Why Fusion May Finally Be Closer Than You Think
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- čas přidán 16. 06. 2024
- There’s this joke that fusion is always 30 years away. 50 years ago, it was 30 years away. 20 years ago, it was still thirty years away. Today, though… we might be within a decade.
We spent the first half of the season on nuclear fission, and the last episode on many of the other energy sources that will play a role in meeting humanity’s growing energy demands and building an Age of Miracles. All of them will be critical.
But there’s a growing chorus of people who believe that if we’re going to meet the demand for 3-5x the amount of energy we use today, and do it with clean energy, we’re going to need clean energy. And that as we climb the Kardashev Scale - the framework for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it can use - fusion is going to be our ladder.
In today's episode, we’ll cover the basics of fusion energy - what it is, how it works, why it matters, how progress is measured, and what the main approaches are.
Thank you to this episode’s guests: Clay Dumas, Andrew Côté, Sehila Gonzalez, Ian Hogarth, and Ryan Umstattd.
Huge thank you to our sponsors:
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Clean Air Task Force: Clean Air Task Force: CATF is one of the few NGO's in the world paving the way toward the global demonstration and establishment of a fusion energy industry this decade. They are undertaking and commissioning fusion energy market studies, technology readiness assessments, and regulatory analysis, emphasizing areas for international collaboration. As an objective and independent resource for stakeholders in the fusion sector, CATF is working to raise awareness and accelerate the potential for fusion energy. Learn more and support their efforts at: www.catf.us/fusion-energy/
For the full list of resources referenced in this show: ageofmiracles.co/
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Timestamps:
(00:00) The fusion race
(06:55) How does fusion work?
(16:02) Fusion reactor designs
(20:24) History of fusion
(25:02) The three approaches to plasma confinement
(30:50) The tokamak
(35:24) Iter
(41:54) Recap
(49:01) Revisiting why fusion matters
This show is produced and distributed by Turpentine, a network of shows and other media properties, where experts talk to experts about tech, business, culture, and more.
Credits: Nancy Xu produced this season of Age of Miracles. Audio editor: Justin Golden. Video editor: Nancy Xu. Executive producers: Amelia Salyers, Packy McCormick, and Erik Torenberg.
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Very grateful for your channel, for the production quality, the depth of coverage, the scope of material covered, for the breadth of spectra of such competent people interviewed, and for the consistent quality of presentation by the two presenters (with genuine thanks for lots of smiles while presenting) !!
So happy your channel found me. It has inspired me to make a total career change, relatively late in life. Thank you ! 🙏
FISSION IS NOW
Awesome vid for newbies, great explanations thanks
I look forward to updates!
I definitely look forward to mastering fusion energy, and I know we will succeed eventually, but I would not even dare to make predictions. There are people much smarter than me who have been very wrong about it for decades.
When we finally do it, I think it will be so life-changing for the world that it could be called a new epoch.
Even after we make a functional fusion energy generator, it will still take a long time to build the infrastructure for the whole world to be powered by fusion. If I were crazy enough to venture a guess, I would guess that it would be highly implemented by the next century. 2100
It won't happen because it won't be allowed to happen. We had thorium reactors in the 1960's that were proven to be reliable and safe energy producers. They are designed in such a way, an uncontrolled meltdown is literally impossible.
The governments simply won't allow these.
Only "an order or magnitude" is needed ? First of all all those reported achievements are just plasma energy gain. All MWh of energy used to trigger that blink of gain is being ignored. The viable commercial solution will have to gain more energy than is put in totally. Including 40% efficiency of steam generators and the rest of the electricity production process. I think current Q plasma record is 3.15/2.05=1.54 and my ignorant guess is we need Q>150 to 200 to have something useful for electricity production.
EXACTLY! This is why LPPFusion's Focus Fusion Tech will win the race. It is the simplest design and does not need to boil water to drive a steam turbine because it is solid state fusion. As a bonus it could be used for both energy generation or as a rocket engine in space.
@@ShannonBarber78LPP did not achieve Q>1 years ago. They do have one of the better Q values, and have done so at a very low investment to date. I just today invested some more money in LPP because I think there approach is unique and may lead to practical affordable alfusion within 10 years, possibly much faster.
Fusion power is still 30 years away, because the speaker in the video does not appreciate the work involved to progress from working prototype to robust commercial power plant.
These are generally aimed at generating hype and thus funding. Haven't watched the whole thing, but I can see that much of it is AI generated.
Agree 100%. This video is total unrealistic hype. It is highly misleading to the general public. Commercial fusion is at least 100 years away, and human civilization is likely to have collapsed by then, based on fossil fuels. Thus, commercial fusion power will remain unrealistic hype. ITER is the worst white elephant waste on money in the World.@@JH-jx1hs
All my life it has been 30 years. Now I know it will be 300 years. ITER will not power the grid.
Please remember hype is all
About money not really production. In California they use the qualified small business tax exemption.
You can turn 50 million into 500 million tax free but if you setup your strategy to maximize things- you turn 50 million into 5 billion tax free. That’s amazing to think about! It’s why big companies go from startup to massively big cause it’s all about taking market share and boosting stock price not necessarily earnings. You must own stock for five years and then you can sell. It makes a ton of sense what’s been going on with tech if you look at the tax loopholes.
So fusion power is all hype and merely a vehicle for shareholders to generate their fortunes by setting up companies that eventually fail without delivering anything of value. I get it. I should set up a company in perpetual motion machines. @@koltoncrane3099
Masterclass video, 👌🏻 Thanks a million…. Kelvin 😉
I don't want to offend. I'm excited to see functioning fusion. Yet I will believe it when I see one work truly work. Producing positive amounts of power.
the problem is that we have to create a huge amount of energy to get not quite the same amount in return. Yet for fission, the energy is already there in the materials used. Problem is, once we release it, controlling the Chain reaction, telling it when to stop, is the hard part
You can literally get it out of water bubble cavitations 🤷♂️
A recommendation for reading a script on camera: use Rapid Serial Visual Presentation so your eyes aren't moving back and forth (like the female presenter does in this video). There's a few free websites that you can copy/paste text into that will format it as RSVP, and you can put the window close under the camera so apparent eye motion isn't noticeable.
10 years out? I’ll be dead by then. However I want my children to have this!
Every time the particles bounce back and forth you lose some - is there also a bremstralung problem, where particles changing direction (accelerating) give off photons and lose energy?
What you describe IS the Bremsstrahlung radiation.
Mostly free plasma electrons "colliding" with nuclei and radiating x-rays.
i heard that the "Inertial Electrostatic Confinement" design from work by Philo T. Farnsworth in 1964 and Robert L. Hirsch in 1967 were really promising
I hope you were joking, but I doubt everyone gets the joke. Farnsworth reactors are well known for producing fusion, but also well known for the certainty that it is impossible to have Q>1 and provably so.
I there a simple back door to Fusion Energy with a catalyst similar to the Petroleum Refining Industry?
Bro are you into Robert Anton Wilson? The first book he wrote as a kid was "Age Of Miracles" and I always thought that would be a cool name for our times, given how crazy it is.
Woah I didn't know that -- will need to check it out!
I believe it will happen.
If things don't go bad here soon, I mean 10 years 20.
If that's the case and somebody else will get it.
At least this is not like the quest for a perpetual motion machine or the efforts of alchemists to manufacture gold. We do have a solid scientific basis for hope. Naysayers can be expected in any human endeavour.
People, we're 17 years, 8 months, 26 days, 4 hours and 12 seconds away from having a Fusion Energy fueled power plant! I know because I work at S-4.
Gonzo fusion reactor descriptions
for every like I will add another (out of 4)
NIF - Laser Reactor
10 billionths of a second. If you traveled 10 billionths of the way to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, you would travel 4000 kilometers. You would be one percent of the way to the moon
For 10 billionths of a second the most powerful laser on Earth blazes from 192 directions at a millimeter sized diamond target filled with heavy hydrogen fuel
The laser has built up so much energy and unleashed it so fast that for an instant the power is 25 times that of the entire planet’s steady state power usage. For the first time in history fusion fuel releases more energy than it directly absorbed without being ignited by a nuclear bomb
The fusion power unleashed lasts 100 times shorter even than the laser pulse. But in that ethersecond of time it is powerful. The instantaneous power output of the laser fusion explosion is equivalent to 40 billion home run hits, 2.4 trillion 100 mph slapshots, or about an order of magnitude below the continuous power output of an entire Type I Civilization all in one place and moment in time
That escalated quickly. So quickly that the full energy released in the record breaking 1.3 megajoule laser fusion explosion is "only" that of 8000 fully hit home run baseballs which have the power of the bat delivered to them continuously for .7 milliseconds rather than the 10 billionth of a second laser blast. To approach commercial levels of output the reactor would need to become more efficient and increase the energy released per shot to 100,000 home run baseballs at a rate of up to 10 times per second
For these reasons a standard laser reactor is expected to be a second generation type of fusion plant with an indefinite timeline for potential commercialization. Which brings us to another reactor under construction with a very definite timeline - not for commercialization but for the first step to it. The holy grail of fusion research for the past 50 years - a net energy reactor
....
*note: I think the record is now 3.5 MJ as the 1.3 MJ shot showed that target imperfections were a bigger deal than realized and they began to increase power and optimize shots to improve the stability of the implosion
Helion - Magnetized Target Reactor
Two shots from plasma railguns collide at a combined speed seven times faster than a blast of lightning. To ignite the fuel so much magnetic pressure is applied that the power could lift over 100 Statues of Liberty
Their light helium fuel is so rare it’s subject to speculation about mining on the moon. Helion's fuel cycle produces it right in the reactor here on Earth. Not only super-rare, it takes even more power to ignite than the standard heavy hydrogen fusion fuel. But the reactor is so efficient it just might do it
Regular power plants generate heat to boil steam, converting their thermal output to electricity at 40% efficiency. The Helion reactor's output conversion is believed to be up to 90% efficient, using the explosion of charged particles to directly induce electric currents in the electromagnets that crushed them. It’s truly a future fuel
They aim to be the first to build a net electricity fusion demonstration device in the history of man. Construction began last year, shortly after they became the first private company ever to reach 100 million degrees in their fuel plasma
While the laser reactor needs 100 times the energy delivered per shot to be released for commercial application the Helion reactor may need shockingly little power gain. With high efficiency energy delivery and ultrahigh efficiency energy recovery their target may be an energy gain just 8 times that applied to the fuel
The Tokamak
Circling the reactor 90,000 times a second, two ions 10 times hotter than the center of the sun collide. The hydrogen fuses so violently that they create a helium particle with 40 billion degrees of heat and a wild neutron that rips away in a random direction with over 100 billion degrees of heat. The reaction is 4 million times more powerful per weight than burning fossil fuels
This is the tokamak, the most powerful fusion experiment ever built. Last year the JET reactor broke the record for total fusion energy output by almost three times. And it’s about to get a lot bigger. Aiming for operational initiation in 2027 a new tokamak containing a central magnet so strong it can lift an aircraft carrier 6 feet into the air and create a current in the plasma equal to 500 lightning bolts will aim for fusion power 50 times the power output of JET’s record
Months ago a new type of containment magnet was tested to be so powerful its operational strength is limited by the structural strength of steel. The magnets contain 2/3rds the power of a lightning bolt with the wattage cost of a lightbulb. This ultradramatic technology is predicted to multiply a tokamak’s power by 10 times and not only enable net energy for the first time but to do so on a commercial scale at a similar price as the first fission reactor. Meltdown risk? Absolute zero. If your face didn’t melt when you tried to do it you could blow out the reaction like a candle
General Fusion - The steampunk dream
In the instant before the collapse the largest plasma gun in the world fires a smoke ring of superheated hydrogen plasma into the center of the reactor chamber
With microsecond precision 200 pistons with the total weight of two Eiffel Towers strike the secondary pistons surrounding the walls of the spherical reactor at 100 miles per hour delivering the kinetic energy of 25 kilograms of TNT
As the molten metal lining of the reactor walls crashes inward it forces a peak velocity of Mach 8 in the target fuel implosion as it crushes and heats the hydrogen. The temperature of the plasma tops out at 300 million degrees as the fusion reaction explodes creating the energy of half a lightning bolt per second
This is the steampunk dream reactor under development by General Fusion
The plasma gun? Built and up to power, even outperforming expectations. The pistons? Tested at full size in a spherical 14 piston compression testbed. The full reactor? It may come hot on the heels of the 70% scale test reactor, now under construction
Thanks for this guys. Adding data to what I have been suspecting for a bit now. We are at one hell of a convergence. Battery tech is on the cusp of flight viability, robotics are rapidly developing, and AI is going to develop quickly.
Buckle up 😁
We're 3 decades away from fusion power....
The guy talking is easier to understand than the girl - good discussion-Great production 👍
Want to see the next one!
Theres a YT doco on ITER I watched recently, and it said basically if you make the magetic confinement volume large enough, the plasma should become self heating (Qinf). So it seems to me there's a minimum size for a highly efficient fusion reactor, and it's big. ITER uses old style superconductors, I'm hoping that new high temp SC's like the ones ARC is using can reduce the cost of large tokamaks or wendelsteins.
Yeah, the exciting thing about ARC is that the magnetic field is almost double and fusion power goes by field to the fourth power - it's 8x more powerful per volume. It sounds like initial ARC plants would be cost competitive with US eastern seaboard offshore wind, except be much more reliable requiring less backup and grid upgrading
ITER is still an experiment and it is not guaranteed that a larger version would work either. LPP Fusions Focus Fusion Tech which is much simpler, is Aneutronic and does not need to make steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. It is a Solid State Fusion Technology!
I wonder if it would be easier to start building stars. They're big enough.
Just Junk Greed Lie Give Us Money People Get Death Just A Fact OF Nuclear Lies Sick School Lie For MONEY We Killed Earth Next Nuclear Melt Down Comes @ 38 CPM
When you know that fusion requires very high temperatures you are not using a steady state process ... You go for intermittent. As with combustion engines. I do not understand why in Iter they went for steady state .... And on top of that they have not solved the problem of converting heat to electricity.
Search for Helion and you find the really clever combition of physics and engineering.
I think it makes much more sense, to say that the Fusion reaction gives off so much energy that the products of the reaction have less mass. If we were able to capture all that expelled energy, it would bring the mass back again. The idea that, unlike any other exothermic reaction, this involves 'mass turning into energy' is to artificially separate it from what is already familiar to most people.
exothermic chemical reactions also result in a reduction in mass. The difference is the change as a percentage of mass is several orders of magnitude smaller for chemical reactions vs nuclear reactions and typically too small for most instruments to measure.
Yes. All energy has the same gravitational field and inertial relationship via relativity. The faster something moves the more mass it has, and the more energy is needed to accelerate it more.
It is worth noting that measuring before and after products assumes after normalization of temperature. After kinetic and radiative dissipation (entropy) the mass will be lowered by the ratio of 1/C^2. Which is indeed a tiny number.
Exactly! Nothing different about the more energetic nuclear interactions.@@bengriffin4027
I'm conflating mass and energy: mass-energy. Total energy is conserved, but because so much of it has 'left the building' as radiation, thermal energy etc. that the remaining products have less mass-energy. I wonder if we are talking at cross-purposes, as there is nothing in your statement that I think is wrong.@@ShannonBarber78
A history presentation.
A hybrid nuclear fusion-fission reactor (FFHR) that is as proposed power source that combines nuclear fusion and fission processes. The concept was first proposed in the 1950s and advocated by Hans Bethe in the 1970s. It supports fusion breeding of fuel for fission reactors. It is between Q2 to 8. Regular Fusion is not economic.
cool! now it's only 20 years away
Fusion will be 10 years away for the next 60 years...
It’s 20 years away.
And always will be.
It's not a joke btw. And fusion on earth is not the answer to our growing energy demands. Fusion already happens in our star in a perfect way. And we just have to use the emitted photons, like we already do
Is it possible to agree on the value of Q? It should surely only refer to the machine efficiency, yet at 17.00 we have the statement that the only machine so far to achieve a Q value of one is inertial confinement experiment at the NIF. This Q = 1 value was great for publicity but by ignoring the massive amount of energy required to fire the 192 lasers, the value is essentially meaningless.
In the lreal literature, we do agree on the values of Q. There multiple values, one is then is the net based on energy delivered to the plasma compared to the total energy of the reaction, this is useful today in particularly since the Q that actually matters is the useful net energy derived compared to the total energy required for the power plant. This Q, is mostly useless today because it is always zero. Nobody is selling their excess power to the grid. Experts think that something around Q 30 is going to be needed for commercial power generation. Personally, I suspect it will need to be even higher than that to be a commercially affordable power source.
Very optimistic, but we need optimism to reach the goal.
A affordable working fusin rector would solve not only the climate problem caused by fossil fuels, but aloso the looming peak oil and ultimate end of all fossil resources.
When we finally do get it, I think the next energy dream will be antimatter. That will be a sticky wicket!
Wouldn't it be funny if we figured out antimatter before we figure out fusion?
There is nothing that fusion promises in some fantasy future that fission can't do today.
We love the fission!
Doomberg's Law
Wrong:
- fueled by the most common element in the universe
- produces no waste
- has no weaponizable components
- can only fail safely
- “walk away safety”
until we discover there is. they said the same thing about cars when horses were the main means of transportation.
@@sethreign8103 not true at all, there are hundreds of advantages to cars over horses, not so for fusion over fission.
Yeah that’s what I heard for 10 years and still done see it
You're just mad that soon by reverse engineering on your Flying Saucer, we'll soon have it! Just admit it!!
literally i have seen this headline and story with the same timeline since the late 89s
There will be a Tritium and Deuterium shortage. Nobody talks about commercial cost of the fuel for fusion reactors.
Tritium is currently made in fission reactors.
The fusion companies will be buying fission reactors cheap to get their tritium.
(Warning, plausible fiction after this point)
They will be causing nuclear disasters to get the next fission reactors cheaper, if not paid to get rid of it, but in reality they are using the fission reactors to balance their energy equation and keep the lie going...
This isn’t true for deuterium but is certainly true for tritium. Worldwide supplies are very limited - between 20 and 30 Kg perhaps. No one knows how much each startup reactor will need before it might become self sufficient by breeding tritium. No reactor can be built without the certainty that it has sufficient supplies. I don’t see how this all will pan out; there seems to be a huge element of risk associated with fusion.
Agree. There is a huge element of risk associated with fusion. The fusion technology is very complex. Moreover, after many years of operation of a fusion reactor, its component parts would become radioactive and thereby become radioactive junk. @@johnh6245
@@johnh6245ITER alone would consume the entire supply of tritium in less than 1 year if running continuously.
@@johnh6245 Every worthy fusion concept breeds it's own tritium.
With Solar, Wind, Fossil Fuels, and Permaculture we can probably support 20 billion people on Earth. With some form of Nuclear, either Thorium or Fusion or both, we can support a population of about 1 Trillion people before we run into a waste heat problem. Our waste heat starts to equal about 10% of the heat we get from the sun.
Another unrealistically optimistic history of fusion as I have been reading them for 40 years now. We still need to demonstrate the most _basic_ kindd of achievment which I would consider to be continued plasma burning for 24 hours (which is remaining modest at that).
This still will remain unachieved by ITER, and so will electricity production. Even some lofty "Moore's law" that Moore never stated will not make exponential growth a reality, progress has prooved to be slow, expensive and laborious in every direction it was taken.
There is no indication that any of the 80 stertups you claim has a chance to return a single dollar from energy produced for the billions to be invested into them. Maybe some can sutvive on patents, but that is a tough proposition to achieve for 50 years which is my uneducated guess for being able to handle 100 Million degrees Centigrade in a few meters as required for fusion.
Progress is Total energy generated - total energy input.
Q. How long is a piece if string?
A. Twice the distance from the center to one end.
25:45 perhapsatron 😂
(magnetic pinch)
Excellent! In the end though, give up, less powerful cars? Umm no.. the electric cars blow the doors off just about everything but rocket cars!
I might be the only one who’s excited about the science and impact and completely turned off by the profit motive. Eventually corporations always optimize for the profit motive.
Thanks for explaining how fusion R&D is progressing. My fear, however, is that people watching this video will believe that fusion power will be a viable solution in the near term, so we don't need to double down on wind and solar energy plus storage to get to net zero by 2050. Current nuclear reactors have significantly higher costs than wind and solar plus grid batteries, and I feel that this video series is misleading the public into thinking that we need to await for new fission reactor designs and new fusion research, whereas we already have the tech that we need to get to net zero in the power sector, and it is essential for the future of humanity that we massively scale wind and solar energy and grid batteries as soon as possible if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change. More investment in nuclear R&D won't solve climate change because nuclear power takes too long to implement and progress is not assured, so any discussion of nuclear power needs to give people a realistic understanding of the timeframe and the risks.
We should be scaling the solutions that are already known to work, because the current climate crisis can't wait for future solutions that may or may not be viable. This video said at the end that we need nuclear energy because we will need 5 times more energy than we currently use, but that conclusion is based on faulty assumptions. The move to electric vehicles will decrease energy consumption, because EVs are roughly 80% efficient in converting energy into motion compared to ICE which are roughly 27% efficient. Moving from combustion to electric heating and/or heat pumps will bring similar gains in efficiency. Most of the estimates saying that we need 5 times more energy are based on hydrogen and synthetic fuels, which are horribly inefficient solutions which simply aren't needed and probably won't be implemented because their giant energy consumption will make them economically nonviable. Building a smart grid and smart applications and EVs that can vary their energy consumption according to energy supply and building grid storage at scale will be a massive effort, but it is known tech and we are already doing it. Yes, we do need a cheaper way to store energy than LFP batteries, but sodium ion batteries, salt water batteries, flow batteries and pumped hydroelectric are all scalable solutions that involve less R&D and can be implemented faster and cheaper than next gen nuclear fission reactors.
You have forgotten to factor efficiency of electric energy production.
Solar and wind energy is unreliable. You need fission reactors as backup.
@@peceed The variability of solar and wind energy can be solved with LFP grid batteries, and solar/wind+grid batteries is significantly cheaper than existing nuclear tech. Grid storage shouldn't use NMC batteries, because there isn't enough nickel and cobalt reserves in the world, but with LFP the only bottleneck is lithium, and there are plenty of lithium reserves, so it is a question of how fast new lithium mines will be opened. With future sodium ion batteries, there are no bottlenecks, although we probably will start having copper shortages in a couple decades, but the copper foil in the anodes can be switched to aluminum foil, because we have unlimited bauxite reserves to make aluminum. At any rate, I expect that we will have even cheaper battery options (like molten metal batteries and compressed air energy storage) 30 years from now when we start to get to copper shortages.
The big question that experts debate is whether we will need more storage than what LFP and sodium ion batteries can provide. Grid batteries make economic sense when cycled daily or a couple times each week, but it would be very expensive to build enough grid batteries to store excess energy from the summer to transfer to the winter when solar panels generate little output. Some experts like RethinkX think that the solution is building 2-3 times more solar panels than are needed in the summer to deal with the reduction in solar output during winter. Maybe you can make the argument that we will need nuclear energy to deal with those times when there is poor sun and wind for a week, which does occasionally happen, but nuclear power isn't designed to be scaled up like peaker plants, so we are still talking about situations where we will have energy shortages and demand will have to be reduced.
My personal belief is that nuclear power won't be economically competitive in the next 30 years and no government is going to do what France did in the 1970s to make it competitive, so the private power industry simply won't invest in new nuclear plants, so it is best to plan to get to net zero without it. We need to try to get to net zero GHG emissions by 2050 if we want a livable planet for human civilization, so that means that we need to invest now in scaling wind and solar plus grid batteries to get there. Current nuclear reactors can't compete economically, and the next gen reactors will take at least 20 years to get to scale in order to compete economically, and fusion is going to take too long to develop, so nuclear simply isn't useful to get to net zero by 2050, which has to be our primary goal.
@@amosbatto3051 Not in central Europe for sure - we need nuclear.
Military reactors are many times cheaper than commercial - molten salt path is safer and cheaper than using PWRT.
Korean design is competitive.
And there is nothing dramatic with global warming.
The only issue is with increasing ocean levels, but that process can be quickly reversed - we will control weather in the next 100 years.
Net zero? Cloud cuckoo land
@@amosbatto3051climate change is not real. You should be smart enough to know that.
You have been promising me fusion for all of my 60 years. We don't believe you anymore.
Man I haven't even been alive for 60 years!
@@notboringco Then quit perpetuating the multi-generational meme.
Hoping your next episode changes my mind about these start-ups, but anything I've seen from any of them so far, is a bunch of 'good ideas', but very little evidence that any of them offer an actual advantage over ITER. If one of them succeeds and they're hiring an army of tax lawyers, to avoid paying back to the common good, please remind them that it was ordinary working Joe's and Josephine's who funded that half century of research that allows you to make trillions.
You make a good point, but the benefits of tapping into that much energy should be so widespread that I doubt many will care about the recovering the cost of the development work.
It ain't so much the recovering the cost, as reminding them and their fellow travellers that most important science is funded by the taxpayer, and they then grab the baton to run the final few metres which is fine, but not fine, to then try to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, to fund the next intergenerational projects.@@wfswiggart5957
Didn’t canada do this twice in the last year? 1:45
Murphy was a cockeyed optimist.
Err... Ahem! Helloooo, fusion is a noble dream and should be pursued. But, has anyone ever heard of Thorium reactors!? Waaayyy better, cheaper cleaner and can put to god use the radioactive waste of common fission reactors. We already have this technology deployed. We need to scale it!
The SAFIRE Project accidentally created fusion (before the Project went dark). They were proceeding with Electric Universe cosmology NOT the Einsteinian ideas about gravity being the underlying main thing. You may can find a source for understanding that the sun (all stars) is not self-controlled fusion, but rather more like an electric arc powered by Birkland currents. Good luck.
I don't believe it, they always say we're close.... for 30 years!!
Cold fusion... these "smart" people come around so slowly. Metals/ magnets arent able to hold the heat/ energy while then trying to extract, so answer please..^
We could have some very good working gen lV fission reactors for a small amount of the money currently spent on fusion reactor research. Fission reactors could be build very shortly and be put to all sorts of uses both large and small. As for fusion, we at this point have no idea if we can make it work. We need to first work on what can work now not something that can maybe work marginally better in the distant future.
Too much logic for this place. To me fusion is just BS. The ingress talks about the standing joke since the 80s about fusion being just 30 years away. Problem is, it's obviously not a joke.
@@KabonkNo1 Fission has the ability to supply all the power mankind needs for the next 1.5 billion years. At that point it should only take a additional 30 years to get fusion up and running.
@@ShannonBarber78 Absolutely. But that's still 30 years away so no worries.
@@ShannonBarber78Not if fusion is too expensive to be practical, or requires so much infrastructure that building enough fusion reactors to power the world takes decades.
I'm all for gen IV fission too, may those be SMRs and not currently common technologies. Unfortunately need to consider appropriate measures of security of assets on a wide scale if they get common, numerous. And regarding fuel cycles depending on type of tech.
Fusion and fission gen IV, one should not detract from other in terms of R&D, rather be parallel.
Undoubtedly one of if not the most hardest engineering challenge is fusion energy, similarly also with biggest return on investment, eventually. Those people dedicating their lives to bringing it puzzle by puzzle piece closer to reality, even if may not live to see its benefits, should be allowed the instruments to do so. Lastly, suggest to also check out Isaac Arthur's video on topic of fusion energy. Has interesting perspective on pace of research, amongst else.
well ITER will probably go online in 2025 , but its not a stellarator design which is the most efficient design afaik atm ; but yes with help from AI , progress in basically all fields is going to be wild this decade
Unfortunately, ITER suffered a big setback that is adding a number of years to their timetable.
so, is it only 10 years away?
One thing I know that Nuclear Fusion is hard or impossible to miniature.
Zap Energy is building garage-size nuclear reactors and we'll dive into their story next episode 👀
@@age-of-miraclesinteresting can't wait!
regardless if the fusion fuel mix, the production of neutrons cannot be avoided, and neutrons are neutral, right? So they can't be confined through any electro/magnetic means. And hence the material that makes up the reactor is going to be constantly bombarded by energetic neurons. And there will need to be shielding to insure neutrons don't escape to menace the exterior environment.
So what about fuel mixes that presumably not produce neurons? Well, the rareness of the necessary ingredients here on Earth is a primary issue, but the other is this:
Reaction pathways of any manner - conventional chemistry or nuclear - there will be statistical percentages of pathways present that are not the ones desired or intended. And these other pathways will result in producing neutrons.
Shielding for neutrons is not so bad a problem, but the degradation of the materials of the inner reactor chambers could be a very serious problem when looking at the issue from over all lifetime reactor operation.
Given how ultra capital intensive these reactors will be, they will need to deliver a lifetime of 50 to 100 years.
But what does one do when the reactor materials have been seriously degraded after a decade of operation?
@@TheSulross In the most easily achievable fuel cycle: deuterium=tritium, the neutrons are absolutely essential to breeding the tritium supply from Lithium-6.
There are no mines or natural source for tritium. The current supply comes from fission reactors.
So the neutron "waste" must be harvested with as high an efficiency as possible in a lithium blanket to make the fuel cycle work.
A side effect is that this neutron-lithium fission reaction will provide most of the accessible thermal energy for the steam turbines.
@@NullHandLithium 6 is only 7.5% of natural lithium which would thus need to be isotopically enriched. Unfortunately there is no way to do this on the scale (many tonnes) required. DT fusion reactors will never be built.
50 years ago it was 50 years away.
And there's also been some light shone on cold fusion, recently. I saw a video about a recent discovery that fusion was actually happening inside microcracks in the electrodes, but most of the electrodes used to try to duplicacate Fleishman's original experiment lacked microcracks, so there would be no fusion to see, but a few did have microcracks, explaining why there were a few confirmations out there. Unfortunately, I neglected to save a link to that video, probably because it was late at night and I was falling asleep while watching.
It is absurd to think that what NIF did is of any use. A huge facility is needed to power a light bulb. That is ridiculous.
Once fusion becomes a thing, I wonder how long it will take us to go through all of Earth's water 😂
haha, well it's about 1/5000 of water molecules
the lithium to make tritium might run out in 1000 years, although it can be mined from the sea after that
The sun would go red super giant before we used one tenth of one percent.
See the Safire project
Fusion, along with ANYTHING that goes with the Kardashev scale, will be unlikely until the general population is less familiar with the Kardashian ... scale ...
Without a focus on quantum tunnelling it's not serious
I get tired watching negative people.
The sun is electric. Fusion happens in the corona. Atoms respond to frequencies
While there is certainly fusion occurring in the corona, it is not generating net energy. The physics math and observations for the sun's power coming from the core is quite certain. The observations of neutrinos coming from the sun and the net power coming from the sun leaves no alternate explanation. Prove differently and win a Nobel prize.
and an opening statement by some fund manager is technically sound and in no way horse shit....
You nailed it.
Anybody watching this video should also see the counterarguments detailing why the fusion startups won't work in the CZcams video "Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040" by Improbable Matter. That video debunks a lot of the claims made by fusion startups, and casts a lot of doubt on them succeeding. I'm pretty sure that guy has a better understanding of the tech than this video, but you be the judge.
Isn't that video from before 2022?
@@fanOmry, The Improbable Matter video is from Sept. 2021, but the startups haven't solved the fundamental problems that the video explained about startup claims. None of them have demonstrated a working tritium breeder blanket, so they haven't solved how they plan to produce tritium in a commercially viable way. Yes, Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility (NIF) has demonstrated "ignition" (producing more energy than input energy) 4 times since Dec 2022 and is producing more 89% energy than was input, but NIF is using a method that is not commercially viable and won't work in a power plant. The Improbable Matter video says that fusion needs to produce more energy than all the energy in the overhead operations, including the tritium breeding. I don't think that NIF is accounting for the energy to produce the deuterium and tritium that it uses, and I doubt that any of the startups are, since none of them are actually producing their own tritium.
Any startup claiming that it can produce fusion in a small space, such as a shipping container, isn't accounting for the radiation produced by tritium breeding, so it is basically BS.
@@amosbatto3051
1. NIF is not using modern lasers. It has only been working on the pelets.
Modern lasers are several times more efficient.
2. Using water in a *fission* power plant will already produce heavy Hidrogen.
So there is little reason to.
But if you want no fission stage/element, fine. Use Hidrogen rich layers coating at the Proccess facing side of the chamber wall.
It that Hidrogen will absorb Neutrons and become hwavier.
When that coating has to be replaced for maintance, that Hidrogen is extracted in the recicling.
Both are proccesses that will be neccesary.
A coating to make the Super conductor last longer? Yes.
Recycling that coating? Yes.
Make it a plastic, a hidrocarbon, and you have Graphene that will be used for Betavoltaic batteries, and heavy Hydrogen.
This was true 30 years ago
I have also been waiting my entire life for fusion. In fact I can remember when Nixon shut down the experimental Thorium reactor ( it was working perfectly and was inherently both far more clean and orders of magnitude more safe) .
Im sorry but once they are able to sustain and actually get fusion working in a way that is energy positive, then we must deal with the next barrier to utilizing this technology. Containment.
The continual bombardment by neutrons and the 100-150 million degree plasma temperatures required will fry any known material in very short order. It’s a massive problem with no practical or even theoretical solution even one out on the horizon…
Welcome to yet another another 50+ years and hundreds of billions more spending for another 50 years.
Thorium works!
Fusion is still mostly theory, where as thorium is far more past theory and into the realm of practical real world knowledge.
😢We have already done it…
We know how to do it!
It’s safe and will be far less expensive than fusion or current light water fission.
We will go broke pursuing fusion and the climate will have long shot past tipping points and suffered
We need solutions now!
We need cost effective and solutions that solve more than one problem at once (thorium reactors can be set up in a way where they use nuclear waste as fuel and completely consume it…)!
The whole building is on fire and we are trying to build a ladder constructed from 24 carat golden toothpicks to get us down to safely many floors below…
We are all going to parish chasing this dream. The stair well (thorium) is down the end of the hall.
Let’s use that.
We have run out of time and cannot any longer let ourselves depend on a possible utopian technology called fusion. We are simply out of time. We need action TODAY !
Not in another 30 years…
If we had spent the hundreds of billions on thorium reactors instead of on pursuing the theoretical “ maybe” of a utopian source of power… we could have already been well on our way to eliminating carbon fuels if not already finished.
The folly of pursuing this cult of fusion power while the planet is literally in crisis, is just beyond Ludicrous….
To late that bus ain’t going to be relevant any more when it finally arrives. Stop it!
Focus people.
Enough of watching the fusion dog chasing it’s own tail…
The person of fusion has literally squandered our chances to effect any solutions to climate change…. It’s too late for fusion. We’ve wasted our time pursuing perfection over practicality. Thorium is the only technology capable of tripling the energy output as predicted we will require.
More hopiism !
Once you have a controlled fusion reaction producing MORE OUTPUT than INPUT POWER -- ONLY THEN WILL YOU HAVE A VIDEO !
Could a reactor like ITER really be cost effective with its massive costs? Stellarators look beautiful. Are atypical systems promising. What about Gen 4 fission reactors that seem more possible. Now being led by China. MSR reactors are hugely popular with many startups. But unpopular with the conservative US mainstay Gen 3 industry and supported by government regulation that strangles innovation in Gen 4. Where Gen 3 regulations do not apply. Gen 4 should be given greater priority. Gen 3 equals wind and solar now but is not very cost effective. We have the resources and much of the tech for Gen 4 without restricting renewables. We need the drive. We can not limit ourselves with renewables. That is a recipe for disaster. We need options. Renewables can not meet all needs. That should be obvious given the numbers. Especially to leave Earth.
Germany has the golden egg with the wonckel reacgtor.But they have stop all work with fusie energie ( the grreen fo**ls
Why not cold fusion? I predict that the current approach is inefficient to the extreme and is wasteful. There must be other methods besides high temperatures to overcome the nuclear strong force barrier. Because the key is confinement and transmutations, not kinetic bumping and forcing. As with cold fusion it is done within a lattice grid that constricts the freedom of movement of atoms while voltage is applied overcoming the threshold that way. But then some come and say that it wasn´t to be and that it was all false claims. I just think it´s being played that way by a winner who wants to take it all. It´s worth looking into. No home power plants could ever operate at millions of degrees temperature, but to instill that belief universally of that one and only solution will ensure the power companies a future market within the centralized paradigm.
How about M greater than 1?
Seems academics tend to leave out one crucial metric, producing more money than it consumes, every bit as fundamental as producing more E than it consumes.
Moored law. When we are talking about -5 watts and we got 100 watts At a few 10’s of billions . People want to believe, in magic. This is a bitcoin of energy 🤔
Fusion is so close to coming to reality, its jsut another 30 years away from 2023 lmao 🤣 so maybe 2053 😂 or 2093 🤣
Basically they have no clue .. just speculation
This is pure marketing bunk with as little credibility as the wind and solar shoveled at us for the last two decades.
We are currently sitting at outputs of 2% of system power (break-even) requirements. Realistically, you need a 100-fold increase in efficiency before you even have a chance of this being economic.
Like in 10y?
First of all the number of comments as I am looking, 161 is a hot number as it is a) a pallandrom (sp?) b) the predictions of scientist . . .we need to stop listening to those predictions as they are full of poop. Thhat is all I've got to say.
I hear no sound?
Hey Eric! There's definitely sound for us on this. Is your site muted?
@@age-of-miraclesMaybe. Now it's work. Thanks you very much.
And no we cannot have the quality of beer in America that is in Germany or Europe in general.
Fusion seems to always be weeks away like the coming of Jesus Christ & the goal posts are constantly moving lol
Bulpucky. You just want to make sure the public money keeps flowing to you.
l can do it
LOL yaa here we go again, fusion is right around the corner...NOT. What is right around the corner is another internet video about fusion to laugh at in 10 years.
Just a quick correction. NIF never came CLOSE to q>1. And will not, ever. That's just a fairytale the military tells US taxpayers. 😂😂😂
Eternaly closer but forever unatainable…
Zero point or bust
I'll believe it when I actually see a reactor producing useful amounts of energy. Till then, just more hype and wishful thinking.
the seies on nuclear fission have been very good but this fusion episode is just not at that level of journalism.
Still smacks at coming off like all the other fusion promotion stuff.
Better double down on doing reality checks for fusion because so far its being greatly glossed over or ignored.
In the matter of competition for investment capital - nuclear fission has far, far more to offer in respect to possible payoff.
Fusion is really still so far from being production realistic that it amounts to fooling investors (and the general public and politicians) into a pipe dream - the same kind of thing that has lead to the irrational nonsense that making ICE cars illegal and forced adoption of EVs would solve climate change issues (and yet gullible politicians buy into this kind of B.S.)
thanks for your support so far! we are digging deeper into the fusion startups race next episode!
We could have some very good working gen lV fission reactors. These reactors could be build very shortly and be put to all sorts of uses both larg and small. As for fusion, we at this point have no idea if we can make it work.
Banning the sale of new ICE vehicles is one of the essential steps to getting rid of fossil fuel combustion and reaching net zero GHG emissions. Of course, it won't do much if it isn't also matched with policies to move to 100% low carbon electricity, and urban redesign to encourage more walking and more use of bikes, ebikes, e-mopeds and public transport, but those changes are also happening in many parts of the world. According to EMBER, only 9 out of 236 TWh (or 3.8%) of new global electric generation in H1 2023 was based on fossil fuels, so investment in new dirty electricity has nearly stopped and a policy of banning new ICE vehicles makes a lot of sense when the electric grid is transitioning to renewables. Of course, transportation isn't the only sector that needs to decarbonize, but it is the biggest sector in the US, representing 28% of 2021 greenhouse gas emissions in the US according to the US EPA.
The argument that EVs aren't feasible or realistic is baloney. EVs (BEVs + PHEVs) represented 35%, 25% and 25.4% of new automotive vehicles in China, Europe and California, respectively, in Sept. 2023, so anyone who argues that EVs can't reach 100% of the market simply isn't following the trends happening in the biggest auto markets in the world.
@@amosbatto3051 It's impossible to make EVs to comparable scale as ICE vehicles because of their reliance on all manner of exotic materials. And manufacturing EVs is far more damaging to the Earth's environment. And even the touted advantage of EVs is extremely dubious given their up front carbon foot print is so enormous. And that is further negated in regions that don't have, say, hydro or nuclear electricity base load production.
And there is nothing inherently bad about ICE vehicles as carbon neutral synthetic fuels can be devised to run them on. If all the foolish capital expenditure that's been spent on EVs was instead spent on producing carbon neutral synthetic fuels, the whole matter of the impact of transportation would be an already solved problem and we'd just keep driving our very affordable ICE vehicles.
Well, I could go on and on about the shear stupidity of EVs - from their horrific, Armageddon battery fires, how they're going to drive insurance rates to be stratospheric, to the fact that the national electrical grid needs to be tripled in order to conceivable convert all ground transportation to be electric (otherwise there will be brownouts, blackouts, and much higher electric rates). And no one is doing anything the least bit serious to expand electrical grid capacity. Certainly none of the complete idiotic politicians that push EVs are doing anything to realistically pave the way - or address the public safety concerns of horrific EV battery fires.
EVs are practically as far fetched as fusion power generators in respect to being a pragmatic solution for anything in the next quarter century.
@@TheSulross The main problem with EV (and ICE) is that people think they need to drag 3,000 lbs of dead weight with them everywhere they go. Nothing can do that efficiently.
color me skeptical you tenured pensioners
When this was first seriously proposed, solar was twenty times more expensive. Now, even wind, is cheaper. Stop with the propaganda. The capital City of South Australia has been completely solar and wind, over several days. Far greater capacity is being installed.
Yes, but somehow they have the highest retail electricity prices in the country (at least from the last report I saw). Maybe LCOE is not the most accurate way to measure cost for intermittent power sources.
I love the hype that these business grifters are so good at generating. Donald Trump would do well to hire these guys to work in his next administration, or the administration of the next grift. All aboard the wealth and success train!
Fusion for third grade dropouts
First solve the problem of quantum gravity and theory of everything and then you will be able to create usable fusion reactors. Otherwise, it's all wasting time on BS.
AI generated...
It won't happen
It will never happen.
Why does this feel like AI generated propaganda?
Sure it has real science things mentioned and some real history, passes most fact check,
... But it still feels like dystopian AI propaganda, WHY?