Alex Battey
PhD Candidate
Being a PhD candidate in plasma physics, one might expect to find Alex Battey in San Diego, where he regularly conducts experiments with the renowned DIII-D tokamak. But addressing the famous San Diego Comic-Con?
Yet the fusion energy researcher did just that last July when he participated in the cheekily named panel, “From OSHA Violation to Superhero: The Lab Accidents That Will Most Likely Give You Superpowers,” informing hundreds of comic and sci-fi fans how the kinds of fission reactions that made the Incredible Hulk so incredible would really affect humans.
Battey drew on his considerable knowledge of science history to elucidate a time before today’s safety standards, when the sorts of accidents portrayed in comics were hardly the stuff of fiction.
After developing a number of nuclear bombs during the second World War, he recounted, the United States government had retained an extra plutonium core at Los Alamos for further research. Pursuing a series of experiments unthinkable today, scientists manually stacked special bricks around the core to bring it closer and closer to the point of going supercritical, or entering into a nuclear chain reaction. In August 1945, less than a week after V-J Day, disaster struck.
“One day someone was stacking a brick onto the stack and noticed it was one too many bricks,” Battey said. “He quickly went to remove it and [accidently] dropped the brick directly onto the core. The room filled with a bright blue light, and he felt a tingling sensation throughout his body because he was getting 500 rem of neutron and gamma radiation.” Far from gaining superpowers, the scientist soon died from severe radiation poisoning.
While the Comic-Con stage was his biggest yet, Battey can often be found sharing his passion for STEM with audiences. In addition to his graduate research at General Atomics in San Diego, he frequently volunteers at the city’s Fleet Science Center. There, he runs interactive experiments and hosts a show breaking down how Tesla coils illustrate principles of plasma physics. It was this experience that won him a spot on the Comic-Con panel, where he chose to zero in on supercritical fission reaction because of the prevalence of nuclear physics incidents—accurate or otherwise—in genre fiction.
Battey’s real-life research interests lie in generating fusion energy—an ambitious aim that requires handling plasma at even higher pressures and temperatures than at the center of the sun, but holds the potential for a reliable and clean energy source producing neither greenhouse gases nor toxic waste. As an undergraduate in applied physics and computer science, he was mentored by Professor Michael Mauel, who introduced him to Columbia’s HBT-EP tokamak and the limitless potential of plasma physics. Now as a PhD student, he works extensively with Professor Gerald Navratil and colleagues from General Atomics on research at the DIII-D tokamak, the largest operating in the United States.
Ultimately, Battey hopes to be part of the team that achieves Earth’s first-ever controlled fusion reaction, with a plasma that produces more energy than it takes to create. Such a feat could bring magnetically confined fusion to market as a renewable energy source.
“While gaining superpowers is not possible, understanding science allows us to do things that are even more amazing,” he said.
The full Comic-Con panel is available below.
Student Spotlight I knew I wanted to come to Columbia because it's one of the few universities with a degree in plasma physics... All the hands-on experience I had at Columbia both as an undergraduate and a graduate student is what made me into the scientist I am today.