Correction: Thank you to the experts in our audience who caught our mistake. At 3:45 min we said, “In this experiment, JET ran for five seconds before its magnets got too hot. We use time to measure energy output, so running the numbers we get 11 megawatts of energy. Now, that’s honestly not a ton. About the same as the energy a household uses in a day.” When we should have used a measurement of energy and not power. So the generator made ~16.4 kWh or about 55% of what a U.S household uses per day.
I came here to jump on that. Thanks for the clarification! You saved me an "Um, actually..." We're looking at, ballpark 9500 homes if you can run that particular experiment continuously. Gonna need to scale up.
I think it was spot on with the 16.4 kWh being what a household uses in a day. Mine this month was 18.6 kWh/day. So the energy released in 5 seconds could power a house for a day. Makes sense to me
In that regard, please fix the other error as well. 1 - 1,5 tonnes of deuterium/tritium-mixture equals about 20-30 million tonnes of coal in electrical energy ( or 30 billion kg, but not 30 billion tonnes!) (1t deuterium/tritium could produce> 20tWh (by containing maximum fusion energy of ~95tWh) , a big coal plant produces about 30tWh of energy by burning 30 million tonnes of coal (brown) The numbers are impressive nethertheless, but It seems at one point someone confused tonnes with kg.
As a scientist in the field, I want to point out something that's not being reported well in these videos on the recent JET results. After the previous deuterium-tritium experiment in 1997, the plasma facing walls were changed from graphite to beryllium and tungsten (same as ITER will have). This was expected to prevent tritium from becoming trapped in the walls, however it makes controlling the plasma more difficult as impurities from the wall have a major effect on performance. Note: tritium is radioactive and there will be a strict limit on the amount onsite at ITER, if it's in the walls, it's not able to be used in the reaction. What's GREAT is that, not only did they increase the fusion energy produced since the '97 experiment, but they are also saying the tritium retention issue is much better with the new tiles! The sentiment I've gotten from other scientists is that this is reassuring, that ITER will perform as predicted.
What do you have to say about the "Q" being shown in the media and how it accounts for very little of the actual power consumed when calculating unity?
The absorption (or adsorption?) of tritium into the walls reminds me of hydrogen embrittlement of metals. However we are talking about tiny amounts of hydrogen so this is probably not going to be a major problem for the reactor walls, compared to hydrogen storage tanks. Also, does that mean the reactor walls are radioactive and hence PPE is required to stop the beta particles? (Probably a biohazard suit is good enough for workers to enter the tokamak).
I grew up about 10 miles from where JET is located and went to school with a bunch of people who had a parent who worked there. Some time in the mid 80s we got to go on a school trip when it was shut down for maintenance. It was all opened up and we got to see inside the "donut". Mind-blowingly cool for a teenage physics nerd 🙂.
You remember something like that forever. I got to see the Wendelstein 7-AS when i was a child, then the biggest stellerator, predecessor to the Wendelstein 7-X, which is currently the biggest magnetic confinement fusion experiment until ITER goes live.
I would have loved that as a kid. All I ever got was a science magazine aimed at "nerdy" kids and to visit the research lab that my step-mum worked at at the Australian National University.
59 Mj *was* the energy yield, Hank. 11 MW was the average power generated, and is no comparison to an average household's daily energy use. You'd want to convert the 59Mj to kilowatt- *hours* for a more conventional measure, i.e. about 16 kWh.
The phrase “watts of energy” needs to disappear from science education forever. It’s so wrong and confusing and leads to so much misunderstanding from people trying to learn this stuff. WATTS IS NOT ENERGY HANK
@@cholten99 Yeah lol there have been a couple of extraordinary days (heat waves where I have also plugged in my EV, mainly) where i've used 1mwh of power in a day, I can't imagine what I'd need to do to use 11 haha
To put some perspective on the "fusion power will always be 30 years away" cynicism: Electricity as we more or less as understand it today (in terms of accumulated charge capable of carrying energy) was known about in a scientific sense from the 17th century. But the first electric power grids to provide practical, useful electric power weren't online until the 1880s. People spent centuries - far longer than we've known about fusion - scoffing that electricity, despite being able to transmit power in a way that would be tremendously useful, would always be an impractical pipe dream of the future. Now, we can't imagine life _without_ it. Did it take a while? Yes. But did we get there? Well... look at the device you're reading this on, and you tell me.
I am 100% with you!! I think the fact we continue to improve shows promise. This is very complex topic and there's still so many unknowns to us yet to discover. Without the full picture, who are we to say this is impossible? We simply don't have the full picture, so we could be missing vital information which makes fusion very feasible. All it will take is discovering that piece of information. Information oddly enough always seems so obvious once discovered, but it's taken for granted just how hard it was to discover it to begin with sometimes.
We have been studying ways to create energy from fusion for about 70 years now, and most reporting from that area is disingenuous at best. I suggest watching Sabine Hossenfelder's video about the subject, debunking and clearing up the subject from the scam taxpayers have been funding.
40 years ago we had a woman engineer come from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory come give a talk to my geometry class. She made reference to the "30 years away" joke while assuring us that they were on the brink of a breakthrough that we in the class could possibly participate in by the time we finished college. The joke has been evergreen for over two generations.
Not to mention we could speed up the process with more funding. i mean, the mRNA covid vaccines would have taken about 15 years to develop, under normal circumstances. But thanks to massive fundings, we succeeded in somewhere between one- and one and a half year, depending on the manufacturer. Ofcourse, fusion would still take more time than that, but just to show that sufficiënt funding can speed things up a lot.
I've once done an interview with a guy working at ITER for our school project. He said that ITER was scheduled to be done 2025-2030 (the interview was a couple years ago). However, ITER will not produce energy for the main energy network. He said that since it was a science experiment it was not meant for that. However, once they prove with ITER that fusion power is possible they will immediately work on the reactor called DEMO which will be a commercial fusion reactor that is attached to the main electricity network. The timeline for DEMO is for 2050 so that is definitely exciting!
i believe they can streamline that to about 2040 if they get the funding/political pressure to make it happen. hell, if we make it as a global prerogative im sure we can have it in less than 2035.
@jasmin UwU I was thinking the engineering side of it. If we disregard costs, we can build a few iterations that would work and which ever version is more efficient/productive we can build more of that one.
2050? Christ, I might not even be around for that. A shame, hearing about all the cool things science is working on and looking at, and then learning that "relatively soon" means "not in your lifetime, but maybe your grandkids' life." Regardless, it's always great to hear that fusion is still getting attention and still getting results.
They have been talking about fusion since I was in my teens. Freeman Dyson said in a Interview that oil industry would be around a while but would be replaced in the 2050s. We still have many years before fusion is viable and the 50s sound very logical.
So glad to hear things are going strong and steady. A slow and determined approach has always seemed more viable than any of these flimsy fusion startups that promise the moon. Hopefully, when fusion actually does become commercially viable, we are able to transition without too much resistance from the older power providers.
@@rogerfroud300 i agree with this. Even if do start using Fusion reactors on Earth, to make them a lot smaller for engines and other fusion powered aircrafts is a long way from us, it will pass at least maybe 500 years or more to find some technology to propel aircrafts with fusion. Better odds would be to find something else for space travel, like bending space-time, or some other source of power.
@@milosstojanovic4623 I think at least commercial electricity production can be switched to fusion powered in the near future. And about vehicles and spacecrafts, I don't think it'll take 5 centuries to perfect fusion and yeah making smaller fusion engines is gonna be way easier than bending space-time ie wormholes which only exist in mathematical equations at this point.
@@milosstojanovic4623 - Man, bending spacetime to make wormholes would be waaaaay harder than fusion. I don't think it is even possible, but fusion is definitely possible.
As a former EUROFusion fellow, I can say that the progress in Fusion energy has really been quite spectacular over the last 20 years. There are now over 20 small-to-mid size devices around the world doing a far wider range of research than was previously possible even in the early 2000's. While I do love following the "big boys", JET, MAST-U, ASDEX-U, TCV, etc... I'm actually more interested in the plethora of smaller projects, as they are addressing how to economically design, build, and operate fusion devices. Most interestingly to me is the upcoming STEP project in the UK. This spherical reactor project will, unlike ITER, aim to provide power to the UK grid once operations begin. Full disclosure, I'm a little biased towards spherical tokamaks having worked designing them in the past, but I really think they're the most economically viable approach. As we know from experience, in the end, the most economically viable product will be the one that gets built.
Just saw an article on the r/fusion site about a central solenoid magnet development that may allow thinner magnets more resistant to neutron flux, I feel like this would be a heck of an advance for STs with their room in the middle issue. It's a great time to be interested in fusion
Damn, can't belive your science teacher was a nuclear physicist working at a world leading fusion laboratory at thr same time he was a high-school teacher. Or you're just lying on the Internet for no reason
We _need_ to address the climate change crisis about 50-60+ years ago, actually, but with time travel being out of reach, now would be the best option we're stuck with.
Given how we've had fission power as a viable option for decades and yet it's been completely ignored in favour of coal and oil, i'd say even if the scientists said "hey we can mass produce fusion power plants across the globe in a couple years" there will still be a giant amount of pushback, likely in the form of propaganda campaigns funded by the coal and oil industries as well as bureaucratic laws technically preventing the funding of these plants.
i'd guess there will undoubtedly be a pushback, but not from coal/oil, at least not as much. the pushback will come from renewables and their backers, because fusion can provide what they can, which is clean renewable energy, in far greater amounts, irrespective of time/weather, and that'll undermine their business
@@The_Mad_Pheasant NASA are planning to put a base on the moon in around 2025 IIRC, and one thing Hank didn't mention here is that the tritium in the fusion reaction can be substituted with Helium-3, large deposits of which may exist on the moon. It may come to pass that tritium is no longer needed, quelling the fear of radioactive contamination of water supplies etc.
We've been 10 years away from fusion power for 50 years now. I guy I know who actually works in the field told me that fusion power was a pipe dream that would never happen, but what we learned from trying kept money flowing into the various projects.
I'm pretty confident that we will surpass break even *eventually* , and have a practical power source a few years after that. What I *don't* expect is to see that happen in the next ten years.
@@geodkyt I think they need to add a zero to their estimates. They were either cocky or clueless (maybe both) when they started tossing around the "10 years away" talking point.
@@nolongeramused8135 I wouldn't be shocked to see break-even in 10-20 years, and the first commercially viable (but still somewhat experimental and small scale) plant 10 years after break-even, and true commercial viability 10 years after that. Honestly, one of the critical technologies to make this work is *practical and persistent* high temperature (as in "near room temperature") superconductors. And that's an entirely seperate field than fusion research.
1. The Tritium that they're using comes from fission reactors. While it's possible to produce tritium from the fusion reaction using all those neutrons it kicks out, you also have to collect all the tritium that isn't burned on its first run through, which is very, very difficult. So right now any fusion reactor *requires* a fission reactor to keep it running. 2. A fusion reactor would produce tons of low level radioactive waste as the neutrons it puts out would irradiate the surrounding structure. So it isn't free of waste as some claim. 3. Fission reactor design is well known and established technology and is still only used by wealthy and technologically advance countries. A fusion reactor design will be even more complex and more expensive thus even further out of reach of the majority of the world. 4. While a fusion reactor can't have a meltdown in the same way a fission reactor can, it could still experience a catastrophic explosion that would severely damage the reactor. 5. All the neutrons the reactor produces can be reacted with U238 to produce Pu239 which would only further nuclear proliferation.
Fission reactors of the typical kind have a major, major design flaw. One we saw played out in places as disparate as Chernobyl, Fukushima, and 3 Mile Island. And one that can be avoided altogether. Thorium salt baths reactors. That is the answer. They make virtually zero wastes, and can't - physically CANNOT - have any meltdowns, at all! There is no downside to them, except for the current industry not wanting to let go of the profit, and current big Oil execs not wanting to let go of even the tiniest piece of the pie. What's the answer again? Thorium salt baths reactors. All the way!
I feel like an important point was glossed over. The waste from a fusion reaction isn't just "short lived." Buried waste from a fusion reaction will be safe enough to build a preschool on within one (admittedly very long) lifetime, whereas the nuclear waste from fission reactions is somewhere on the scale of *hundreds of thousands to millions of years.* So if one day in a far off future we power the entire planet with fusion, we will not suddenly start marching towards irradiating the planet with waste. We're talking about relatively small amounts of waste that becomes less radioactive than a crate of bananas in under 100 years. This is big. This is exciting. This is faaar off. But it's closer now, and that's cool.
Not only that but the radioactive waste (tritium) only released beta particle radiation which is super easy to block. A thin sheet of metal of a few pieces of paper protect from it. It's barely even radioactive.
"the nuclear waste from fission reactions is somewhere on the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years" If we re-used this nuclear waste instead of just processing it for storage purposes then we could reduce that scale down by few orders of magnitude. The average "spent" fuel in the USA has only had 90% of it's usable energy removed from it.
@@emu071981 This, thank you. Non-proliferation screws up an extremely abundant energy supply. Waste would be greatly reduced with proper reprocessing and newer reactors.
Ahem... thorium salt baths. A thorium salt bath reactor creates virtually zero hazardous waste of _any_ kind, and can't - physically CANNOT - have any kind of meltdown. It could literally be next door to that preschool you speak of NOW, with zero danger.
I’m so happy this was filmed in a studio and not over a zoom call like every other media company is doing nowadays. I’m glad SciShow still cares about production quality.
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@@a.ielimba78 Sources for a landfill problem relating to solar panels and wind generator? Also, are you confusing fission and fusion systems? Furthermore, why are you posting the same reply under every comment of this video?
@@jking6736 it's been observed. oil companies knew It happened and kept it a secret. don't fall for political propaganda. climate change is a scientific fact that is measurable.
What was missing for me in the video was a specific percentage of energy efficiency with the old record and the current JET experiment, as to be able to gauge *how much closer* this puts us to breaking even :)
Right. Reading between the lines here, I'm betting that --- in both experiments --- they used as much power as they possibly could, and that this latter experiment used waaay more power than the first one. If it were even equally efficient as the old process, they would have advertised that in the abstract of their paper.
JET had the record Q gain of a .67 instantaneous peak from 1997 while their 22 joule output from then was the real record performance as about a 4 MW sustained output. The efficiency of that record was .3 and the new one was actually the same at .3 with an 11 MW sustained pulse. This took a lot of work as the tungsten/beryllium walls reduced performance for a long time until they could adjust to it. For some reason they didn't try to beat the peak record, possibly it was too much of a risk seeing that they were not beating the performance, just matching it with increased input power The key metric for tokamaks is a Q goal of >20 where they enter commercially competitive potential. This is the ratio of heating power applied to the plasma vs the thermal power of the fusion output. With JET succeeding in matching their old carbon wall performance this gives more confidence that ITER can reach its goal of a Q of 10. What's really interesting is that last year a new high power superconducting magnet was demonstrated which kind of makes ITER obsolete. The magnetic field is now limited by the structural strength of steel allowing a 70% increase which increases power by 10x for the same size of tokamak So now a private company CFS that spun off from MIT are building a tokamak smaller than JET with an expected Q of 10. It may come online before ITER does in 2027 and being smaller has better economic potential. They hope to build a JET size tokamak in the early 30's with a Q of 13 and a total gain of 3 putting 270 MW of electricity out where ITER is likely net breakeven in terms of total electricity to run vs total electric output The smaller tokamak SPARC won't have electric conversion (same as ITER) but it may put out enough thermal energy that it would extrapolate to net breakeven, so in terms of that the timeline may be late 20's vs ITER's plan to run at full power in the mid 30's
@@Canucklug That's good news! The next few decades will be exciting! I wonder if fusion will capture our imaginations the way that the space race did in the 60s? Probably not, unless there's a global conflict to contrast against it. Still, it's a worthy endeavor.
In my opinion Fusion power generation is so important that we should be funding the research like the 60's NASA program. While 5 seconds is impressive, not so impressive is having to shut it down to stop it melting through the walls. I would love to see Fusion research really take off, we have some independent venture capital backed work I was sort of hoping would show some real progress but after all the hype still nothing leaving ITER as our best bet.
Cant wait they complete the iter already, waiting for this over 10 years to finally prove the concept. Hopefully things work out and we'll have a brighter future
We've been on the road to fusion power for a long time. It has, so far, required us to develop technologies that we didn't even know COULD exist when we started. I increasingly wonder if it is a landmark technology. One of those things that requires so many different advancements and developments in so many different disciplines, that there is a dividing line to a world between before it and after it.
Close to break even the Q inside the reaction I assume... Meaning, still decades away from breaking even on power consumption for the entire plant, much less produce electricity for a grid.. Unfortunately Fusion Power is still far off into the future. But, fission still works great and is more than enough to power the world!
Agreed. Notice that Hank showed a photo of solar panels and wind turbines when alluding to the long time before fusion. Question is how do we to get forward thinking, climate minded people to embrace fission-nuclear as our only viable way to transition off fossil fuels in time?
not really because once we know how to break even we can work backwards and optimise everything else in the plant. At the moment everything is set up with flexibility in mind rather than efficiency.
@@BrianSu Even if we pursue efficiency, we can only be so efficient with converting thermal energy into usable energy. In fact, it has a theoretical limit! Look up Carnot's theorem (thermodynamics) and how it relates to the second law of thermodynamics.
@@rylandrc Carnot's theorem applies to every heat engine, including fossil fuel, nuclear, and solar heater designs. I don't see the particular relevance to fusion.
I am glad this guy is actually explaining how it works instead of the disinformation of most youtube channels saying how they "created a sun" in a lab. Using heat as brute force vs the gravity and pressure that the sun uses.
@@a.ielimba78 Surely yes a lot of politicians shoot down fusion R&D for less than savory reasons, but it’s not accurate to say that lacking ethical standards is all of it. These research projects are expensive and take lots of time to yield fruit, and that’s been the case for decades. Fusion is exciting and certainly could be useful if we got it to be viable for net production, but that’s a pretty important “if”. Not to mention that it can’t be the only solution to the very complicated issue(s) of climate change, so it makes sense to consider other cheaper, more immediate, renewable energy solutions with proven track records. Considering the political and practical struggles that these clean and renewable sources have had to put up with, fusion being an financially expensive and time consuming endeavor means that even a net-producing reactor is gonna have the same problems of infrastructure that other sources have. Fusion would be great if it works yeah, but it’s still too young, and it’s probably significantly more cost effective and reliable to try to increase access to renewables and tax carbon emissions for addressing climate change immediately.
@@a.ielimba78 first, learn to spell. Second, it's not the "dems and other groups" from the left that are the problem. No company wants to build expensive new reactors, with the bad rap they have for accidents. The Right is in the pocket of Big Oil that does NOT want to see any form of non-fossil-fuel energy produced, either. On top of all of that, there's the thorium salt baths reactors that could be built that are a thousand times safer, have nearly zero radioactive wastes, and can't - physically CAN'T - have a meltdown, but they're not getting built, either! Simply because the public doesn't know how SAFE they are!! So, stop blaming the ones that aren't to blame for this debacle. It serves nothing, and actually hurts the situation when you cloud the facts with nonsense.
@@SimuLord its not the politicians in general doing anything of the sort. It's one specific group of them, that are getting rich by protecting the profits of the giant multinational fossil fuel industry! That's the ones to blame. Add to that the fact that there is a MUCH safer form of nuclear reactors that nearly no one has even heard of - thorium salt baths reactors - that produce next to nothing in radioactive wastes, and can't - physically CAN'T - have a meltdown. I can tell you that the existing nuclear companies don't want to lose their investments, so don't want these new reactors built, and I can also tell you that the fossil fuel industry doesn't want it to happen, either. Now... if you think it's the pols that are to blame, you're missing the big picture, the real culprits, hidden in plain sight.
Fun conversion: 59 megajoules is just a bit over 14,000 kilocalories (i.e. 14,000 nutrition label calories), or about the same energy as eating 2.5 gallons of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream. 😍
The "Belle the Singing Cow" commercial is here on YT for Texans on a nostalgia trip. They got Thunderbolt Transmission for fans of low budget Houston TV in the early eighties too.
I love how everyone forgets fission reactors like they arent clean now and actually can damn near eliminate green house gas emmision. Compare Germany and France
There are other technologies who could bring us fusion sooner than ITER : - inertial fusion with laser (as experimented in the USA) - stellareator, the twisted cousin of tokamak, as experimented in Germany - aneutronic fusion with boron, as experimented in Australia (see HB 11) - various other kinds of tokamak using more powerful and modern magnets than those of ITER, allowing for compact design. All those should have been massively more funded decades ago, as well as breeder fission reactors. Alas, we let the unholy alliance of Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Stingy and Big Stoopid gut nuclear fusion and nuclear fission research. And now, our planet is burning, Putin and the OPEC are blackmailing us on a daily basis and the future of fusion and breeder reactors may well be in China. Success...
Fusion reaction actually is more complicated than most people thought, as you actually cannot produce temperature high enough for atoms to have enough kinetic energy to penetrate the Coulomb barrier, even if you get to temperatures 10 times higher than the center of the sun. Particles actually have to quantum tunnel for the fusion reaction to happen. And increasing pressure does not make this easier, huge pressure is needed because higher density means more quantum tunnels per unit of time. On the other hand, higher temperatures will make quantum tunnel easier and therefore also more likely.
That's a very strange thing to say. I mean, nuclei are notoriously quantum. Why should I care if classical physics says it won't work at these temperatures? Classical physics doesn't apply... Well, don't get me wrong, it's cool that there's a tunneling effect here, I'm just not that surprised.
@Punch Down King The whole left vs right wing mentality is the biggest source of hate for progress, nobody can bring up new ideas without being accused of being "for the other side".
@@T1Oracle so are you. Both of you believe in a pyramid scheme of endless growth and progress. And the person you're being rude to is right about solar and wind btw. Just confused about politics. You're wrong about solar and wind AND confused about politics
@@hungrymusicwolf materialist progress is an illusion that will lead to the end of the conditions that allow it to exist. Empires bring deserts which they cannot survive.
Small clarification for viewers: The sun does not fuse nuclei the same way as we do in a fusion reactor. The sun, while it does use gravity, only needs to get a fraction of the temperature as a fusion reactor because the sun completes the process through quantum tunneling of the nuclei to be able to fuse. In a fusion reactor, the gravity and sheer mass of nuclei isn't there, so the temperature must be turned up to break past the electrostatic barrier and physically fuse them. Quantum tunneling can still happen of course, but without the mass chance, there is no way enough nuclei can fuse that way to ever sustain a reaction.
@@SimuLord being "openly hostile" towards that is the very last thing you need to be aiming your hostility towards. It's counterproductive and aiming at exactly the wrong target, period. 🙄
Yeah I understand your scepticism. A lot has been done in the last 10 years so hopefully it will be different this time, but we have a lot to learn and many problems to encounter still. The private companies seem to have more optimistic timelines
Scoundrels invented the hydrogen bomb 7 decades ago, the fusion powerplant is always ten years in the future - now looming as a solution for climate change
Past month, it was the launching of James Webb(now up and running), and now another one with Fusion power! I can see 2022 will be a huge one for science community
Right? I used to wonder about this, but then I took an energy systems class. The thing about water is that not only is it cheap and abundant, it's also the only material that regularly exists in all 3 phases on earth. So it's easy to obtain as a liquid and heat up to a gas, and the work pulled out of this process is still one of the most efficient available. So basically when we invented the steam engine, we lucked into one of the best power conversion systems available to us and haven't needed to change it all that much to get high efficiency.
@@webx135 that's how I see it too. It always kinda bothers me when I see cool future tech connected to a steam engine. But its just very cool that we have this very simple tool to move things, get work done and make electric energy available. Simple does not look fancy and future techy, but simple is very desirable in terms of engineering. And that's good. So it bothers me less nowadays.
@@ruolbu There's an interesting exception with thermalvoltaics, which are more of a work in progress. But basically you could store a lot of energy as heat and then extract energy using basically a solar cell for infrared. I can't imagine it's anywhere as efficient as steam, but it's interesting being essentially a solid-state thermal power source.
Always have been. People think that technological progress is linear, but it almost never is. Often it's exponential, and sometimes that means that progress appears to our sensibilities to be so agonizingly slow that we appear not to have made any progress at all. But make no mistake, we're much closer to viable fusion power than we've ever been before, and that IS a fact.
that's not really a useful metric though. another fact is we are much closer to interstellar travel than we have ever been before...doesn't mean it will ever happen. for people in the know, fission is safe, abundant, and available NOW, not at some undisclosed time in the future.
Honestly if they did get a working fusion plant, would it really be different (in practical, economic terms) from a modern fission reactor? It's clean, expensive, and fills the same grid role of supplying good steady state power. It doesn't produce fission by-products, but would likely be so expensive that it would be economically the same as building a fission reactor and paying extra to store the waste. This is not to dunk on the fusion concept; fusion is the long term future, its in almost every way the best long term energy source besides solar power. But in the short to medium term, where we are trying to prevent a climate crisis, this would be the same as fission plants. If there was the political will we could be switching all fossil fuel power into fission power NOW, without ANY new technology. The real issue is the vested interest of huge companies who stand to lose if fossil fuels are switched away from and huge negative public feeling towards fission plants.
Honestly, I think we should look past the "cost" issue to think longer term than profit alone. Yes, fission is a good way to cut down on burning greenhouse gases right now, but I think a wasteless fusion future is worth the initial extra costs.
Your right, most governments should transition to fission powered reactors. The problem is that there is 0 political will to do that. Fusion would be different because more of the population could get on board with it
The problem with fission is when it goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. Chernobyl and Fukushima are still radioactive hazards long after the meltdowns. People evaluate risk poorly so even though new fission plants would have a miniscule (wild guess, 0.0001 percent) change of melting down, all people see is themselves being in the meltdown evacuation zone, which means no political will. A fusion explosion would probably just be a steam explosion and would be extremely local to the fusion torus. Edit: I looked up the number of fission plants in the world and it is 441. So 2/441 plants divided by 50 years of fission power is 0.009 percent per year but that includes older plants where new engineering techniques to reduce risk have not been incorporated.
@@Virtuous_Rogue There's modern design's for fission reactors that literally can't meltdown (molten salt reactors for example) few fun facts, you say they went really wrong? chernobyl (by FAR the worse of the two) actually has a thriving wildlife population around it. Turn's out people are worse for the local habitat than big chunks of radioactive waste. Also, per unit of energy generated, Nuclear is among the safest. It sort of depends on which chart you want to go by, but it either causes less death's than solar\wind, or it's more or less a draw. I'm not sure we have enough information to comment much on the danger of fusion, we haven't sustained a reaction long enough to have much idea. Nor do we have any idea what a commercial reactor's safety would look like, since none exist.
Did you know that tokamak is an abbreviation? тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками -> toroidal'naya kamera s magnitnymi katushkami -> toroidal chamber with magnetic coils;
But is also much slower to build and set up, if we where going to use nuclear to counteract climate change we should have started building reactors 20-30 years ago. It's too late for nuclear to stop climate change now sadly
I've been following fusion reactor news for a year or two now, it's good to see more people getting excited. It's very frustrating to see most media seems to not know the difference between MW and MJ.
1:47 Nuclear reactors, power plants, house plants and wind up watches all "convert mass into energy using E=MC²". Mass is a property of energy, and any time energy is released the mass goes down. It just happens that nuclear reactions release so much every that mass loss is easily detectable, as opposed to infinitesimal for most reactions.
If we'd started building 20-30years ago it'd be the best candidate, if we started building now the climate crisis would already be out of control by the time nuclear was able to cut emmisions
@@jacobarcher1097 China's showing how it's done right now. If you threw as much money at fission as you did renewables, we could have reactors up and running to replace every fossil fuel powered electricity plant in 10-15 years. Unfortunately what we can't do in that timeframe is educate the people and get them over their unreasoning fear of it.
I want to know how much energy they put in precisely, not just “more”. Ever since Sabine Hossenfelder made the video about Q Plasma and Q Total I expect those values to be reported in any fusion related video.
My understanding it exceeded 1 for q plasma by a good bit but not for q total. Net meaning if they could cool the coils better it would likely exceed q total. It looks like it has gone from a science problem to a much better understood engineering problem.
If you split diatomic hydrogen h2 into atomic hydrogen h1 with electricity and let it fuse back to h2 inside a controlled chamber and extract all the heat to create steam to spin the turbines, you can in theory generate more electricity than you put in if the h1 taps into zero point energy (the environment atoms live in) and releases it as heat as it fuses back to h2.
This test happened on my birthday, so that’s cool. I’ve been following fusion progress a little bit and I’m cautiously optimistic that we might have it this time.
Worth remembering that 5 seconds at a subatomic scale is a very long time. Particles at those temperatures are circling the reactor thousands of times at those temperatures. So under those circumstances the difference between 5 seconds and 5 days are really not very big, the particles just keep up their revolutions just a wee bit longer in their time/space.
Your explanation is illogical ("5 seconds is really long, therefore 5 days is really short." Doesn't make sense!) but I think I can make it a little better. "5 seconds is already such a long time period (compared to the processes which happen at an atomic scale) that it approximates infinity. 5 days approximates infinity only slightly better than 5 seconds, since one day of operation has a miniscule additional effect compared to one second of operation." I'm still not sure if I agree with you, though. I can't extract enough clarity or detail from your argument in order for it to "click" for me.
@@jpaugh64 Your restatement does make sense to me. You can basically going to look at it as "The processes happening here are so rapid that if things were going to fail, they'd fail in the first few milliseconds. If it survives 5 seconds it's probably stable enough to survive 5 days."
In 4+ billion years, some say the sun will expand to incinerate the Earth, so I’d say it’s pretty fair to say we’re headed for fusion power……all a matter of time.
There's an information that I keep missing here. ITER was designed to end up with a Q = 10, being conservative. How does this affect the expectations? Are we still short? can we expect to have a better than expected performance? is it on track?
Not even close, considering no tokamak has been able to solve the magnetic confinement stability problem. To date, the longest run is about 6 minutes. Most of the time the field collapses in just a few seconds. These reactors would need to run for years. Q is pointless if you cannot get it run for more than a few minutes.
@@guytech7310 Your information is outdated. EAST managed to break the record a few months ago managing to keep 120 million degrees plasma during more than 1000 seconds, close to 17 minutes. And you don't need to keep it running for years. You need to be able to start it fast. What matters is that it produces more energy than the input. Increasing the reaction time helps increasing the Qplasma due to requiring less energy for maintaining it that what's required to ignite it. You can have several reactors in parallel and work in cycles to ensure a continuous energy production. ITER, in fact, it's designed to produce 500MW of power in pulses of 400 seconds.
@@guytech7310 1. Where did you get the idea the “field collapses in a few seconds”? Just not true 2. They don’t need to run for years. They need to run for a couple hours, with a short downtime. Then short term energy storage can keep the turbines ticking over.
@@BlueFrenzy Nope, China lies & lies. If you go look at the press release in may 2021, China stated they would have a test run of over 1000 seconds by the end of the year, Meanwhile in may of 2021 they could not get runs over a minute. If you believe anything that comes out of the CCP state news you're a fool. CCP is the only nation that can accurately time major science breakthroughts down to the month. Amazing? I think not! May 2021: "The latest round of experiments mark another step forward for the researchers. According to the *state-run* Xinhua News Agency, they have set a new record of 120 million °C (216 million °F) for heated plasma, and sustaining it for 101 seconds. In separate experiments, the "artificial Sun," as it is called, heated plasma to 160 million °C (288 million °F) for 20 seconds. Ultimately, the publicly stated goal of EAST is to hold plasma at around 100 million °C for *more than 1,000 seconds*, or around 17 minutes."
I have two main pet peeves with journalism regarding fusion power research and you've squarely nailed one, and struck a bit of a glancing blow on the other. ;) First, every article or video about a tokamak-based project seems to be written as if tokamaks are the only possible approach. I'm not saying they should always go through a list of every idea someone's ever had for ways to generate power through fusion, but just acknowledging the concept that it isn't necessarily the only game in town would be nice. Like, "One of the methods scientists are trying to use is the Tokamak" really doesn't add a lot of words, and someone better at editing could surely trim that down without losing the concept that there are alternatives out there, like a stellarator, or inertial confinement, just to pull a couple off the top of my head. It's not just articles about tokamaks that do this, but one about a stellarator project, for instance, tends to at least acknowledge the difference between them and tokamaks, since "what they do better than a tokamak" is an important reason for their existence. Second, "Fusion Energy." It often gets talked about in such a way that it sounds like it's some special flavor of energy, as if there's something qualitatively different about electricity that comes from that source (the same occasionally goes for "solar energy"), rather than just being a better, cleaner alternative way of generating plain vanilla electricity. In the beginning this seemed to be headed that way, but this video does actually explain that a real fusion power plant would go through the usual heat to steam to electricity process, so it scores points there. Thus 'glancing blow'. ;) Despite the nitpicks, I do love your content. Thanks for keeping so much great stuff coming!
The economics don't work out- mined uranium is too cheap. And if you think economics isn't important to building reactors then I invite you to build one without money. Let me know how far you get.
Important distinction: was the energy released calculated, the energy transfered into water or what energy the steam engine ultimately would produce? Just because fusion reaction breaks even doesn’t mean it can actually produce energy in the grid.
It sounds like they haven't even built the steam-heat transfer equipment yet, because the generator technology itself is not yet self-sustaining. No reason to build the conventional parts until the experimental parts are working
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I take (a small) issue with 0:29 - because fusion has to be done at high temperatures & pressures, the atoms are stripped of their electrons, you're fusing nuclei, not atoms.
If only there already was a fusion reactor nearby, that already had a huge supply of hydrogen, and already got the reaction going, and was already streaming the energy at us, reliably for 5 billion years. That would be awesome.
Hmm... seems to me I remember something like that... something already existing... but there's no little light going off over my head, yet. I'm sure I'll get some Illumination soon, though. It's only a matter of time.
There was also a recent breakthrough announced by MIT of new electromagnets that perform better at super high temperatures allow tokamaks to be smaller. This will allow for faster and cheaper iterative experiments which should accelerate the learning curve. Right now, all of these tokamaks are GIGANTIC and EXPENSIVE. This hinders development. We are still, optimistically, decades away from even the first commercial fusion plant, and more realistically, probably several decades away. But once it hits, it's going to blow every other energy source out of the water. Until then, fission and geothermal are our best bets to fight climate change as they are reliable base-load sources of power.
3:55 - do you mean 1,000 households, Hank? 11KW is a lot closer to what I'd expect of a single home in a single day, than 11MW 5:20 - don't MSRs belong in that graphic, too? They're arguably greener than wind and solar
For some reason I can't watch an episode without Hank. I have no idea why, he just holds my attention and this channel doesn't feel the same if he isn't the one doing it. Am I the only one?
If you love Hank, check out Into the Microcosmos, a channel built by him and a friend from the ground up, and which is _amazing!!_ I love his voice on that channel, too... soothing, and smooth as satin sheets! Perfect for going to sleep to, in fact!
I always remember getting really excited when I got a monetary surplus on the SIMS City game on the PC and was able to afford the fusion power plant I was always transfixed at how it glowed a vivid blue and red when you put your cursor on the plant and that synth hum the plant made when you clicked it too was so cool.
But it needs to be the RIGHT fission. We need thorium salt baths reactors, not the old fashioned kind. We need the kind that makes nothing that will be radioactive for centuries, and can't - physically CANNOT - have any sort of meltdown at all, and that's thorium salt baths!
@@MaryAnnNytowl There is no free lunch and fossil fuels cause immensely more deaths than nuclear. Less nuclear = more warming and more species and ecosystems lost, forever. We can't be serious about addressing climate change without fission - old and new.
Like the speed of light, the time horizon of fusion is constant for all observers -- thirty years out. It was thirty years out in the late seventies when I wrote a high school paper on the topic. It's still currently thirty years out...
RIght? Like all things considered, that is SUCH AN EASY PART. And I assume the magnet temperature really wasn't that relevant to the test. Just a reactor that wasn't designed for sustained thermal output. And when I hear 5 seconds, that's practically there. Reactor tests tend to bump up exponentially and have a saturation cutoff. So like, if it reaches a few minutes, the reaction is basically steady-state, and then it's more about the endurance of the containment system. If it reaches an hour, it's more about transferring the heat to the turbines, which is something we've been doing for ages. An hour might as well be 10 years.
If it overheats in 5 seconds, how many times more cooling does it need to reach steady state? 100x? 1000x? it's not trivial...at all. That's not to mention the fact they are probably using cooling systems that would make no sense for a commercial design (I imagine they are doing something along the line of cryogenics right now)
@@animefreak5757 Cryogenics is just the science of low temperatures. Your refrigerator is "something along the line of cryogenics." Obviously it's more complicated then that, but you must realize your major complaint is "keeping something not hot." and pretending it needs some major advancement. "Trivial" isn't what I said. What I said was "solvable."
@@mooseitself let me rephrase it then. They are likely using something like liquid nitrogen to keep the magnets cool. About as good as it possibly get's for keeping things from getting hot. Now tell me just how you intend to do orders of magnitude better then the best we've already got? I'm not saying it won't happen, but saying "we are pretty much there" is extremely misleading. The challenges fusion faces are still enormous. there's a reason people crack jokes about it being "20 years away...for the last 70 years" It requires breakthroughs in technology that just can't be put on a clock. They could happen next year, or never for all we know.
@@animefreak5757 JET uses copper confinement coils. Experiments do this because it's cheap and the timescales of plasma physics are much shorter than a second. Running 1 GW of power through those coils for 5 seconds is an incredible feat of engineering. No reactor would use anything other than superconducting magnets.
Fusion in the sun works because of quantum mechanics, that’s why hydrogen fuses there at 10,000 kelvin instead of the 10 million kelvin on earth. Gravity provides inertial confinement on the sun, but we’re up our own butts about tokamaks in spite of the limits magnetic confinement places on fusion. There’s a right way to do this, but we’re not doing it, which is why fusion power is still 20 years away…
1:50 it's also possible in Muon assisted fusion, if you swap the electrons out for muons, which have the exact same charge, but are a thousand times heavier than electrons. They're orbiting close enough to the nucleus that the strong nuclear force can fuse two nuclei, if they form a molecule around a muon pair. Basically at room temperature, compared to normal fusion. But it takes too much energy to constantly create muons, because they're too unstable, so not a viable way to go.
We've been "20 years away from fusion power" for like 30 years at this point. Subsidized fusion research is starting to feel to me like grants for string theory. I'm always in favor of STEM for STEM's sake but how long are we going to keep funding obvious dead ends when we could be buying new telescopes?
I see your point. Yeah you could say stop wasting time on impossible stuff. But then there's the alternative more risky decision of taking a chance on something that seems impossible and it becoming reality.
@@csvscs and why do you guys don‘t believe that ITER will rock the house soon ;D? The last couple of decades the problem was that the founding was cut down so drastically. There was a study which looked at how fast fusion progress can be achieved and the actual founding was below their „worst case scenario“-line. Major goals got achieved and ITER will show around 2035 that it will work. Also it is not „one or another“: in projects like these many technical things get invented along the was necessary for other fields as well.
The primary reason why we we have hopes on fusion energy is that we have had actual demonstrations of a massive return on energy invested at human scales using H-bombs (fusion bombs with a fission bomb for ignition). It's just impractical to use thermonuclear warheads to power a country. And the fact that it's actually straight forward for people to do fusion in their garage with off the shelf stuff and a few kilowatts of electricity in the form of a Fusor. The problem with fusors besides producing a pretty glow and neutrons is that it consumes more energy than it makes. The whole goal of fusion energy research is trying to marry the high energy yields of thermonuclear warheads with the steady output of fusors which is easier said than done. Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor www.britannica.com/technology/thermonuclear-bomb
@@csvscs No, it's literally impossible when you compare the kind of energy output you'd need to make a viable power plant to the energy of a nuclear warhead. Even if you could confine the power of what amounts to a nuclear bomb, the energy losses in the meantime at each stage of the reaction alone (never mind the overhead power required for a reactor) would liquefy the metal and ceramics used to make it.
Important precision, ITER goal is to produce more energy than one puts in it. But this energy is not te be harvested, it will mainly be heat and not at all electricity. Producing electricity with that heat will be another problematic step to solve. That is why, some scientist often refer to fusion as the energy of 2100 century.
@@lightningstrike6467 Yes, but pumping the heat out of the system in a useful way without disrupting an indefinitely running fusion reaction is a pretty hefty engineering problem when we can't even get the reaction to work efficiently in isolation for more than a few seconds. The hardest part about getting it going is properly containing the plasma, now we need to talk about extracting energy and byproducts while containing the reactants and pumping in more fuel, all of which directly conflict with the containment thing we're already finding nearly impossible to do.
Climate disaster's already bearing down on us with more severe weather conditions worldwide. Extreme droughts leading to massive, nigh uncontrollable fires and record high summers paired with unusually warm winters in many parts of the world. Just because winter still comes and summer still goes doesn't mean the planet hasn't heated, and the effects are only going to get worse as time goes on. Cliamte change isn't one of those disasters that just smacks you in the face when it comes. It's creeping up on us all, slowly enough that people don't recognize the danger, and I fear that people won't acknowledge it until it's far too late to do anything about it.
@@JaMaAuWright Fewer people have died due to extreme weather events in recent times than at any point in human history. Even if you think humans can control global mean average temperatures up or down half a degree C, all that knowledge and industry would be better put to use building safer housing, more reliable transportation, and more secure food supply chains.
@@JaMaAuWright dude we were told in the 90's by all the climate alarmists the polar Ice caps would be completely gone by early 2000's. It's been "the sky is falling" my entire life. The problem with every single climate projection model is the sun is a constant in every calculation. The sun's energy output varies over 100's of years and has a huge impact on climate. It's all cyclical. Global temperature rises and falls over thousands of years, experiencing interglacial periods. Even if humanity wasn't here earth would still get warmer by a few more degrees before it cools again. Our time, energy, and money is being wasted the way's we are handling the warming of the planet.
@@rhekman Fewer people die now because we have the means to predict weather events and the knowledge necessary to take precautionary measures. Just because the body count is lower doesn't mean the storms aren't getting worse. Ultimately the nightmare scenario isn't even something like a bigger hurricane. Rising sea levels will put entire cities under water, this is a big enough concern that there are serious considerations about building sea walls around costal cities. That, and wet bulb conditions. Wet bulb conditions are high summer temperatures with a humidity above 90%. The problem with these conditions is that when the humidity gets too high, our sweat doesn't evaporate like it should. The air literally cannot contain the moisture. This means that our bodies cannot cool down, and depending on your age and heat tolerance, you could die in temperatures as low as 25 C because you literally cannot cool down anymore. Better housing isn't going to save you from that unless you plan on never going outside again.
@@jamesbouchard3661 Yes, it does rise and fall over thousands of years. The problem is that right now, according to all our models and all information we've managed to gather on the topic, we're supposed to be in a cooling period right now, not a warming one.
I'm in New Zealand. We're anti-nuclear here, and as much as I know it's not as doom and gloom as some say, it still makes me unjustifiably uncomfortable. Fusion however, that's what I think the goal should be. I would imagine that if those wonderful minds cracked this, we'd work to bring it here. :-)
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Fission is a proven technology that makes you uncomfortable. Fusion is experimental, and likely will have novel problems that we have not even discovered, yet, which we will have to learn how to solve *after* we implement our first power plant. If commercial fission makes you uncomfortable, commercial fusion (when it arrives) might not be "safe" enough to make you feel comfortable before the year 2100 or longer.
Not one mention of the SPARC reactor, or tritium breeding, or the biggest breakthrough in modern electromagnet tech: High-Temp Superconductors. ITER will at least be tackling issues of tritium breeding for sustainability models, but ITER is massive and nothing more than a proof of concept at that size. Both ITER and JET are using _oldschool_ magnet coils made of braided wire. The SPARC reactor project is not only tackling tritium breeding, but they're using magnet coils made with high-temp superconducting wire that is able to create vastly more powerful magnets. They're building coils with the magnetic strength of ITER... at a quarter of the size. Size is super important to the progress of fusion energy. Heck, it's been a major roadblock of _all_ forms of nuclear energy. Even if ITER succeeds, someone is gonna have to design a version that investors can AFFORD and won't take thirty years to build. Because of its size and complexity, ITER had to design and build everything in-house, starting with the wires for their coils. Meanwhile High-Temperature Superconductors already have a number of industrial uses and are currently being mass-produced as an off-the-rack part. That makes modern reactor parts very cost effective to build and maintain. ITER: Radius: 6.2m Field Strength: 11.8T (maximum) Expected Q ratio (energy return vs energy in): ~10 SPARC: 1.85m Field Strength: 12T (operating) / 20T (maximum) Expected Q ratio: ~11 That's a massive difference. I'm pretty psyched to see how that project plays out in the coming years. If their project timeline remains on schedule, they may even be officially unveiling their reactor around the same time as ITER in 2025. That's _right_ around the corner. If ITER's design proves that fusion can work, and SPARC is able to replicate it at a fraction of the size... then holy crap that is gonna be a BIG win for fusion energy. I think a lot of people would rather see a video on this, as well as how all the frontrunner designs compare with one another. There are still other modern designs like the stellerators and laser bombardment to talk about as well. Fusion is so damn close to becoming viable. The timetable is no longer "always 30 years away." I think everyone should be psyched about what's coming.
Correction: Thank you to the experts in our audience who caught our mistake. At 3:45 min we said, “In this experiment, JET ran for five seconds before its magnets got too hot. We use time to measure energy output, so running the numbers we get 11 megawatts of energy. Now, that’s honestly not a ton. About the same as the energy a household uses in a day.” When we should have used a measurement of energy and not power. So the generator made ~16.4 kWh or about 55% of what a U.S household uses per day.
I came here to jump on that. Thanks for the clarification! You saved me an "Um, actually..."
We're looking at, ballpark 9500 homes if you can run that particular experiment continuously. Gonna need to scale up.
Then the average US household still needs to sharply decrease its energy consumption because gd 30kWh is actually a lot of energy
0:56 credit of the photo got it's letters separated:
یاسمین سکندر
Secandar Yasamin
I think it was spot on with the 16.4 kWh being what a household uses in a day. Mine this month was 18.6 kWh/day. So the energy released in 5 seconds could power a house for a day. Makes sense to me
In that regard, please fix the other error as well.
1 - 1,5 tonnes of deuterium/tritium-mixture equals about 20-30 million tonnes of coal in electrical energy ( or 30 billion kg, but not 30 billion tonnes!)
(1t deuterium/tritium could produce> 20tWh (by containing maximum fusion energy of ~95tWh) , a big coal plant produces about 30tWh of energy by burning 30 million tonnes of coal (brown)
The numbers are impressive nethertheless, but It seems at one point someone confused tonnes with kg.
As a scientist in the field, I want to point out something that's not being reported well in these videos on the recent JET results. After the previous deuterium-tritium experiment in 1997, the plasma facing walls were changed from graphite to beryllium and tungsten (same as ITER will have). This was expected to prevent tritium from becoming trapped in the walls, however it makes controlling the plasma more difficult as impurities from the wall have a major effect on performance. Note: tritium is radioactive and there will be a strict limit on the amount onsite at ITER, if it's in the walls, it's not able to be used in the reaction. What's GREAT is that, not only did they increase the fusion energy produced since the '97 experiment, but they are also saying the tritium retention issue is much better with the new tiles! The sentiment I've gotten from other scientists is that this is reassuring, that ITER will perform as predicted.
Cant wait for ITER to start. 🤤🤤
Thanks for the additional info!
What do you have to say about the "Q" being shown in the media and how it accounts for very little of the actual power consumed when calculating unity?
The absorption (or adsorption?) of tritium into the walls reminds me of hydrogen embrittlement of metals. However we are talking about tiny amounts of hydrogen so this is probably not going to be a major problem for the reactor walls, compared to hydrogen storage tanks.
Also, does that mean the reactor walls are radioactive and hence PPE is required to stop the beta particles? (Probably a biohazard suit is good enough for workers to enter the tokamak).
@@wilurbean It's a reactor that doesn't even have superconductors in it. It's not about efficiency.
I grew up about 10 miles from where JET is located and went to school with a bunch of people who had a parent who worked there. Some time in the mid 80s we got to go on a school trip when it was shut down for maintenance. It was all opened up and we got to see inside the "donut". Mind-blowingly cool for a teenage physics nerd 🙂.
A school trip to a fusion reactor is seriously epic.
You remember something like that forever. I got to see the Wendelstein 7-AS when i was a child, then the biggest stellerator, predecessor to the Wendelstein 7-X, which is currently the biggest magnetic confinement fusion experiment until ITER goes live.
That would be an awesome field trip....
I looked at owl vomit in highschool
I would have loved that as a kid. All I ever got was a science magazine aimed at "nerdy" kids and to visit the research lab that my step-mum worked at at the Australian National University.
59 Mj *was* the energy yield, Hank. 11 MW was the average power generated, and is no comparison to an average household's daily energy use. You'd want to convert the 59Mj to kilowatt- *hours* for a more conventional measure, i.e. about 16 kWh.
About 680W over 24hrs
Yup - I was immediately "yikes" at the concept of a household consuming 11MWh per day. For that I'll be running my own rail-gun. A large one 😂.
The phrase “watts of energy” needs to disappear from science education forever. It’s so wrong and confusing and leads to so much misunderstanding from people trying to learn this stuff.
WATTS IS NOT ENERGY HANK
@@cholten99 Yeah lol there have been a couple of extraordinary days (heat waves where I have also plugged in my EV, mainly) where i've used 1mwh of power in a day, I can't imagine what I'd need to do to use 11 haha
Thank you, I heard that I was like wait a minute. I think personal and average (edit: US) daily usage is around 30 kwh a day innit?
To put some perspective on the "fusion power will always be 30 years away" cynicism: Electricity as we more or less as understand it today (in terms of accumulated charge capable of carrying energy) was known about in a scientific sense from the 17th century. But the first electric power grids to provide practical, useful electric power weren't online until the 1880s.
People spent centuries - far longer than we've known about fusion - scoffing that electricity, despite being able to transmit power in a way that would be tremendously useful, would always be an impractical pipe dream of the future. Now, we can't imagine life _without_ it. Did it take a while? Yes. But did we get there? Well... look at the device you're reading this on, and you tell me.
I am 100% with you!! I think the fact we continue to improve shows promise. This is very complex topic and there's still so many unknowns to us yet to discover. Without the full picture, who are we to say this is impossible? We simply don't have the full picture, so we could be missing vital information which makes fusion very feasible. All it will take is discovering that piece of information. Information oddly enough always seems so obvious once discovered, but it's taken for granted just how hard it was to discover it to begin with sometimes.
We have been studying ways to create energy from fusion for about 70 years now, and most reporting from that area is disingenuous at best.
I suggest watching Sabine Hossenfelder's video about the subject, debunking and clearing up the subject from the scam taxpayers have been funding.
40 years ago we had a woman engineer come from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory come give a talk to my geometry class. She made reference to the "30 years away" joke while assuring us that they were on the brink of a breakthrough that we in the class could possibly participate in by the time we finished college. The joke has been evergreen for over two generations.
@@pabrodi It's not a scam if it can end up working in the long run, and there's no reason to think it can't end up working.
Not to mention we could speed up the process with more funding. i mean, the mRNA covid vaccines would have taken about 15 years to develop, under normal circumstances.
But thanks to massive fundings, we succeeded in somewhere between one- and one and a half year, depending on the manufacturer.
Ofcourse, fusion would still take more time than that, but just to show that sufficiënt funding can speed things up a lot.
I've once done an interview with a guy working at ITER for our school project. He said that ITER was scheduled to be done 2025-2030 (the interview was a couple years ago). However, ITER will not produce energy for the main energy network. He said that since it was a science experiment it was not meant for that. However, once they prove with ITER that fusion power is possible they will immediately work on the reactor called DEMO which will be a commercial fusion reactor that is attached to the main electricity network. The timeline for DEMO is for 2050 so that is definitely exciting!
i believe they can streamline that to about 2040 if they get the funding/political pressure to make it happen. hell, if we make it as a global prerogative im sure we can have it in less than 2035.
@@takumi2023 science takes time, just pouring more more money into it won't make it go faster
@jasmin UwU I was thinking the engineering side of it. If we disregard costs, we can build a few iterations that would work and which ever version is more efficient/productive we can build more of that one.
@@JasminUwU tell that to the atomic and space races back in the day. Science is fast, it's always the funds
2050? Christ, I might not even be around for that. A shame, hearing about all the cool things science is working on and looking at, and then learning that "relatively soon" means "not in your lifetime, but maybe your grandkids' life."
Regardless, it's always great to hear that fusion is still getting attention and still getting results.
They have been talking about fusion since I was in my teens. Freeman Dyson said in a Interview that oil industry would be around a while but would be replaced in the 2050s. We still have many years before fusion is viable and the 50s sound very logical.
@@a.ielimba78 no one is suppressing fusion
@@uhohhotdog he’s copy-pasting that exact reply onto every comment. He did it to mine, and I’ve found at least one other.
@@Shaun_Jones report these bot accounts. Problem solved
Freeman Dyson might be right
@@uhohhotdog Yeah I think he meant fission, that would be true.
So glad to hear things are going strong and steady. A slow and determined approach has always seemed more viable than any of these flimsy fusion startups that promise the moon. Hopefully, when fusion actually does become commercially viable, we are able to transition without too much resistance from the older power providers.
"when fusion actually does become commercially viable..." I can't see that every happening. the cost of these things is mind blowing.
@@rogerfroud300 But the power of fusion is also equally mind blowing.
@@rogerfroud300 i agree with this. Even if do start using Fusion reactors on Earth, to make them a lot smaller for engines and other fusion powered aircrafts is a long way from us, it will pass at least maybe 500 years or more to find some technology to propel aircrafts with fusion. Better odds would be to find something else for space travel, like bending space-time, or some other source of power.
@@milosstojanovic4623 I think at least commercial electricity production can be switched to fusion powered in the near future. And about vehicles and spacecrafts, I don't think it'll take 5 centuries to perfect fusion and yeah making smaller fusion engines is gonna be way easier than bending space-time ie wormholes which only exist in mathematical equations at this point.
@@milosstojanovic4623 - Man, bending spacetime to make wormholes would be waaaaay harder than fusion. I don't think it is even possible, but fusion is definitely possible.
As someone who has both been watching SciShow since it’s inception and works on fusion at UKAEA, this episode had me beaming!
Whatever.
@@satanofficial3902 infitine potion of extend life energy
As a former EUROFusion fellow, I can say that the progress in Fusion energy has really been quite spectacular over the last 20 years. There are now over 20 small-to-mid size devices around the world doing a far wider range of research than was previously possible even in the early 2000's.
While I do love following the "big boys", JET, MAST-U, ASDEX-U, TCV, etc... I'm actually more interested in the plethora of smaller projects, as they are addressing how to economically design, build, and operate fusion devices. Most interestingly to me is the upcoming STEP project in the UK. This spherical reactor project will, unlike ITER, aim to provide power to the UK grid once operations begin.
Full disclosure, I'm a little biased towards spherical tokamaks having worked designing them in the past, but I really think they're the most economically viable approach. As we know from experience, in the end, the most economically viable product will be the one that gets built.
Just saw an article on the r/fusion site about a central solenoid magnet development that may allow thinner magnets more resistant to neutron flux, I feel like this would be a heck of an advance for STs with their room in the middle issue. It's a great time to be interested in fusion
I remember my physics teacher in High School bragging about the steel fusion doughnut he was working on. That was 2000.
Hey 22 years is still pretty small in the amount that humans have been around
Yeah, my youngest son was already graduated from HS 8 years, by then, and they were talking about fusion power being "just around the corner" when >>I
@@MaryAnnNytowl Fusion was right around the corner in the 60's. But a lot has happened in the last 10 years so we can be optimistic.
Damn, can't belive your science teacher was a nuclear physicist working at a world leading fusion laboratory at thr same time he was a high-school teacher.
Or you're just lying on the Internet for no reason
@@gmtom19 Breaking Good, lol.
We _need_ to address the climate change crisis about 50-60+ years ago, actually, but with time travel being out of reach, now would be the best option we're stuck with.
Given how we've had fission power as a viable option for decades and yet it's been completely ignored in favour of coal and oil, i'd say even if the scientists said "hey we can mass produce fusion power plants across the globe in a couple years" there will still be a giant amount of pushback, likely in the form of propaganda campaigns funded by the coal and oil industries as well as bureaucratic laws technically preventing the funding of these plants.
Inb4 "TRITIUM IS AN RADIOACTIVE GAS WE CAN'T LET IT ESCAPE"
i'd guess there will undoubtedly be a pushback, but not from coal/oil, at least not as much. the pushback will come from renewables and their backers, because fusion can provide what they can, which is clean renewable energy, in far greater amounts, irrespective of time/weather, and that'll undermine their business
@@The_Mad_Pheasant NASA are planning to put a base on the moon in around 2025 IIRC, and one thing Hank didn't mention here is that the tritium in the fusion reaction can be substituted with Helium-3, large deposits of which may exist on the moon. It may come to pass that tritium is no longer needed, quelling the fear of radioactive contamination of water supplies etc.
Makes me wonder if fission and fusion will Unite and likely turn those nuclear fuels into semi-renewable or prolonged the fuel
@@okamijubei it's taking away any advantages fusion would have
I think a good follow up to this piece would be to explain the difference between fusion ignition and breakeven. Keep up the great work!
We've been 10 years away from fusion power for 50 years now. I guy I know who actually works in the field told me that fusion power was a pipe dream that would never happen, but what we learned from trying kept money flowing into the various projects.
I'm pretty confident that we will surpass break even *eventually* , and have a practical power source a few years after that. What I *don't* expect is to see that happen in the next ten years.
@@geodkyt I think they need to add a zero to their estimates. They were either cocky or clueless (maybe both) when they started tossing around the "10 years away" talking point.
@@nolongeramused8135 I wouldn't be shocked to see break-even in 10-20 years, and the first commercially viable (but still somewhat experimental and small scale) plant 10 years after break-even, and true commercial viability 10 years after that.
Honestly, one of the critical technologies to make this work is *practical and persistent* high temperature (as in "near room temperature") superconductors. And that's an entirely seperate field than fusion research.
@@geodkyt What? No "cold fusion"...? 😁
@@nolongeramused8135 🤣
1. The Tritium that they're using comes from fission reactors. While it's possible to produce tritium from the fusion reaction using all those neutrons it kicks out, you also have to collect all the tritium that isn't burned on its first run through, which is very, very difficult. So right now any fusion reactor *requires* a fission reactor to keep it running.
2. A fusion reactor would produce tons of low level radioactive waste as the neutrons it puts out would irradiate the surrounding structure. So it isn't free of waste as some claim.
3. Fission reactor design is well known and established technology and is still only used by wealthy and technologically advance countries. A fusion reactor design will be even more complex and more expensive thus even further out of reach of the majority of the world.
4. While a fusion reactor can't have a meltdown in the same way a fission reactor can, it could still experience a catastrophic explosion that would severely damage the reactor.
5. All the neutrons the reactor produces can be reacted with U238 to produce Pu239 which would only further nuclear proliferation.
You strongly overestimate the amount of fuel in a fusion reactor.
Fission reactors of the typical kind have a major, major design flaw. One we saw played out in places as disparate as Chernobyl, Fukushima, and 3 Mile Island. And one that can be avoided altogether.
Thorium salt baths reactors. That is the answer. They make virtually zero wastes, and can't - physically CANNOT - have any meltdowns, at all! There is no downside to them, except for the current industry not wanting to let go of the profit, and current big Oil execs not wanting to let go of even the tiniest piece of the pie.
What's the answer again? Thorium salt baths reactors. All the way!
honestly fission is a better source for Tritium than bombarding Lithium with (I'm guessing neutrons?), since we need that Li for energy storage.
This sounds like someone has been sipping a little too much dihydrogen monoxide
@@liwoszarchaeologist We'll be getting plenty of lithium simply by bombarding something else. Like beryllium I guess.))
I feel like an important point was glossed over. The waste from a fusion reaction isn't just "short lived." Buried waste from a fusion reaction will be safe enough to build a preschool on within one (admittedly very long) lifetime, whereas the nuclear waste from fission reactions is somewhere on the scale of *hundreds of thousands to millions of years.* So if one day in a far off future we power the entire planet with fusion, we will not suddenly start marching towards irradiating the planet with waste. We're talking about relatively small amounts of waste that becomes less radioactive than a crate of bananas in under 100 years. This is big. This is exciting. This is faaar off. But it's closer now, and that's cool.
Not only that but the radioactive waste (tritium) only released beta particle radiation which is super easy to block. A thin sheet of metal of a few pieces of paper protect from it. It's barely even radioactive.
"the nuclear waste from fission reactions is somewhere on the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years"
If we re-used this nuclear waste instead of just processing it for storage purposes then we could reduce that scale down by few orders of magnitude. The average "spent" fuel in the USA has only had 90% of it's usable energy removed from it.
@@emu071981 This, thank you. Non-proliferation screws up an extremely abundant energy supply. Waste would be greatly reduced with proper reprocessing and newer reactors.
Ahem... thorium salt baths. A thorium salt bath reactor creates virtually zero hazardous waste of _any_ kind, and can't - physically CANNOT - have any kind of meltdown. It could literally be next door to that preschool you speak of NOW, with zero danger.
@@MaryAnnNytowl The thorium fuel cycle has the same nonproliferation byproducts problems as the uranium fuel cycle.
I’m so happy this was filmed in a studio and not over a zoom call like every other media company is doing nowadays. I’m glad SciShow still cares about production quality.
Head to linode.com/scishow to get a $100 60-day credit on a new Linode account. Linode offers simple, affordable, and accessible Linux cloud solutions and services.
@@a.ielimba78 Sources for a landfill problem relating to solar panels and wind generator?
Also, are you confusing fission and fusion systems?
Furthermore, why are you posting the same reply under every comment of this video?
2016 patent fron the Navy says we are
Why is Wolfgang in the ad wtf
Scishow your science content is amazing except your climate change content can you please be neutral on climate change it's not real
@@jking6736 it's been observed. oil companies knew It happened and kept it a secret.
don't fall for political propaganda. climate change is a scientific fact that is measurable.
What was missing for me in the video was a specific percentage of energy efficiency with the old record and the current JET experiment, as to be able to gauge *how much closer* this puts us to breaking even :)
Right. Reading between the lines here, I'm betting that --- in both experiments --- they used as much power as they possibly could, and that this latter experiment used waaay more power than the first one. If it were even equally efficient as the old process, they would have advertised that in the abstract of their paper.
JET had the record Q gain of a .67 instantaneous peak from 1997 while their 22 joule output from then was the real record performance as about a 4 MW sustained output. The efficiency of that record was .3 and the new one was actually the same at .3 with an 11 MW sustained pulse. This took a lot of work as the tungsten/beryllium walls reduced performance for a long time until they could adjust to it. For some reason they didn't try to beat the peak record, possibly it was too much of a risk seeing that they were not beating the performance, just matching it with increased input power
The key metric for tokamaks is a Q goal of >20 where they enter commercially competitive potential. This is the ratio of heating power applied to the plasma vs the thermal power of the fusion output. With JET succeeding in matching their old carbon wall performance this gives more confidence that ITER can reach its goal of a Q of 10. What's really interesting is that last year a new high power superconducting magnet was demonstrated which kind of makes ITER obsolete. The magnetic field is now limited by the structural strength of steel allowing a 70% increase which increases power by 10x for the same size of tokamak
So now a private company CFS that spun off from MIT are building a tokamak smaller than JET with an expected Q of 10. It may come online before ITER does in 2027 and being smaller has better economic potential. They hope to build a JET size tokamak in the early 30's with a Q of 13 and a total gain of 3 putting 270 MW of electricity out where ITER is likely net breakeven in terms of total electricity to run vs total electric output
The smaller tokamak SPARC won't have electric conversion (same as ITER) but it may put out enough thermal energy that it would extrapolate to net breakeven, so in terms of that the timeline may be late 20's vs ITER's plan to run at full power in the mid 30's
@@Canucklug That's good news! The next few decades will be exciting! I wonder if fusion will capture our imaginations the way that the space race did in the 60s? Probably not, unless there's a global conflict to contrast against it. Still, it's a worthy endeavor.
In my opinion Fusion power generation is so important that we should be funding the research like the 60's NASA program. While 5 seconds is impressive, not so impressive is having to shut it down to stop it melting through the walls. I would love to see Fusion research really take off, we have some independent venture capital backed work I was sort of hoping would show some real progress but after all the hype still nothing leaving ITER as our best bet.
Cant wait they complete the iter already, waiting for this over 10 years to finally prove the concept. Hopefully things work out and we'll have a brighter future
We've been on the road to fusion power for a long time. It has, so far, required us to develop technologies that we didn't even know COULD exist when we started. I increasingly wonder if it is a landmark technology. One of those things that requires so many different advancements and developments in so many different disciplines, that there is a dividing line to a world between before it and after it.
Close to break even the Q inside the reaction I assume... Meaning, still decades away from breaking even on power consumption for the entire plant, much less produce electricity for a grid.. Unfortunately Fusion Power is still far off into the future. But, fission still works great and is more than enough to power the world!
Agreed. Notice that Hank showed a photo of solar panels and wind turbines when alluding to the long time before fusion. Question is how do we to get forward thinking, climate minded people to embrace fission-nuclear as our only viable way to transition off fossil fuels in time?
Couldn’t have said it better.
not really because once we know how to break even we can work backwards and optimise everything else in the plant. At the moment everything is set up with flexibility in mind rather than efficiency.
@@BrianSu Even if we pursue efficiency, we can only be so efficient with converting thermal energy into usable energy. In fact, it has a theoretical limit! Look up Carnot's theorem (thermodynamics) and how it relates to the second law of thermodynamics.
@@rylandrc Carnot's theorem applies to every heat engine, including fossil fuel, nuclear, and solar heater designs. I don't see the particular relevance to fusion.
always nice to end with "We need energy souces now" ... and totally ignore nuclear fission
I am glad this guy is actually explaining how it works instead of the disinformation of most youtube channels saying how they "created a sun" in a lab. Using heat as brute force vs the gravity and pressure that the sun uses.
Wow! Our fusion reactor at Northwest Nuclear Laboratories Federal Way, WA, can only run for 8 hours. But we do produce a lot less energy.
Sadly, even ITER won't generate electricity, but it will hopefully show how to build a fusion reactor that will.
* probably
@@a.ielimba78 Surely yes a lot of politicians shoot down fusion R&D for less than savory reasons, but it’s not accurate to say that lacking ethical standards is all of it. These research projects are expensive and take lots of time to yield fruit, and that’s been the case for decades.
Fusion is exciting and certainly could be useful if we got it to be viable for net production, but that’s a pretty important “if”. Not to mention that it can’t be the only solution to the very complicated issue(s) of climate change, so it makes sense to consider other cheaper, more immediate, renewable energy solutions with proven track records. Considering the political and practical struggles that these clean and renewable sources have had to put up with, fusion being an financially expensive and time consuming endeavor means that even a net-producing reactor is gonna have the same problems of infrastructure that other sources have.
Fusion would be great if it works yeah, but it’s still too young, and it’s probably significantly more cost effective and reliable to try to increase access to renewables and tax carbon emissions for addressing climate change immediately.
@@a.ielimba78 first, learn to spell. Second, it's not the "dems and other groups" from the left that are the problem. No company wants to build expensive new reactors, with the bad rap they have for accidents. The Right is in the pocket of Big Oil that does NOT want to see any form of non-fossil-fuel energy produced, either.
On top of all of that, there's the thorium salt baths reactors that could be built that are a thousand times safer, have nearly zero radioactive wastes, and can't - physically CAN'T - have a meltdown, but they're not getting built, either! Simply because the public doesn't know how SAFE they are!!
So, stop blaming the ones that aren't to blame for this debacle. It serves nothing, and actually hurts the situation when you cloud the facts with nonsense.
@@SimuLord its not the politicians in general doing anything of the sort. It's one specific group of them, that are getting rich by protecting the profits of the giant multinational fossil fuel industry! That's the ones to blame.
Add to that the fact that there is a MUCH safer form of nuclear reactors that nearly no one has even heard of - thorium salt baths reactors - that produce next to nothing in radioactive wastes, and can't - physically CAN'T - have a meltdown. I can tell you that the existing nuclear companies don't want to lose their investments, so don't want these new reactors built, and I can also tell you that the fossil fuel industry doesn't want it to happen, either. Now... if you think it's the pols that are to blame, you're missing the big picture, the real culprits, hidden in plain sight.
Fun conversion: 59 megajoules is just a bit over 14,000 kilocalories (i.e. 14,000 nutrition label calories), or about the same energy as eating 2.5 gallons of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream. 😍
Ok that doesn't seem that much
Interesting… between 4.5 and 6 days of human survival in nutrition label calories 🤔
@@aniketbiswas7660 My waistline would disagree.
The "Belle the Singing Cow" commercial is here on YT for Texans on a nostalgia trip. They got Thunderbolt Transmission for fans of low budget Houston TV in the early eighties too.
@Nathaniel Klumb
After reading your comment, I had to drag my old ass out of bed and grab a Klondike bar from of the freezer.
Thanks a lot, Nate!
I love how everyone forgets fission reactors like they arent clean now and actually can damn near eliminate green house gas emmision.
Compare Germany and France
The new generation fission reactors are the way to go for the next 50-100 years.
There are other technologies who could bring us fusion sooner than ITER :
- inertial fusion with laser (as experimented in the USA)
- stellareator, the twisted cousin of tokamak, as experimented in Germany
- aneutronic fusion with boron, as experimented in Australia (see HB 11)
- various other kinds of tokamak using more powerful and modern magnets than those of ITER, allowing for compact design.
All those should have been massively more funded decades ago, as well as breeder fission reactors. Alas, we let the unholy alliance of Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Stingy and Big Stoopid gut nuclear fusion and nuclear fission research. And now, our planet is burning, Putin and the OPEC are blackmailing us on a daily basis and the future of fusion and breeder reactors may well be in China.
Success...
It wasn’t Big Oil defunding nuclear, it was The People.
Hey man... I messed up a lot in High School, and now I have to make up for it as an adult. We make mistakes, we try to fix them, and we move on.
Fusion reaction actually is more complicated than most people thought, as you actually cannot produce temperature high enough for atoms to have enough kinetic energy to penetrate the Coulomb barrier, even if you get to temperatures 10 times higher than the center of the sun. Particles actually have to quantum tunnel for the fusion reaction to happen. And increasing pressure does not make this easier, huge pressure is needed because higher density means more quantum tunnels per unit of time. On the other hand, higher temperatures will make quantum tunnel easier and therefore also more likely.
That's a very strange thing to say. I mean, nuclei are notoriously quantum. Why should I care if classical physics says it won't work at these temperatures? Classical physics doesn't apply... Well, don't get me wrong, it's cool that there's a tunneling effect here, I'm just not that surprised.
We've always been on the road to fusion, it's just always been a long and bumpy one
@@a.ielimba78 Turn off your TV, close CZcams, log out of Facebook, go outside, and talk to actual people. You are being programmed.
@Punch Down King The whole left vs right wing mentality is the biggest source of hate for progress, nobody can bring up new ideas without being accused of being "for the other side".
@@T1Oracle so are you. Both of you believe in a pyramid scheme of endless growth and progress. And the person you're being rude to is right about solar and wind btw. Just confused about politics. You're wrong about solar and wind AND confused about politics
@@hungrymusicwolf materialist progress is an illusion that will lead to the end of the conditions that allow it to exist. Empires bring deserts which they cannot survive.
@@gekkobear1650 You completely misinterpreted my comment, though I don't whether it was by mistake or on purpose but you completely missed the point.
Small clarification for viewers: The sun does not fuse nuclei the same way as we do in a fusion reactor. The sun, while it does use gravity, only needs to get a fraction of the temperature as a fusion reactor because the sun completes the process through quantum tunneling of the nuclei to be able to fuse. In a fusion reactor, the gravity and sheer mass of nuclei isn't there, so the temperature must be turned up to break past the electrostatic barrier and physically fuse them. Quantum tunneling can still happen of course, but without the mass chance, there is no way enough nuclei can fuse that way to ever sustain a reaction.
I’m 60. Fusion power as a safe source of clean energy has been ten years away my entire life. Call me skeptical.
@@SimuLord being "openly hostile" towards that is the very last thing you need to be aiming your hostility towards. It's counterproductive and aiming at exactly the wrong target, period. 🙄
@@SimuLord *enter the unabomber*
Yeah I understand your scepticism. A lot has been done in the last 10 years so hopefully it will be different this time, but we have a lot to learn and many problems to encounter still. The private companies seem to have more optimistic timelines
@@XxfishpastexX lmao i know, this mf writting his manifesto rn
Scoundrels invented the hydrogen bomb 7 decades ago, the fusion powerplant is always ten years in the future - now looming as a solution for climate change
Past month, it was the launching of James Webb(now up and running), and now another one with Fusion power! I can see 2022 will be a huge one for science community
Lol I love how even with fusion we're still trying to heat up water to turn a turbine at the end of the day.
Right? I used to wonder about this, but then I took an energy systems class. The thing about water is that not only is it cheap and abundant, it's also the only material that regularly exists in all 3 phases on earth. So it's easy to obtain as a liquid and heat up to a gas, and the work pulled out of this process is still one of the most efficient available.
So basically when we invented the steam engine, we lucked into one of the best power conversion systems available to us and haven't needed to change it all that much to get high efficiency.
@@webx135 that's how I see it too. It always kinda bothers me when I see cool future tech connected to a steam engine. But its just very cool that we have this very simple tool to move things, get work done and make electric energy available. Simple does not look fancy and future techy, but simple is very desirable in terms of engineering. And that's good. So it bothers me less nowadays.
@@ruolbu There's an interesting exception with thermalvoltaics, which are more of a work in progress. But basically you could store a lot of energy as heat and then extract energy using basically a solar cell for infrared. I can't imagine it's anywhere as efficient as steam, but it's interesting being essentially a solid-state thermal power source.
What's wrong with that? "Lol"
Always have been. People think that technological progress is linear, but it almost never is. Often it's exponential, and sometimes that means that progress appears to our sensibilities to be so agonizingly slow that we appear not to have made any progress at all. But make no mistake, we're much closer to viable fusion power than we've ever been before, and that IS a fact.
that's not really a useful metric though.
another fact is we are much closer to interstellar travel than we have ever been before...doesn't mean it will ever happen.
for people in the know, fission is safe, abundant, and available NOW, not at some undisclosed time in the future.
Honestly if they did get a working fusion plant, would it really be different (in practical, economic terms) from a modern fission reactor? It's clean, expensive, and fills the same grid role of supplying good steady state power. It doesn't produce fission by-products, but would likely be so expensive that it would be economically the same as building a fission reactor and paying extra to store the waste.
This is not to dunk on the fusion concept; fusion is the long term future, its in almost every way the best long term energy source besides solar power. But in the short to medium term, where we are trying to prevent a climate crisis, this would be the same as fission plants. If there was the political will we could be switching all fossil fuel power into fission power NOW, without ANY new technology. The real issue is the vested interest of huge companies who stand to lose if fossil fuels are switched away from and huge negative public feeling towards fission plants.
Honestly, I think we should look past the "cost" issue to think longer term than profit alone. Yes, fission is a good way to cut down on burning greenhouse gases right now, but I think a wasteless fusion future is worth the initial extra costs.
Your right, most governments should transition to fission powered reactors. The problem is that there is 0 political will to do that. Fusion would be different because more of the population could get on board with it
The problem with fission is when it goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. Chernobyl and Fukushima are still radioactive hazards long after the meltdowns. People evaluate risk poorly so even though new fission plants would have a miniscule (wild guess, 0.0001 percent) change of melting down, all people see is themselves being in the meltdown evacuation zone, which means no political will. A fusion explosion would probably just be a steam explosion and would be extremely local to the fusion torus. Edit: I looked up the number of fission plants in the world and it is 441. So 2/441 plants divided by 50 years of fission power is 0.009 percent per year but that includes older plants where new engineering techniques to reduce risk have not been incorporated.
@@Virtuous_Rogue There's modern design's for fission reactors that literally can't meltdown (molten salt reactors for example)
few fun facts, you say they went really wrong? chernobyl (by FAR the worse of the two) actually has a thriving wildlife population around it. Turn's out people are worse for the local habitat than big chunks of radioactive waste.
Also, per unit of energy generated, Nuclear is among the safest. It sort of depends on which chart you want to go by, but it either causes less death's than solar\wind, or it's more or less a draw.
I'm not sure we have enough information to comment much on the danger of fusion, we haven't sustained a reaction long enough to have much idea. Nor do we have any idea what a commercial reactor's safety would look like, since none exist.
There is no solution to the climate crisis under capitalism
- So, fusion is just 20 years away?
- Always has been.
Did you know that tokamak is an abbreviation?
тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками -> toroidal'naya kamera s magnitnymi katushkami -> toroidal chamber with magnetic coils;
It's one of those great acronyms like "LASER" that really works well as a word, to the point that people forget it wasn't.
When using solar panels, I DO use fusion to power stuff!
When using fossil fuels, I use fusion to power stuff...
It looks like we're only about 50 years away from stable nuclear fusion technology everyone!
I got this news a few days back. But this is the first video that made me understand clearly what happened.
I mean, we could just go for fission energy in the mean time, since that is heck of a lot more reliable and efficient that wind or solar...
But is also much slower to build and set up, if we where going to use nuclear to counteract climate change we should have started building reactors 20-30 years ago. It's too late for nuclear to stop climate change now sadly
And infinitely more destructive, larger, less sustainable, and extremely dangerous...
Too much nuclear waste with fission.
With thorium maybe
@@MrScorpianwarrior false information. Stop the fear mongering.
I've been following fusion reactor news for a year or two now, it's good to see more people getting excited. It's very frustrating to see most media seems to not know the difference between MW and MJ.
That's amazing! We may actually have viable fusion reactors in 30 years!
Plus or minus an indeterminate number of years on top of it.
I'd rather say that within 30 years we may actually have strong practical evidence that fusion energy reactors are really possible to build. Or not.
I'll believe it when the first successful power station is up and running. Fusion is just 20 years away, same as it has been for 90 years now.
Narrative of Self is the result of a feedback loop between “Separate Self” & Cosmos~ 🎈
Literally just researched this project and now this video comes out! Awesome!!!
God I hope
1:47 Nuclear reactors, power plants, house plants and wind up watches all "convert mass into energy using E=MC²". Mass is a property of energy, and any time energy is released the mass goes down. It just happens that nuclear reactions release so much every that mass loss is easily detectable, as opposed to infinitesimal for most reactions.
Aren’t we going to talk about how nuclear Fission is the best candidate energy to transition from fossil fuel ? Renewables just won’t cut it
We should build them but they take a long time to build. We still need more solar and wind in the short term.
Thorium Salt Reactors. Arguably the best modern alternative.
If we'd started building 20-30years ago it'd be the best candidate, if we started building now the climate crisis would already be out of control by the time nuclear was able to cut emmisions
@@uhohhotdog exactly my thoughts. We need both
@@jacobarcher1097 China's showing how it's done right now. If you threw as much money at fission as you did renewables, we could have reactors up and running to replace every fossil fuel powered electricity plant in 10-15 years.
Unfortunately what we can't do in that timeframe is educate the people and get them over their unreasoning fear of it.
I want to know how much energy they put in precisely, not just “more”. Ever since Sabine Hossenfelder made the video about Q Plasma and Q Total I expect those values to be reported in any fusion related video.
My understanding it exceeded 1 for q plasma by a good bit but not for q total. Net meaning if they could cool the coils better it would likely exceed q total. It looks like it has gone from a science problem to a much better understood engineering problem.
@@lrmackmcbride7498 Thank you, I’m just disappointed in the video for not having those figures.
No matter how futuristic the power, it always makes the steam.
@@a.ielimba78 Why are you spamming? and liking your own comments
If you split diatomic hydrogen h2 into atomic hydrogen h1 with electricity and let it fuse back to h2 inside a controlled chamber and extract all the heat to create steam to spin the turbines, you can in theory generate more electricity than you put in if the h1 taps into zero point energy (the environment atoms live in) and releases it as heat as it fuses back to h2.
This test happened on my birthday, so that’s cool. I’ve been following fusion progress a little bit and I’m cautiously optimistic that we might have it this time.
Loving the professional jacket + Pizza John look, Hank. Don't think we didn't notice!
Worth remembering that 5 seconds at a subatomic scale is a very long time. Particles at those temperatures are circling the reactor thousands of times at those temperatures. So under those circumstances the difference between 5 seconds and 5 days are really not very big, the particles just keep up their revolutions just a wee bit longer in their time/space.
Yeah. A particle moving at 100m/s will travel 100nm in 1ns, which is multiple molecules of distance.
Your explanation is illogical ("5 seconds is really long, therefore 5 days is really short." Doesn't make sense!) but I think I can make it a little better. "5 seconds is already such a long time period (compared to the processes which happen at an atomic scale) that it approximates infinity. 5 days approximates infinity only slightly better than 5 seconds, since one day of operation has a miniscule additional effect compared to one second of operation."
I'm still not sure if I agree with you, though. I can't extract enough clarity or detail from your argument in order for it to "click" for me.
@@jpaugh64 Your restatement does make sense to me. You can basically going to look at it as "The processes happening here are so rapid that if things were going to fail, they'd fail in the first few milliseconds. If it survives 5 seconds it's probably stable enough to survive 5 days."
Very excited for where this goes and the development of water boiler 5.0
In 4+ billion years, some say the sun will expand to incinerate the Earth, so I’d say it’s pretty fair to say we’re headed for fusion power……all a matter of time.
From what I heard we will in just 1 billion years know for relatively certain how much longer it will take! We definitely live in the end times folks!
In this direction, there is probably a big enough bang to finalise strategic questions of this type.
There's an information that I keep missing here. ITER was designed to end up with a Q = 10, being conservative. How does this affect the expectations? Are we still short? can we expect to have a better than expected performance? is it on track?
The point of the recent JET research was to confirm ITER simulations. As in, we are now confirmed to be on track with ITER performance.
Not even close, considering no tokamak has been able to solve the magnetic confinement stability problem. To date, the longest run is about 6 minutes. Most of the time the field collapses in just a few seconds.
These reactors would need to run for years. Q is pointless if you cannot get it run for more than a few minutes.
@@guytech7310 Your information is outdated. EAST managed to break the record a few months ago managing to keep 120 million degrees plasma during more than 1000 seconds, close to 17 minutes.
And you don't need to keep it running for years. You need to be able to start it fast. What matters is that it produces more energy than the input. Increasing the reaction time helps increasing the Qplasma due to requiring less energy for maintaining it that what's required to ignite it. You can have several reactors in parallel and work in cycles to ensure a continuous energy production. ITER, in fact, it's designed to produce 500MW of power in pulses of 400 seconds.
@@guytech7310 1. Where did you get the idea the “field collapses in a few seconds”? Just not true
2. They don’t need to run for years. They need to run for a couple hours, with a short downtime. Then short term energy storage can keep the turbines ticking over.
@@BlueFrenzy Nope, China lies & lies. If you go look at the press release in may 2021, China stated they would have a test run of over 1000 seconds by the end of the year, Meanwhile in may of 2021 they could not get runs over a minute. If you believe anything that comes out of the CCP state news you're a fool. CCP is the only nation that can accurately time major science breakthroughts down to the month. Amazing? I think not!
May 2021: "The latest round of experiments mark another step forward for the researchers. According to the *state-run* Xinhua News Agency, they have set a new record of 120 million °C (216 million °F) for heated plasma, and sustaining it for 101 seconds. In separate experiments, the "artificial Sun," as it is called, heated plasma to 160 million °C (288 million °F) for 20 seconds. Ultimately, the publicly stated goal of EAST is to hold plasma at around 100 million °C for *more than 1,000 seconds*, or around 17 minutes."
I have two main pet peeves with journalism regarding fusion power research and you've squarely nailed one, and struck a bit of a glancing blow on the other. ;)
First, every article or video about a tokamak-based project seems to be written as if tokamaks are the only possible approach. I'm not saying they should always go through a list of every idea someone's ever had for ways to generate power through fusion, but just acknowledging the concept that it isn't necessarily the only game in town would be nice. Like, "One of the methods scientists are trying to use is the Tokamak" really doesn't add a lot of words, and someone better at editing could surely trim that down without losing the concept that there are alternatives out there, like a stellarator, or inertial confinement, just to pull a couple off the top of my head. It's not just articles about tokamaks that do this, but one about a stellarator project, for instance, tends to at least acknowledge the difference between them and tokamaks, since "what they do better than a tokamak" is an important reason for their existence.
Second, "Fusion Energy." It often gets talked about in such a way that it sounds like it's some special flavor of energy, as if there's something qualitatively different about electricity that comes from that source (the same occasionally goes for "solar energy"), rather than just being a better, cleaner alternative way of generating plain vanilla electricity. In the beginning this seemed to be headed that way, but this video does actually explain that a real fusion power plant would go through the usual heat to steam to electricity process, so it scores points there. Thus 'glancing blow'. ;)
Despite the nitpicks, I do love your content. Thanks for keeping so much great stuff coming!
We could use breeder/thorium reactors until we perfect fusion. small amounts of short lived waste and can use long lived waste as fuel.
The economics don't work out- mined uranium is too cheap. And if you think economics isn't important to building reactors then I invite you to build one without money. Let me know how far you get.
Important distinction: was the energy released calculated, the energy transfered into water or what energy the steam engine ultimately would produce? Just because fusion reaction breaks even doesn’t mean it can actually produce energy in the grid.
It sounds like they haven't even built the steam-heat transfer equipment yet, because the generator technology itself is not yet self-sustaining. No reason to build the conventional parts until the experimental parts are working
So... It happened!
The section comparing with household consumption bugged my mind. Anyways, great video! Thanks
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I take (a small) issue with 0:29 - because fusion has to be done at high temperatures & pressures, the atoms are stripped of their electrons, you're fusing nuclei, not atoms.
Okay, you explain it better later.
If only there already was a fusion reactor nearby, that already had a huge supply of hydrogen, and already got the reaction going, and was already streaming the energy at us, reliably for 5 billion years.
That would be awesome.
Hmm... seems to me I remember something like that... something already existing... but there's no little light going off over my head, yet. I'm sure I'll get some Illumination soon, though. It's only a matter of time.
Yeah, but that's not really nearby in practical terms, and the mechanism is getting power out of it is very different.
The sun is millions of miles away...how is that nearby?
If only it can provide the same place on earth with that energy for 24 hours and no layer of gasses are in between us and the hypothetical reactor.
I LOVE Jitsi been using it for more than 2 years. Better quality than zoom or FB.
There was also a recent breakthrough announced by MIT of new electromagnets that perform better at super high temperatures allow tokamaks to be smaller. This will allow for faster and cheaper iterative experiments which should accelerate the learning curve. Right now, all of these tokamaks are GIGANTIC and EXPENSIVE. This hinders development.
We are still, optimistically, decades away from even the first commercial fusion plant, and more realistically, probably several decades away. But once it hits, it's going to blow every other energy source out of the water. Until then, fission and geothermal are our best bets to fight climate change as they are reliable base-load sources of power.
11MW probably covers not just your house, but your household's broader energy footprint. For example, grocery store refrigeration.
It is a nonsense, energy is not measured in watt, power is.
3:55 - do you mean 1,000 households, Hank? 11KW is a lot closer to what I'd expect of a single home in a single day, than 11MW
5:20 - don't MSRs belong in that graphic, too? They're arguably greener than wind and solar
11MW for 5 seconds equates to 16kwh. he sort of crossed his terms.
Nice to see Wolfgang and thelinuxgamer getting some recognition!
For some reason I can't watch an episode without Hank. I have no idea why, he just holds my attention and this channel doesn't feel the same if he isn't the one doing it. Am I the only one?
I love some Stefan and Michael. My favourite host was Olivia but she's left for other employment. Jessi who does Animal Wonders is also great.
If you love Hank, check out Into the Microcosmos, a channel built by him and a friend from the ground up, and which is _amazing!!_ I love his voice on that channel, too... soothing, and smooth as satin sheets! Perfect for going to sleep to, in fact!
I always remember getting really excited when I got a monetary surplus on the SIMS City game on the PC and was able to afford the fusion power plant I was always transfixed at how it glowed a vivid blue and red when you put your cursor on the plant and that synth hum the plant made when you clicked it too was so cool.
Yeah, fusion fuel costs are trivial. Its plant construction costs that are insane.
Fission is what could save us in future decades.
In what way?
But it needs to be the RIGHT fission. We need thorium salt baths reactors, not the old fashioned kind. We need the kind that makes nothing that will be radioactive for centuries, and can't - physically CANNOT - have any sort of meltdown at all, and that's thorium salt baths!
@@MaryAnnNytowl There is no free lunch and fossil fuels cause immensely more deaths than nuclear. Less nuclear = more warming and more species and ecosystems lost, forever. We can't be serious about addressing climate change without fission - old and new.
Like the speed of light, the time horizon of fusion is constant for all observers -- thirty years out.
It was thirty years out in the late seventies when I wrote a high school paper on the topic. It's still currently thirty years out...
Using solar power, to power a fusion reactor which is basically a mini sun in doughnut form, would be funny. Once we figure out how that is.
Thanks to the hard work of our brilliant scientists, we are 30 years closer to a working nuclear fusion power generator
Fusion - Coming Soon… said scientists every decade since the 50’s. Let’s hope they’re right this time.
Hehe.
2:22 finally there is a picture with human size comparison.. thanks
All I hear when you say "magnets got too hot" is "solvable with engineering." We're pretty much there.
RIght? Like all things considered, that is SUCH AN EASY PART. And I assume the magnet temperature really wasn't that relevant to the test. Just a reactor that wasn't designed for sustained thermal output.
And when I hear 5 seconds, that's practically there. Reactor tests tend to bump up exponentially and have a saturation cutoff. So like, if it reaches a few minutes, the reaction is basically steady-state, and then it's more about the endurance of the containment system. If it reaches an hour, it's more about transferring the heat to the turbines, which is something we've been doing for ages. An hour might as well be 10 years.
If it overheats in 5 seconds, how many times more cooling does it need to reach steady state? 100x? 1000x? it's not trivial...at all. That's not to mention the fact they are probably using cooling systems that would make no sense for a commercial design (I imagine they are doing something along the line of cryogenics right now)
@@animefreak5757 Cryogenics is just the science of low temperatures. Your refrigerator is "something along the line of cryogenics." Obviously it's more complicated then that, but you must realize your major complaint is "keeping something not hot." and pretending it needs some major advancement. "Trivial" isn't what I said. What I said was "solvable."
@@mooseitself let me rephrase it then. They are likely using something like liquid nitrogen to keep the magnets cool. About as good as it possibly get's for keeping things from getting hot.
Now tell me just how you intend to do orders of magnitude better then the best we've already got? I'm not saying it won't happen, but saying "we are pretty much there" is extremely misleading. The challenges fusion faces are still enormous. there's a reason people crack jokes about it being "20 years away...for the last 70 years" It requires breakthroughs in technology that just can't be put on a clock. They could happen next year, or never for all we know.
@@animefreak5757 JET uses copper confinement coils. Experiments do this because it's cheap and the timescales of plasma physics are much shorter than a second.
Running 1 GW of power through those coils for 5 seconds is an incredible feat of engineering. No reactor would use anything other than superconducting magnets.
I live near JET, it's actually in a small hamlet called Culham which is south of Oxford.
Fusion in the sun works because of quantum mechanics, that’s why hydrogen fuses there at 10,000 kelvin instead of the 10 million kelvin on earth. Gravity provides inertial confinement on the sun, but we’re up our own butts about tokamaks in spite of the limits magnetic confinement places on fusion. There’s a right way to do this, but we’re not doing it, which is why fusion power is still 20 years away…
1:50 it's also possible in Muon assisted fusion, if you swap the electrons out for muons, which have the exact same charge, but are a thousand times heavier than electrons. They're orbiting close enough to the nucleus that the strong nuclear force can fuse two nuclei, if they form a molecule around a muon pair.
Basically at room temperature, compared to normal fusion.
But it takes too much energy to constantly create muons, because they're too unstable, so not a viable way to go.
It's been 18 months, time to remind everyone we're only 30 years away from fusion power. Just like we've been doing for past 60 years.
So, it's only 20 years away? ;-)
E2A: Hey, that's Gardiner Bryant in the Linode video. Yay for Linux!!
We've been "20 years away from fusion power" for like 30 years at this point.
Subsidized fusion research is starting to feel to me like grants for string theory. I'm always in favor of STEM for STEM's sake but how long are we going to keep funding obvious dead ends when we could be buying new telescopes?
I see your point. Yeah you could say stop wasting time on impossible stuff. But then there's the alternative more risky decision of taking a chance on something that seems impossible and it becoming reality.
@@csvscs and why do you guys don‘t believe that ITER will rock the house soon ;D?
The last couple of decades the problem was that the founding was cut down so drastically. There was a study which looked at how fast fusion progress can be achieved and the actual founding was below their „worst case scenario“-line.
Major goals got achieved and ITER will show around 2035 that it will work.
Also it is not „one or another“: in projects like these many technical things get invented along the was necessary for other fields as well.
The primary reason why we we have hopes on fusion energy is that we have had actual demonstrations of a massive return on energy invested at human scales using H-bombs (fusion bombs with a fission bomb for ignition). It's just impractical to use thermonuclear warheads to power a country.
And the fact that it's actually straight forward for people to do fusion in their garage with off the shelf stuff and a few kilowatts of electricity in the form of a Fusor. The problem with fusors besides producing a pretty glow and neutrons is that it consumes more energy than it makes.
The whole goal of fusion energy research is trying to marry the high energy yields of thermonuclear warheads with the steady output of fusors which is easier said than done.
Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
www.britannica.com/technology/thermonuclear-bomb
@@brandonn.1275 Backyard fusion in no way compares to magnetic confined fusion test reactors.
@@csvscs No, it's literally impossible when you compare the kind of energy output you'd need to make a viable power plant to the energy of a nuclear warhead. Even if you could confine the power of what amounts to a nuclear bomb, the energy losses in the meantime at each stage of the reaction alone (never mind the overhead power required for a reactor) would liquefy the metal and ceramics used to make it.
Important precision, ITER goal is to produce more energy than one puts in it. But this energy is not te be harvested, it will mainly be heat and not at all electricity. Producing electricity with that heat will be another problematic step to solve.
That is why, some scientist often refer to fusion as the energy of 2100 century.
@@lightningstrike6467 Yes, but pumping the heat out of the system in a useful way without disrupting an indefinitely running fusion reaction is a pretty hefty engineering problem when we can't even get the reaction to work efficiently in isolation for more than a few seconds. The hardest part about getting it going is properly containing the plasma, now we need to talk about extracting energy and byproducts while containing the reactants and pumping in more fuel, all of which directly conflict with the containment thing we're already finding nearly impossible to do.
As I understand it, the problem main ITER has to solve is finding a material to use for the walls to convert high speed neutrons to heat.
I'm 40 and my entire life I've been told we have been 10 years or less away from a climate disaster and fusion. Still waiting for both lol.
Climate disaster's already bearing down on us with more severe weather conditions worldwide. Extreme droughts leading to massive, nigh uncontrollable fires and record high summers paired with unusually warm winters in many parts of the world. Just because winter still comes and summer still goes doesn't mean the planet hasn't heated, and the effects are only going to get worse as time goes on. Cliamte change isn't one of those disasters that just smacks you in the face when it comes. It's creeping up on us all, slowly enough that people don't recognize the danger, and I fear that people won't acknowledge it until it's far too late to do anything about it.
@@JaMaAuWright Fewer people have died due to extreme weather events in recent times than at any point in human history. Even if you think humans can control global mean average temperatures up or down half a degree C, all that knowledge and industry would be better put to use building safer housing, more reliable transportation, and more secure food supply chains.
@@JaMaAuWright dude we were told in the 90's by all the climate alarmists the polar Ice caps would be completely gone by early 2000's. It's been "the sky is falling" my entire life. The problem with every single climate projection model is the sun is a constant in every calculation. The sun's energy output varies over 100's of years and has a huge impact on climate. It's all cyclical. Global temperature rises and falls over thousands of years, experiencing interglacial periods. Even if humanity wasn't here earth would still get warmer by a few more degrees before it cools again. Our time, energy, and money is being wasted the way's we are handling the warming of the planet.
@@rhekman Fewer people die now because we have the means to predict weather events and the knowledge necessary to take precautionary measures. Just because the body count is lower doesn't mean the storms aren't getting worse.
Ultimately the nightmare scenario isn't even something like a bigger hurricane. Rising sea levels will put entire cities under water, this is a big enough concern that there are serious considerations about building sea walls around costal cities. That, and wet bulb conditions.
Wet bulb conditions are high summer temperatures with a humidity above 90%. The problem with these conditions is that when the humidity gets too high, our sweat doesn't evaporate like it should. The air literally cannot contain the moisture. This means that our bodies cannot cool down, and depending on your age and heat tolerance, you could die in temperatures as low as 25 C because you literally cannot cool down anymore. Better housing isn't going to save you from that unless you plan on never going outside again.
@@jamesbouchard3661 Yes, it does rise and fall over thousands of years. The problem is that right now, according to all our models and all information we've managed to gather on the topic, we're supposed to be in a cooling period right now, not a warming one.
Dr Octavius: “I’ve been looking forward to this!”
Great video! Just what I was searching for!
I'm in New Zealand. We're anti-nuclear here, and as much as I know it's not as doom and gloom as some say, it still makes me unjustifiably uncomfortable. Fusion however, that's what I think the goal should be. I would imagine that if those wonderful minds cracked this, we'd work to bring it here. :-)
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Fission is a proven technology that makes you uncomfortable. Fusion is experimental, and likely will have novel problems that we have not even discovered, yet, which we will have to learn how to solve *after* we implement our first power plant.
If commercial fission makes you uncomfortable, commercial fusion (when it arrives) might not be "safe" enough to make you feel comfortable before the year 2100 or longer.
10 years from now we're going to learn that we're getting closer to having fusion energy.......
I thought we had already reached the break even with some reactions.
Still. glad to see that even if 'fusion is 20 years away' we're still chasing it.
Yes another 1000 years and we will be there!!
Not one mention of the SPARC reactor, or tritium breeding, or the biggest breakthrough in modern electromagnet tech: High-Temp Superconductors. ITER will at least be tackling issues of tritium breeding for sustainability models, but ITER is massive and nothing more than a proof of concept at that size. Both ITER and JET are using _oldschool_ magnet coils made of braided wire. The SPARC reactor project is not only tackling tritium breeding, but they're using magnet coils made with high-temp superconducting wire that is able to create vastly more powerful magnets. They're building coils with the magnetic strength of ITER... at a quarter of the size.
Size is super important to the progress of fusion energy. Heck, it's been a major roadblock of _all_ forms of nuclear energy. Even if ITER succeeds, someone is gonna have to design a version that investors can AFFORD and won't take thirty years to build. Because of its size and complexity, ITER had to design and build everything in-house, starting with the wires for their coils. Meanwhile High-Temperature Superconductors already have a number of industrial uses and are currently being mass-produced as an off-the-rack part. That makes modern reactor parts very cost effective to build and maintain.
ITER:
Radius: 6.2m
Field Strength: 11.8T (maximum)
Expected Q ratio (energy return vs energy in): ~10
SPARC:
1.85m
Field Strength: 12T (operating) / 20T (maximum)
Expected Q ratio: ~11
That's a massive difference. I'm pretty psyched to see how that project plays out in the coming years. If their project timeline remains on schedule, they may even be officially unveiling their reactor around the same time as ITER in 2025. That's _right_ around the corner. If ITER's design proves that fusion can work, and SPARC is able to replicate it at a fraction of the size... then holy crap that is gonna be a BIG win for fusion energy. I think a lot of people would rather see a video on this, as well as how all the frontrunner designs compare with one another. There are still other modern designs like the stellerators and laser bombardment to talk about as well.
Fusion is so damn close to becoming viable. The timetable is no longer "always 30 years away." I think everyone should be psyched about what's coming.