Nikola Tesla was a visionary beyond his time, and those who
study electromagnetism follow in his footsteps, piercing together
electric mysteries that become tomorrow's breakthroughs.
In today's episode, we're meeting one of those students,
Ryan Serpa, who's looking at researching fusion technologies.
I remember in my 4th grade when I first built that Tesla foil
and I looked into Nikola Tesla. Ever since then, I was
fascinated with understanding how things work.
We'll be honing in on what curiosity pulled him into study
electromagnetism, and eventually fusion.
We'll be tracing his path from a curious 4th grader to a student
athlete at Purdue all the way to studying his PhD.
So let's get started. My name is Ryan Zurbuth.
I will be graduating from Purdue University, majoring in nuclear
engineering and minoring in physics.
I've specialized in research in what's called fusion energy,
which involves rather than the typical fission reactors that we
have today that utilize heavy elements such as uranium that's
split apart, we utilize lighter elements like hydrogen extracted
from water that can kind of smash the atoms together and
release the energy. And the goal is to to ultimately
use that to hopefully generate a very efficient electricity.
Ryan is graduating from Purdue in nuclear engineering, minoring
in physics with research in fusion, using light elements
like hydrogen to release energy by binding nuclei, not splitting
them. So how does someone even get
started in studying something like fusion energy?
I got started in fusion when I was about a freshman or
sophomore in high school. I came from a background of
always being very curious and interested in science.
I remember that I was asked when I was about fourth grade or
something, what I wanted to be when I grow up, and I said I
wanted to be an inventor. I was fascinated with minds such
as Nikola Tesla, who drew me into the field of
electromagnetism. So much so that I built a Tesla
coil as a little demonstration for my class project.
Not great. And ever since then I was
fascinated with understanding how things worked.
How did the Tesla coil work? What are the origins of the
electric and magnetic fields? And that drew me into particle
physics, which I went down the rabbit hole of searching into
what the electron is in its wave particle duality.
And as I continued further and further, I got more interested
in how I could apply this as well.
It was a combination of my curiosity into understanding how
things work and that desire to bring something to life that
could potentially be helpful. From 4th grade I want to be an
inventor, to building a Tesla coil for his class, Ryan chased
how electricity fields worked and wandered into particle
physics, finding a home in Fusion's biggest Questions.
But once that spark, once that flame is lit, how do you keep it
going? Where do you draw inspiration
from as a young scientist wanting to learn more about the
world? One of my big inspirations when
I was young was the Myth Buster show where I watched Adam Savage
and the rest of the crew test common myths that were you
otherwise you you were left to wonder.
And they would build some elaborate device, some robots,
and they would blow something up.
They would test is in in a scientific manner, in a very fun
and educational way, but in a way that yielded results.
And I felt like that was the most amazing job in the world
and I wanted to do that. And I felt like I was most able
to combine my love of applying science in the interest of the
betterment of technology and hopefully mankind, as well as my
curiosity for understanding how the world works in nuclear
fusion. So how really does this path to
discovery work in one big Eureka moment or inch by inch along the
way? I, I think it's definitely a
combination of both. There can definitely come a
point and there was a point for me where everything kind of came
together and I knew, but that wasn't before years of asking
question by question, learning a little bit more.
I remember in my 4th grade when I first built that Tesla coil
and I looked into Nikola Tesla I was doing, we were tasked with
doing a class project on inventors.
And initially I wanted to do Edison.
However, Edison had been taken by another classmate of mine
unbeknownst to me. And so I'm doing research on
Edison and I present to the teacher and during my research,
I come across the famous current war in the late 1890s over The
Who was going to utilize either direct current or alternating
current to power the world fair at that time.
And there was a big nasty dispute between Nikola Tesla and
Thomas Edison. And eventually, as we all know,
Nikola Tesla won and alternating current powered the world fair
that year and powers practically everything we know today.
So I decided to do Nikola Tesla and in researching how the Tesla
coil worked, it was fascinating to to come across the idea of
fields that was very of that was very foreign concept.
The idea that fields that can reach across air and, you know,
deliver work and power to things.
It was fascinating to me. And so I wanted to learn more
and through that pursuit, through lots of Internet
research, lots of coming across YouTube videos of public science
educators online such as The Real Engineering, Cody's Lab,
Styro Pyro, PBS documentaries as well.
Things that would light up my curiosity and get get my feet
wet on concepts like wave particle duality and what is the
idea of quantum mechanics versus classical and how does that
shape how we understand the world?
Little bits and pieces, step by step.
I would ask a question. I would ultimately reach the
limit of my knowledge and far surpass it.
I would try to read. I would get lost, and a day or
two later I would try again and I would ask my professors and
what does this mean? I knew, OK, these people who
knew particle physics, they know calculus.
I need to learn calculus. I have no idea what a limit is.
I have no idea what what a derivative is.
I am still in 7th grade or something at this time.
But I ask and maybe I don't understand the first time, Maybe
I don't understand the 10th time.
But if I keep asking professors and I keep asking the Internet
and trying to pool wealth knowledge, eventually something
will click. And sure enough, when I came
into the age in which I was taking these classes, I was able
to absorb this material a lot more efficiently than I might
have been able to otherwise because of the previous
exposure. Even if you don't end up
understanding when you dive into a venture, the previous exposure
can help you one day when it all comes in front of you when you
take that class. I think I was watching a
documentary about PBS documentary about the universe
and it was talking about huge stars in interstellar space and
how they fuse not just hydrogen but heavier elements such as
carbon into nitrogen into oxygen and then even bigger stars can
fuse all the way up to iron. I was curious about this process
of fusion and I look it up. I look up how does fusion work
in interstellar stars? Let's pause here.
Ryan is explaining the journey of a young scientist, the
consistent pursuit of following your why your curiosity, pulling
the threads until you reach an answer and eventually get to the
next big question. So how does fusion work in
interstellar stars? And the first paper I come
across is this paper, paper by Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory, and they talk about how quantum tunneling is a
possible explanation for the lower temperature, the fusion
reactions occurring despite the temperature.
And I was amazed because I was like, wow, my love of particle
physics, my love of understanding the universe and
its most kind of extreme and arguably beautiful conditions,
and all of this merges into one place.
This is what I want to do. There are so many fundamental
questions to answer about interstellar stars, supernovas,
solar fusion. But how do you package those
questions up into a university curriculum?
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My experience was very, it was very fruitful.
I would say that I had a interesting Rd.
So at Purdue University, the curriculum largely revolves
around for nuclear engineering, largely revolves around
conventional fission nuclear reactors.
And they basically they take heavy elements like namely
uranium. And so a lot of my classes
revolved around understanding how neutrons are transported in
a nuclear reactor, how they seep through the fuel and the
moderating elements, which are the are the materials that
control the nuclear reactors that make them not only safe but
efficient and operable. How to shield against radiation,
understanding how radiation propagates through space and how
it affects different things, including living beings.
There was lots of fundamentals such as it's called like fluid
transfer, heat, heat and mass transfer which discussed the
basic thermodynamic and fluid mechanics properties that are
needed to know in this in a power plant setting.
However, it was neat because I was able to despite the lack of
fusion specific classes for undergrad.
I was able to frame the way that I viewed these classes as a way
to build my abstract problem solving skills.
Some of these are still definitely applicable in in all
of these classes. Particle transport theories and
codes that are useful for not only simulating fission reactors
but also simulating fusion reactors and charge particle
transport. In addition, like fluid
mechanics is very applicable to plasma physics as largely what
you do is you it is fluid mechanics with charges.
You add the Lorentz force and all of the effects that ensue As
a result. I was able to have a few fusion
specific classes thanks to Professor Choi at Purdue and he
has been a great inspiration and mentor to me in which he was
able to give me some insight into plasma physics and theory
in the working of the fusion reactor test devices that we
have today. Whether it is the tokamak, the
big giant metal doughnut that we all know and love, the laser
ignition facility at the National Ignition Facility in
Livermore, CA. Things like Z Pinch Sandia
National Laboratory, in which I was able to work these this
exposure in theory and the combination of that as well as
exposure due to my physics minor really helped to build the the
wealth of knowledge that made me feel confident to continue to
pursue this. But despite the lack of
undergraduate opportunities to pursue a field that is so
complex and is so tight knit that they're the barrier of
entry seems to be largely Graduate School.
We've talked about internships at national laboratories on the
show before, but we've never talked about Sandia National
Laboratory. Sandia National Laboratories is
a federally funded research and development center headquartered
in Albuquerque, NM with a second principal lab in Livermore, CA
Sandia tackles national security problems with world class
science and engineering. Think advanced materials, micro
and nanoelectronics, energy resilience, cybersecurity, high
energy density physics, and pulse power experiments like the
Z machine. They work closely with
universities, industries and offer internships for students.
So my research at Sandia National Laboratory, first I
studied under Doctor Adam Harvey Thompson and David Ampleford.
They're researchers in the fusion energy research sector of
Sandia National Laboratory in which they utilize this machine
called the Z machine, which is a giant disk with a bunch of
electrical components on the outside marks generators that
charge up and store immense electrical energy.
They use a series of triggers within these devices to send all
of the electrical energy at once.
These kind of special conduits that what's called like pulse
warming, where they shape the electrical pulse, they decrease
the amount of time that the energy is being deposited and
eventually they send it through a tiny cylinder that is filled
with fusion fuel. And this metal cylinder, when
you send a electrical current through a wire, you generate a
magnetic field about the axis, and the combination of that
current and the magnetic field produce a force, and that force
is inward radially, and so it compresses and causes implosion
of the cylinder. And that compression in 100
nanoseconds, that compressive force is sufficient to smash
these hydrogen atoms together or deuterium, rather an isotope of
hydrogen to produce fusion. And my research revolved around
a particular experiment they did where we're trying to understand
a way to shorten the length of time in which the pulse was
delivered while keeping a similar amount of current
traveling through the target. And they utilize something
called the wire current array, which is a whole mess of really
tiny hair thin wires that explode when the current is sent
out. Imagine 2 metal plates and in
between the metal plates you have all these hair thin wires
of tungsten or aluminum. And on top of this kind of metal
sandwich you have a tiny cylinder of beryllium.
And on top of that is another metal electrode.
And the idea is that you are able to perform this and reduce
the amount of time that the current flows through that
cylinder, which is what you care about, to deliver the force to
the fusion target from 100 nanoseconds to 10.
And we were able to observe this through simulations and things
that I helped out with. That research was invaluable for
getting into grad school, but also getting my feet wet and in
into the field and really ensuring that this is in fact,
what I'm passionate about. On Sandia's Z machine, Ryan
continued experiments that compressed tiny fuel filled
targets using colossal shaped electrical pulses.
Wire array tricks shunted current into the target faster,
shrinking A-100 nanosecond delivery to 10 nanoseconds.
So the magnetic squeeze happens hard and fast, enabling fusion
conditions and giving him first hand high energy density
experience. But even though Ryan spent most
of that summer in the desert during the school year, he
actually spends most of it in the pool.
So how do you balance the workload for heavy math and
physics when you're also training like a collegiate D1
athlete? I was a varsity swimmer the last
four years I had produced a university.
I was very grateful to have that opportunity.
Division One, which meant that I was able, I was fortunate enough
to get scholarship for my athletics and which helped pay
for my school. That was a vital piece of my
life that I would not have been able to have this opportunity
otherwise. And so, yeah, we would.
We'd swim around 20 hours a week and have many other obligations
outside it. It was a full time job.
I would get up around 5:30 in the morning, eat breakfast, roll
into practice around six O clock or 630, and we'd practice from
6:30 to 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning, at which point I would
go to class. Usually have several hours of
class. My kind of average course load
was about 15 credit hours or so. Just not terrible.
But it's I'm having usually I'd go to a three hour lab and then
I'd go to two to three hour long lectures, at which point it'd be
about eat breakfast during class, of course, at which point
I would go eat lunch somewhere in the middle of the day.
And around 2:00, 2/30 we would go lift weights for hour 15
until about 4 and we roll straight over to the pool, swim
from 4:30 to 6:30. Something about we averaged
about like 5000 yards a day in the afternoons alone.
Mornings are also something like anywhere from 3 to 5000 yards as
well. And then we would eat dinner
until about 8:00 or so, go home, do homework, usually do at the
end of the night, rinse and repeat.
Three lifting sessions a week. Practices Monday through
Saturday. 3 morning practices a week.
It was a lot but very valuable experience in in learning how to
manage my time and of course allowing me this opportunity in
the first place. Division One swimming 20 plus
hours a week, pre dawn practices, labs and lectures,
lifts, afternoon yardage and then homework.
That is a full time job and I would know I was a student
athlete myself, but I played softball and I always felt bad
for the swimmers. However, that commitment and
dedication forged time management, resilience and
focus. So how do you manage near robot
like performance as a college athlete to something completely
different such as communicating with the public about fusion
energy? The biggest thing that I try to
remind people almost a preface that I like to give when I
discuss what I do and what I'm interested in, but also science
at in general. I think anybody who works in the
engineering field or in any of the sciences has an obligation
to attempt to bridge the gap between the general public and
scientists and our wealth of knowledge.
The purpose of science is to uncover truths and to hopefully
use them to to better society. And I think the more that the
general public understands what it is that we do, the more
efficiently you will be able to do so.
The first thing that I like to say is be careful not to
conflate knowledge and intelligence, right?
There is an important distinction I feel between how
much like how much it is that you know about a particular
subject, your ability to understand that subject, and I
think effort, patience, and I guess resilience, these are very
important qualities in intelligence.
And so I try to remind people that it is OK not to understand
as long as you're willing to accept something new.
That is something that the book. I would highly recommend Letters
to a Young Scientist by Edward Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize winning
entomologist, I believe, who discusses all kinds of valuable
pieces of advice all throughout a scientist's career, from a
young child to well into their career.
I would highly recommend. Our climate reality is kind of
bleak, but the younger generation of students are
wasting no time getting to work and finding real world
solutions. That's part of the reason why
we're seeing such an increase in enrollment in nuclear energy.
Students are wanting to find the solutions to the climate crisis
and get paid for it. So how does Ryan spend his time
explaining fission and fusion to high schoolers he knows?
If I had to explain fusion to someone who didn't understand, I
would first discuss and set the stage by saying that we are in
an energy crisis, right? Global temperature on average is
rising, which you have to remember that is the average
global temperature that is rising.
There are more violent fluctuations in temperature.
The other piece is the population rise in the demands
for energy is rising and it's not something I think people
realize. But one of the first things that
we did in my intro to nuclear, intro to thermonuclear fusion
class at Purdue was we calculated based on the, the
knowledge of energy consumption and the population growth rates
and the reserves and the energy density of oil and natural gas.
We calculated how long it would be for energy reserves until our
oil and gas were no longer sufficient to to supply energy
to the world's population. We need something new and
preferably, ideally, we need something cleaner that does not
output carbon dioxide and, and perfluorocarbons and thin and
different compounds into the air that eat at the ozone layer
pollute the atmosphere. Nuclear energy has been a key
piece of that puzzle. The nuclear energy fission is,
which is what we currently have with uranium, is 1,000,000 times
more energy efficient in terms of units of energy gained per
mass of fuel, like joules per kilogram or something like that.
It is a million times more efficient than oil and gas.
As it turns out, fusion is 3 to 4 times more energy efficient at
least than conventional fission nuclear power.
And so that is where the interest and the need for this
type of energy is it comes from. And on top of that, it also does
not produce the same types of nuclear waste that fission fuel
does. When you have a gas such as
hydrogen that's really hot, hot enough that their vibration,
they break free of the electrons in negative charge orbiting this
positively charged proton. They are moving about South
violently that they RIP free from their electrons and their
ions. The protons and the electrons
flow about freely and separately from each other.
You know what's called the plasma?
Plasma is just a super hot gas that does that.
And so now you have these protons and these protons are
both positively charged and they are certain distance away from
each other. They're moving really fast, as
you may remember, like with magnets or with the experiment
where you have rub a piece of glass or plastic on a cloth and
charge it up, and then you can extend out the balloon or
something, and you can repel the balloon.
Something positively charged repels something else possibly
charged. And so there's this immense
force that's pushing these protons apart.
But in the sun there's so much hydrogen, there's so many Earth
masses of hydrogen that the force due to gravity is so
intense of all this mass pulling in on each other that it over.
It's able to force the protons to overcome that proton, that
positive charge to positive charge repulsive force so that
they get so close together that they smash into each other the
protons. And when they smash into each
other, a another force takes over called the strong nuclear
force that only operates under very small distances, extremely,
exceedingly small. This force takes over and it
binds the protons together. And when it does so, this
process actually releases energy.
We don't have the luxury of using gravity and so we have to
use very advanced laser technology and or huge coils of
wire such as Electro magnets to force these protons together to
produce the same result. And hopefully the goal is that
we are able to do so on a scale that we can use for power
generation to hopefully solve this problem.
I have to agree with Ryan. We scientists, engineers,
doctors, biologists, physicists owe the public clarity.
We should take the time to explain how we got to the
knowledge we did and start to show the messy side of learning,
starting with the why scaffolding to the how, and then
letting students do the research.
But now it's time for our rapid fire questions.
So the first one is. If.
You had to develop a futuristic city.
What three things would you put in it?
I would put, assuming the technology exists, I would put a
fusion reactor. I would put quantum computing I
guess hardware for the slight server Internet infrastructure
of the city and material to be used for all manner of
appliances and wires, things of that sort.
That's a good one. Next question, what's your
favorite meal? Sushi unagi sushi easily.
Eel sushi is one of my favorite things of all time.
I love it. I barely for it, but when I can.
Fuji it is Unagi. OK, awesome.
Aside from swimming, do you have any other?
I play guitar. I have my guitar behind me.
I was playing a little bit before I hopped on.
Love to play video games. I love to think it's fun.
I love to hike surf as a California, LA native, and I
love to most recently at rock climbing.
There's been a recent uptake climb.
I've loved it, It's been awesome.
Amazing. And then if you could travel
somewhere to learn more about fusion or just science, where
would you go? Where are you travelling to?
Think I would have to travel to Germany to see the Bendelstein
7X accelerator. I think that machine is really
cool. I almost would have answered the
NIF facility in Livermore, but I live in California and I'm going
to make a point to see it. So it's something harder and
something more, something interesting and cool to see.
Definitely be that machine out there at the Max Planck
Institute. What grad school are you going
to? And then what are you going to
be studying as you're there? I will be going to University of
Rochester in upstate New York and I will be pursuing my PhD
studying high energy density physics, which is this fields of
which includes nuclear fusion research which I hope to make my
focus the focus of my PhD. They utilize a amazing laser
facility, the Laboratory of Laser Energetics, in which I
hope to explore the behaviour of materials, mainly fusion fuel
and the like. Hundreds of millions of degrees
temperature, hundreds of millions of pascals of pressure
and times the atmosphere. Yeah, very exciting, very
extreme conditions of materials focused study and I'm very much
looking forward to. It amazing.
And yeah, I'm also looking forward to seeing the research
that you're doing, publishing things.
I'm like, oh, that's really exciting.
Before recording this episode, Ryan and I chatted briefly about
what it's like to be a nerd, to be driven by your curiosities,
and sometimes it can be difficult.
So I wanted to ask him what advice does he have for young
scientists and other kids labeled as the nerds of the
world I. Mean, I was bullied a bit when I
was young for being a nerd. Reading I 7th grade I'd sit in
on AP physics and didn't understand a thing, but I'd be
sitting with all the juniors in high school and reading and
trying to absorb the best I could.
Huge nerd. My best advice is try your best
to surround yourself with people or media that are like minded in
your curiosity. Feed your curiosity.
I think that is the single most important thing you can do.
I've been introverted for all of my life.
I've been able to grow slowly to the point of doing things like
this podcast for instance, which has been amazing, but you slowly
develop the confidence over exercising this curiosity by
asking people. We humans are social creatures
and I think we stand to gain nothing by venturing into the
unknown by ourselves. I've come to learn that it's
much more valuable to be slightly annoying and persistent
than it is to be obedient or quiet.
My favorite scenes that I think about from the movie to psych
myself up to to ask questions is in the movie Shawshank
Redemption. The main character, he's in
prison. He wants a library for the
prison. He wants to help people to read
and he wants to read himself. And the warden is super corrupt.
The warden's like, no, I'm not going to get a library.
So the main character, he writes a letter to someone above the
warden's head and they don't respond and he goes and I sent
another letter the next week and the next week and the next week,
50 something letters later, they built this library and they sent
a letter back to tell us to stop sending so many letters.
I think of that every time of being persistent and reminding
myself that like my curiosity is someone is out there that is
willing to lift you up and I encourage you to stay persistent
in finding that person. Feed your curiosity
relentlessly. Ask dumb questions.
Find people and media that nurture your learning.
Be politely persistent, because the worst thing you can hear is
no, and the next yes could unlock a whole set of new
questions. I wanted to thank Ryan for
coming onto the show and giving us a little bit more insight to
his world, studying fusion energy from Tesla coils to the Z
machine, from the pool to the desert, and reminding us that
curiosity plus persistence is a chain reaction of success on its
own. Next time on Naked Nuclear, we
head to the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
From quantum tunneling in stellar cores to the machines
that people pushing fusion forward.
Until next time, stay curious.