiation conditions. In addition, their findings need to be replicated by groups at other institutions using their own facilities. “What needs to happen now is for other labs to build their own facilities and start verifying whether they get the same results as we did,” says Short. To that end, Short and Zhou have made the details of their experimental setup and all of their data freely available online. “We’ve also been actively communicating with researchers at other institutions who have contacted us,” adds Zhou. “When they’re planning to visit, we offer to show them demonstration experiments while they’re here.”

    But already their findings provide practical guidance for other researchers and equipment designers. For example, the standard way to quantify corrosion damage is by “mass loss,” a measure of how much weight the material has lost. But Short and Zhou consider mass loss a flawed measure of corrosion in molten salts. “If you’re a nuclear plant operator, you usually care whether your structural components are going to break,” says Short. “Our experiments show that radiation can change how deep the cracks are, when all other things are held constant. The deeper the cracks, the more likely a structural component is to break, leading to a reactor failure.”

    In addition, the researchers offer a simple rule for identifying good metal alloys for structural components in molten salt reactors. Manufacturers provide extensive lists of available alloys with different compositions, microstructures, and additives. Faced with a list of options for critical structures, the designer of a new nuclear fission or fusion reactor can simply examine the composition of each alloy being offered. The one with the highest content of corrosion-resistant elements such as nickel will be the best choice. Inside a nuclear reactor, that alloy should respond to a bombardment of radiation not by corroding more rapidly but by forming a protective layer that helps block the corrosion process. “That may seem like a trivial result, but the exact threshold where radiation decelerates corrosion depends on the salt chemistry, the density of neutrons in the reactor, their energies, and a few other factors,” says Short. “Therefore, the complete guidelines are a bit more complicated. But they’re presented in a straightforward way that users can understand and utilize to make a good choice for the molten salt–based reactor they’re designing.”

    This research was funded, in part, by Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center’s Laboratory for Innovative Fusion Technologies. Earlier work was funded, in part, by the Transatomic Power Corporation and by the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy University Program. Equipment development and testing was supported by the Transatomic Power Corporation.

    This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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    Optimizing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors

    In 2010, when Ericmoore Jossou was attending college in northern Nigeria, the lights would flicker in and out all day, sometimes lasting only for a couple of hours at a time. The frustrating experience reaffirmed Jossou’s realization that the country’s sporadic energy supply was a problem. It was the beginning of his path toward nuclear engineering.

    Because of the energy crisis, “I told myself I was going to find myself in a career that allows me to develop energy technologies that can easily be scaled to meet the energy needs of the world, including my own country,” says Jossou, an assistant professor in a shared position between the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), where is the John Clark Hardwick (1986) Professor, and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

    Today, Jossou uses computer simulations for rational materials design, AI-aided purposeful development of cladding materials and fuels for next-generation nuclear reactors. As one of the shared faculty hires between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and departments across MIT, his appointment recognizes his commitment to computing for climate and the environment.

    A well-rounded education in Nigeria

    Growing up in Lagos, Jossou knew education was about more than just bookish knowledge, so he was eager to travel and experience other cultures. He would start in his own backyard by traveling across the Niger river and enrolling in Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria. Moving from the south was a cultural education with a different language and different foods. It was here that Jossou got to try and love tuwo shinkafa, a northern Nigerian rice-based specialty, for the first time.

    After his undergraduate studies, armed with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, Jossou was among a small cohort selected for a specialty master’s training program funded by the World Bank Institute and African Development Bank. The program at the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria, is a pan-African venture dedicated to nurturing homegrown science talent on the continent. Visiting professors from around the world taught intensive three-week courses, an experience which felt like drinking from a fire hose. The program widened Jossou’s views and he set his sights on a doctoral program with an emphasis on clean energy systems.

    A pivot to nuclear science

    While in Nigeria, Jossou learned of Professor Jerzy Szpunar at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, who was looking for a student researcher to explore fuels and alloys for nuclear reactors. Before then, Jossou was lukewarm on nuclear energy, but the research sounded fascinating. The Fukushima, Japan, incident was recently in the rearview mirror and Jossou remembered his early determination to address his own country’s energy crisis. He was sold on the idea and graduated with a doctoral degree from the University of Saskatchewan on an international dean’s scholarship.

    Jossou’s postdoctoral work registered a brief stint at Brookhaven National Laboratory as staff scientist. He leaped at the opportunity to join MIT NSE as a way of realizing his research interest and teaching future engineers. “I would really like to conduct cutting-edge research in nuclear materials design and to pass on my knowledge to the next generation of scientists and engineers and there’s no better place to do that than at MIT,” Jossou says.

    Merging material science and computational modeling

    Jossou’s doctoral work on designing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors forms the basis of research his lab is pursuing at MIT NSE. Nuclear reactors that were built in the 1950s and ’60s are getting a makeover in terms of improved accident tolerance. Reactors are not confined to one kind, either: We have micro reactors and are now considering ones using metallic nuclear fuels, Jossou points out. The diversity of options is enough to keep researchers busy testing materials fit for cladding, the lining that prevents corrosion of the fuel and release of radioactive fission products into the surrounding reactor coolant.

    The team is also investigating fuels that improve burn-up efficiencies, so they can last longer in the reactor. An intriguing approach has been to immobilize the gas bubbles that arise from the fission process, so they don’t grow and degrade the fuel.

    Since joining MIT in July 2023, Jossou is setting up a lab that optimizes the composition of accident-tolerant nuclear fuels. He is leaning on his materials science background and looping computer simulations and artificial intelligence in the mix.

    Computer simulations allow the researchers to narrow down the potential field of candidates, optimized for specific parameters, so they can synthesize only the most promising candidates in the lab. And AI’s predictive capabilities guide researchers on which materials composition to consider next. “We no longer depend on serendipity to choose our materials, our lab is based on rational materials design,” Jossou says, “we can rapidly design advanced nuclear fuels.”

    Advancing energy causes in Africa

    Now that he is at MIT, Jossou admits the view from the outside is different. He now harbors a different perspective on what Africa needs to address some of its challenges. “The starting point to solve our problems is not money; it needs to start with ideas,” he says, “we need to find highly skilled people who can actually solve problems.” That job involves adding economic value to the rich arrays of raw materials that the continent is blessed with. It frustrates Jossou that Niger, a country rich in raw material for uranium, has no nuclear reactors of its own. It ships most of its ore to France. “The path forward is to find a way to refine these materials in Africa and to be able to power the industries on that continent as well,” Jossou says.

    Jossou is determined to do his part to eliminate these roadblocks.

    Anchored in mentorship, Jossou’s solution aims to train talent from Africa in his own lab. He has applied for a MIT Global Experiences MISTI grant to facilitate travel and research studies for Ghanaian scientists. “The goal is to conduct research in our facility and perhaps add value to indigenous materials,” Jossou says.

    Adding value has been a consistent theme of Jossou’s career. He remembers wanting to become a neurosurgeon after reading “Gifted Hands,” moved by the personal story of the author, Ben Carson. As Jossou grew older, however, he realized that becoming a doctor wasn’t necessarily what he wanted. Instead, he was looking to add value. “What I wanted was really to take on a career that allows me to solve a societal problem.” The societal problem of clean and safe energy for all is precisely what Jossou is working on today. More

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    Making the clean energy transition work for everyone

    The clean energy transition is already underway, but how do we make sure it happens in a manner that is affordable, sustainable, and fair for everyone?

    That was the overarching question at this year’s MIT Energy Conference, which took place March 11 and 12 in Boston and was titled “Short and Long: A Balanced Approach to the Energy Transition.”

    Each year, the student-run conference brings together leaders in the energy sector to discuss the progress and challenges they see in their work toward a greener future. Participants come from research, industry, government, academia, and the investment community to network and exchange ideas over two whirlwind days of keynote talks, fireside chats, and panel discussions.

    Several participants noted that clean energy technologies are already cost-competitive with fossil fuels, but changing the way the world works requires more than just technology.

    “None of this is easy, but I think developing innovative new technologies is really easy compared to the things we’re talking about here, which is how to blend social justice, soft engineering, and systems thinking that puts people first,” Daniel Kammen, a distinguished professor of energy at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a keynote talk. “While clean energy has a long way to go, it is more than ready to transition us from fossil fuels.”

    The event also featured a keynote discussion between MIT President Sally Kornbluth and MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Ceramics Yet-Ming Chiang, in which Kornbluth discussed her first year at MIT as well as a recently announced, campus-wide effort to solve critical climate problems known as the Climate Project at MIT.

    “The reason I wanted to come to MIT was I saw that MIT has the potential to solve the world’s biggest problems, and first among those for me was the climate crisis,” Kornbluth said. “I’m excited about where we are, I’m excited about the enthusiasm of the community, and I think we’ll be able to make really impactful discoveries through this project.”

    Fostering new technologies

    Several panels convened experts in new or emerging technology fields to discuss what it will take for their solutions to contribute to deep decarbonization.

    “The fun thing and challenging thing about first-of-a-kind technologies is they’re all kind of different,” said Jonah Wagner, principal assistant director for industrial innovation and clean energy in the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy. “You can map their growth against specific challenges you expect to see, but every single technology is going to face their own challenges, and every single one will have to defy an engineering barrier to get off the ground.”

    Among the emerging technologies discussed was next-generation geothermal energy, which uses new techniques to extract heat from the Earth’s crust in new places.

    A promising aspect of the technology is that it can leverage existing infrastructure and expertise from the oil and gas industry. Many newly developed techniques for geothermal production, for instance, use the same drills and rigs as those used for hydraulic fracturing.

    “The fact that we have a robust ecosystem of oil and gas labor and technology in the U.S. makes innovation in geothermal much more accessible compared to some of the challenges we’re seeing in nuclear or direct-air capture, where some of the supply chains are disaggregated around the world,” said Gabrial Malek, chief of staff at the geothermal company Fervo Energy.

    Another technology generating excitement — if not net energy quite yet — is fusion, the process of combining, or fusing, light atoms together to form heavier ones for a net energy gain, in the same process that powers the sun. MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has already validated many aspects of its approach for achieving fusion power, and the company’s unique partnership with MIT was discussed in a panel on the industry’s progress.

    “We’re standing on the shoulders of decades of research from the scientific community, and we want to maintain those ties even as we continue developing our technology,” CFS Chief Science Officer Brandon Sorbom PhD ’17 said, noting that CFS is one of the largest company sponsors of research at MIT and collaborates with institutions around the world. “Engaging with the community is a really valuable lever to get new ideas and to sanity check our own ideas.”

    Sorbom said that as CFS advances fusion energy, the company is thinking about how it can replicate its processes to lower costs and maximize the technology’s impact around the planet.

    “For fusion to work, it has to work for everyone,” Sorbom said. “I think the affordability piece is really important. We can’t just build this technological jewel that only one class of nations can afford. It has to be a technology that can be deployed throughout the entire world.”

    The event also gave students — many from MIT — a chance to learn more about careers in energy and featured a startup showcase, in which dozens of companies displayed their energy and sustainability solutions.

    “More than 700 people are here from every corner of the energy industry, so there are so many folks to connect with and help me push my vision into reality,” says GreenLIB CEO Fred Rostami, whose company recycles lithium-ion batteries. “The good thing about the energy transition is that a lot of these technologies and industries overlap, so I think we can enable this transition by working together at events like this.”

    A focused climate strategy

    Kornbluth noted that when she came to MIT, a large percentage of students and faculty were already working on climate-related technologies. With the Climate Project at MIT, she wanted to help ensure the whole of those efforts is greater than the sum of its parts.

    The project is organized around six distinct missions, including decarbonizing energy and industry, empowering frontline communities, and building healthy, resilient cities. Kornbluth says the mission areas will help MIT community members collaborate around multidisciplinary challenges. Her team, which includes a committee of faculty advisors, has begun to search for the leads of each mission area, and Kornbluth said she is planning to appoint a vice president for climate at the Institute.

    “I want someone who has the purview of the whole Institute and will report directly to me to help make sure this project stays on track,” Kornbluth explained.

    In his conversation about the initiative with Kornbluth, Yet-Ming Chiang said projects will be funded based on their potential to reduce emissions and make the planet more sustainable at scale.

    “Projects should be very high risk, with very high impact,” Chiang explained. “They should have a chance to prove themselves, and those efforts should not be limited by resources, only by time.”

    In discussing her vision of the climate project, Kornbluth alluded to the “short and long” theme of the conference.

    “It’s about balancing research and commercialization,” Kornbluth said. “The climate project has a very variable timeframe, and I think universities are the sector that can think about the things that might be 30 years out. We have to think about the incentives across the entire innovation pipeline and how we can keep an eye on the long term while making sure the short-term things get out rapidly.” More

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    Cutting carbon emissions on the US power grid

    To help curb climate change, the United States is working to reduce carbon emissions from all sectors of the energy economy. Much of the current effort involves electrification — switching to electric cars for transportation, electric heat pumps for home heating, and so on. But in the United States, the electric power sector already generates about a quarter of all carbon emissions. “Unless we decarbonize our electric power grids, we’ll just be shifting carbon emissions from one source to another,” says Amanda Farnsworth, a PhD candidate in chemical engineering and research assistant at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).

    But decarbonizing the nation’s electric power grids will be challenging. The availability of renewable energy resources such as solar and wind varies in different regions of the country. Likewise, patterns of energy demand differ from region to region. As a result, the least-cost pathway to a decarbonized grid will differ from one region to another.

    Over the past two years, Farnsworth and Emre Gençer, a principal research scientist at MITEI, developed a power system model that would allow them to investigate the importance of regional differences — and would enable experts and laypeople alike to explore their own regions and make informed decisions about the best way to decarbonize. “With this modeling capability you can really understand regional resources and patterns of demand, and use them to do a ‘bespoke’ analysis of the least-cost approach to decarbonizing the grid in your particular region,” says Gençer.

    To demonstrate the model’s capabilities, Gençer and Farnsworth performed a series of case studies. Their analyses confirmed that strategies must be designed for specific regions and that all the costs and carbon emissions associated with manufacturing and installing solar and wind generators must be included for accurate accounting. But the analyses also yielded some unexpected insights, including a correlation between a region’s wind energy and the ease of decarbonizing, and the important role of nuclear power in decarbonizing the California grid.

    A novel model

    For many decades, researchers have been developing “capacity expansion models” to help electric utility planners tackle the problem of designing power grids that are efficient, reliable, and low-cost. More recently, many of those models also factor in the goal of reducing or eliminating carbon emissions. While those models can provide interesting insights relating to decarbonization, Gençer and Farnsworth believe they leave some gaps that need to be addressed.

    For example, most focus on conditions and needs in a single U.S. region without highlighting the unique peculiarities of their chosen area of focus. Hardly any consider the carbon emitted in fabricating and installing such “zero-carbon” technologies as wind turbines and solar panels. And finally, most of the models are challenging to use. Even experts in the field must search out and assemble various complex datasets in order to perform a study of interest.

    Gençer and Farnsworth’s capacity expansion model — called Ideal Grid, or IG — addresses those and other shortcomings. IG is built within the framework of MITEI’s Sustainable Energy System Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME), an energy system modeling platform that Gençer and his colleagues at MITEI have been developing since 2017. SESAME models the levels of greenhouse gas emissions from multiple, interacting energy sectors in future scenarios.

    Importantly, SESAME includes both techno-economic analyses and life-cycle assessments of various electricity generation and storage technologies. It thus considers costs and emissions incurred at each stage of the life cycle (manufacture, installation, operation, and retirement) for all generators. Most capacity expansion models only account for emissions from operation of fossil fuel-powered generators. As Farnsworth notes, “While this is a good approximation for our current grid, emissions from the full life cycle of all generating technologies become non-negligible as we transition to a highly renewable grid.”

    Through its connection with SESAME, the IG model has access to data on costs and emissions associated with many technologies critical to power grid operation. To explore regional differences in the cost-optimized decarbonization strategies, the IG model also includes conditions within each region, notably details on demand profiles and resource availability.

    In one recent study, Gençer and Farnsworth selected nine of the standard North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) regions. For each region, they incorporated hourly electricity demand into the IG model. Farnsworth also gathered meteorological data for the nine U.S. regions for seven years — 2007 to 2013 — and calculated hourly power output profiles for the renewable energy sources, including solar and wind, taking into account the geography-limited maximum capacity of each technology.

    The availability of wind and solar resources differs widely from region to region. To permit a quick comparison, the researchers use a measure called “annual capacity factor,” which is the ratio between the electricity produced by a generating unit in a year and the electricity that could have been produced if that unit operated continuously at full power for that year. Values for the capacity factors in the nine U.S. regions vary between 20 percent and 30 percent for solar power and for between 25 percent and 45 percent for wind.

    Calculating optimized grids for different regions

    For their first case study, Gençer and Farnsworth used the IG model to calculate cost-optimized regional grids to meet defined caps on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The analyses were based on cost and emissions data for 10 technologies: nuclear, wind, solar, three types of natural gas, three types of coal, and energy storage using lithium-ion batteries. Hydroelectric was not considered in this study because there was no comprehensive study outlining potential expansion sites with their respective costs and expected power output levels.

    To make region-to-region comparisons easy, the researchers used several simplifying assumptions. Their focus was on electricity generation, so the model calculations assume the same transmission and distribution costs and efficiencies for all regions. Also, the calculations did not consider the generator fleet currently in place. The goal was to investigate what happens if each region were to start from scratch and generate an “ideal” grid.

    To begin, Gençer and Farnsworth calculated the most economic combination of technologies for each region if it limits its total carbon emissions to 100, 50, and 25 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) generated. For context, the current U.S. average emissions intensity is 386 grams of CO2 emissions per kWh.

    Given the wide variation in regional demand, the researchers needed to use a new metric to normalize their results and permit a one-to-one comparison between regions. Accordingly, the model calculates the required generating capacity divided by the average demand for each region. The required capacity accounts for both the variation in demand and the inability of generating systems — particularly solar and wind — to operate at full capacity all of the time.

    The analysis was based on regional demand data for 2021 — the most recent data available. And for each region, the model calculated the cost-optimized power grid seven times, using weather data from seven years. This discussion focuses on mean values for cost and total capacity installed and also total values for coal and for natural gas, although the analysis considered three separate technologies for each fuel.

    The results of the analyses confirm that there’s a wide variation in the cost-optimized system from one region to another. Most notable is that some regions require a lot of energy storage while others don’t require any at all. The availability of wind resources turns out to play an important role, while the use of nuclear is limited: the carbon intensity of nuclear (including uranium mining and transportation) is lower than that of either solar or wind, but nuclear is the most expensive technology option, so it’s added only when necessary. Finally, the change in the CO2 emissions cap brings some interesting responses.

    Under the most lenient limit on emissions — 100 grams of CO2 per kWh — there’s no coal in the mix anywhere. It’s the first to go, in general being replaced by the lower-carbon-emitting natural gas. Texas, Central, and North Central — the regions with the most wind — don’t need energy storage, while the other six regions do. The regions with the least wind — California and the Southwest — have the highest energy storage requirements. Unlike the other regions modeled, California begins installing nuclear, even at the most lenient limit.

    As the model plays out, under the moderate cap — 50 grams of CO2 per kWh — most regions bring in nuclear power. California and the Southeast — regions with low wind capacity factors — rely on nuclear the most. In contrast, wind-rich Texas, Central, and North Central don’t incorporate nuclear yet but instead add energy storage — a less-expensive option — to their mix. There’s still a bit of natural gas everywhere, in spite of its CO2 emissions.

    Under the most restrictive cap — 25 grams of CO2 per kWh — nuclear is in the mix everywhere. The highest use of nuclear is again correlated with low wind capacity factor. Central and North Central depend on nuclear the least. All regions continue to rely on a little natural gas to keep prices from skyrocketing due to the necessary but costly nuclear component. With nuclear in the mix, the need for storage declines in most regions.

    Results of the cost analysis are also interesting. Texas, Central, and North Central all have abundant wind resources, and they can delay incorporating the costly nuclear option, so the cost of their optimized system tends to be lower than costs for the other regions. In addition, their total capacity deployment — including all sources — tends to be lower than for the other regions. California and the Southwest both rely heavily on solar, and in both regions, costs and total deployment are relatively high.

    Lessons learned

    One unexpected result is the benefit of combining solar and wind resources. The problem with relying on solar alone is obvious: “Solar energy is available only five or six hours a day, so you need to build a lot of other generating sources and abundant storage capacity,” says Gençer. But an analysis of unit-by-unit operations at an hourly resolution yielded a less-intuitive trend: While solar installations only produce power in the midday hours, wind turbines generate the most power in the nighttime hours. As a result, solar and wind power are complementary. Having both resources available is far more valuable than having either one or the other. And having both impacts the need for storage, says Gençer: “Storage really plays a role either when you’re targeting a very low carbon intensity or where your resources are mostly solar and they’re not complemented by wind.”

    Gençer notes that the target for the U.S. electricity grid is to reach net zero by 2035. But the analysis showed that reaching just 100 grams of CO2 per kWh would require at least 50 percent of system capacity to be wind and solar. “And we’re nowhere near that yet,” he says.

    Indeed, Gençer and Farnsworth’s analysis doesn’t even include a zero emissions case. Why not? As Gençer says, “We cannot reach zero.” Wind and solar are usually considered to be net zero, but that’s not true. Wind, solar, and even storage have embedded carbon emissions due to materials, manufacturing, and so on. “To go to true net zero, you’d need negative emission technologies,” explains Gençer, referring to techniques that remove carbon from the air or ocean. That observation confirms the importance of performing life-cycle assessments.

    Farnsworth voices another concern: Coal quickly disappears in all regions because natural gas is an easy substitute for coal and has lower carbon emissions. “People say they’ve decreased their carbon emissions by a lot, but most have done it by transitioning from coal to natural gas power plants,” says Farnsworth. “But with that pathway for decarbonization, you hit a wall. Once you’ve transitioned from coal to natural gas, you’ve got to do something else. You need a new strategy — a new trajectory to actually reach your decarbonization target, which most likely will involve replacing the newly installed natural gas plants.”

    Gençer makes one final point: The availability of cheap nuclear — whether fission or fusion — would completely change the picture. When the tighter caps require the use of nuclear, the cost of electricity goes up. “The impact is quite significant,” says Gençer. “When we go from 100 grams down to 25 grams of CO2 per kWh, we see a 20 percent to 30 percent increase in the cost of electricity.” If it were available, a less-expensive nuclear option would likely be included in the technology mix under more lenient caps, significantly reducing the cost of decarbonizing power grids in all regions.

    The special case of California

    In another analysis, Gençer and Farnsworth took a closer look at California. In California, about 10 percent of total demand is now met with nuclear power. Yet current power plants are scheduled for retirement very soon, and a 1976 law forbids the construction of new nuclear plants. (The state recently extended the lifetime of one nuclear plant to prevent the grid from becoming unstable.) “California is very motivated to decarbonize their grid,” says Farnsworth. “So how difficult will that be without nuclear power?”

    To find out, the researchers performed a series of analyses to investigate the challenge of decarbonizing in California with nuclear power versus without it. At 200 grams of CO2 per kWh — about a 50 percent reduction — the optimized mix and cost look the same with and without nuclear. Nuclear doesn’t appear due to its high cost. At 100 grams of CO2 per kWh — about a 75 percent reduction — nuclear does appear in the cost-optimized system, reducing the total system capacity while having little impact on the cost.

    But at 50 grams of CO2 per kWh, the ban on nuclear makes a significant difference. “Without nuclear, there’s about a 45 percent increase in total system size, which is really quite substantial,” says Farnsworth. “It’s a vastly different system, and it’s more expensive.” Indeed, the cost of electricity would increase by 7 percent.

    Going one step further, the researchers performed an analysis to determine the most decarbonized system possible in California. Without nuclear, the state could reach 40 grams of CO2 per kWh. “But when you allow for nuclear, you can get all the way down to 16 grams of CO2 per kWh,” says Farnsworth. “We found that California needs nuclear more than any other region due to its poor wind resources.”

    Impacts of a carbon tax

    One more case study examined a policy approach to incentivizing decarbonization. Instead of imposing a ceiling on carbon emissions, this strategy would tax every ton of carbon that’s emitted. Proposed taxes range from zero to $100 per ton.

    To investigate the effectiveness of different levels of carbon tax, Farnsworth and Gençer used the IG model to calculate the minimum-cost system for each region, assuming a certain cost for emitting each ton of carbon. The analyses show that a low carbon tax — just $10 per ton — significantly reduces emissions in all regions by phasing out all coal generation. In the Northwest region, for example, a carbon tax of $10 per ton decreases system emissions by 65 percent while increasing system cost by just 2.8 percent (relative to an untaxed system).

    After coal has been phased out of all regions, every increase in the carbon tax brings a slow but steady linear decrease in emissions and a linear increase in cost. But the rates of those changes vary from region to region. For example, the rate of decrease in emissions for each added tax dollar is far lower in the Central region than in the Northwest, largely due to the Central region’s already low emissions intensity without a carbon tax. Indeed, the Central region without a carbon tax has a lower emissions intensity than the Northwest region with a tax of $100 per ton.

    As Farnsworth summarizes, “A low carbon tax — just $10 per ton — is very effective in quickly incentivizing the replacement of coal with natural gas. After that, it really just incentivizes the replacement of natural gas technologies with more renewables and more energy storage.” She concludes, “If you’re looking to get rid of coal, I would recommend a carbon tax.”

    Future extensions of IG

    The researchers have already added hydroelectric to the generating options in the IG model, and they are now planning further extensions. For example, they will include additional regions for analysis, add other long-term energy storage options, and make changes that allow analyses to take into account the generating infrastructure that already exists. Also, they will use the model to examine the cost and value of interregional transmission to take advantage of the diversity of available renewable resources.

    Farnsworth emphasizes that the analyses reported here are just samples of what’s possible using the IG model. The model is a web-based tool that includes embedded data covering the whole United States, and the output from an analysis includes an easy-to-understand display of the required installations, hourly operation, and overall techno-economic analysis and life-cycle assessment results. “The user is able to go in and explore a vast number of scenarios with no data collection or pre-processing,” she says. “There’s no barrier to begin using the tool. You can just hop on and start exploring your options so you can make an informed decision about the best path forward.”

    This work was supported by the International Energy Agency Gas and Oil Technology Collaboration Program and the MIT Energy Initiative Low-Carbon Energy Centers.

    This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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    At Sustainability Connect 2024, a look at how MIT is decarbonizing its campus

    How is MIT working to meet its goal of decarbonizing the campus by 2050? How are local journalists communicating climate impacts and solutions to diverse audiences? What can each of us do to bring our unique skills and insight to tackle the challenges of climate and sustainability?

    These are all questions asked — and answered — at Sustainability Connect, the yearly forum hosted by the MIT Office of Sustainability that offers an inside look at this transformative and comprehensive work that is the foundation for MIT’s climate and sustainability leadership on campus. The event invites individuals in every role at MIT to learn more about the sustainability and climate work happening on campus and to share their ideas, highlight important work, and find new ways to plug into ongoing efforts. “This event is a reminder of the remarkable, diverse, and committed group of colleagues we are all part of at MIT,” said Director of Sustainability Julie Newman as the event kicked off alongside Interfaith Chaplain and Spiritual Advisor to the Indigenous Community Nina Lytton, who offered a moment of connection to attendees. At the event, that diverse and committed group was made up of more than 130 community members representing more than 70 departments, labs, and centers.

    This year, Sustainability Connect was timed with announcement of the new Climate Project at MIT, with Vice Provost Richard Lester joining the event to expound on MIT’s deep commitment to tackling the climate challenge over the next 10 years through a series of climate missions — many of which build upon the ongoing research taking place across campus already. In introducing the Climate Project at MIT, Lester echoed the theme of connection and collaboration. “This plan is about helping bridge the gap between what we would accomplish as a collection of energetic, talented, ambitious individuals, and what we’re capable of if we act together,” he said.

    Play video

    Sustainability Connect 2024: Decarbonizing the Campus Video: MIT Office of Sustainability

    Highlighting one of the many collaborative efforts to address MIT’s contributions to climate change was the Decarbonizing the Campus panel, which provided a real-time look at MIT’s work to eliminate carbon emissions from campus by 2050. Newman and Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship Joe Higgins, along with Senior Campus Planner Vasso Mathes, Senior Sustainability Project Manager Steve Lanou, and PhD student Chenhan Shao, shared the many ways MIT is working to decarbonize its campus now and respond to evolving technologies and policies in the future. “A third of MIT’s faculty and researchers … are working to identify ways in which MIT can amplify its contributions to addressing the world’s climate crisis. But part and parcel to that goal is we’re putting significant effort into decarbonizing MIT’S own carbon footprint here on our campus,” Higgins said before highlighting how MIT continues to work on projects focused on building efficiency, renewable energy on campus and off, and support of a cleaner grid, among many decarbonization strategies.

    Newman shared the way in which climate education and research play an important role through the Decarbonization Working Group research streams, and courses like class 4.s42 (Carbon Reduction Pathways for the MIT Campus) offered by Professor Christoph Reinhart. Lanou and Shao also showcased how MIT is optimizing its response to Cambridge’s Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance, which is aimed at tracking and reducing emissions from large commercial properties in the city with a goal of net-zero buildings by 2035. “We’ve been able [create] pathways that would be practical, innovative, have a high degree of accountability, and that could work well within the structures and the limitations that we have,” Lanou said before debuting a dashboard he and Shao developed during Independent Activities Period to track and forecast work to meet the Cambridge goal. 

    MIT’s robust commitment to decarbonize its campus goes beyond energy systems, as highlighted by the work of many staff members who led roundtables as part of Sustainability in Motion, where attendees were invited to sit down with colleagues from across campus responsible for implementing the numerous climate and sustainability commitments. Teams reported out on progress to date on a range of efforts including sustainable food systems, safe and sustainable labs, and procurement. “Tackling the unprecedented challenges of a changing planet in and around MIT takes the support of individuals and teams from all corners of the Institute,” said Assistant Director of Sustainability Brian Goldberg in leading the session. “Whether folks have sustainability or climate in their job title, or they’ve contributed countless volunteer hours to the cause, our community members are leading many meaningful efforts to transform MIT.”

    Play video

    Sustainability Connect 2024: Climate in the Media PanelVideo: Office of Sustainability

    The day culminated with a panel on climate in the media, taking the excitement from the room and putting it in context — how do you translate this work, these solutions, and these challenges for a diverse audience with an ever-changing appetite for these kinds of stories? Laur Hesse Fisher, program director for the Environmental Solutions Initiate (ESI); Barbara Moran, climate and environment reporter at WBUR radio; and independent climate journalist Annie Ropeik joined the panel moderated by Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT Director Deborah Blum. Blum spoke of the current mistrust of not only the media but of news stories of climate impacts and even solutions. “To those of us telling the story of climate change, how do we reach resistant audiences? How do we gain their trust?” she asked.

    Fisher, who hosts the TIL Climate podcast and leads the ESI Journalism Fellowship, explained how she shifts her approach depending on her audience. “[With TIL Climate], a lot of what we do is, we try to understand what kinds of questions people have,” she said. “We have people submit questions to us, and then we answer them in language that they can understand.”

    For Moran, reaching audiences relies on finding the right topic to bridge to deeper issues. On a recent story about solar arrays and their impact on forests and the landscape around them, Moran saw bees and pollinators as the way in. “I can talk about bees and flowers. And that will hook people enough to get in. And then through that, we can address this issue of forest versus commercial solar and this tension, and what can be done to address that, and what’s working and what’s not,” she said.

    The panel highlighted that even as climate solutions and challenges become clearer, communicating them can remain a challenge. “Sustainability Connect is invaluable when it comes to sharing our work and bringing more people in, but over the years, it’s become clear how many people are still outside of these conversations,” said Newman. “Capping the day off with this conversation on climate in the media served as a jumping-off point for all of us to think how we can better communicate our efforts and tackle the challenges that keep us from bringing everyone to the table to help us find and share solutions for addressing climate change. It’s just the beginning of this conversation.” More

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    Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion

    In the predawn hours of Sept. 5, 2021, engineers achieved a major milestone in the labs of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), when a new type of magnet, made from high-temperature superconducting material, achieved a world-record magnetic field strength of 20 tesla for a large-scale magnet. That’s the intensity needed to build a fusion power plant that is expected to produce a net output of power and potentially usher in an era of virtually limitless power production.

    The test was immediately declared a success, having met all the criteria established for the design of the new fusion device, dubbed SPARC, for which the magnets are the key enabling technology. Champagne corks popped as the weary team of experimenters, who had labored long and hard to make the achievement possible, celebrated their accomplishment.

    But that was far from the end of the process. Over the ensuing months, the team tore apart and inspected the components of the magnet, pored over and analyzed the data from hundreds of instruments that recorded details of the tests, and performed two additional test runs on the same magnet, ultimately pushing it to its breaking point in order to learn the details of any possible failure modes.

    All of this work has now culminated in a detailed report by researchers at PSFC and MIT spinout company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), published in a collection of six peer-reviewed papers in a special edition of the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. Together, the papers describe the design and fabrication of the magnet and the diagnostic equipment needed to evaluate its performance, as well as the lessons learned from the process. Overall, the team found, the predictions and computer modeling were spot-on, verifying that the magnet’s unique design elements could serve as the foundation for a fusion power plant.

    Enabling practical fusion power

    The successful test of the magnet, says Hitachi America Professor of Engineering Dennis Whyte, who recently stepped down as director of the PSFC, was “the most important thing, in my opinion, in the last 30 years of fusion research.”

    Before the Sept. 5 demonstration, the best-available superconducting magnets were powerful enough to potentially achieve fusion energy — but only at sizes and costs that could never be practical or economically viable. Then, when the tests showed the practicality of such a strong magnet at a greatly reduced size, “overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day,” Whyte says.

    “Now fusion has a chance,” Whyte adds. Tokamaks, the most widely used design for experimental fusion devices, “have a chance, in my opinion, of being economical because you’ve got a quantum change in your ability, with the known confinement physics rules, about being able to greatly reduce the size and the cost of objects that would make fusion possible.”

    The comprehensive data and analysis from the PSFC’s magnet test, as detailed in the six new papers, has demonstrated that plans for a new generation of fusion devices — the one designed by MIT and CFS, as well as similar designs by other commercial fusion companies — are built on a solid foundation in science.

    The superconducting breakthrough

    Fusion, the process of combining light atoms to form heavier ones, powers the sun and stars, but harnessing that process on Earth has proved to be a daunting challenge, with decades of hard work and many billions of dollars spent on experimental devices. The long-sought, but never yet achieved, goal is to build a fusion power plant that produces more energy than it consumes. Such a power plant could produce electricity without emitting greenhouse gases during operation, and generating very little radioactive waste. Fusion’s fuel, a form of hydrogen that can be derived from seawater, is virtually limitless.

    But to make it work requires compressing the fuel at extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures, and since no known material could withstand such temperatures, the fuel must be held in place by extremely powerful magnetic fields. Producing such strong fields requires superconducting magnets, but all previous fusion magnets have been made with a superconducting material that requires frigid temperatures of about 4 degrees above absolute zero (4 kelvins, or -270 degrees Celsius). In the last few years, a newer material nicknamed REBCO, for rare-earth barium copper oxide, was added to fusion magnets, and allows them to operate at 20 kelvins, a temperature that despite being only 16 kelvins warmer, brings significant advantages in terms of material properties and practical engineering.

    Taking advantage of this new higher-temperature superconducting material was not just a matter of substituting it in existing magnet designs. Instead, “it was a rework from the ground up of almost all the principles that you use to build superconducting magnets,” Whyte says. The new REBCO material is “extraordinarily different than the previous generation of superconductors. You’re not just going to adapt and replace, you’re actually going to innovate from the ground up.” The new papers in Transactions on Applied Superconductivity describe the details of that redesign process, now that patent protection is in place.

    A key innovation: no insulation

    One of the dramatic innovations, which had many others in the field skeptical of its chances of success, was the elimination of insulation around the thin, flat ribbons of superconducting tape that formed the magnet. Like virtually all electrical wires, conventional superconducting magnets are fully protected by insulating material to prevent short-circuits between the wires. But in the new magnet, the tape was left completely bare; the engineers relied on REBCO’s much greater conductivity to keep the current flowing through the material.

    “When we started this project, in let’s say 2018, the technology of using high-temperature superconductors to build large-scale high-field magnets was in its infancy,” says Zach Hartwig, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. Hartwig has a co-appointment at the PSFC and is the head of its engineering group, which led the magnet development project. “The state of the art was small benchtop experiments, not really representative of what it takes to build a full-size thing. Our magnet development project started at benchtop scale and ended up at full scale in a short amount of time,” he adds, noting that the team built a 20,000-pound magnet that produced a steady, even magnetic field of just over 20 tesla — far beyond any such field ever produced at large scale.

    “The standard way to build these magnets is you would wind the conductor and you have insulation between the windings, and you need insulation to deal with the high voltages that are generated during off-normal events such as a shutdown.” Eliminating the layers of insulation, he says, “has the advantage of being a low-voltage system. It greatly simplifies the fabrication processes and schedule.” It also leaves more room for other elements, such as more cooling or more structure for strength.

    The magnet assembly is a slightly smaller-scale version of the ones that will form the donut-shaped chamber of the SPARC fusion device now being built by CFS in Devens, Massachusetts. It consists of 16 plates, called pancakes, each bearing a spiral winding of the superconducting tape on one side and cooling channels for helium gas on the other.

    But the no-insulation design was considered risky, and a lot was riding on the test program. “This was the first magnet at any sufficient scale that really probed what is involved in designing and building and testing a magnet with this so-called no-insulation no-twist technology,” Hartwig says. “It was very much a surprise to the community when we announced that it was a no-insulation coil.”

    Pushing to the limit … and beyond

    The initial test, described in previous papers, proved that the design and manufacturing process not only worked but was highly stable — something that some researchers had doubted. The next two test runs, also performed in late 2021, then pushed the device to the limit by deliberately creating unstable conditions, including a complete shutoff of incoming power that can lead to a catastrophic overheating. Known as quenching, this is considered a worst-case scenario for the operation of such magnets, with the potential to destroy the equipment.

    Part of the mission of the test program, Hartwig says, was “to actually go off and intentionally quench a full-scale magnet, so that we can get the critical data at the right scale and the right conditions to advance the science, to validate the design codes, and then to take the magnet apart and see what went wrong, why did it go wrong, and how do we take the next iteration toward fixing that. … It was a very successful test.”

    That final test, which ended with the melting of one corner of one of the 16 pancakes, produced a wealth of new information, Hartwig says. For one thing, they had been using several different computational models to design and predict the performance of various aspects of the magnet’s performance, and for the most part, the models agreed in their overall predictions and were well-validated by the series of tests and real-world measurements. But in predicting the effect of the quench, the model predictions diverged, so it was necessary to get the experimental data to evaluate the models’ validity.

    “The highest-fidelity models that we had predicted almost exactly how the magnet would warm up, to what degree it would warm up as it started to quench, and where would the resulting damage to the magnet would be,” he says. As described in detail in one of the new reports, “That test actually told us exactly the physics that was going on, and it told us which models were useful going forward and which to leave by the wayside because they’re not right.”

    Whyte says, “Basically we did the worst thing possible to a coil, on purpose, after we had tested all other aspects of the coil performance. And we found that most of the coil survived with no damage,” while one isolated area sustained some melting. “It’s like a few percent of the volume of the coil that got damaged.” And that led to revisions in the design that are expected to prevent such damage in the actual fusion device magnets, even under the most extreme conditions.

    Hartwig emphasizes that a major reason the team was able to accomplish such a radical new record-setting magnet design, and get it right the very first time and on a breakneck schedule, was thanks to the deep level of knowledge, expertise, and equipment accumulated over decades of operation of the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, and other work carried out at PSFC. “This goes to the heart of the institutional capabilities of a place like this,” he says. “We had the capability, the infrastructure, and the space and the people to do these things under one roof.”

    The collaboration with CFS was also key, he says, with MIT and CFS combining the most powerful aspects of an academic institution and private company to do things together that neither could have done on their own. “For example, one of the major contributions from CFS was leveraging the power of a private company to establish and scale up a supply chain at an unprecedented level and timeline for the most critical material in the project: 300 kilometers (186 miles) of high-temperature superconductor, which was procured with rigorous quality control in under a year, and integrated on schedule into the magnet.”

    The integration of the two teams, those from MIT and those from CFS, also was crucial to the success, he says. “We thought of ourselves as one team, and that made it possible to do what we did.” More