Nuclear Fusion: Rapid Progress for Inertial Confinement
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 22 мар 2024
- Check out my course about quantum mechanics on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ brilliant.org/sabine.
Nuclear fusion by inertial confinement has seen some dramatic progress in the past year years. After their big headlines in 2022, the National Ignition Facility has managed to pretty reliably reproduce ignition, and more recently, First Light Fusion collaborated with Sandia Labs on a remarkable experiment.
🤓 Check out my new quiz app ➜ quizwithit.com/
💌 Support me on Donatebox ➜ donorbox.org/swtg
📝 Transcripts and written news on Substack ➜ sciencewtg.substack.com/
👉 Transcript with links to references on Patreon ➜ / sabine
📩 Free weekly science newsletter ➜ sabinehossenfelder.com/newsle...
👂 Audio only podcast ➜ open.spotify.com/show/0MkNfXl...
🔗 Join this channel to get access to perks ➜
/ @sabinehossenfelder
🖼️ On instagram ➜ / sciencewtg
#sciencenews #science #technology #tech #technews #nuclear 
Наука
For a long time, fusion energy was half a century away. It looks like they’ve now narrowed it down to just 50 years.
Nah, it’s always been 30 years.
@@georgejones3526And still is . . .
@@rickhill3071
Well for me the answer now is, “Not in my lifetime”.
Oh no! Fusion energy was always perpetually 30 years in the future. Now, thanks to AI-powered, venture-capital-backed startups, it's perpetually 5 years in the future.
@@richardmetzler7909AI-powered startup makes no sense lmao
Inertial confinement is how I treat myself when I get home from work at the end of the week.
😂
With a liquid lubricant !
Wow you’re just such a hard worker
Mama kudos for saying that, for spilling.
You win the comments today!
The quartz knows what it did.
lol best reply so far.
But all they got was iron pyrite.
Ah ,the BFG
only nowit's 'friendly'
Any Doom players will know what it really stands for!
Seeing it as an acronym, I suddenly realize exactly why they named it the big "friendly" gun 😅
@@johnpearcey It's history repeating itself. This is the prototype for what will eventually become the portable hand-held BFG9000. It is the attempts to achieve fusion that will rip open a portal to a dimension full of demons.
Unlike the BFH which hasn't changed. 😂
@@MrWill-ng8dg "big friendly hadron?"
Thank you for mentioning the inefficiencies of the supporting equipment! The media tend to leave this out to make fusion research sound more exciting and closer to commercialization.
Fusion at powerplant scales just isn't physically possible.
The entire thing is another hilarious screw up from the physics community, like string theory.
Edit: True net energy fusion. We have created fusion in these setups.
she mentioned the input ones, but how to you capture the output? neutrons be like:
I agree that there is some overhype about this, but there is a good reason why they use the scientific gain and not the engineering gain. NIF is an old facility with an efficiency of less than one percent, but modern lasers can achieve 10-20% efficiency. So just by changing lasers, your engineering gain changes. Its obvious that the goal of anyone trying to do fusion is first to get the scientific gain above unity; improving the laser efficiency is an endeavor of another kind.
All the money going into fusion research should be going to fission research
@@DrDeuteron - These are good points. There are various methods proposed for capturing the energy. You made a good point about capturing the energy contained in the 14.1 MeV fusion neutrons. They are neutral and poorly interact with matter, passing through much of the shielding and causing the generation of neutron activation isotopes as they pass through some of the surrounding materials. The rather vague plans often call for capturing a significant portion of the neutrons to generate tritium (3H) in order to generate the fuel required for some of these reactors.
Years ago I knew a guy that worked for US DOE on the inertial confinement fusion project. We used to play Starcraft, and then Warcraft together
Based
Cool anecdote.
Nice story about autism.
Did you play "Irradiate the Containment Structure"?
If you wouldn't have played so much games with him, maybe that guy would have cracked fusion.
Also: this isn't about you, it's about science.
The joke at 3:40 is freakin' brutal. I love Sabine. 😂
Yes, I'm sure she takes cheap shots like this all the time at democracies, but she would never take a cheap shot at any dictatorship, because that's not "funny." Her science is excellent, but her politics and morality are clearly stinkers when she takes cheap shots.
Some small objects become big objects with Final Solutions.
@@TheNameOfJesus > she would never take a cheap shot at any dictatorship
Assumption is yo mama
@@onebronx then that mama be BIGG.
@@nihalbhandary162 Eyyyyyyyy
Yep, BFG stands for “big friendly gun”. 😂🤣
I lol'd myself when I heard that.
Big Fusion gun ?
big fUCKING GUN@@jondonnelly4831
If it delivered torque, would it be the Big screwing gun?
@@jondonnelly4831 Is a reference to DOOM franchise videogame, if came from a shooting videogame you can guess what does the "F" means.
"If you ignore all the energy you put into the lasers..."
"Aside from all that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?"
I think the point is that the lasers themselves deliver less energy to the fuel than is releases. Meaning that, for example, to run a 1W laser, they're using 10W of power. If they could run a 1W laser on 1.2W of power they'd get more energy out than in.
The NIF uses old and inefficient lasers. Current generation lasers use about half the power, and are expected to continue to get more efficient. That is why the energy put into the lasers is ignored.
The laser efficiency is literally the easiest thing to solve because they only need a factor of 100 improvement. Raising the cycle rate by 100,000 and reducing the fuel pellet cost by a factor of 100,000,000 (not a typo) are the insurmountable obstacles which make ICF a deadend.
@@mal2kscPerfect, now in stead of it using 126 times more power in than out, it is only 63 times more power in than out. Should be easy! Only 20 more years.
@@EngiRedbeard it's nonsense and you can't use it for anything useful.
Good coverage! I work on high pressure physics and I collaborate with a lot LLNL scientists.
One small note in case anyone is confused: the lasers are fired at the gold cylinder and not directly at the pellet to produce a more spatially even drive. When the lasers hit the gold, it creates a bath of X-rays that are much more spatially uniform than the lasers are, which leads to a more symetric implosion. Other places study direct drive which is a bit more efficient in terms of laser energy to pressure, but it's much harder to avoid big instabilities forming.
I found this description to be accurate. Thank you.
Perhaps you can also explain where the nuclear fusion INPUT energy is measured. Is it the UV energy that strikes the interior of the hohlraum, the X-rays that are emitted in multiple directions from the inner wall of that hohlraum, or the X-rays that end up directly impinging upon the fuel capsule?
@@vernonbrechin4207 in the past they have used consfuing definitions of "energy in". But for these recent breakthroughs, "energy in" simply refers to the energy emitted by the lasers, all of which is deposited onto the gold hohlraum.
This would be the UV energy you mentioned
All this is useless for a power plant. This work is intended to make nuclear w-eap-ons with the need for a fission core. Need the x-rays since they have sufficient momentum to compress the pellet high enough for fusion. Same in a thermonuclear device which x-rays compress the lithium core that has conversion to tritium from the fission emitted neutrons.
@@guytech7310 *without.
@@vernonbrechin4207 they have used different definitions in the past, but for these recent experiments, energy input is defined as the total UV energy emitted by the lasers.
I actually applied to first light fusion about 5 months ago when they were first starting up in Oxford, I didn't get the job but I can't believe how quickly they have made progress. Good on them!
edit: I have no idea what tf happened in the comments.
Not sure why but I find something evil in their eye 4:40
@@DR_1_1
Do you? Really...? 😂😂
Ah, a 6 monts old alien-worshipping, anti-science channel. Surely not a bored troll...
@@marrs1013 Are you on the sauce, I have no "channel", i.e. no videos,, and I opened my YT account more than 5 years ago.
Sounds like you are projecting your own mental deficiencies...
@@DR_1_1
It says 'Joined 6 months ago'.
@@DR_1_1right, even though you can only see 3 pixels of their eyes lmao
I bet you already know why they use quartz, but what you said was more entertaining.
Piezoelectricity is
Electric charge generated in certain solids due to mechanical stress.
So the voltage output depends upon the pressure.
I used to use that method to alter the shape of the object for my atomic force microscope to see individual atoms and push the atoms around.
The most famous example is when IBM moved some atoms into the shape of the letters. Then they scanned the surface to see the letters. Fun stuff for physicists.
does the effect get saturated? I mean 1850 GPa is a lot, I think. Pascal is an SI failed unit.
@@DrDeuteron good question. A solid state physicist could answer that. Assuming that the fusion people know what they are doing, I expect that it doesn’t saturate.
The solid state will compress a long way if the temperature doesn’t turn it into a plasma.
I know that many units are unpractical, but if you had to work with maybe 8-10 different systems just because one was handy for something, I now consider one system better.
As a graduate student in the 80s sometimes we would have to spend almost as much time reconciling units as solving the physics.
So did they use crystalline quartz or fused quartz? I don't recall any mention of it, but fused quartz is not piezoelectric, while crystalline quartz is.
@@sonicspring6448 yes, I think the electric effect depends on the crystal structure. I think fused quartz has no crystal structure.
But we really need a solid state physicist here. They are common as it has the most people. However, they stay busy as they earn the highest salary.
Maybe they should try wintergreen life savers instead of quartz. 😊
All fusion concepts share a common problem:
Every fusion reaction consumes one tritium atom.
The reaction also produces one neutron which can be used to produce a tritium atom.
But this can not be done with 100% efficiency and therefore it is very difficult if at all possible to make a fusion reactor self-sufficient regarding tritium production.
That is an excellent point. It is never mentioned by those who claim the fuel is as plentiful as the hydrogen in sea water. The current market rate for commercially produced tritium is approximately $30,000/gram and is expected to get more expensive over time. Most nuclear fusion experimental facilities are not even looking into generating their own tritium source. The ITER's massive cost overruns have resulted in them pairing back in their tritium generating experiments. That experimental facility is likely to not begin operating until after 2030.
This is why I've always touted bypassing fission and fusion and going straight to anti matter we already have cooling and I want to say protonation as anti protonation just doesn't feel right :) then you can just react it with regular hydrogen which would yield orders of magnitude more energy and there are a load of emissive source reactions to get the requisite components without using any heavily toxic or polluting materials well pre reaction that is obviously gamma rays for days after :) .
@@leonmusk1040 - My guess is that you've been steeped in much scientific fantasy literature. Typically, engineers who are tasked with coming up with commercially practical solutions, don't rely upon such dream concepts.
We already have anti hydrogen production albeit not any where near commercial amounts but it's a thing unlike unity in fusion and the anti matter being produced is expensive but it's being produced as a by-product not a specific product and it's 20'000 times higher output.@@vernonbrechin4207
The Sun produces fusion via gravitational confinement.
We've been able to produce net power (not just ignition) from fusion since 1952 - the problem isn't to get more power out than we put in, but to *continuously* get more power out than we put in. I don't see how any of the current inertial confinement results bring us any closer to that, than Ivy Mike did.
The project is to develop nuclear b-om-bs with a fission core. its useless for electricity production, but the publis is so dumbed down they are clueless.
Ivy Mike is gonna put the hurt on Jake Paul.
Yep, thats why all ICF is just atomic bomb research.
Well the shots can be theoretically repeated much more easily than bomb blasts, doesn't that count at all? Repeated with high enough rate is almost as good as continuous. The results which do not destroy the building do indeed bring us closer to that, than results that destroy the building.
@@u1zha Nope. The target pellets have to be precisely aligned. Even temperture varations cause alignment problems. NIF is a project to develop pure fusion nuclear weapons.
Now it is only 20 years away! Thats great progress, since it has been 30 years away in the last 60 years.
Thank you for all the science and education, I love hearing your thoughts on things. Mr. X
I'm telling you, it's only 5 years away.
35 years away, take it or leave it.
Isn’t it always :)
I'm sensing sarcasm, but I'll bite...
I wonder how close we are to self-sustaining ignition, since that's one of the critical requirements for commercial fusion power production which hasn't been achieved yet and, as far as I can tell, no one's building or planning lab machinery for it yet.
@@bobbabai - The name 'National Ignition Facility' is deliberately misleading. Most people's view of ignition is something like striking a match head, where the fuel is fully consumed within a few seconds of the reaction starting.
In the announced, December 5, 2022, NIF experiment the detected fusion reaction lasted for approximately 0.000,000,000,08 second and then the reaction pressure resulted in approximately 96% of the expensive fuel being blown away from the reaction center before it could react. The calculated fusion energy produced was about enough to boil two cups of water. The laser input energy was more than 100 times greater. It took about a week to set up the experiment.
As it has been for the last 35 years… 😂😂
Thanks for the really good news. We've had really good news about nuclear fusion yearly since 1950. Maybe we should have a really good news holiday. I could celebrate that.
lighten up
The sudden reality check 3:40 is genuinely so funny that I couldn't control hysterical laughing.
Hard to imagine how one would scale up inertial confinement to grid production levels.
I think Inertial confinement can be a initiator stage for something else.
But if the Sun is already producing fusion for free, instead of spending all these thousands of dollars into all these worthless scientists, why aren't we just sending some rockets with cables and connect it to our power grid?
Like seriously, am I the only one here that has a brain??
But if the Sun is already producing fusion for free, instead of spending all these thousands of dollars into all these worthless scientists, why aren't we just sending some rockets with cables and connect it to our power grid?
Like seriously, am I really the first one to this about this??
But if the Sun is already producing fusion for free, instead of spending all these thousands of dollars into all these useless scientists, why aren't we just sending some rockets with cables and connect it to our power grid?
Like seriously, am I really the only one here with a functioning brain?
But if the Sun is already producing fusion for free, instead of spending all these thousands of dollars into all these useless scientists, why aren't we just sending some rockets with cables and connect it to our power grid?
FLF has always been my favourite startup. Their long format presentations are awesome.
Ask yourself the following. Have they yet achieved any significant amount of fusion reactions? When do they expect one of their future machines to achieve that? How much time to we have left to turn this 'Titanic' around with a large fleet of economically and commercially practical nuclear fusion power plants?
Even back in the 1970s, I read popular articles that suggested inertial confinement showed more promise than magnetic confinement. I wondered then what I still wonder now: how do you scale it up? How do you manufacture and deliver tiny fuel pellets to the reactor, and how do you harness the energy that comes from blasting them?
And want all those answers in a 10 minutes youtube video, or willing to take a few doctorates in physics?
Good questions. Keep a skeptical eye on the 'breakthrough' announcements. The LLNL began its laser fusion experiments back in the late 1950s and several generation of large machines followed that initial research. NIF was expected to achieve a break-even fusion energy reaction by 2012. It failed by a factory of at least 10. It took a decade of alterations before they achieved their December 5, 2022, experiment.
@@marrs1013Just asking those questions brings no harm
@@MadsonOnTheWeb
I didn't say you mean harm, just trying to make you fathom the complexity of the problems you are 'just asking' about. Those answers will make a few Nobel-prizes, I reckon.
@@marrs1013I get what you mean, it is indeed a such complex subject. Still, his question has some context for him though. I think it is still fair to ask.
Another great content of you, Sabine. 😊
Clear and concise for a introduction to the topic... Thank you🎉
😲 Fusion news! My favorite! Thanks, Sabine! 🙂
I really hope I live to see how fusion changes the world... 🤞
Only 10 years away. First time I heard that was 40 years ago.
I'm personally very hopeful about the Wendelstein stellarator. The idea to make the plasma confinement exploit an extra-twisty Mobius strip in order to cancel out the effects of drift is exactly the sort of clever work I think we need to develop real fusion.
Stop being hopeful and use naturally hot radioactive material to create heat, not naturally cold water and stupid amounts of electricity... Advanced (Thorium++) Breeder Reactors please.... Trillions spent on useless fusion cons, still only a few 10s of billions spent on Breeder Reactor development... The 'produces less waste' claim is rubbish if you do a WASTE TO WATTS generated ratio.
--
The problem is, for decades and decades these experiments have produced lots of Tritium, a highly radioactive, nasty substance useful for nukes and that's about it. Ideally, almost all gets turned to helium which is useful - but that's far from what happens.. Add in trillions of Watts and dollars WASTED instead of generated and FUSION IS THE DIRTIEST NON-ENERGY SOLUTION bar none.. Fusion makes coal seem green. It's not even better than burning rainforest in a power station.
Stellarators will probably be the best option long term, but they are pretty far behind other approaches currently.
Great Video ! Met Prof. Gerald L, Kulcinski that led a gang of three at a space conference in ABQ (ISDC 2001) that included one geologist... They talked on mining Oxygen and Solar Wind Gasses from the Lunar Regolith. They were from the UW-Madison and had a small Fusion Machine using He3-D reaction ! The Geologist Prof. wrote about this mining operation in the October 2004 issue of PM ! (He is now retired and consulting at UNM on extra-terrestial rocks) tjl
One thing to keep in mind is that the DoE here is not only is their intent not to create a power plant, but the purpose of their research isn't just pure physics research of fusion, they do it for nuclear weapons development.
Thank you for the video.
Oh my goodness!! ❤❤ Love this info!! Thanks again for the useful knowledge ❤
Yes! It's nearly as useful as astrology videos for me!!!
Wow the 'Z Machine' sounds really cool and I'd love to hear more about it
'Actively engage with the topic.' Your chastisement is sending me down to the workshop to machine some more wood !
Thankyou Sabine.
One can actively engage with a video. How well one retains information from watching a video depends on: how funny it is, how interesting it is to you, how much you think it relates to you and what you care about, etc. All of those triggers actively engage a viewer with a topic. It is true that a comprehensive learning approach should include practice, however.
3:03 BFG - best weapon in Doom :)
Came here for the BFG jokes too xD
This means we can have fusion power within the next 30 years (as promised consistently since the 1950s)
I'd say that with contemporary advancement in physics, engineering and most eminently AI, that promise might be much more concrete now
fusion is already happening 30 light-years away from us, in sum stars
People said exactly the same about AI up to 2023
Well prox 7 light minutes away in our sun. @drgetwrekt869
The inevitable moronic platitude appears again
Good talk Sabine
I love your channel friend 😐♥️
Thank you for organizing it for us.
Thanks for another informative video. It still seems to me that practical fusion power is 50 years away as it has been for the past 70 years. We'll see what the situation is in 2074.
right when they get the ITF working, it will be overtopped by rising sea levels. Murphys Law on the global scale.
Connect a few dots to understand what's happening here:
1. Sandia Labs is essentially a US Air Force weapons lab.
2. Remember the "bright pebbles" idea from the "Strategic Defense Initiative," colloquially known as "Star Wars"? That's where the whole idea comes from.
Therefore it's essentially a military, not a fusion project.
You mentioned the energy necessary to produce the 2.05 MJ of laser at NIF, but you didn't mention how much energy stored in the capacitor bank of Zeta is needed to achieve these shots. This yet is another hyped announcement from one of the many companies trying to draw private investment. As it's been said many times, it isn't so difficult to produce fusion from electric power. The problem is to produce electric power from fusion. And this is far from the way to do it.
It is true that both the NIF and Sandia Labs are primarily funded as part of the nuclear weapons complex. That complex is not part of the U.S. Air Force which is a branch of the U.S. Defense Dept. The U.S. nuclear weapons complex is primary operated by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) which is a branch of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
*brilliant pebbles
The "brilliant pebbles" idea had nothing to do with fusion. It was about basing small anti-missile projectiles in orbit around Earth.
It is exactly as easy to generate power from fusion as it is from fission, or natural gas. And it is done in exactly the same way.
@@stargazer7644 - Please provide some examples where nuclear fusion reactions are being employed on Earth to generate more than one watt-hour of electrical energy per day.
very interesting! Thank you!
I had no idea Sandia Lab was working on this, and they're practically right down the street from me.
Thank you! It's a nice distraction on this stressful morning... 😔
Everyone is in your corner, my friend.
I hope that people understand that laser induced fusion facilities are now and have always been about refining computer models for *_weapons design_* .
Net energy production is not what these are funded for and never will be. Tokamaks, on the other hand, are designed for continuous burning of fuel _and continuous harvesting_ of energy.
Thank you for pointing this out. Few fans of this technology are aware that both NIF and the Z Machine have been primarily funded as part of the U.S. DOE's nuclear weapon program. The announced Dec. 5, 2022 experiment included a weapons related target sample. The management of such facilities have become masterful in obscuring such facts when presenting to the press and the general public.
I'll second that! Sad that so many commenters are unaware of the connection to the military-industrial complex that finances this kind of research: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#Nuclear_weapons
Fusion reactors don't "burn" fuel any more than fission reactors burn uranium.
@@danielh.9010 - Thanks for the Wikipedia article reference. Very few fans of this technology bother to seek details beyond the sales pitches that are so alluring.
FYI: NIF is doing research for the military (DoE = Department of Energy, ask Wikipedia) as testing nuclear bombs got 'out of fashion' and they want to validate their computer models.
Also, at the moment it takes them about a week to create a target with the required < 10nm surface roughness (some ten atom layers) which they would have to produce at 10 pieces per second for a reactor, at a price for few cents each :D
Super exciting stuff! I would love to see a video on the proton21 lab and if we can believe their results or have others reproduce them
Well to call it repeated and reliably we would need to know how many shoots haven't worked inbetween. Not to mention they have to come down to 1/sec so quite some way to go. But still making progress is always good.
The NIF is capable of about one shot a day, max. But they rarely get even close to that. It was supposed to achieve the 'break-even' shot announced on Dec. 5, 2022, by 2012. It failed by a factor of at least ten then. It took a decade of adjustments to achieve that original goal. The announced experiment took about a week to set up. The fusion reaction lasted for approximately for 0.000,000,000,08 second before the force of the reaction blew the remaining 96% of the expensive fuel away from the reaction center. Keep in mind that the facility has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research tool. The announced experiment was simply part of that program.
@@vernonbrechin4207And they blame bitcoin miners for electricity shortages! :D
Great work Sabine. I am a high school physics teacher and love your videos.
It would be lovely if you covered more LENR type fusion designs. There is a considerable amount of emperical evidence one can examine if one chooses.
Anyways, appreciate your work and anyone who took the time to read this. 🍻
The fun thing with shooting quartz is the piezo effect gives immediate confirmation of impact.
These are encouraging developments. Big "Friendly" Gun...any bets on what it's called internally?
BFG 9000
Initially the SpaceX super heavy-lift launch vehicle was known internally as Big F***g Rocket. They were unsuccessful in convincing observers that the F actually stood for Falcon, as in their smaller rockets. So they renamed it Starship.
Big Fusing Gun?
@@NicholasW943 Well played
1:58 “NIF wasn’t built to produce power, only to study.” Thank you! Audiences can finally stop yelling at the TV. That’s why we love you, Sabine.
We are all too tired of talking heads mangling our respective fields
Yeah but it's still a dead end 50 years of wasted of money. You can build a fusion device on your desktop called a fusor that is more energy efficient.
@@phookadude - Please state how much total energy is required to operate such a fusor compared to the energy produced in the fusion reaction. The fact is that their fusion energy output is minuscule and they can't be scaled up to anything that can power even a cell phone.
@@vernonbrechin4207 Exactly the point. The NIF system will never produce power, and will never be economically viable. The fusor has the same problems. The NIF is far more efficient than a fusor (although even the "10x input power" is generous when you look at the energy losses at generation) couldn't find numbers sorry. There are so many problems with laser confinement, like scaling and extracting the energy and cost. The NIF is a giant 4 billion dollar fusor.
This is the best news I have heard in a while, I hope this leads to workable fusion for the energy grid. That would be rad.
*Gray
No, it probably wont. This is basically fusion bomb research and funded by the military-industrial complex: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#Nuclear_weapons
What most people don't realize is NIF isn't working on power production fusion, it's nuclear weapons research. At one time, a few decades ago, they were seriously considering it as power production, but now, it's about weapons research.
The other thing most people don't realize is this, DoE's main job is to take care of the US' nuclear arsenal. There's an opdiv (operating division) that all they do is deal with maintaining the arsenal.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Sandia labs have always been primarily funded for issues related to nuclear weapons. It is true that about two decades ago the LLNL had a project that explored the eventual commercialization of their work with ICF.
I would be willing to bet "most people" who have actually heard of and know what NIF is, do know its purpose.
I have two questions.
Is there any value to the mass created in these fusion trials?
If you insert a photon to reconnect the beta particles of Tritium reforming an electron, is this considered fusion even though you haven’t combined neutrons and protons?
Not sure what you mean. Loosely speaking, mass is converted into energy, not being created. However for some sorts of fusion, the products can be used for other things, eg Helium. Then again the amounts that are produced are so tiny you can't do much with it.
As to what's call fusion, there needs to be some nucleus involved.
An electron is not a compound of beta particles. Electrons and their anti-matter versions, the positrons, are what we call beta particles. When it comes to decay.
In the case of the NIF experiments, utilizing the fusion of deuterium and tritium nuclei, the resulting mass is helium-4 nuclei. As Sabine pointed out the resulting helium quantity is so minuscule that the product isn't useful. It simply interferes with the reaction if it isn't removed rapidly.
I’m holding out for a Mr Fusion.
Impressive confidence for a video about physics.
Sabine is a master of deadpan humor
Inertial confinement looks so much more uncomplicated than magentic confinement, and it already works -- sadly in weapons only.
I see a parallel between inertial vs magnetic confinement, and and piston vs turbine engines. The former burns fuel in discrete amounts, yielding short bursts of energy at regular intervals. The latter burns fuel continuously, yielding continuous energy output. While the latter is definitely more efficient, the former is a lot easier to get working.
@@solandri69Piston engines are more efficient than turbines though...
Uncomplicated because there is no thought put into power extraction? I think that's the big problem with inertial confinement, how are you going to use it for power generation
@@Takyodor2 turbine has multiple rings of propeller blade which allow it to extract all the torque possible from pressure difference in the passing air.
@@Takyodor2 Small scale yes, large scale no.
big friendly gun? is that a reference to Doom?
Ancient device from when games came on copied floppy discs
@@keithsquawk computers back before the internet was something else
In New Zealand, Openstar Technologies is currently building an HTS levitating dipole magnet to utilise magnetic confinement to achieve fusion.
I am so relieved we didn't get a video clip of Queen's "Under Pressure" every time Sabine mentioned "Pressure" in the video. Also, thank you for the Nuclear Fusion news!
What a missed opportunity for a short Queen "under pressure" clip...
ah, nice to know I was not the only one thinking in that direction
😅
Eh. Her natural humor is dry, nihilistic, and sarcastic.
Adding in quick little pop culture clips and random gags feels forced when it comes from her.
I prefer the style of her older videos that are less... youtubey.
At least the information she presents is still quality
@@Ri-ver
Then u havent watched enough Sabine videos
3:39 "Americans really like shooting with high power at small object, don't they?" HELL YEAH, WE DO!
I guess schools are filled with small objects
I was just waiting for this comment! 😂
Another 100 to 150 years, we may get there.
When I was working as a doctoral student and research assistant in Math during the early 80th, a college was working on the numerical math, needed for inertial confinement. On day, he brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate, that researchers in the US had achieved a „real“ breakthrough, because they „reached ignition of fusion“. I thought: „Whow! We still try to calculate and they have done it!“ But when I had a closer look at the paper, I found that their COMPUTER MODEL just reached „ignition conditions“ before it finally collapsed. The problem with the numerical calculation and the technical realisation (Laser beams or heavy ion beams where suggested at that time) are somehow closely related: You have to obtain a very, very unstable equilibrium over a perceived infinite time Intervall. It is pretty much like balancing on the point of a needle. Nevertheless, I at least have experienced a constant flow of remarkable breakthroughs for at least 40 years now. But the outcome was somehow disappointing: Just one single bottle of Moët.
Always 20 years away.
I'd say that's becoming more and more concrete with the advancement in supportive fields such as physics, engineering and AI
May be 20 years, but not with this technique. There is no way to scale this up to nuclear plant. You nead a steady reaction to use the heat.
But this time its different…
Always 1 AU. 😉
@@gottfriedmayrock1967
I've heard there's a new approach for harnessing energy from the system via electromagnetic fields instead of heat.
Energy to heat to motion to electricity is so 1866 😂
Big friendly gun. Happy American noises
G-rated version of Big F@#king Gun. Lol
@@LawsonBarnette giggles in american
@@shawnflynn5391 Giggles - that's my nickname for our vice president. Lol
@LawsonBarnette oh man, that made me laugh so hard bro
Crazy to see my field in one of your videos.
Got it. They in the future devise some sort of quantum knots. Maybe these twisted strands contain the protons in a very tight grid so that they fuse! Make such an ordinary knotted net and twist it with some sasers or masers.
If Sandia Labs is in the Unites States, I rather think it's called the Zee-Machine and not the Zed-Machine, or I'll abide by whatever they call it.
That's an American thing, goober.
Zed is the 'correct' pronunciation in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, India, Australia, and New Zealand, and zee is 'correct' in the United States.
I worked at SNL for 6 years. The Americans called it zee machine. Everyone else called it zed machine.
IBM makes a mainframe called the z16.
@@Ri-verThanks for confirming that the proper phonetic is Zee-Machine. Pronunciation is respectfully determined by how a person, or company, call themselves.
@@jwplatt9233 That's just silly. Say Iran out loud right now to yourself. Say Paris. There's a high likelihood that you pronounced it like eye-ran instead of ur-aan. And I'd be shocked if you pronounced Paris as Paghee.
Again, the engineers I worked with *at SNL* used their native pronunciation of the letter Z. There's no company mandated pronunciation, and I think you would be the only person who would *ever* think to correct someone on that
Okay Sabine, why the same shirt lately?
Have you heard of a washing machine?
All her Ad outfits have to match her vlog outfit.
@@leialuminous Have you heard of style?
@@aniksamiurrahman6365 have you heard of fragile masculinity? Why is style relevant to nuclear fusion?
All evidence points towards her having access to a washing machine.
I used to pass the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab nearly every day in the 80s. They were working on fusion research before then. So they have been working on it for 50 years there. It’s the same or worse for the toroidal version. And it’s all at least another 50 years out to get something that can generate electricity by some means. And 50 years is a very hopeful estimation. LENR (so called fusion)is a much better possibility . There have been so many lies told about LENR not working, and so many labs that have confirmed that something is going on leading to energy production in LENR. One lab was the naval research lab that concluded something was producing energy, but they could not produce it consistently enough.
30 years out. Will check back in a few years
I've been a Subscriber from the beginning ! I've joined & paid $ for more than a year ! Now I realize I can No Longer get the weekly video (which I watched religiously) unless I pay You $30/month.... I can only watch "Daily" with 2 Ads from RUclips & one inside from you, which is about 5 mins of ads for 5 mins of news !!! And I CAN'T see the weekly program, which brought me to your formally wonderful channel in the first place . Shame on you ! I QUIT !
Yeah, but it’s all gone south hasn’t it. :(
Sabine no longer represents why I came to her channel in the first place. A cool physics girl that stood against the establishment and sang great techno pop…
@@DaduM282 exactly ;)
Why should she be ashamed, it's her channel and she decides. She just put the long weekly science news into short daily parts, and she explained a dozen times why. You can watch them in the playlists whenever you want, it's even free. Just for a special weekly summary you need the level "seriously" for about 24dollar. In first and second level you have early access to all videos and since December last year she's busy to react and answer all comments there. I appreciate that very much. So no reason to be offended. Hope you stay, but if not, all the best.
Just get RUclips premium, it's cheaper, better experience compared to being a channel member
Also sounds like a nice method to investigate generation of metallic hydrogen.
That Brilliant course is very nice. I would like to have it as a book. I study better with a book than on a computer screen. Those computers tend to make me nervous.
not only does NIF not plan to build a nuclear fusion power plant, but their research is based more in the military sector. That's the opposite of "affordable energy for the people".
I am the Sandia-side principal investigator for the FLF shot. Expect more cool results later this year!
Please be concise about exactly what was achieved and what wasn't achieved, such as actual nuclear fusion reactions. Your job, at a nuclear weapons related facility, is to serve the public, not mislead them.
No pressure
We kinda expected more hot results, but whatever floats your boat.
@@vladimirdyuzhev - It is all done in the spirit of experimentation. It is fun working with such machines. The level of the advance is not as important as simply learning more from the questions that are posed.
Two protons do not directly hit each other. If they come within 10^-15 meters of each other the strong nuclear force overcomes their electromagnetic repulsion and binds them together.
Pretty confident we're on the path toward getting net positive fusion.
Yay! Now fusion will always be 29.9 years in the future - progress!
I took my first nuclear engineering class during the 1966-67 school year. Depending on who you listened to fusion reactors were X years away. Some things haven't changed.
Thanks.
I like this, good physics lady professor, excellent
Fascinating indeed... But I still can't see something like that generating energy, Sabine...
Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Obviously not.
This is basically like setting a glass of gasoline on fire and then saying you made huge progress towards the development of the internal combustion engine.
No, you barely explored the most fundamental process behind it.
@@carlpanzram7081 except... the first person to refine and light gasoline WOULD have marked huge progress. Most of your ancestors just played in the mud before the industrial revolution.
There is nothing that fusion promises for some magical future that fission can provide today.
Profitable fusion is pretty much a given at this point. No matter how expensive ignition is, the size of a match does not limit the size of the fire you can start.
The problem I see with both the NIF and the Sandia's Z machine is neither processes are repeatable in a fashion that can give a continuous flow of power. Both can pulse after a prolonged set up but not in a way that can keep a power plant running. The recent improvement of super conductor tape has led to the possibility of a miniaturized version of the ITER large fusion experimental Tokamak. The MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center in collaboration with private fusion startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is developing a compact, high-field, net fusion energy Tokamak called SPARC. SPARC, a smaller-scale version of the planned ARC power plant. The successful operation of SPARC will demonstrate that a full-scale commercial fusion power plant is practical. SPARC is in the final stages of construction and is believed it can achieve net positive energy, based on the demonstrated performance of the magnets. SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025.
"neither processes are repeatable in a fashion that can give a continuous flow of power." - They're aware of that. The reason for that kind of research is that it's fusion bomb research, financed by the military-industrial complex. The research might lead to a "pure" fusion bomb, without the fission stage: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#Nuclear_weapons
@@danielh.9010I am aware of that. It is interesting to note that during the Obama Administration, who didn't have much enthusiasm for nuclear bomb research, the charters of the United States nuclear labs had to reflect more green goals to justify their budgets. For example Sandia lab now says: "The Z machine’s role in solving the world’s energy challenges is directly tied to its fusion potential. With growing concerns about the health of our planet and escalating energy needs, the development of fusion technology is especially promising." Sabine Hossenfelder stated that the NIF and Z machine has made "Rapid Progress for Inertial Confinement" implying some practicality at energy production. Though their research is vital to defense interests, I don't see much utility in commercial energy production by the techniques they practice.
Fusion will be a game changer when perfected. Nuclear fission is safe and can supply cheap plentiful power with a small footprint. Let's build new state of the art safe fission plants to reduce carbon emissions.
Fusion is the energy of the future - and that is where it will remain. Fusion is always just a decade away.
Actually, it is always three decades away. This period of time is called the fusion constant.
Sabine says:...if you ignore the losses in the lasers.......and the optics......and the distribution gear.......the whole frecking thing
Could you maybe make a video about what the next steps are, i.e., how does this become scalable? I don't want to be the Malthus of fusion but it doesn't look like a linear transformation will help. What sort of progress should we watch out for?
Impressive. But as a (retired) engineer I am skeptical. Reliable energy production requires not just 1 pulse per week, but a large number of pulses per hour. I have worked on a similar subject (but much, much, smaller scale); 3/4 of the time was spent on maintenance. And the future material damage by radiation, etc.
"But as a (retired) engineer I am skeptical." - For good reason. It's basically fusion bomb research, sponsored by military-industrial complex: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#Nuclear_weapons
NIF exists to study nuclear weapons; their experiments are not directed at electrical energy production. Useful electrical energy production by fusion is a long way off (if ever).
Despite having no chance of being economically feasible, I find this stuff pretty awesome all the same :)
Laser inertial confinement is for H-bombs, not energy production. NIF is doing great work, but it isn't getting us closer to fusion power production. Also, 14 MeV neutrons!
We are still decades away unless one of these startups has an unimaginable breakthrough. What all of them are claiming isn't significant. So far, ITER is where we must go. It is the necessary next step.
I love our Sabine but I do prefer the longer format.
A year ago you made a video about the current results of research into cold fusion. It found that there was definitely something happening there, but exactly what was still unknown. I wonder what the Zap machine would do if it used a piece of palladium metal bombarded with deuterium as a target.
One needs lots of pressure OR lots of heat to create lots of motion to make atoms ram into each other to fuse. TAE is working on the heat model for aneutronic Boron-Hydrogen fusion. Also, they are trying to produce electricity directly from the plasma, eliminating steam generators.
Most fusion announcements are promotional in nature and filled with misleading hype to attract potential investors. Ask yourself how often they employ the nuclear fuels in their experiments and when they do how much nuclear fusion energy was generated in those experiments. In most cases they are only projecting what they hope to achieve. Ask yourself how much energy to the have to put into their experiments compared to any amount of nuclear fusion energy that they measure that is generated by those experiments.
You missed saying that Inertial Confinement Fusion produces too little energy and costs too much per target to be economically viable.
Nuclear processes (transmutation) take place in electrical discharge (lightning).