Why The Latest UK Fusion Breakthrough Matters
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- čas přidán 24. 05. 2024
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First Light Fusion has achieved a major step towards solving one of the engineering challenges behind the design of a viable fusion pilot power plant. Let's talk to one of the research team behind the breakthrough to find out exactly what has changed.
Thanks again to Mila and the First Light Fusion team for their continued work and their openness to share their progress with us.
Find out more about them here; firstlightfusion.com/
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0:00 First Light Fusion Achieves Major Fusion Milestone
1:47 How to Build a Fusion Reactor
6:15 Fusion Breakthrough
12:00 Why is Fusion always 10 Years Away?
#fusion #breakthrough #explained
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Thanks again to Mila and the First Light team for their continued openness to share their progress with us.
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Do you understand that they do easy way to create "clear fusion bomb"? You can take their aim-design with "ДВМГ, дисковый взрывомагнитный генератор", which is a chemical bomb, compressing magnet flow, and able to generate extremely high I, and speed up aluminum liner to 60 km/s, - and you have first stage of fusion bomb. Additional 3 D+T stage allows you to go to clear Deitherium gas stages, and reach any final energy of your bomb. Say hello Israel, say goodbye Israel, for example.
And "fusion always in ten years" (20, 30), because you should PAY for construction something. Until you don't do it, you will be always in "10/20/30 years" from this construction. Try to google "US ERDA 1975 year plan vs fact", for sure, - it never was have paid
Using these two points:
1950: 30 years away.
2025: 10 years away.
We can calculate that the real date will be mid 2062. Which is 38 years away 😂
and how you gonna get any useful energy OUT.... ALL THOSE COILS MUST SURROUND THE THIS GIZMO
It wont work because its not a SPHERE. a circular coil has too many degrees of freedom ...kinks . touches the sides. loses energy. peters out
Can you do one on "Fusion: the World's Greatest Boondoggle"?
As a teenager, the joke that had been around for thirty years was that fusion was "always 50 years away". So getting to "always 30 years" or "always 10 years" away is a huge improvement in the span of thirty-odd years.
Either that, or they're just updating their earlier guesses by subtracting time at a suitably plausible rate.
@@73elephants Ha! I love this. In thirty year's time, the headlines will be, "Fusion is always next week."
@@mceajc It wouldn't be the first time that a bunch of professors kept a grift going for decades -- but I'm not completely blackpilled. Fingers crossed, eh?
Fusion: the World's Greatest Boondoggle
it has always been 10 years away. At least you can find major news-outlets reporting like that since the 70's.
Great, now fusion is only 10 years away
It used to be 30 years away, so that’s an improvement
It’s still 20 years off just like in the 1980’s.
It will still take 20 years till the first commercial fusion power plants could solve our energy problem, but the chances are very high now, that in 10 years we have constantly working fusion machines that produce more energy, as we put into them. Then we need some more years to scale up this process...
Can you do one on "Fusion: the World's Greatest Boondoggle"?
@@juimymary9951 Still is 30 years away.
"The landscape has changed, because we now have achieved gain."
This is exactly the part tons of people missed about the success of NIF. We can now see the finish line, so we have the tools to chart a course in that direction.
It also makes funding easier to justify. Instead of pointing off into the void, we have a flag out there and we can say "See that? Let's go there."
This will hopefully snowball, and hopefully means those "20 years away" timelines are effectively frozen.
Great point - hopefully we only have to wait 19.999 years now.
Nobody, absolutely nobody has ever achieved anything remotely near gain. It is all hype.
Energy break even, or even a gain, says nothing about economic break even which is equally necessary and *much* further away.
@@rasmichael this
@@Mrbfgray Nobody EVER achieved anything even near energy break-even let alone gain. Today you can count yourself lucky if you can get single digit % of the energy you expended back.
I don't know if you're aware of it, but there is a fascinating book that really documents the _start_ of the "fusion is always 10 years away" idea, which I think you'd enjoy. It's called "PROJECT SHERWOOD: The U.S. Program in Controlled Fusion", published in 1958 as part of the declassification of the U.S. research into fusion reactions, and contains detailed reports on the U.S.'s research projects from 1951 to 1958. That puts it almost perfectly at the cusp of where people were starting to grasp how difficult a problem this was, and the project reports are detailed enough that you really get the perspective of seeing what that realization like at the time, to the people who were figuring it out.
It's almost heartbreaking watching them get to the top of the first hills expecting to be making good progress, and then seeing the expanse of mountain still to climb that was now visible, especially with the hindsight of knowing that even that was a small fraction of what was truly ahead. Even in the dry scientific writing, some of that sense of dauntedness comes through.
thanks for the recommendation - I'll check it out
The joke's on us taxpayers.
Fusion is always the xx number of years away BOONDOGGLE.
Things always brushed under the carpet: I'll believe them that the approach with the gun works, but the entire lithium curtain thing is a different beast.
Lithium is chemcially fairly aggressive and can corrode steel. But you need it to be Lithium because you need to take the excess Neutron of the fusion reaction to produce more of the Tritium used as fuel for the fusion (the only other source of tritium is waste from nuclear fission plants, but the worldwide production is nowhere near enough to run a power plant on.).
In short: just getting the fusion rection to be net positive still won't be enough to get a full scale power plant.
Actually, I was going to comment on the lithium curtain as well, but in a much more positive light. So the problem with hydrogen isotope fusion has always been how to get the energy out of the neutrons. The big tokomak project can make all the progress in other areas that it wants, but realistically, without some impossible material that can absorb neutrons and survive relatively unscathed to turn them into heat, it's never going to actually work. This is the first approach I've seen that completely addresses that problem without relying on some mystical future tech material (by both the gun staying at a distance from the reaction, but also the absorbing material for the neutrons being a liquid). There's clearly still more hurdles to get past, but I would say (purely from watching this vid) that the lithium curtain concept is the real breakthrough of their approach...
It's so far beyond even that, they need to remove waste helium, stabilise the plasma flow long term, work out a way to get usable energy, refuel it whilst it's running, and so so many more things.
But hey, it makes great headlines and videos, so there's that.
Dilithium in startrek probably then?!......
A biggish vacuum chamber full of lithium showers is an insane image, but there are commercial fission reactors running at this moment on molten sodium - which is pretty comparable in the explode-on-contact-with-anything department, oh and BTW the sodium's crazy radioactive so the chemical fire would spread a cloud of death like Chernobyl (though a lot smaller and shorter duration).
Yes there are a lot of problem with liquid lithium: very corrosive to any structural material, much worse at those high temps they need to run at; it might destroy the vacuum pumps or and ruin UHV (fusion reactions has to happen in best vacuum possible); it reacts explosively with water so not a good idea to have lithium near water
So we’ve gone from being 20 years away to being just 20 years away.
An interesting thing to keep in mind with that timeline is, is that at least something like 10 years should be expected to be used up building and testing the final version, the commercial test plant.
After all, even if you were some what quick about it, building a commercial scale power plant can easily take 5 years, and that's assuming you aren't trying anything all to hard. And then you need to run it for years to make sure you've figured out general operation enough to sign off on large scale deployment.
And this is why the time frames so often then become at least 20-30 years. Because you need some time to figure out what you still don't know and how to design the final power plant design. And because people don't really know how much more is really still left to figure out, they tend to either underestimate or overestimate it by quite a bit. And also equally obviously once one realizes it, people who are optimistic on figuring out fusion are the ones who will work on it and thus give predictions... and so the predictions tend to be optimistic. So assume 10-20 years of R&D work before building the final commercial test plant.
In any case, we clearly haven't started on building that plant, so obviously any realistic fusion timeline is thus at least 10 years. And then we have the unknown amount of time to finish the research.
In conclusion, fusion will always be 20-30 years away, until suddenly it isn't anymore because they're going to build the commercially viable test plant. Same way it was with say nuclear energy as well, where it was considered a pipedream until suddenly it wasn't.
5 years ago it was 10 years away. Today it's 5 years away. The timeline has stopped perpetually expanding.
@@VAXHeadroomWell it would be nice if it was that quick. But we haven't even started building the full scale test plants. And if I recall correctly even pretty optimistic timelines assuming everything goes perfectly still tend to presume 10-15 years I think.
I do agree that it seems to be getting closer though, certainly they're progressing on several interesting approaches lately.
It's actually worse than that. Because the earth's orbit is slowing down (except till recently, where it has 'sped up' due to changes in the mass of the earths core and polar ice caps moving and melting: but let's forget about that for the moment), the clock keepers have to add a second or partial second, to keep the annual time on track. And since we are constantly slowing down, the 20 years is 20 years plus X number of seconds. As if life wasn't complicated enough already!
Let's hope the ITER project in France, bears some fruit in 2025.
The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.
Hello Dr. Ben! Thank you for yet another excellent video demonstrating your skills in asking the questions and pursuing the answers. It also helps to have the contacts and the reach you have. Cheers to you~!
Nice video. I like how the breakthrough is basically turning a electric rail gun into a conventional gun. Whereas a conventional gun will have a primer and gunpowder to push a projectile this rail gun uses electricity as a primer and metal foil as a kind of gunpowder that explodes into a plasma and pushes the flyer/projectile. Very cool!
a plasma cannon ^_^ wonder if that could be tuned for regular atmospheric pressure use, yeah the power usage is insane but no part of it is actually explosive or even flammable.
@@Joe-Dead Honestly, plasma is ultra inneficient, like if you ever seen in any sci-fi people using plasma is just dumb, plasma literally would lose energy ultra fast or just outright explode once its left its containment as a bullet to make plasma viable you need to use enough energy that it would be worth it to just use a laser
@@Aureonw "just use a laser" that's being done, secondly kiddo, i said nothing about using plasma as the destructive force as the gun in the fusion attempts isn't using the plasma EITHER as a projectile of any sort. using plasma as gunpowder, much like gunpowder cannons were a thing, the propulsive force being gunpowder, plasma cannons, the propulsive force being plasma.
something first light is probably intent upon as it would allow cartridges to be mass produced to power the cannon and simplified feed system. the thing with a standard atmosphere to deal with is...air. you can pull off that kind of rapid acceleration used in fusion under vacuum but in air it might as well be concrete...why the 'tuned' part.
@@Joe-Dead First of all my bad for not reading the top comment just yours lol thought you were thinking of making plasma bullets, secondly why call someone a kiddo?, especially someone who likes his own comment lol
@@Aureonw the stupid assumptions you make, like 'likes his own comment' based on nothing but your own self delusion. thinking like a child who hadn't figured out rational thought yet who instead just makes up narratives whole cloth that don't exist. your bad was trying to 'well actually' based on your own assumptions, your second was AGAIN using the same tactic that failed you the first time again. making assumptions.
Thank you for this very interesting analysis of the topic. I see most of the comments below have focussed on the time to commercialisation, but I think the real payload of this video is how mathematical modelling is changing the landscape.
Modelling physics requires that we understand enough of the way the universe works such that we can codify a small part of it mathematically. When you are breaking new ground as nuclear fusion is then we see our understanding being challenged every step of the way.
The point about this method is that the more we know, the faster we make progress. There are two benefits that pop out of this - first we have a viable fusion reactor, which in itself is a game changer for climate change and geopolitics of the Middle East. - and secondly we have a set of tools which mean we can take greater strides in understanding fundamental physics.
Both of those things are game changers and I applaud the progress being made by this team. Congrats - and thank you.
There is the ITER project in Southern France, backed by 37 countries, who have invested $Billions to get a 'Test of theoretical Concept' actual plant built, that won't even be a functional Fusion Power Generator, when it's tested in 2025. If it proves the science and the numbers are right, then they have to build a bigger Fusion Power Plant.
Since Gerry Anderson Day has just passed by: They need a F.A.B to get an FPP. 😁
So it's good to see other methodologies being tried out, which are producing new modelling concepts. Hopefully these might benefit the many other companies trying different methods.
If they are prepared to share their modelling programs.
If we didn't have to worry about climate change,and how close we are to irreversible climate change,I would say,go for it,and develop a practical fusion reactor than produces more power than it uses. As it stands,however,there are ominous signs climate change is becoming unstoppable (historic temperature records being broken worldwide),and the only practical steps are getting small modular FISSION reactors online asap to supplement wind and solar.
@@mikedunn7795 I’m not sure if you have been on the same planet as me for the past 30 years or so but you may have noticed that oil production isn’t going anywhere south right now. And why should it there are at least 3 billion people out there who also want their air-conditioner, washing machine, and car in the garage and we have no alternative to oil when it comes to providing it.
Yep, no alternative, that’s what I said. All other so-called green energy alternatives turn out to be mostly unreliable and consume huge quantities of oil to produce them, not to mention resources that we simply don’t have at scale.
The ‘green revolution’ is BS, and the only tech in the horizon that could produce baseline power with no fossil fuel input is fusion. I really wouldn’t worry too much about the panic merchants telling you the sky is falling - the world is an amazing place that has recovered from much worse than we are throwing at it currently. And with the end of globalisation meaning a lot less transported goods by sea, then a huge input to the atmosphere of bad crap (not only CO2) will slow down a lot.
So I see a blip on the charts only, I don’t think we’ll be seeing the huge sea level rises that are predicted - increased wind damage is quite likely but that’s about all. Don’t panic.
@@daveozip4326 I agree with you entirely.
And the 'blip' is being caused by what, in reality.
Can the warming of the air actually warm the sea? Why is there no scientist looking at why the spin of the Earth has 'sped up' ? Why are the ice caps in Antarctica melting from underneath? Why is there more volcanic activity? Why are the young modern scientists ignoring the 'old time' experienced scientists who say, the warming of the Earth causes increased CO2 emissions, not the other way around?
Because it suits the world governments to move away from a resource that is running out. If they can say 'This is man made climate change.', it is easier to BS the public to use alternative resources. If they said 'The Earths core is going through a cycle of heat transfer, which we can not control.', then they won't get anyone to move away from using oil. And once this 'blip' is over, we are going to cool down again. But how long will that take? As no scientist seems to be studying the Earth's core, we won't have a 'best guess' to work towards. That's my theory, based on observation.
As long as we keep checking, and challenging the model, to ensure that growth is benign. We saw what incorrect modelling, and assumed data points can do with the wuflu......😊
Great video. Super excited for the future of fusion.
You're right more than anyone may believe Prof. Miles, when you say: "We have to confirm that the Universe works the way we think it works" when we reach some operating conditions that have never been practiced before.
As an example, the forces holding together the atoms of the projectile under that immense speed - do act the way we expect? I would use the fields theory to solve the problem...
In the 1960s and 70s I didn't hear anyone serious talk about fusion power being 10 or 20 years away. Most serious commentators said it was unlikely there would be real fusion power stations feeding the grid until the middle of the 21st century.
more passion more energy
More footwork
If you dig through history, you will find that fusion used to be said to have always been 50 years away. When I visited JET a couple of decades ago, the joke was that fusion was forever 30 years away. More recently I've heard "20 years away". Today was the first mention of it having "always been 10 years away".
That's some kind of progress I guess.
Edit: just got too the bit of the video where you discuss this!
!!! I thought it was just me.
I remember the joke being 30 years away, and then 20 years away, and now the joke's told like it's always been only 10 years away. The joke just doesn't seem to add up.
Zeno's paradox realized
Very cool. Let's keep building fission plants in the meanwhile though.
Smoothbrains not understanding the immensity of the breakthroughs in the past two years be like : "10 yEaRs aWaY FoReVeR DURHUR"
There comes a tipping point in most technology where before we are working blind then someone finds the light switch and rapid progress is made to the next room and we start searching for the light switch again. We may even go into the wrong room first.
There is a channeled by the name of improbable matter which at least by my own estimation offers an extremely well informed insight with regards to fusion technology and its myriad of challenges.
Love your content, thanks for sharing and explaining.
We'll definitely have fusion in about 20 years or so, we promise this time. LoL.
Great interview and great video as always.
This b-21 raider is another example of some complicated technology that's been accelerated by digital design and simulation.
so they made a Rifle Cartridge that uses metal plasma instead of gun powder... noice!
Wow, Mila Fitzgerald is a first class communicator. There aren't many people with the advanced knowledge that she has that can communicate it so well.
First-class communicator, obviously brilliant, and quite the looker.
Bright Topic! Sorry, I couldn't resist!
Congratulations to First Light for their 10mm to 10cm achievement! Go get 'em First LIght!
Now, THAT was helpful! Like you kinda said, the announcements focus so much on achieving the next increment, they kinda forget we don't have a clue how hard it was to get here. But yeah, the idea they're working so deep into the fringe of known science that we keep finding new physics quibbles to get past -- that makes MUCH more sense!
Very well presented
I remember the time when it was said fusion is always 50 years away. Then it became "always 40", then "always 20", now "always 10". It's just an anecdote about too optimistic predictions. But the progress is constant and noticeable. If nothing else the brute force approach of ITER will be eventually successfull.
ITER itself is always 20 years away.
ITER will also fail but with another €10,000,000,000,000 they can get 2 years closer.
It wont work because its not a SPHERE. a circular coil has too many degrees of freedom ...kinks . touches the sides. loses energy. fizzles out
@@esecallum ITER is a 'Proof of Concept' model and was never designed to work.
If the tests give the results expected (hopefully better than expected), only then, will the 37 countries involved, build a functional full scale Fusion Power Plant. And that will be designed around the findings. It will probably be very different than the concept design.
The predictions weren't pessimistic enough. Or, rather, the framing of the question was always just plain wrong.
We're not years away from practical commercial fusion-powered electricity: we're in the wrong universe for commercial fusion power to be practical on a cost basis.
Unless you count solar, which is already so cheap it makes zero sense to float terrestrial fusion.
I remember doing some back of the envelope calculation according to which a tiny grain of interstellar ice, hitting a spacecraft traveling at a fraction of the speed of light (such as .1 c) , could cause the hydrogen atoms in it to fuse, making the impact a lot worse. The speeds mentioned here are ~1/1000 of that.
There's a Russian crackpot, Alexander Bolonkin, who puts out an absolute barrage of deeply impractical but fun concepts. One of them is to fire multiple sub-milligram lithium deuteride nanobullets at ICBMs at very high speeds, to make aiming easy, and a small distance apart. If the front one hits an incoming weapon it decelerates. The second one then hits the squashed first one, initiating a "small" nuclear boom to neutralize...anything.
Brilliant Light Power
Miles: "I didn't understand what any of the words mean"
That hit me right in the liver.
I think we need to explore energy generation via sequential heat pumps using refrigerants with overlapping temperature spans of their phase change cycles.
Essentially, we could use waste heat in our environment to generate power. It would only be a portion of the energy input, but it would also produce local cooling. Might be useful in incredibly hot locations where the concept would also be the most effective.
I wonder if life extension would be a stronger metaphor than time travel, for learning the spaces we have to work within to achieve our goals.
It's never been ten years away.
30 years is the perpetual time period until fusion will be achieved
It will never be achieved.
It's interesting to me that at the center of the sun, where fusion occurs and has a density of 160 g/cc (not a near vacuum), produces less energy per unit volume than a human body does. Fusion is a pipe dream, promising incredible things, and will continue to promise these things until the end of time.
I like Eric Lerner's approach at LPP with Focus Fusion. The man is beyond brilliant, but he's 77 and one has to wonder how much longer he'll be able to continue that research.
The idea of a bean counter standing behind a physicist trying to develop a time machine and telling him to "Hurry up" amused me.
fusion is fascinating, well, trying to attain it.. but i'd love to have a long talk with Mila, seems like a brilliant mind.
I'd really like to hear more about the ML/AI the team using in their simulations and designs. It would seem like an area that is ripe for automated iterative refinement in simulation given that the target state is generally theoretically well understood and the challenges are mostly engineering/behaviour based.
Funny - I saw somewhere the physics we thought we understood for airfoil lift might actually be wrong - but whatever we have come up with until now kinda works out for us.
Addendum: I am unsure if this is the origin of future tech being 10 years away, but it was a series of events that influenced the 10 year meme.
FYI: An author famous for science fiction writing, Arthur C Clarke, was interviewed twice about space elevators and their potential of becoming a reality ten years apart. The first time he stated they would become a realistic technology 10 years after people stopped laughing about it. The second time he stated the same and added and I believe they've stopped laughing. I believe that's the general story, I leave finding out the specifics to those interested in science fiction to fact predictions or space elevators.
That's a great story, and mostly I just disagree with him about the idea that people have stopped laughing about space elevators -- I think he was just talking to the wrong people, and specifically to people who'd been listening to him rather than doing the materials-science calculations. He did have a gift for getting ideas -- whether they were space elevators or the "it's always 10 years away" phrasing -- into the public consciousness and getting them to stick.
I'm pretty optimistic about fusion. It seems like AI might be instrumental in pushing fusion into commercial viability. Exciting stuff!
Great video. Very well communicated. How will the debris be removed from the chamber ?
wombles
Ben, fascinating video, thanks.
Question:
Assuming we succeed in providing a high proportion of our energy needs from fusion, we would then be converting stored potential energy into extra surface heat. Would this be a problem? I have often wondered the same about Geothermal accelerated heat released to the surface.
The key difference with SolarPV and solar derived energy sources (wind, hydro, etc.) is that they do not add energy to the earth, rather they simply convert a part of the incoming energy before it eventually reverts back to what it anyway becomes without intervention - surface heating.
braking the speed of light is probably tougher the fsion but sice their is no problematic enemy of fission power to figth. adainst.
She said fusion doesn't produce radioactive waste, but all those metal parts that have to be replaced because they've been irradiated by fast neutrons are radioactive. I don't know what the decay lifetime of neutron activated metals are, but the lack of actual danger has never stopped anti-nuclear opposition in the past.
It's a few hundred years half life for fusion bi-products.
Instead of 20,000+ years for fission.
Not to mention absolutely zero chance of a "meltdown" scenario.
In saying that, I still believe we must embrace fission completely and replace all fossil fuel plants with nuclear until fusion becomes a viable alternative.
That's true, but the public generally thinks of 'high level' waste aka spent fuel rods when they hear nuclear waste. Medium level nucler waste is what all that induced radioative metal is considered, and low level waste is stuff like discarded bunny suits. So the 'no waste' bit while technically true is mostly matching what the public thinks of as waste. More correct Fusion advocates say 'no highly radioactive waste'.
Thing is, here (virtually) all the neutrons are stopped by the lithium rather than chamber walls. Producing tritium, which is rare and highly valuable for both this process and other fusion reactors.
something that is always omited about the sun being hot and dense
enough to produce fusion is that it doesnt - only VERY slowly
Great video? Fascinating insight on how we are progressing towards cheap energy. Also..say regime one more time... :)
So many of these "breakthroughs" in my newsfeed daily, hopefully this is something significant.
PB fusion might be nice. Much less bad nuclear waste but still some radioactive waste from those neutrons I think.
2:28 we are not trying to recreate the condutions at the core of the sun. Instead we need temperatures abd pressures far higher than the center of the sun so as to increase the rate of fusion far more than what happens at the center of the sun.
The Sun is fusing protons. Fusion reactors are mostly trying to fuse Deuterons and Tritons. The rate is already multiple orders of magnitude higher. We still need temperatures about 10x higher, but actually considerably lower pressure
@@MattNolanCustom pressure sort of looses meaning at high energy few particles. For instance, we dont really speak of pressure when its two protons slamming Into each other.
@@kreynolds1123you mentioned pressure in your original comment. Further, any useful fusion reactor will be using absolutely vast numbers of particles, not just a couple, otherwise it will not produce any meaningful energy and certainly not break even.
@@MattNolanCustom I'm sorry to appear to as if to flip flop. My inital comment on pressure was factoringing several different confinement techniques. Then in responce to your comment i was reflecting on what is pressure really in the context of fusing a few protons vs a great many protons, and how subjective is the distinction.
More reflecting. On fusion rate, on the one hand, at the core of our sun fusion is slow enough that the sun can last billions of years. On the other hand, hydrogen bombs fuse protons at a far faster rate. Hear is to hopping humanity can learn to fuse hydrogen at a rate inbetween the two in a way that we can commercially viable way to power humanity needs.
This doesn't sound right but this is how Google AI responded to me asking the rate of fusion per colision, it said the core of the sun was about 0.1% while deterium and tritium in a hydrogen bomb was closer to 30%.
@@kreynolds1123 I've not seen Google AI give an answer to a technical question which is not deeply flawed. What do those % rates even mean? You're right - it doesn't sound right! An H-bomb typically uses a fission bomb with shaped charges to produce the symmetrical compaction needed to trigger the fusion core. NIF and First Light are loosely analogous to this. Tokamaks, Stellarators, etc. are pretty much the opposite extreme. Much lower pressure / density for much longer times. Pressure is related to energy of collisions and frequency of collisions. Temperature, at least in Maxwellian systems, is a proxy for collision energy. You corrected yourself later, but H-bombs don't fuse protons.
Helion seems the most fascinating effort to me.
In a fision reactor the reaction supplies the energy to keep going. Couldn’t the fast neutron in a fusion reactor be used in a similar manner?
the usual intent is for the hot ion product to be used to keep it going while the fast neutron product is used to extract energy
Question: wouldn't a tapered unit send the projectile farther than the current design? The cloud could stay longer in focus.
The problem was to not turn the thing into a cloud in the first place. They need a sharp, simultaneous impact across the back of their container.
Just a quick note that NIF stands for National Ignition Facility rather than Nuclear Ignition Facility
Any update on the nex generatiion launcher Machne 4? They saiid they should be breaking ground this year. It sounds huge at 75m diameter, maybe these breakthroughs means it doesnt need to be so big. Did the full funding come through?
More ENERGY 🕺🕺More PASSION 🕺🕺More FOOTWORK
Have you done any videos on Helion?
I haven't even finished this video yet, but it amazes me how many things that would change the world, such as Fusion, a cure for aging, a cure for cancer etc, have much less funding that you would expect. You would think that almost unlimited funding would be available for them since they are so important. It is something to see such a lovely physicist.
AMEN!! This blew my mind!!
investments are made into things with a likely return
if im trying to sell you a philosophers stone you get to see as soon as i leave, how much would you give me for it
Good luck finding that funding without taking away Laquisha's welfare check! (Sorry LaQuisha, nothing personal!)
I am absolutely sure, this will work.
Part of the reason fusion has always been seen as something "20 years away" is because the goal posts have been moving. First it was the challenge of just achieving any fusion at all. We did that. Then it became the challenge of achieving ignition. We've done that. Right now it's the challenge of achieving net positive and producing power.
We should not assign timelines to it. It took us the better part of 70 years to achieve ignition and net power (at the level of the reaction, not the overall system).
End of the century is probably more realistic and perhaps even too optimistic.
So, what she is saying is "measure twice, cut once" is a rule the fusion industry is starting to learn.
nice
I was dubious but at 10:40 Mila has a good point about why 10cm is good news for bigger stand off distances.
The image at 6:29 is what the LLNL will be interested in using this technology for.
you make it almost sound like each and every discovery on the macro level will take 20 years per discovery. I wonder if a quantum computer with super AGI could make a difference?
Excellent presentation! Just FYI, the "N" in NIF stands for "National" not "Nuclear."
I need to be a PhD student. My exact idea when looking at this problem was to add a layer that would absorb the energy in order to push the object. Make it like a cartridge. Keep it simple.
If they combine all the current fusion efforts, Imagine
A tokomak donut magnet with two rail guns firing deuterium foam frozen pellets into the center of the donut from each side ( the donut on edge). With six lasers at each side, on 45 degree angles, aimed at the center. All controlled by AI.
The guns pulse foam pellets, into the center at regular times. The magnetic donut holds them in place, while the lasers add extra heat, and keep the fuel in the center, by AI control.
The heat can be removed by liquid lithium, and direct electrical power
Have they tried making in a shape of a shaped-charge to keep the projectile from dispersing?
It's interesting to me that at the center of the sun, where fusion occurs and has a density of 160 g/cc (not a near vacuum), produces less energy per unit volume than a human body does. Fusion is a pipe dream, promising incredible things, and will continue to promise these things until the end of time.
Did they stop the projectile at 10cm, or did it vaporize at that distance? If they stopped it, why?
The scientist says in the video that their test chamber "range" was 10cm long, and that at that distance it was out of the danger zone for turning into plasma. She's confident that having reached 10cm as a solid, it will continue indefinitely through vacuum.
4:11 The only 'viable' way is continuous small feed through streams with high probility of fusion, much like particle colliders do, but with short cyclotronic accelerators, since the goal is fusion, not breaking. WIth the right angle and speed, this may be achievable, where the angle of each particle is the most decisive factor.
In nature, nothing happens without reason, this means that the success or failure to fuse has factors in it. These factors are then speed differential, vector, angle and initial energy (heat). For 'viable' fusion, the heat must be as low as possible, while other factors are to be optimized in order to drain the initial energy factor. That would then only be speed differential, vector of collision with angle in there somewhere. Possibly heat oscillation is a factor since it would then also make the speed variable, with this then mitigated by lowering the speed by heat (the oscillation) by using the least amount of heat during collision.
Personally, I'd think that truly cold fusion has the best chance, with that meaning not without neutrons but low in temperature like nearing 0K, to reduce the speed variability, but also using the correct angle and speed to create fusion.
This can be done theoretically, but with any succcesfull fusion, heat would be relased, and would then be a block for the newer arriving fusion particles. It would make a great way to create larger atoms from smaller ones, but it would still require way more energy than comes out.
In both cases, either for creating energy or creating larger atoms, the speed and the angle are most important during the collision since these determine whether or not during that collision merger happens, succesful fusion.
By the time fusion is commercially viable The Thunderstorm Generator will be in its 3rd commercial iteration
What makes you believe that practical fusion is possible on Earth?
We have discovered places like Oklo where nuclear fission occurred naturally, however we have no examples of self sustaining fusion reactions at a sub stellar scale (
Search up sonofusion (Bubble fusion). Fusion at low scales is not as "out-there" as you may presume.
@@ichtozavuzovsky8370 , it was never replicated.
There is no issue to force fusion at a small scale - any neutron generator could do it. The problem is to reach Lawson criterion and get self sustaining reaction.
@@antonburdin9756 Unlike fission, fusion isn't self-sustaining, even in the sun It's ultimately started and sustained by gravitational collapse.. All we need is net energy release.
@@HypoceeYT, why would you bother creating fusion conditions when you can get more energy per reaction from fission at "normal" conditions?
Hydrogenbombs make me think it is possible
We got rail gun surplus parts in 1994 and used them to shrink coins
Will we ever achieve micro-fusion like they have in Star Wars?
I like your videos on fusion. And this one is no excrption. You seem very confident, that fusion could one day solve our energy problems.
There remains the question though, if we switch all energy production to a relatively cheap source that basically runs on heat, while the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere remains as high as it is now, doesn this create an additional warming problem?
No, the total energy needs of the world could be satisfied by the energy the sun delivers to Earth in 2 minutes, which means means all our energy use is producing a comperable amount of heat, apply typical powerplant heat conversion and your looking at ~5 minutes of solar heat for every powerplant on year per year. That's the equivilent of brightening the sun by 1/100,000th and it would have a trivial affect on temperature.
The Earth gain and looses an absolutly staggering amount of energy every second, it's like building a damn on a river to create a lake. The height of the dam is going to determine the ultimate level of the lake, out powerplant heat is like a garden hose being added to the lake, both tiny in volume and inconsequential be cause the damn sheds excess water faster the more the lake overtops the dam. Greenhouse gasses are like adding more rows of bricks to the dam.
@@kennethferland5579 That is a very informative post and seems to make sense. I asked, because a well known german physisist, Harald Lesch, who has a environmentalist podcast, alluded to a problem in that regard - but on revisiting it, he of course said only that creating energy with heat is currently a problem, because you need to cool down the vapor and if you use rivers for it and you dont want to boil the fish, that resource is very limited.
I think the most difficult part is to make it economical. Nuclear power plants are probably cheaper and more efficient. So it will be very hard to compete against that.
The lasers used in the National Ignition Facility reportedly require a tremendous amount of electricity far exceeding the Fusion energy currently being achieved. Perhaps the gun approach will be a more efficient approach.
Just like 10 years ago, fusion is 10 years away
An electromagnetic pulse (EMP), also referred to as a transient electromagnetic disturbance (TED), is a brief burst of electromagnetic energy. The origin of an EMP can be natural or artificial, and can occur as an electromagnetic field, as an electric field, as a magnetic field, or as a conducted electric current. The electromagnetic interference caused by an EMP can disrupt communications and damage electronic equipment. An EMP such as a lightning strike can physically damage objects such as buildings and aircraft. The management of EMP effects is a branch of electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) engineering.
The first recorded damage from an electromagnetic pulse came with the solar storm of August 1859, or the Carrington Event.[1]
In modern warfare, weapons delivering a high energy EMP pulse are designed to disrupt[2] communications equipment, the computers needed to operate modern warplanes, or even put the entire electrical network of a target country out of commission.[3]
General characteristics
An electromagnetic pulse is a short surge of electromagnetic energy. Its short duration means that it will be spread over a range of frequencies. Pulses are typically characterized by:
The mode of energy transfer (radiated, electric, magnetic or conducted).
The range or spectrum of frequencies present.
Pulse waveform: shape, duration and amplitude.
The frequency spectrum and the pulse waveform are interrelated via the Fourier transform which describes how component waveforms may sum to the observed frequency spectrum.
Types of energy
Main article: Electromagnetism
EMP energy may be transferred in any of four forms:
Electric field
Magnetic field
Electromagnetic radiation
Electrical conduction
According to Maxwell's equations, a pulse of electric energy will always be accompanied by a pulse of magnetic energy. In a typical pulse, either the electric or the magnetic form will dominate.
In general, only radiation acts over long distances, with the magnetic and electric fields acting over short distances. There are a few exceptions, such as a solar magnetic flare.
Frequency ranges
A pulse of electromagnetic energy typically comprises many frequencies from very low to some upper limit depending on the source. The range defined as EMP, sometimes referred to as "DC to daylight", excludes the highest frequencies comprising the optical (infrared, visible, ultraviolet) and ionizing (X and gamma rays) ranges.
Some types of EMP events can leave an optical trail, such as lightning and sparks, but these are side effects of the current flow through the air and are not part of the EMP itself.
Pulse waveforms
The waveform of a pulse describes how its instantaneous amplitude (field strength or current) changes over time. Real pulses tend to be quite complicated, so simplified models are often used. Such a model is typically described either in a diagram or as a mathematical equation.
" "
Rectangular pulse " "
Double exponential pulse " "
Damped sinewave pulse
Most electromagnetic pulses have a very sharp leading edge, building up quickly to their maximum level. The classic model is a double-exponential curve which climbs steeply, quickly reaches a peak and then decays more slowly. However, pulses from a controlled switching circuit often approximate the form of a rectangular or "square" pulse.
EMP events usually induce a corresponding signal in the surrounding environment or material. Coupling usually occurs most strongly over a relatively narrow frequency band, leading to a characteristic damped sine wave. Visually it is shown as a high frequency sine wave growing and decaying within the longer-lived envelope of the double-exponential curve. A damped sinewave typically has much lower energy and a narrower frequency spread than the original pulse, due to the transfer characteristic of the coupling mode. In practice, EMP test equipment often injects these damped sinewaves directly rather than attempting to recreate the high-energy threat pulses.
In a pulse train, such as from a digital clock circuit, the waveform is repeated at regular intervals. A single complete pulse cycle is sufficient to characterise such a regular, repetitive train.
I kinda got a smile when I realized the method to boil water was to fire a gun at a target. That's the simplistic version of the metal foil essentially detonating and firing a projectile basically like a standard gun. Just observational humor.😉
I assume the deuterium and tritium are either easy / cheap to produce or occur naturally?
Deuterium is abundant and cheap at scale, in the form of splitting "heavy water". Tritium is rare, expensive, and hard to produce; there isn't enough on the entire Earth at any moment to run a reactor. An advantage of this approach, described in other releases, is that the absorption of neutrons by the lithium produces tritium, allowing the reactor to supply its own needs. It could also make money by supplying the tritium needed by other fusion reactors!...Although if they can make the fusion work, and they're orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than the other reactors, well, just build more of this kind.
@@HypoceeYT The neutrons from the fusion process cannot suffice to supply the reactor's own tritium needs.
Take a closer look onto the neutron balance. Each fusion event consumes one tritium atom and produces one neutron. Each neutron can breed one tritium atom. For the reactor to supply its own needs, no neutron and no tritium atom would be allowed to get lost. Since there are no lossless technologies in reality, there would be too few neutrons and too little tritium would be produced. Therefore, additional substances like lead and beryllium have to be consumed as neutron multipliers, which release more than one neutron for each neutron they capture.
@@FranzN57 Sure, whatever. Um akshually it's not pure lithium, it's lithium with some lead mixed in. Videos like this one report on the challenging, costly part of that mix.
*1:00** Why is it always, 10, 20 years away? Because people know that people have short term memories and that 10 years is too long for them to "remember to ask if anything happened in 10 years".*
i.e., it's a scapegoat date so they don't have to give a concrete answer.
Anyone that knows what they are doing has a concrete answer.
As Einstein is reputed to have said: "If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call it 'research'."
I think there's an importance difference between the approach used here is that used by, say, Tesla to autonomous vehicles. This used modelling based on "theory" i.e. physics. And used that model to conduct simulated experiments whereas all the modern AI stuff is, arguably, devoid of domain theory and promises to achieve mastery only by scaling data and compute. There is no underlying theory of driving that companies are using. Here, the modelling was actually a simplified model, which is what you do with models. They have to be simplified, but you can still get value from it. Modern AI approaches don't work with simplified models because they are purely data driven.
"There are very few other domains that human beings operate in where that fundamental check and vet process ... is actually necessary."
I think there are tons of domains like this; any science that deals with complexity and especially those with relatively limited data. So ecology, psychology, public health, health care, economics, etc. Of course physics has many domains dealing with complexity as well, such as fluid dynamics.
If they learn to actually control the angle at which the particles collide, this will increase output.
Why ? The assymetrical nature of the reaction, where one part, the deuterium has no symmetry,
makes difference in the applied forces till they connect. Pretty certain that the angle of collission matters.
So, getting two streams, one of deuterium and one of tritium, where both particles are being angularly controlled
has an impact on the success ratio of the merger into helium.
I still don't know why we aren't researching geothermal. The only problem is digging the hole deep enough. We know that the heat is down there. This seams like a much better way forward for a green energy future to me.
Does a single impact of the bullet initiate a self-sustaining reaction, or must a constant series of bullets be fired, each producing a short-lived controlled fusion explosion?
Hey Peter, its a "pulsed power" approach, so each shot detonates - then another fuel target and projectile are fired into the reaction chamber
@@DrBenMiles Thanks
so the flyer will protect the projectile from evaporated?
That's fantastic news! I can rest easy knowing that my great grandchildren will have all the cheap energy they need while digging through the rubble for scraps of food and fighting other survivors and wild dogs for water!
I always thought the sun cheated by using quantum tunneling, and that's only made possible, but the sheer volume of particles, which we can't do. Which is why this is always a dead end, until you find something super clever to take the place of the tunneling. hence why our reactors have to be hotter , under more preasure, and in this case, Shooting the particles at each other.
Yeesh, when I was a teen, back in the Seventies, I read some articles in magazines from the Fifties talking about how fusion was going to come online in the Sixties. Now I'm in my sixties, and will possibly not see it in my lifetime. Well, it can join the permanent bases on the Moon and Mars.
The thing to consider is that at one time, going to the moon received the same scorn.
2:38 are you sure that “fast neutrons” are actually producing heat?
Doesn't water boil at lower room temperatures under certain conditions? I wonder if that has been considered for running a turbine...but am no scientist by any regards.
I think I have seen cold fusion, hydraulic press vs large steel ball bearing, there was a strange red glow around the ball bearing, then boom, a bright flash, the ball bearing explodes with a huge force, clue, the Suns core is iron
Once again, you took a complex, interesting and highly relevant topic and presented a concise, entertaining and very educational video - congratulations and thank you.
Your concluding remarks on bringing the physics of the universe to engineering working devices seems to mark another major step in our taking apparently esoteric knowledge and turning it into practical uses. This has seemed to have previously encountered the barrier imposed by limits of the mental and physical capacity of humanity. Now, "outsourcing" to computers of testing ideas and solutions through modelling scenarios is removing the barrier of human computational capacity. I see this as potentially as big a developmental driver of the human mind as was the making and using tools by early humans. Now for the neural link between brain and computer!
We know where the finish line is. We just don't know what the race track looks like or what obstacles are on it. We are the first ones in the race, so no one can tell us what to expect
8:36 one of the benifits of fusion … is it does not produce radioactive waste
8:56 you want you permanent hardware a safe distance away from the fusion reaction otherwise you start irradiating that hardware.
While the fuel itself and the direct fusion products of the fuel are minimally radioactive the neutron flux of fusion produces comparable amounts of radioactive waste to fission.
I’m very pro nuclear, both fusion and fission, but we need to not kid ourselves about the radioactive waste they produce. We also need to not blow it out of proportion. And we would be better off eliminating the laws in the US that prevent us from recycling fission fuel.
If the energy used to fire the electron is more than is used to boil the water to make steam, then it's not worth doing.