Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Explained | Dennis Whyte and Lex Fridman
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- čas přidán 20. 01. 2023
- Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Dennis Whyte: Nuclear ...
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GUEST BIO:
Dennis Whyte is a nuclear scientist at MIT and the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
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Full podcast episode: czcams.com/video/aJoRMFWn2Jk/video.html
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Guest bio: Dennis Whyte is a nuclear scientist at MIT and the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
Isn’t the model based on Tritium fusion doomed to fail because there is only 20 kg available worldwide??? Isn’t the model based upon helium and deuterium fusion more viable??
holy moly! Q, Fusion, Plasma. On a Quantum level this about QAnon, Fusion of Ideas and Blood Plasma.
Heating a substance with lasers until Fusion takes place creating more energy than the starting point.
@@SacredOwl
who Who the great owl 🦉 says go on…..
@@SacredOwl damage to disease…thinking out loud sets one free of these things, damage needs air, light, warmth, circulation, room to breathe and recovery time at half speed. Necessary nutrients.
Without these, the damaged becomes diseased.
Stagnant, confinement to limiting and hindering healthy routines.
Allowed to think Aloud.
@@SacredOwl speak more more of this fountain of youth if it bares witness and walks the path of soleful truth and good feats.
Owls, do they give a hoot?
Wide Eyes, I witnessed an Owl 🦉 🦇 snatch a Bat in the the sky.
If you've ever changed the diapers of a two-year-old toddler, you've experienced how output can exceed input.
I think that's the preferred DOE metaphor, check page 5. It's true.
Lol
Yup….😂
So very very true
I’m pretty sure they used this example to create fusion
I always look forward to seeing the Lex clips from the upcoming new podcast as it gives me a flavour of what is to come...
Keep up the amazing work you do Lex and please continue to do so with love in your heart
I know some of those words
This is HANDS DOWN, the best explanation of the Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough that I have heard to date!!
Agreed 👍 He was able to make it understandable without leaving out information. I now understand the process in general and what specifically the breakthrough was.
@@keenanlarsen1639 unfortunately, it’s BS because though, because there was no breakthrough. The reaction consumed 300 mega joules, to “produce” 3.. They just recalculated or estimated that 300 mega joules to 2.05. There’s no such thing as fusion break-even. The sun uses an immensely powerful gravity well powering that fusion. Even the sun isn’t producing more energy than that gravity well. The forcing of heavier elements “squeezes” excess energy out in the reaction, but not more than you put in. Fission is how energy is produced because matter itself is already highly concentrated energy by nature. The best way to understand why fusion ignition is a misunderstanding is if you quit actively squeezing elements in the sun, the fusion of elements would quit almost immediately. It’s not a self-sustaining reaction, and requires a huge amount of active energy input to sustain. That’s why there’s no such thing as a runaway fusion reaction, it requires a constant input of energy greater than is being released. Fission, on the other hand, is capable of ignition, or net energy gain because matter is condensed energy, and that release can cause a chain reaction of other atoms breaking down.
@@aalvarez2914 bingo these people are liars or intentionally misleading. It also takes a full day to prep this experiment and make 3 megajoules of energy.
You can really see Lex come alive and has even more fun when he is discussing topics he is excited about
That's him coming alive?
Fyi don’t know anything y’all said but still a huge fan, an hitting like button anyway because I respect what you stand for! You’re the man dude. 💯
Lex, you have the patience of a Saint. Thank you for the content!
10:30 really great way of explaining it
That microexpression and accompanying reply after lex asked about making a sun just reveals such a sexy absolute understanding of something.
Really really interesting interview. This guy knows his stuff.
Great explanation of a complex topic. Thanks Lex.
really?😏
thanks Dennis Whyte
Does Lex ever ask if this inertial confinement is a loud process? Seems like shrinking something that fast would result in some sort of sonic boom?
Wow lex sounds smart as hell talking to this guy. Good stuff
ive been hearing about fusion breakthroughs for 20 years
I would be interested in hearing you discuss The Safire Project.
Still hear Saskatchewan in Dennis' voice, love that.
woww i didn't understand anything at all!!
Me either. Makes me question my own intelligence 🤦♂️😂
I think this is way above most of our heads... 😄 but super cool the more we understand about it.
Let me explain it to you:
Sorry I can't...
Dude laid it out simply. If you fire a rocket engine all that flame and gas comes out the nozzle. With the lasers the pellet is fired so fast, the "flame and gasses" can't move out of the way fast enough due to inertia. When you press down on a can of deodorant or hair spray it gets cold due to the gasses expanding. The back of your refrigerator is hot, the AC system has a heat exchanger and fan outside, after your turbocharger or supercharger you have an intercooler. Compressing gasses heats them, which is the opposite. When you fire the pellet, the fact that it is "burning" faster than the byproducts can get away (due to inertia) means that you're "compressing" the pellet and thus getting more heat than you put in it from the laser.
5 minutes in, I am like, what a fuck just happend 😂😂😂
Yep words have been spoken here
So it's something like compression ignition, but you use deuterium instead of diesel and lasers instead of cylinder walls and pistons. But smaller and much greater potential energy. And hopefully thermal.
This guy is like my hero
So basically we’re 50 years out from a commercial application of this implementation 😂
And we always will be... at least that's the running joke
Sounds explosive
People can be really smart. Love it
You have the perfect enunciation from the jaw moving guest... and the mumble of the host by his speaking with minimal jaw movement through his teeth. That's one way of making the guest more prominent in a presentation... (just an observation by an immigrant from the host's part of the world)
Dennis is my mom's cousin. Great guy and super knowledgeable!
better to compare the compression to objects entering our atmosphere, for example space rockets re-entering our atmosphere need heat shields. the atmosphere isnt that temperature, but the compression of air makes the object heat up.
I wonder if having the deuterium and tritium in separate stellarators would help to localize heating from the alphas. The simplest would be 2 side by side Tokamaks, but perhaps concentric stellarators could be more cost-effective, with more overlapping reaction regions. With the 2 fuel components revolving in opposite directions, momentum could carry unused fuel thru the reaction zones, and perpendicular magnetic fields could bring the alphas to a designated area.
Nice.
5:40 It’s the MCP from Tron!
Creating fusion with plasma. Electric universe theory has been predicting this for awhile.
Excellent interview. Long story short we are several decades away from ever seeing this in commercial action. Possibly over 100. At this point will understand zero point energy before making fission viable. It’s time to reinvest in fission and expand research in to thorium. Even that could take several decades to roll out but it’s are best option if we want to stop burning fossil goals at scale.
Like berries on the vine, Lex gets better all the time 🍇.
Simply get enough energy that could fuse particles, which theoretically produces more energy from the fusing of the nucleus.
We're all born from the burst of a star. Now we're at the level of machining the very thing that which brought life. Wild! Curious how theyre solving the problem of containing the power produced from the fusion. Seems like the gravity from stars solves many issues found when trying to recreate one
I think because I am high right now, this is sooooooo talking over my head. And I really want to understand.
Such an exciting development. I am just hopeful for more nuclear power stations dotted about now, smaller underground installations. So power is finally cheap again, and ev's actually become more viable (apart from the batteries). Who knows, maybe we will even figure out the technology of the amazingly smart ancient civilisation that we currently do not understand. The world is exciting, and science is exciting.
Well, if you only consider a fraction of the energy output, you can get a net gain and write it off as a “breakthrough”. Despite thee fact that it only represents 0.5% or the total energy used.
What about Thorium reactors! Any joy for those energy makers in the future?
Output greater than input … that’s called profit
20mins when there was no breakthrough👍
Every year there is a new breakthrough…
the question isn't "how to make a star"... it's how the get a star to make itself where we want it to be and do what we need it to do.
Who else left this clip more confused about nuclear fusion?
Well that has to be what fushion will be. The vast majority of energy has to come from the fushion itself. So very good for what it is.
Fusion has been 30 years away from reality for the Last 50 years. Not holding my breath for this in my lifetime but hopefully it will continue to develop. Hope I’m wrong though
No, you aren't wrong, you are spot on.
....ok you can go by heuristics, or you can try to comprehend the situation
@@Bran_Flakesx7 shut up martin, this 20 minute clip of a podcast describes the reality of fusion. like ethan said, fusion has been 30 years away for the last decade of my life, 50 years of theirs. get your head out of lex's ass and stop using big words to sound smart.
@@freeaudiojungle4407 yikes.
@@Bran_Flakesx7 czcams.com/video/3vUPhsFoniw/video.html
I don’t understand the last question about the possibility of making a sun… but not on earth. Then where and why?
This fusion breakthrough is really about more compact, more efficient nuclear weapons.
Try listening to the podcast and you'll find out the opposite is the case
@Martin Jowsey , it certainly isn't about commercial electricity generation.
With the US DOE involved, what else is it about but weapons?
@@jonathangwynne1917 prolly
Almost all technical and scientific progression is looked into for plausible use in militaristic development. Many of these fusion programs wouldn’t be getting a dime from governments if this weren’t true.
Thermonuclear bombs from fusion have existed for like 60 years now at least, how would cryogenetic superconducting and intertidal/magnetic confined fusion reactions be efficient at all for weapons lmao
5:22 Exactly what a russian agent would ask politely :D
So... Exciting, but as I understood it, this was the expected result and it would have been very bad if this didn't work. We're still 40 years from seeing this being able to compete with other energy solutions as far as I understood it. Those engineering challenges are unbelievably huge. I'm good with investing in that but we got to an for how we're going to get energy until then.
The process creates helium. Isn't helium one of the substances in rather short supply? How important might that be? (not enough to make a difference)
Helium is like the by-product of this kind of fusion reaction, so at a large enough scale we could probably produce helium (which is interesting because helium can be used to power nuclear FISSION, the kinds of nuclear power plants that exist currently)
This sounds remarkably like the input for a combustion style engine. Any chance for direct draw of the energy with a high level piston and firing chamber for the fuel? Especially if you could miniaturize the tech? From what I understand of the physics there, you could scale down the fuel size pretty exponentially right? Altho u would get less energy at the same scale, the ratio should stay the same with a process like that right?
(Yes my sci fi brain is jumping to fusion car engines, but more likely for massive superstructure construction equipment, or ships before that.)
Can anyone translate what it exactly mean for humankind? Are we gonna have independence infinite energy
Metroid Fusion would be proud
holy moly! Q, Fusion, Plasma. On a Quantum level this about QAnon, Fusion of Ideas and Blood Plasma.
Heating a substance with lasers until Fusion takes place creating more energy than the starting point.
You cant subtract the amount of energy it took to produce the reaction, 1.21 gigwatts output from 10 gigawatts input.
What if instead of a pellet like on Earth. Truly a dimension that is not terrestrial or Celestia silloute is favorable because of the Tanakh where you are not to engrave images on rocks. A thermal series of rings that feed each other eternally.
Must be only 20 years away now! 😂
Still 30 years away...again
Shout out LLNL for being in my backyard
Q Plasma is 100s time smaller than Q Total of the system needed to create excess energy to the grid. So the fusion community got us slightly over 1 after 70 years. Let's hope we start seeing the exponential rise of performance
The Wright brothers first flight only flew for seconds
Is it possible to use fusion as a weapon? Is Dennis gonna blow the world up!
yes
Yes, but not in the same way being used to produce energy. A bomb and a fusion reactor use two very different processes. Thermonuclear weapons (nuclear fusion bombs) have existed since the 1950s.
Yes (and to the second question no because it's too hard without starting it with a fission bomb), and as a matter of fact, the True Purpose of this NIF thing and inertial fusion is to test ... look up Edward Teller and thermonuclear.
He’s patronizing and educative while derisively commenting “...otherwise we wouldn’t have stars...”
He’s also ignorant. The stars are powered by gravity, not fusion. Fusion is an active process, like turning a crank, but the power to turn the crank comes from something else, in this case gravity. There is no such thing as fusion ignition because it’s not self-sustaining. You need to have that constant power input, or the crank quits turning. Fission is the direction energy flows, which is why you can have runaway fission reactions. A “spark” can start other atoms “burning” and so on, because matter is concentrated, “stabilized” energy, at a fundamental level. Fusion is like actively turning a crank, forcing heavier elements to be created while squeezing out the excess energy used to power the reaction. If the sun’s gravity power source quit that pressure, those elements would stop fusing almost instantaneously.
He’s a nuclear fuse short of brilliant
There's this stuff called... Uh, well, ok, you see there this stuff you eat from bread. You it's well it's heated to with uh, it's, ok bread that's headed.
Lex: Toast? Well uh toast but not regular toast. It's ugh, it's heated with coils in this um.. this box.
I am interested in turning the Earth into a Sun .
Look deeper... takes more energy to do than it creates... way more... breakthrough is a wee early, a wee way early.
Feed the lasers the particles....
Don't tell me, in 20 years!
Sounds like we're halfway to a black hole... So long humanity
Nuclear fusion would be a game-changer for fossil fuel use as well. We use 20% of our fossil fuel energy making electricity. That means with this fantastic development, we'd still be 80% of the way to some kind of green future, but hey, it's something. I think combined with massive human death and economic degrowth, nuclear fusion could be one of the most important things we do for some semblance of decent future. It could make the difference between our civilization fully collapsing or just partially, which is actually pretty exciting.
It could also be the difference between some powerful peoples 9 figure income and the loss of their monopoly. Right now there is no incentive to allow it to succeed.
It's guys like this that keeps kids from enjoying science
Howcome?
Pretty fuckin stupid thing to say tbh
Quite the opposite actually
@@jamesbernedo3204 not...he rambles endlessly. I would much rather listen to Betul Kacar in how she explains the origins of life...a subject more complex than fusion.
Cant wait til they figure out perpetual energy and still chsrge us for it
Thanks now I understand.
Unfortunately, this is nonsense. They’re trying to rationalize a reaction that actually cost 100 times the energy produced as a net gain, to create false hope and hype. Why, I have no clue.
@@aalvarez2914 yes but now I know.
PERHAPS FINDING ANSWER TO TESLA’s # 369 MAY HELP US FIND OTHER ANSWERS
If this is true it makes you wonder why people go to war when in theory if we perfect this we will never have a lack of power......
Got it! the scientists smashed a basketball to the size of an atom in billionth of a second by laser rocket engines firing backwards, and that's the opposite of a cool can of Aqua Net. Physics is amazing!
Lex just casually asking how would we make a star, in the end of the video 🤣
When I want nuclear science knowledge and experience I think of the guy who has zero knowledge and experience and his channel
If you compress the earth to the size of a tennis ball you get a black hole , this is the beginning of an artificial singularity
You need to compress it to the size of a penny. But indeed I get the humor.
@@bengsynthmusic Schwarzschild radius so to compress any matter small enough would create a black hole even a single atom ⚛️ and it seems that in this case the object itself the source of compression not gravity in an advanced form this technology would be able to create one ..... 🧐
Wow, prison has aged Kevin Spacey a bit!
Sabine Hossenfelder does a good job explaining the "fusion community's" bias concerning their focus on pure gain and how it's misused to get funds and create news headlines.
We just gotta scale it way up. Duh. We've all seen the movies. There's always that room with the big glowing blue ball inside with all the wires attached. That's the future power source. Obviously. We cracked this back in comic books yo. If you wanna go nuclear, you need a big glowy ball.
Fusion is natural. Con fusion is the fusion of carbon oxygen nitrogen (con) however, science is Kool!✌️
192 lasers, because 193 would be overkill.
Is the energy the heat?
14:11 Yes they slow down the fast particles and extract the energy.
@@bengsynthmusicthank uuu
So if a laser fails, the reactor explodes???
No
It's better to weaponise it
amazing technology to just get enough energy to boil a kettle of water.😂
I wish fusion was going to be available anytime soon but I doubt it. Does anyone have any thoughts on the work done around laser / gyrotron drilling for geothermal energy ? I believe this approach is more easily achievable in the near future.
I also wish Fusion would be available in the near term, but it sounds like there are significant hurdles to still be overcome, such as manufacturing enough Tritium to supply just even enough for one Fusion reactor.
Just like the movie The Core. You're trying to get them giant diamonds aren't you? 💎
@@Flint-Dibble-the-Don Nah, I read about MIT spinout Quaise Energy and believe they have some good ideas that aren't far from being a reality.
Lex is indeed right that not all 'P's are made the same 🍆
Sounds like a fusion, confusion.
No offense to physicists, you guys are awesome, but how can you explain something as amazing as laser ignited nuclear fusion in terms that make it sound boring ...
.. And when we're done, it will still be a big boiler. Using the effort on energy conversion just ain't sexy enough. And we are the apex, area 51 don't exist...
Oak ridge probably don't do 115..
We need to add fuel to a bigger target 🎯 you need a mass to hold it an just add fuel trapping that reaction it could be the way we hit the target to start the plasma so holding it will need a breakthrough of confinement we might need to ask ai mixed with every smart designer an scientist to design the method of construction 🚧 could you reflect the first shot to have the same effect on more targets then start a chain of targets set each over off it might be in the path of the beam hits multiple targets with better fuel container 🫙 getting that energy out has more of its own breakthroughs to discover and then you’ve Gotta work out how much energy put into the lasers and how much you get it out of the pellets plus out of loads of pellets only a few perfect ones make it to be fired at 😂 these are some massive problems that someone’s got to think around. Well, if you like a challenge, creating a sun and holding the plasma is a real challenge.
This is like saying I ate all fiber and had a big blow-out in the bathroom. All that chewing, lack of calories, etc. isn't even counted - just look at the product!
This mixed with AI is gonna make everyone pretty robotic even if they don’t have augments. Only the incredibly rich will be free with this technology and will be digital and physically immortal.
can't wait to look down on the unblessed peaseantry beneath me :D
Maybe that should tell you that this future is immoral and evil. And you shouldn't want anything to do with this.
Hopefully this doesn’t end up like Octavius’ work with precious tritium
Running that experiment on a New York city studio apartment was clearly an OSHA violation.
I LOVE KING GIZZARD AND WIZARD LIZARD TOO!!🎉🎉🎉❤❤❤
Funny how the Scientific community continued to utter the fact that an over unity machine is impossible yet they continued to conduct research and development of such machines in the background .
Well people can still hold different views. It’s not like the entire scientific community even agrees on everything. So yeah some people thought it was possible. Not that deep.
fusion doesn't violate conservation of energy. it derives excess energy from fuel by transforming some of its mass into energy. but meeting the temp requirements in an efficient way seems nearly impossible with our current laser technology. but it's really our only hope to solve the energy crisis we are in and wind and solar are just too inefficient.
@@Big_Slick Ohh ..makes more sense , so they would basically still need to refuel after the fuel is depleted?
Do you want to pressurize it with hydrogen, until you create the conditions of the star it’s not gonna work. Kind of a no-brainer.