Could nuclear fusion energy power the future? - with Melanie Windridge
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- čas přidán 1. 06. 2024
- Could fusion energy transform the way the world produces energy for the world? Find out with demos of plasma, superconductors, diode pumps and more.
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Watch the Q&A here: • Q&A: Could nuclear fus...
00:00 Intro
01:06 Why do we need fusion energy?
05:54 Why is energy density important? (demo)
10:26 What’s the science behind nuclear fusion?
13:58 What is plasma? (demo)
20:20 What’s the history of fusion energy?
24:39 The growth of private fusion industry
31:02 High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) Magnets
41:30 Laser fusion and diode pumps
47:15 Fusion is entering the engineering phase
50:30 What's next for fusion?
Dr Melanie Windridge is a specialist in fusion energy who helps people see the value, opportunities and excitement of fusion. Melanie is the founder and CEO of Fusion Energy Insights, which keeps people up to date with developments in the growing fusion industry. She has a PhD in plasma physics (fusion energy) from Imperial College London, where she remains an Academic Visitor, and she sits on the Advisory Boards of the UK Fusion Cluster and US non-profit Energy for the Common Good. Melanie was previously UK Director of the Fusion Industry Association. In 2022 she was elected a Fellow of the Clean Growth Leadership Network. Melanie is the author of Aurora: In Search of the Northern Lights and Star Chambers: the race for fusion power, as well as writing for Forbes online.
For more information please visit www.melaniewindridge.co.uk and www.fusionenergyinsights.com
This talk was recorded at the RI on 3 May 2023.
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Everybody always talks about how to generate and maintain a plasma, but nobody talks about the much less sexy, surrounding problems, that also need to be solved for commercial fusion power:
- how to produce, transport and store the tritium fuel (currently it is one of the most expensive materials in the world)
- how to effectively capture the energy, that is released at an extremely high power (basically commercial reactor designs need channels for circulating a coolant medium, that then will drive a turbine/generator; but this takes precious space away for the coils needed to generate the magnetic confinement)
- how to handle the waste products, that are so much more radioactive than depleted fission fuel rods
There's fungi that degrade some radioactive material. As for energy storage, they can use water pumps or reusuable iron rust ignition machines.
They don't talk about a lot of things. They just compare energy into the plasma vs energy out of the plasma (Qplasma in/ Q Plasma out)
@@CarlosMartinez-eu3ii That is a useful metric for plasma physicist not very much for the public. As long as you can separate them in your head there is nothing wrong with them talking about what they interested in.
Glad you asked. Multiple ways are suggested to solve these problems so which pathway will prevail is not clear yet, but here is a few idea.
HWRs or CANDUs has some tritium production that may or may not be practically recovered and used. Let's not forget the whole point of the very high energy density is that just how little fuel you actually need to have a decent power output (once everything else is ironed out ofc.) So you don't really need a lot of tritium, at least not compared to other fuel types in other power plants.
However as far as I know the goal is to actually use the Deuterium Lithium fuel cycle (D2+Li6=> 2He4+T3 via the D2+T3=>He4+n =>n+Li6 =>He4+T3 detailed reaction) where you basically use enriched Flibe (it's a molten salt 2:1 stochiometric mix of lithium and berylium fluoride) as a blanket to capture the neutron flux (neutrons are not bound by the magnetic fields) and breed tritium. This blanket also "takes" the kinetic energy of the neutrons (which carries away most of the energy generated in a neutronic fusion like D+T) and heat up the salt, so all you need is to run a heat exchanger through the blanket which then can go to your steam generator (actually it might go to a gas turbine as of a Bryton cycle allows higher efficiency and the temperature should be high enough for that) and then you can spin your generator. This is one way to do it, it's far from being the only way, there are other proposals all of them having their up and downsides.
As for the "waste" products those are "filtered out" from the plasama via the divertor and should be mostly helium 4 (stable actually useful gas) and maybe some plasma sputtered residue (impurities). Other than that what really is significant are the decomissioned plasma facing components or anything really in the way of the neutron flux which mostly produce neutron activated stuff (I belive medium level waste depending on the materials used in said component)
I hope this answers some of your questions.
Yes, using DT fuel will activate the surround material to such a level that remote maintenance is necessary. The good part is the decay half-lives are a few years. Did my PhD dissertation analyzing this aspect of fusion. I joke that when you decommission a fusion power plant, it becomes a food irradiator facility.
The same question was asked in 1973, 50 years ago when I was a nuclear engineering student. At that time it was predicted to be in 40 years time. It may happen, but on a different timescale.
Simple, we don't have gravity of a star and that is why the fusion claim that it is doing what is done in the sun is a fallacy - smacking particles together is not a serious alternative. We need to work with nature - do what it does, not try to bend it to our beliefs of what we think it should be doing.
We've bent it in the past. It's likely we'll be able to do it with fusion as well.
@@ruilopes00 another 70 years?
@@magnetsandmushrooms But...but....but....there's no money to be siphoned from the gubmint that way.
@@chuckschillingvideos Let's stop this stupidity right there. If you worried about who siphoning what from the goverment you should look around the military budget and the millitary industrial complex because what fusion research cost vcompared to that is change. Beside all that they talk about private sector fusion start ups, and when they mention something like NIF, now that is primarily built for nuclear weapon research.
Very few of the viewers of this channel would need much of the very basic information presented here because we are concerned individuals who have a keen interest in science presentations. Most, like me were hoping for some good news about progress towards the useful operation of a fusion reactor. I now understand that there is a whole industry growing around the research and development. Huge amounts of money are going in and sooner or later investors are going to wonder when, if ever, a viable and reliable reactor will emerge.
Beginning with a familiar assertion about the future of energy and fusion's place within this future. Even if these systems magically come to fruition tomorrow, scaling up to make a significant contribution is going to take decades at the very least. 2050 is 27 years away. I totally love the collaborative nature of this research and ITER in particular is a fantastic achievement of precision engineering on a huge scale but there's no guarantee that it will work and meanwhile the carbon footprint of the project is monstrous. If we fail to get fusion to the holy grail of useful efficiency, it will have been a colossal distraction from the central energy problem it was supposed to be relieving. As for privatisation? It doesn't exactly have a shining success story to point to.
Scientific American ran a very negative article about ITER. To summarize. ITER has massive cost overruns and delays. It is approaching the point in time where the partners need to evaluate if it worth continuing.
@@davefoc Y'all seem to be drinking the green Koolaid ! Personally, I am not convinced. Ĺook at the data. Climate chang will always happen. Maybe AI will slap some sense into us.
Fusion is an important technology to continue researching but we should be investing in fission nuclear in the meantime. It's very mature and safer than coal at this point. It's ridiculous that we've stopped using nuclear power now.
Absolutely correct. Fusion may well happen but no where near quickly enough. We need solutions that can be rolled out at large scale within twenty years.
Nothing I have heard about fusion suggests that it will be possible to have affordable commercial scale fusion energy within fifty years.
Fission energy on the other hand is easily doable and could sustain civilization the hundred or so years needed for fusion to become feasible.
Fission energy sources that look particularly attractive include tried and true heavy water reactors such as the CANDU system and SMRs based on molten salt and pebble bed technology both of which are in advanced development.
Those advocating nuclear energy always down play the cost of decommissioning reactors. Nuclear energy is expensive.
@@garyboyle695 Like it or not nuclear will be a significant part of the future energy mix in most parts of the world.
Fortunately, all modern proposals are 'through lfe'. This means unlike coal plants for example (that can leave behind a huge mess) the decommissioning is fully planned and funded from the outset.
For some SMR designs (that are particularly likely to be deployed in the developing world) the entire plant is prefabbed off site and when it's safe operating life is reached, it is shipped back (by barge) to the manufacturer for recycling and disposal.
Such plants are already being deployed by Russia and China, a number of western designs are also nearing regulatory approval
I like the molten salt designs. Very good burn rates on the fuels and it's not a giant pressure vessel
One thought…Fukushima! Hmmmm….
I think that fusion is both possible and will one day be profitable, however I don't believe someone who is _admittedly financially vested_ in selling the notion that it's just around the corner by citing vague notions of "advanced manufacturing" and "artificial intelligence".
Scientists need to stop chasing this stupid DREAM. It will never be brought to fruition!
This was a fusion research infomercial.
yes, i like this lady, but the lecture was more political than scientific i thought. informative in places, but although subtle, a little bit propagandist - as much a pitch as a lecture.
Commercialising science is expensive, there is no way around. The money invested in fusion at the moment is to low to solve it. So explaining what the state of fusion is and getting people interested in investing at the same time seems like a good thing. That aside, it feels like we are trying to build a modern computer in the early 20th century. which would be impossible at the time but easy 50 years later.
This was an outreach video on the progress of fusion. Simply put, it was explaining what's been achieved on the billions of tax payer money that's been invested in fusion progress. Decades of investment hasn't produced a commerical fusion reactor but there's a huge amount of technology that's benefited our lives in unseen ways. That's what this video is mostly about.
Ah, so Ri is now in the advertising business?
complete with many of the same bogus claims or "production" of energy - which shows no total input electrical energy to generated electrical energy ratios - because they can't as it has never been done and if they did on the thermal fusion energy yield alone would still show a pitiful negative ration.
@@magnetsandmushrooms Along with trashing the competition with similarly bogus claims and irrelevant infotainment demos.
This "lecture" is a good reminder to me, why I won't have any place in any form of PR.
Mostly good, but if felt a little more like a sales pitch than a complete picture. Not enough emphasis on the potential pitfalls and how to mitigate them (tritium breeding), damage to components from high energy protons. It would be good to have had these addressed in further detail.
It is a sales pitch. Unfortunately it’s not the first time that the RI hosts “paid advertisements” by companies that peddle pseudo science/pseudo technology and whose only purpose is to raise their credibility profile with investors.
Fusion research started in the early 1950’s, as did I. I don’t anticipate fusion making a practical contribution in my lifetime.
On the other hand, Si based photovoltaics also started in the early ‘50’s. This technology is now contributing significantly to the the grid, and it’s the fastest growing energy source at this time. In my lifetime I expect it to surpass all other sources of electricity and to also be the cheapest source of power. Let’s get on with it!
It is already the cheapest, which i gather is part of the reason it is gradually surpassing all other sources of energy.
Also two weeks ago Sam Altman(OpenAI) said on a talk, that OpenAI and Microsoft made a deal with Helion (fusion energy reactor developer) for Helion to deliver fusion energy within 5 years. So fingers crossed for you and all of us, maybe in 5 years we get to see an economicly viable fusion energy production.
It's the energy of the future .... and will always be.
@@CarlosMartinez-eu3ii I *hope* you will be proven wrong and maybe in my lifetime. After all we are building already several test reactors and private companies have been heavily invested in and private money usually is rather conservativ with investments expecting return on investments.
As mentioned above Helion might be a company to look out for in that aspect.
@@kinngrimm I used to think fusion was great, just by looking at videos like this one. I later learned they are misleading by not measuring the efficiency (Energy Out/Energy In) in a helpful way. Wander why they are doing this.
Reply
@@CarlosMartinez-eu3ii Whats wrong with this video? It showed basic physical concepts which for many maybe educational and layed out some of the problems that the development of fusion energy is facing. It did not give any false data or hopes for when to expect anything.
If i remember correctly it also addressed the differance of energy in/out put, so again that video surely can't be the cause of you taking issues.'
Besides at any time there was ample information on the ongoing development on several different projects from the scientific community, again with factual data without making estimates when it was production ready and always pointing out there that this is fundametal scientific proof of concept tests first. If you have seen videos of the clickbaiting type and took it for reality, if i may humbly suggest rather speak to your choice of sources till you found a better one. This here definetly was no clickbait. Ofcause you are free to think differently.
Nice demos. It helps me build intuitions about what a plasma is, it was always quite abstract when I read or watched stuff about fusion. Magnets and superconductors were fun too.
A lot of Ri talks I've seen are science authors presenting their books, which has its own value. But this talk brought the emphasis to demos, which I believe is an old tradition in the Ri.
Commercial fusion power plants are always 20-30 years in the future. It was like that when first people talked about Tokamaks, 50 years later, it is still in the future.
Dang it you beat me to it.
There are many schemes getting reported to be the scam afterwards like solar energy, green energy and you can get list ever lasting 😅
If a mans income depends on not knowing things, he will make every effort not to find out.
It keeps the taxpayer $$$$ flowing - that's the only thing that matters.
Just another thirty years... as they said sixty five years ago.
Chapter markers! What a fantastic addition. Thank you.
But DT reaction is impractical to further commercialisation of fusion power.
As
All tokamaks like ITER run at beta (ratio between plasma pressure and magnetic pressure) not higher than 2.5% .
Spherical tokamaks run at higher values but have another limitations.
We need to build monstrous reactor because power density is proportional to beta^2.
Today we cannot to heat plasma higher than 10 keV ((15 keV for ITER).
While reactivity of plasma has a maximum at about 30-50 keV.
This also impacts on size of reactor and its cost.
High neutron flux will inevitably quickly damage costly first wall.
That will be strongly radioactive after this.
Then should be replaced.
Replacement.
You remotely!!!! should dismantle a lot (iter has 18 toroidal field magnets weighing 310 tons each).
Before you should dismantle the entire cryostat.
The only way to make fusion power attractive for investors is to go to uneutronic fusion.
That need for ignition much higher temperatures.
Sorry.
But that is reality.
Fusion race now is like a competition of many collateral technologies - such as huge superconductive magnets. Etc
But where is a creative ideas to overcome limitations of tokamaks?
Make experimental with lower cost resistive magnets but with higher beta, with higher plasma temperature.
If successful, only then build the next reactor place in such a huge cryostat with liquid helium cooling and use costly superconductors.
Billions have been spent in research and building of all kind of tests.
We did have a few moments of fusion but nothing that has enough output to feed everything thats needed to keep it running.
There have been developments that are always brought in the media as breaktroughs but we are not close to having any kind of reliable fusion plant
These breaktroughs are actually very small steps and we need to take many many more.
I think the economie will collapse and funding will dry up before they have developed actual fusion with enough output to make it self sustainable and send power to the grid.
It is because it starts on a false premise - we do not have the gravity of a sun, so we try to fudge it.
Still ... a long long way from TOTAL net energy output from fusion ...
The hot and the cold are both so intense--put them together, it just makes sense! =)
I'm glad to see the progress in this technology--hope it comes soon enough!
Great talk 🙏🏻 thank you for
I also like these experiments which are unusual in German talks
I'm going to say it. it will always to 60 years away
Aren’t we already ~20 years into the fusion power era? … based on the 1975 predictions of ‘fusion power in 30 years’ (I was there)
It's always 30 years away 😂
Since when did predictions entered the stage as being a form of science?
If you look up a bit information about fusion u see that in the last 20 years the magnetic field for fusion reactors has become 10.000 times more efficiënt.Not bad progress at all, plus many other things as well.
Imagine how AI could aid fusion tech, realtime controling the magnetic fields to keep the plasma close to equilibium as possible.
It might be that without rl AI managing the plasma fields, fusion would never get there. Btw have you followed how much money the world put in to fusion. Not that much for something So important. China has doubled the ammount of money in to fusion research then that of the whole world.
So the speed of progress also is for a degree linked to how much money we invest.
As last, China is finnishing now a fusion plant that uses electrical fields, to fuse! Totally different idea then the West. You can then better dosage the outcome of energy that way. They want to have it commericially ready in 12 years. Its way bigger then the projects of the world today.
So it might well be fusion takes more time then was predicted, would be very weird if any person back 50 or 40 or 30 years could perfectly predictic that.
But never the less it is getting real , we just dont know excactly when. At first like with the first cars it probably also wll have start up issues. Would be weird if not. So as with most things it goes in stages, in time zones.
If there are enough savvy scientists, engineers and politicians (with grey cells) to pull it off, all the myopic cynicism and negativity in the world won't stand in the way, and neither will the vast dead weight of a doomed fossil fuel industry.
Gotta love demos
2:52 So can hydro, and last I checked it's still considered pretty renewable, except it isn't perpetually 20-30 years away as COMMERCIAL FUSION STILL IS TODAY.
That was a strange lecture, and I don't think I like it. One third was about some fundamentals better suited for an introductiory lecture; one third (ok, maybe not quite :-) was about how awesome private companies are; one third was actually what I wanted to see, ie. an overview of current and future projects.
One question about these awesome private companies: How many of them get public money?
Tax breaks - if you are a high end tax payer in US say - you can claim a good chunk of the investment. That is public money.
I hope Ri can organize a talk about tritium breeding. Even if STEP and others have not yet made a breakthrough, I'd like to know what basic science is involved (I don't think it's plasma physics), what existing technologies might be repurposed, and what are possible roadmaps to a breeding blanket for scalable deuterium-tritium fusion. What papers are people reading, what universities or labs are writing them, what skill sets are needed to make it happen? What is happening in condensed matter physics and nuclear physics that might be relevant to tritium breeding, or vice versa?
Feels like an hour long advertisement rather than a lecture.
We need to have honesty that’s what we need to have because until we have that we cannot progress as a society
And this has little of that.
Absolutely, we need to get engineers working on what we know will work. The way ahead is very clear, solar PV, wind, hydro and pumped hydro and nuclear fission. The mix will vary from time to time and place to place but the recipe is absolutely clear.
When affordable fusion reactors turn up they can swap out the nuclear fission plants as appropriate.
There is a very interessting Fusion koncept in Germany, it is called Wendelstein .
It is build in Greifswald by the Max Planck society .it is about the magnetic geometrie of the fusionreactor.
After all the work humanity put into researching harnessing fusion energy, the economic solution is merely 40 years away.
Science should be the focus of the talk at the Royal Institute rather than a business. It was more about the business, general and speculative, and vague. Topics that were briefly and vaguely discussed should have been addressed in more depth. Nevertheless, we are in for some interesting times. The experiments carried out were the stars of the presentation, so my hour was saved.
Fusion is just a pipe dream; cold fusion is the stuff of pure science fiction.
Not quite, Heisenburgs Uncertainty principle means cold fusion does occur occasionally but so rarely as to be useless. Fusion reactors of course reduce the 'uncertainty' but only with great difficulty.
24:45 No longer experimental? So we already have working power plants?
Ehhhhhh, no
The elephant in the room, however, is the fact that 80% of the fusion energy (14.1MeV) is actually contained in very fast neutrons.
14.1MeV is 10 times as much as the average energy of neutrons produced in a nuclear reactor.
But they act as if this is not a problem. These neutrons can smash any nucleus and thus generate radioactivity.
A fusion reactor with 5 GW of fusion power would blast away 4 GW in highly aggressive neutrons. Each of these neutrons could theoretically produce a radioactive nucleus.
If you think about it, you can only shake your head.
Fission Suppressed Fusion Hybrid - Q4 to Q8 - A fission-suppressed fusion hybrid is a proposed power source that combines nuclear fusion and fission processes. The idea is to use high-energy neutrons from a fusion reactor to trigger fission in non-fissile fuels, such as U-238 or Th-232. The neutrons are then captured in the blanket, converting the "fertile" material into fissile isotopes. The fissile material is then used as fuel in conventional nuclear reactors.
The demonstration was flawed: we had air, followed by butane, followed by H2-+ O2. A fair comparison would have been to have the butane-laden balloon contain the same oxygen load as the hydrogen balloon.
Also, plasma is not the "most extreme form of matter". To date - and that might change - the "most extreme form of matter" would be the Bose-Einstein condensate.
And ---- A condensate can form at ANY TEMPERATURE - it just easiest to do at near absolute zero
SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR GENERATING COHERENT MATTERWAVE BEAMS
Patent No.: US9,502.202B2 Lockheed Martin Corporation Filed: Dec. 28, 2011
And ... Coherent matter made from electrons at least is what makes ball lightning, and as Ken Shoulders showed in his 1987 book "EV - A Tale of Discovery", J.R.Roth said in his 1995 ANS journal of "Fusion Technology" article and Dr. Takaaki Matsumoto said in his 1999 book "Steps to the Discovery of Electro-Nuclear Collapse" - The Natural quantum coherent phenomena of Ball Lightning is the answer to how to make fusion work... That is what a real spherical tokamak is trying to achieve.
So, without a single number reflecting the current issues with fusion achievements (like resourcing tritium fuel, or a need to increase efficiency of the most advanced techonlogies so far - 300 manifold, i.e. to make the process three hundred times more efficient to become viable) - this is just a sale pitch, a call for investors to pour into.
yup - im 20 mins in and as far as i can tell, this is a sales pitch. Terrible "presentation".
I tuned out after a few minutes. No new information here, just cheerleading.
It really was shameful
I am not a huge fan of fusion power being privately owned. The hard problems had been once more solved with public funds only for then a few profiting more than others. All the time we are speaking about how our systems are not sustainable and with this we may get a technological band-aid for one major problem, but it is addressing the underlaying sociological issue, that brought us here in the first place and will do so again if only with other reflections and maybe obfuscated as we now may think all is well. A(G)I will increase these preasures more and maybe will help us understand them, as those but then are also privately owned i am not sure it would solve them either. Aslong we are not in an utopia, we are obliged to avoid dystopias.
In a post greenhouse gas world energy supplies initially at least will need to be a public or publicly subsidised good.
This is simply because fossil fuel energy has relied for its profitability on externalities, a tragedy of the commons where polluting green house gas is dumped into the atmosphere at no cost.
@@jimgraham6722 Neither would i bet on that nore see it the same for every nation. Though the pressure from the rich in that direction exists for many decades. That public goods and services would be privatized. With a lot of detremental sideeffects like polluting the environment and only if that gets too bad then suddenly it is a public problem again.
In a post energy scarcity world, in the beginning you are right the public has to chime in to finance not just one but many ractors that in case of a ITER version will be massivly ressource intensiv and costly. It was said with the current anual production of some of these rare ressources you could build maybe *one* per year, that is if the usual use could then be ignored and nations would not compete for those specific ressource to stockpile them and eventually build such a reactor. So if the emerging political 3-5 blocks want peace, they need similar agreements as done within the EU so it would not be fought over these ressources just on an international level.
In any case, if we really do not want a group of maybe 50 to 100 very rich being our new kings, we better make sure fusion energy is not privatized! This is a key technology of longterm control. People need to realize this.
@@kinngrimm It seems small ie. affordable, fusion reactors might just be possible, but they will need almost magical technological breakthroughs so I am not holding my breath.
You are right, fusion power plants based on the ITER development pathway will, initially at least, be hugely expensive and produce only modest power. They will be the preserve of the wealthiest countries.
another spreadsheet. another presentation.slide. brill
I really think DFR(dual fluid reactor) would be impressive in the meantime, it has the potential for huge EROI without too much hazzle, fusion is really hard and even harder to get any ok-ish EROI.
interesting talk, i like the idea of fusion, i think it will be great if and when it gets going, so when i say this was a bit of a propaganda lecture on behalf of the industry, rather than a science lecture, don't get me wrong, just making sure the RI is aware it's not fooling anyone.
I was waiting patiently through the long intro for the technical content but then it went straight to conclusions 🤦♂️
Yes. Nuclear fusion in 30 years. Like always
That's it, why not jump on cynics bandwagon. It gets the upvotes, at least.
@@fred_2021 Acknowledging reality is hardly cynical. Commercial fusion is 30 years away barring a miraculous breakthrough
FISSION NOW for bulk electricity. Fossil fuels for transportation
This is a great video as an intro. I wish it was more in depth.
Interesting even if she didn't say that fusion is for now a research area and not a technology close to application.
Without having any Idea of baseline cost of fusion power, it is stated other sources are not economical on slide "why we need fusion" ....probably similar kind of projections were given when funds for fission reactors was sought
3:50 where do you get the fuel from ?
Tritium is very hard to get … 😅
We need a form of nuclear energy Fusion or fission at which we have abundent fuel + easy to get…
Hello, This retired EE would like to know what portable storage systems are in the works, what power grid is planned to carry the green transition and what security methods will protect it. Shalom/gw
thank you
I'm wondering if we're on the cusp of shortcutting the path to clean fusion entry via solar panel innovations on the horizon i.e. the huge fusion reactor at the center of the solar system. I'd bet on the solar panel industry innovating cheaper and better panels faster than the fusion reactor industry can solves fusion technology hurdles.
Commercial fusion is still a faraway goal for now/long term investment, wind, solar and battery already viable solution for now
solar panels have a finite life. Therefore we will have a huge ecological problem in 25 years or so as the recently installed panels are replaced en masse
Just need to work out how to get them to work at night or when it is cloudy.
@@RonTodd-gb1eo Battery tech is improving but the Lithium load on the environment is brutal and not talked about enough.
[7:58] Well... I wasn't really convinced hydrogen has a bigger energy density per volume than butane. Neither by the bang, nor by the flame. 🤔 Could it be because H₂ has 0.01 MJ/L and C₄H₁₀ has nearly 0.04 MJ/L?
The hydrogen was mixed with oxygen and the butane was not.
The false claim that fusion “broke even” recently is a patent lie.
It surpassed energy directed at the target but it came nowhere near the energy required to power the lasers used for the ignition pulse.
The lack of journalistic rigor needs to be called out.
Total and utter lie
Yep, Q needs to be 30 to 50 for a viable reactor, not 1 and also not just 10 (which ITER is aiming at AFAIK).
Also because the energy was emitted in 11 billionth of a second there's no way to use it.
@@martinwilliams9866 That and the laser lenses quickly get covered by ejecta... Oh, and what to do with the fast neutrons?
I didn't read the recent result as false. I read it as one of the many baby steps towards usable energy. That's the way it was presented in what I read. Who exactly was lying? Someone on the internet perhaps?
fascinating
We might get slightly more energy produced than input - but the cost of the energy inas well as the deuterium don’t come anywhere near close (yet) to the VALUE of the energy produced
We nowhere near even have that. They managed to produce more energy THAN WHAT GOT DELIVERED ONTO THE FUEL MOLECULES, but that's still orders of magnitude less than what it took to power the actual apparatus that produced fusion - if they pulled the plug the reactor would have stalled instantly...
The deuterium is better used as heavy water in a CANDU fission plant.
The neutron as waste is am interesting concept. Why isn't it possible to capture and focus the neutrons produced to do something else in the reaction
When it comes to big technologies, the private sector never innovates, it waits for the public sector to develop a product, it invests in some niche projects to lay down some patents, some "public-private" operations to funnel government grant money into their coffers while securing rights to the discoveries, and it lobbies to ensure that it has total control, and then the private industry does the bare minimum in providing service to maximize its profits. Private investment does indicate that fusion is nearing the product stage the same way leeches indicate the presence of blood.
Your right I've never seen this venue used for this kind of commercial pitch before. It's PPI with a government ideology of using tax payers money to promote commercial interest, who then make the public pay for it AGAIN.
I didn't know you were a nuclear physicist with a degree in political science.
@@davidharvey3743 Of course, anyone with a different opinion than you is way out of their depth.
NIF in the USA is a military camouflage project for
the development of laser weapon systems under
the guise of scientific energy research.
22:10
/There is no commercial fusion at the present time\
Sparking a fusion reaction and keeping it going needs immense temperature and pressure, and will require technology that is yet to be invented.
A dream yet to be realised.
10 years, 100 years or 1000 years.?
Didn't mention general fusion or that other US company that catches the magnetic impulse off a small fusion reaction .
Anhilaition is with the highest with the energy density. Matter + anit-matter = clean and clear energy
A solution was devised by J Norman Collie et al, on 23 July 1914 at Imperial College London, they were researching Helium & Neon, but encountered the " ball lighting" effect, noted but it was ignored, it has been stumbled upon at least 5 times in the last 130 years, 100's of science at least 5 cleverest, minds concentrate their lives working on it, that includs Tesla & the Manhattan Project. Last Frday Cambridge University confirmed that it could be done.
42:30 Not that important, but the comparison with a flashlight did not age well. I don't think that any flashlights using incendescant light bulbs are on the market anymore.
Having worked in this field, I am afraid any expectation of a useful contribution by nuclear fusion to solve the energy problem within this century is futile. The book by L J Reinders is actually pretty solid about the huge issues to be solved.
What are the limits of fusion ? I feel frustrated it was not discussed
Wow👌👌🤗...you have given the best demonstrating platform to the people world wide.
Why is there no mention of Helion's approach? I've been interested in Fusion since 1960 - and with Tokamak -- it's always 30 years away! Helion says it's on track to produce 50MW by 2028, and apparently Microsoft believes them.
We NEED to develop fusion, but the real gains its not be inside our planet...we gone need very few of them here on earth...almost dispensable. but for colonizing space....its a must have.
solar , wind, geotermal, and hydroeletric tecnologies are growing exponencialy too...and, you missed the game changer: the battery industry! we already produce more energy than we need, but we cant store the excess...the energy density on batteries is very close to supply the most needed human necessities, its totaly possible to run entire world on solar panels +batteries (at least it more achievable than fusion in long term) . imagine the gains over more 15 years in development of batteries , solar panel, wind power, energy distribution and eficiency and so on.
its like the Compact Disc (CD PLAYERS) techonoly: makes a tons of promises , costs a lot, have a tons of troubles and lived short, the memory storage industry always have been there, far away in efficiency but growing exponecially until the day that CD´s have surpassed .
i think the same will happen to fusion, i still thin that we NEED to push forward and develop this thing, but the uses are gone be far from here.
Do companies like ITER have small scale working model of tokamak?
Looking at the cost and esp. time projections for ITER getting going doesn't make me as optimistic as this video feels. Think the old saw about "fusion being very close, just another 40 years", may still hold true as in the 50's.
Guess we'll see in 50 years.
so why isn't copper magnetic?
The running joke is that fusion is and will always be 50 years away.
So the basic problem with fission is dealing with radio active materials... so we are shutting them down even though all accidents are with generation 1 power plants and there are generation 3 or more that are much safer and use much more of their fuel. They work now. Fusion, which doesn't work now and even if everything goes well and does work "on time", the first production plants are decades away. Oh, and it requires handling radio active material too. Hey, I have an Idea, while we wait for fusion, why don't we build new safe fission plants that can run on "nuclear waste" (is there really such a thing?) as a backup plan. It seems people are so focused on a maybe in the future that they refuse to look at (or spend money on) what we have that works right now.
Absolutely correct.
My takeaway is that fusion is not gonna commercially viable for the next hundred of years.
You can fuse matter with coherent sound.
I don't think we can project current development into 100 years of future. One year tech evolution these days might already be 10 years of the past.
Well, fusion is hard, much harder than initially thought. But the goal is worth working hard and investing a lot.
Not hard, impossible. Scientists lie to get grant money, sorry to burst delusion.
Fusion requires massive gravity to work. end of story.
@@j.jester7821 thats wrong, we already do it, just not with net engergy gain
Yes - but don't pretend we are doing what happens on the sun when we don't have the gravity. Now, doing what Ball Lightning does - that is far better as J.R.Roth stated in his 1995 article in the ANS journal "Fusion Technology" and as the late Dr. Takaaki Matsumoto established in his book "Steps to the discovery of Electro-Nuclear Collapse" or as Ken Shoulders investigated and published in his 1987 book "EV - A Tale of Discovery"
Not if it is diverting funds and brains away from achievable energy solutions like better batteries, solar panels or clean fission.
You should call out to the moonshine community, because I have not seen any other that can come up with stills with such diversity that still makes the same end product. With some guidance, they will figure out how to build a good reactor.
Good presentation but you don't have to sell me. I'm even pro fission until Fusion is on the grid. Renewables will always be only a fraction of what is needed. Hydro is great too. Tidal? Geothermal?
Can fusion in sun be used for creating electricuty like geothermal power on earth.?
7:10 Bold of them to use balloons of the same colour. Can't help thinking Bill Coates would know better.
There is a serious problem on this planet currently stemming from the side-effects caused by the interaction between click and like driven news media, and over-hyped science. People losing trust in science will definitely carry a measurable death toll. Perhaps the RI could field some experts to cover this issue, addressing such uncomfortable facets of this phenomena such as funding and careers, the influence of industry, the lack of recognition of data that fails to support the initial premise sometimes being very valuable, etc... and perhaps offering some plausible potential solutions. For a video title, I suggest 'Billions of lives saved by Brave RI video team when saving the entire known universe from evil scientific journalism." (;
I’m a bit confused; previous videos I saw from The Royal Institute by scientists were about science, but this is a sales pitch? Why?…
well put
Tidal isn't intermittent for the UK and USA.
When the physicist is a professor and a rocket at the same time 👩🔬🚀
Plasma Fusion is sustained, patented, trademarked, and ready for industry use. It’s called, “The Quantum Kinetic Well.”
All of this and not one mention of Helios and the other similar systems that have achieved sustained fusion and energy capture. How is it that this was entirely missed in this magnificent presentation?
I think heli is more hot air than anything.
Nice ad
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That hydrogen balloon wasn't stoichiometric at all. It was oxygen rich.
Try the same experiment with oxygen and acetylene and everyone in the room will need "ear defenders"
It also produces abundant heat, I believe.
That why 'containment' magnetic or otherwise, is a key technology.
Fusion due to the development costs and the complexity of construction of a presumed working powerstation make fusion look like it will be very expensive. Will only the rich countries be able to afford it? Will the electricity from it be affordable?
ITER is 30m in diameter and surrounded by super conducting magnets near zero kelvin operating in proximity to a plasma at millions of kelvin. Of course nothing could go wrong,. Could such massive plants produce 2-3 GigaWatts and be possible for less than $10bn.
We can understand how sun really work in macro level.
It’s always 10 year’s away.
Nice dress. It's amazing how one white panel with the correct curvature can transform an article of clothing's appearance.
Did they recycle the presentation they gave to their investors? This seemed extremely high-level and vague for RI...
Excellent 😊
Energy is to Fusion research, what Gold is to Alchemy.
Eventually humanity learned how to make gold,
even though it is impractical and not economically viable.
Do a youtube search for "Homage to the fusioneer:
60 Years of Fusion research in 5 minutes."
"Ever strive for the promise of fusion power".
They are wrong, the problem is NOT the technology. The problem is the fundamental physics that tells us there will always be major negative feed back loops if you try fusion in an earth environment, unlike fission.
Take a shot everytime somebody says "plasma".
"Could nuclear fusion energy power the future?"
Absolutely! A distant future none alive today will be alive to see.
There are different types of stars therefore different types of fusion.
Fusion is when u find ur perpetual motion machine and start building it
Containment is a real problem with fusion...In the Sun, containment is achieved by the huge gravitational force.
How to contain continuous fusion is unknown.
Perhaps the magnetic force field.?
Then again how much power will be required to get the power out.?
There is this thing called the Carnot cycle....
The Carnot cycle is an idealized thermodynamic cycle that describes the reversible conversion of heat into work. It is named after Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, a French physicist who invented it in 1824. The Carnot cycle is composed of four reversible processes:
Isothermal expansion: The working fluid is in contact with a heat source at a high temperature, and it expands isothermally, absorbing heat from the heat source.
Adiabatic expansion: The working fluid is isolated from its surroundings, and it expands adiabatically, doing work on its surroundings.
Isothermal compression: The working fluid is in contact with a heat sink at a low temperature, and it is compressed isothermally, releasing heat to the heat sink.
Adiabatic compression: The working fluid is isolated from its surroundings, and it is compressed adiabatically, absorbing work from its surroundings.
The Carnot cycle is the most efficient heat engine possible, because it does not involve any irreversibilities. In practice, however, all heat engines are irreversible, and therefore they are less efficient than the Carnot cycle.
The efficiency of a heat engine is defined as the ratio of the work output to the heat input. The efficiency of the Carnot cycle is given by the following equation:
η = 1 - (Tcold / Thot)
where Tcold is the temperature of the heat sink and Thot is the temperature of the heat source.
The Carnot cycle is an important concept in thermodynamics, and it is used to analyze the efficiency of heat engines and refrigerators. It is also used to define the thermodynamic temperature scale.
In otherwords you cannot get more energy out than you put in....
The best efficiency that can be achieved is around 66%.
Without that gravitational force as in the sun, I suspect it will be impossible to achieve more Energy OUT for the required Energy IN to sustain the fusion reaction..
Fusion / fission is not a heat engine, so the Carnot cycle is irrelevant for it. What matters is, if the output of a self-sustained reaction can maintain the ignition criteria.
In (some) fission this is the case, since it produces high energy neutrons can cause future fission. If not controlled it becomes a chain reaction, that quickly consumes all available fuel (-> atomic bomb)
To ignite fusion we need to look at temperature, pressure and time. (We can ignore time, since we cannot control it) The temperature is self-sustained by the energy released by fusion. For the pressure this is a problem. As you pointed out on the sun the pressure is maintained by gravity. Here on earth we need to put outside energy into the system to maintain the reaction, e.g. though the magnetic confinement or the lasers for the fuel implosion. To do this at the moment we must take a part of the energy produced by the fusion, convert it to electricity, that then drives the magnets/lasers (see fusion energy gain factor).
@@weltuntergang6668
The heat generated by the fusion reaction and hopefully contained and extracted to produce electricity, some of which (i.e. the electricity) is needed to create the fusion reaction and contain the very high temperature plasma must come from a heat engine....called a steam turbine driven by...Heat.
There is a lot of heat about.
The question as to how to extract the heat from the plasma, has still to be answered.
The bottom line is that to get electricity you need a gigantic kettle that gives superheated steam at super high pressure.
It is a gigantic heat engine...
But the talk was excellent.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I do hope, fusion power is a success.
@@weltuntergang6668 In fission you have the difference between a sustained chain reaction and a runaway chain reaction.
@@PMA65537
On Fusion....
Sustaining it, containing it and transferring or getting the heat from it, has still be be figured out.
A very big ask that may never be achieved in a million years.
The Sun can do it, but with the aid of at the very least the gravitional force, which is immemse and can never be recreated anywhere other than in a Sun.
The Sun sustains fusion for Billions of years.
The sun contains fusion with the force of Gravity.
The Sun radiated the heat via electro magnetic waves or radiation.
What have we done.?
What can we do.?
Not much other than toy with the idea....
Almost like Musk who believes mankind's future lies in space.
Ball Lightning. Paul Koloc got close in his 1973 "Plasmak" patent - referred to in J.R.Roth's 1995 ANS Journal of Fusion Technology article and copied without real credit by ENEA in their 2001 "Proton-Sphera" review and proposal.
F. Allasio F., Mancuso A., Micozzi P., Pieroni L., “PROTO-SPHERA”, Euratom-ENEA Frascati, July 2001
Internasional Power Generation
The short version of this video could last 7 seconds: intro (4 seconds), question: Could nuclear fusion energy power the future? (2 seconds), answer: No (1 second). Let's meet here in 30 years and talk about it.