I hope you enjoyed the tour of ITER! Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: go.nebula.tv/upandatom Watch my exclusive video on whether math is invented or discovered: nebula.tv/videos/up-and-atom-is-mathematics-invented-or-discovered
I enjoy hearing about what we're doing about nuclear fusion. It's been a topic I've read about since I was a lad 50 years ago. Even then, I had no idea that we'd been thinking about it since the early 1950s. Last December's "baby step" fusion success gave me such hope. We'll get there in the end. It will STILL require solar and wind and fission power to continue to advance and grow until we can completely arrive at nuclear fusion power for everyone. I hope you'll see all this come to fruition before too long.
@jade ... Did you ask if the 50 MW input is the actual power consumed by all the equipments used in the reaction, or is it only the energy that is injected in ... Because every equipment actually has some degree of loss .
2:48 Seems like you don't watch Kyle Hill. Nuclear waste is locked up in thick containers, while fossil waste is in the atmosphere, in your lungs, giving you cancer. And also lasts for thousands of years. BY FAR nuclear energy caused the fewest deaths per TWh out of ANY source of energy, even when you account for accidents. So don't make it out to be a bigger problem than it really is. 5:25 I would direct you to Thunderf00t for that.
I thought haha that's funny Grady and Jade both release a video on ITER on the same day, what a coincidence. Excellent pair of videos, I watched Grady's first though
When I began my physics degree I was discussing the potential of nuclear fusion research with one of the professors acting as a departmental advisor. He told me that "to be realistic", there was not likely to be any payoff for "at least 25 years", but the work that was going to have to be done, was going to have to be done by _someone_ That was in 1984 Let's just say that I feel for your guide
@@mfmageiwatch We get ITER in 2035, DEMO construction will have started by then making it complete in 2050. By then partner's will have already planned their own reactors so that will bring us to 2070 by the time they start construction, giving us a 2080-2085 timeline for grid power. So pretty good estimate! That will be 200 years from discovering quantum mechanics, and 150 years from discovering fusion is possible, to toasting my bread with fusion energy. Not bad!
Whenever I see tours of places like ITER or CERN or the Chernobyl Containment building, I just think about the tradesmen who do stuff like wire the lighting or tile the floors or put up the drywall. Like, how surreal to do such mundane work in buildings with such non-mundane purposes.
That's exactly how I felt when I toured Fermilab. Especially as, at the time, it was being converted into a facility for Proton Therapy-between the high tech of science fiction and the sterility of a medical facility, it was jarring to find that the _real magic_ is mostly exposed ductwork, industrial equipment and control technology from the 1970s.
I think it's cool to have the perspective of someone like Grady, the civil engineer. It's easy to focus on the insane physics behind what's going on, but making something that's in real life takes a lot more.
Having worked with a lot of cabling installers in the past, I'd suspect you're overthinking that question. Most of the time a subcontractor only gets called in for a piece of the overall work scope, and so "I'm doing drops in what's going to be a mega-security switching headquarters" loses head space to "I have x drops to run today and this block to punch tomorrow" or whatever. That said, I did have an opportunity to do a summer internship at Los Alamos National Lab, where the junior guy on the team only had a masters degree in EE and so he was the experimentation tech. Now, he got to do surreal things like building simple charging circuits from scratch for a 25kV capacitor. To him every day was a wondrous adventure of creation, while to a network installer it's probably not much worth thinking about due to the nature of the assignment.
A lot of the promise of these commercial ideas is that they're going to beat the ITER timeline (even NIF gets on that hype once in a while). Whether any of them will pan out remains to be seen of course. Certainly nobody would expect another Tokamak to beat ITER but that doesn't mean alternate methods can't be achieved faster. The ones that try to combine inertial and magnetic confinement (ie: NIF and ITER) could potentially do better than either mode separately can manage. Or maybe not. But as long as rich people keep thinking there's an RoI to be had and are willing to put lots of money toward these projects, I'm not ruling out the possibility that one of them might succeed. Still won't happen fast enough to "solve" climate change though. Even the most promising (aka: hyped) tech managing to meet its goals wouldn't be commercially viable for another decade or more, and then we have to figure out how to build several thousand of them (none come close to ITER's designed power output so that 600 number would be drastically lowballed). Oh, and we'd still have to deal with the fossil fuel industry doing everything in their power to prevent these things from succeeding at a political level on top of everything else.
It should be noted that the nuclear waste and meltdown issues with fission are a consequence of old and aging reactor designs. We have (mostly theoretical) Gen IV reactor designs that would be physically incapable of melting down while simultaneously burning waste as fuel, and recycling what is left on site. We are not gonna run out of fuel any time soon, and it is much simpler and cheaper technologically speaking, the problem is mostly of PR and lobbying (as usual).
Loved the video, and that you got such an awesome opportunity that I'm so jealous of! One note I'll add is on the nuclear fission dismissal at the beginning. Obviously, fission is a viable form of energy generation that's used on a large scale all over the world. Per unit of energy generated, it's the safest way to make electricity, including renewables (double down: that thing that lots of people are afraid of? It's safer than wind energy). And there's a solution to nuclear waste that's been known since the early 60's: reprocessing. Basically, at the end of most fuel cycles today, more than half of the initial fuel (U-235) is thrown away, along with about 75% by mass U-238, which could be made into new fuel. Only 5% by weight of the contents of dry-cask waste disposal actually contains fission waste products. If you're going to do a video on fusion, it might be beneficial to do a follow-up on fission, highlighting where it could be made better. Just a thought :)
100%. China knows this which is why they are building loads of reactors over the next 10 years. Plenty of interesting science going on in the Uranium mills!
When Richard was talking about retiring before plasma will be made, it made me think of that proverb “Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit”
This is a really cool look into how the project is going! Though I would heartily recommend some sort of image stabilization - at some points the footage is really hard to watch because of the shaking.
It's important to remind people that the "2 megajoules" of energy input by the National Ignition Facility (to get 3 megajoules out) is the laser energy. It took 300 megajoules of electricity to generate that 2 megajoule laser shot. So, it's not a gain of 50%, it's a loss of 99%.
It's also important to rember, as very clearly stated in the video, that we're taking about an experimental reactor made to understand how to build, hopefully, a real reactor capable of producing energy. ITER has been made to research and understand, not to become a power plant.
Nuclear fusion will indeed create nuclear waste. Those "blankets" will absorb those stray neutrons, however, as well all know from nuclear fission, sometimes those neutrons will cause spontaneous fission if it’s absorbed by an atom thats no longer stable with that extra neutron.
Great video! Very interesting insights. I really hope this technology brings peace, like Sabina said. Science is always for good, an achievements this size can only bring people together. Small correction: at 17:25 you say 4 K = -296 °C, but it's actually - 269 °C. You got your digits mixed up! Below the absolute zero is definitely colder than Pluto :P
Bigger correction that 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 such 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 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.
Just to clarify, the fusion breakthrough last year only technically produced positive energy. The power of the lasers output was only 2 MW, but to actually run the lasers took 100MW.
That is the big problem with communication by fusion researchers. They tell us "the reactor had more output than input" but they do not emphasize enough that this is only concerning the actual reactor and measured at convenient forms of energy, not the achievable result for a power station. To have a usable power station, the efficiency of the reactor still has to be improved by at least two orders of magnitude, if not more.
5:23 this is simply not true, although journalists tried to "sell it" this way. The "net positive" result was only achieved through "creative accounting" - if you consider only the energy of the laser blast vs. energy of resulting fusion energy. But if you consider also the energy needed to ramp up the lasers it turns out they got back about 1% of the energy.
One thing to comment on: If an alien civilization meets us, there's gonna be 3 possible scenarios in which it can occur, us going to their home stellar system, them visiting ours, and both of us meeting each other during our respective colonization efforts. Any civilization that can visit other star systems is advanced enough to harness something as basic as nuclear fusion, otherwise they would not get to be an interstellar species in the first place. On the other hand, if they're a not-so-advanced species, and we reach them first, then obviously, they might not have cracked the nuclear fusion engineering marvel. This is the beauty of physics, whatever mathematical framework we build for quantifying the observable physics, the physics is not subjective, rather it's an universal observable truth. So, if fusion is harnessed by any sentient civilization, it's going to be done exactly this way, because physics is not different for different observers -- one of the vague postulates of the theory of relativity.
Awesome collaboration. Thank you so much for the edification, and helping to set realistic expectations. I'm very excited for this, even if I never get to witness it in my lifetime.
I started Naval Nuclear Power School in 1970. Our physics instructor was very sure we were going to have practical fusion tech by the year 2000. So now we are 23 years past that prediction and we still are running experiments to TRY to create a sustainable, controllable fusion reaction. The other point that needs to be addressed is that fusion reactors, when they become available, cannot replace all other energy systems. As was pointed out in the Practical Engineering video, it takes a LOT of megawatts to run the support equipment, form the containment field and then create and heat the plasma. Only when those conditions have been met can we start to inject the lithium and Tritium needed to create actual output power so that the fusion reactor facility can make enough power to run itself. A few emergency diesel generators will not be able to do that. You will need fossil fuel and/or nuclear fission plants that CAN be started up with backup diesel generators to get things going. So if the the climate change crisis is really as bad as is claimed by many, we had better start building nuclear fission power plants NOW and use them to replace the fossil fuel plants in use all around the world. I say that because fusion power is NOT going to be coming on line in time to meet the predictions of the climate change crowd.
DOA. Fission is too expensive & Fusion (if it worked) would be 50 times more expensive than fission. The cost of ITER (500 MWth) will be between $45B and $65B, and still won't have the means to produce electricity or breed tritium.
Among other things, I think I find one of the most impressive things is that a bunch of countries that can barely get along managed to come to an agreement to have this jointly built and have their scientists and engineers works together on it.
I'd kind of nitpick that fusion bombs also produce energy gains of greater than one - so if "fusion history" includes weapons then the US National Ignition Facility's test last year wouldn't have been the only time in fusion history that output was greater than input. Only time in fusion reactor history maybe, not not in all of fusion history.
Yeah its a bit of a sloppy wording. She (and most other people these days now that fusion power is all over the hype train) mean the first _controlled_ reaction with net gain.
@@altrag Even then, it's still sloppy wording. At NIF, they had 2.05 MJ of laser energy, and got 3.15 MJ of energy output. That is only a gain relative to the laser input, ignoring the energy required to create the laser beams in the first place. The lasers required around 300-400 MJ of energy to produce the 2.05 MJ laser input. Gain = Ouput/Input = 3.05/400 = 0.007625. That's still FAR from being actual energy gain of over 1, by a factor of over 131.
@@lukas_berger Hence the "with net gain" caveat. But yes that's still a little confusing and there was a lot of science reporters at the time who went out of their way to clarify that distinction (how many were successful at their attempts is an exercise left for the reader). But that's a fairly typical "science doesn't always use words in their colloquial sense" issue that plagues all of the sciences regularly, whereas mixing up nuclear energy vs nuclear weaponry is a fairly large distinction relative to simple definition misunderstandings.
Well done, as always. I did enjoy the part where Richard put the concept of powering the world with just 20% of fusion produced electricity into perspective. Truly a goal none of us are likely going to be around to see achieved, if it happens at all.
I had no clue it would be so big. Seeing the beginnings of the plasma ring drove that home. 😳Also, remember in Sagan's "Contact", The Machine? This is that kind of scale. 😅
Correction for your information about the gain of 1.5 at Lawerence Livermore's National Ignition Facility in 2022. The achievement is called "Ignition" and it means they released more energy from the fuel pellet fusing than they delivered to the pellet. Because lasers are not 100% efficient in converting electricity to heat or pressure, in this case, the experiment required many times the energy released. ITER hopes to solve this problem by scaling up and we'll have to see if that works. The reactor was expected to take 10 years to build, and ITER had planned to test its first plasma in 2020 and achieve full fusion by 2023, however the schedule is now to test first plasma in 2025 and full fusion in 2035. Thus making very real the joke that Fusion is always just ten years away.
So helium is the 'waste' product. That means we can take the tour and bring back home a few souvenir balloons. They could print on them: "I visited Iter and all I got was this lousy balloon!" Yes, I did catch that they need lots of liquified helium for cooling. So you can't call it a waste product.
Even the net positive of the laser fusion breakthrough is not taking into account the power the lasers use to shooting the laser ... Its net positive only when you take the energy that hits the target ..
Excellent presentation here! Just two things short of being perfect: *1.* The 3 heating methods mentioned seem to be designed to work on plasma. However, the fusion fuel obviously isn't yet a plasma when it is first introduced into the reactor. Which heating methods do they use to turn the fuel into plasma in the first place? *2.* The extremely long construction time and extensive supporting facilities for ITER seem to suggest that the logistics for a fusion plant would dwarf that of a fission plant, possibly even taking a century just to build?! Looking at all the bureaucratic and political mess around fission plants today, this could be even worse for a fusion plant. There is a very real possibility that even if technical feasibility doesn't kill fusion, plain old logistics, politics and the like might still doom it in the end.
I'm all for science for pushing the boundaries of what we know and can do, but as the scientist says at the end, it's going to be vastly undersized and colossally expensive, then times 600. $20B and growing and 10 years and growing - would be far better to carpet areas around the world with solar and battery farms. Up and running in months, safe, cheap, well-understood, easy to repair, recyclable.
With fusion, why can't we use the energy more directly? Seems like it still ends up being used to heat up water, make steam, power a turbine with a generator and then get electricity.
@@ZainPhilippe no, but why can't the circular rotation of the plasma, which is held in place by strong magnets, not also be used to rotate the magnetitic field on a generator? That's all the steam is doing in a turbine (powering the rotation).
Hope you liked your trip in France :) For the question about maths, I'd say that althought we invented maths the way it is, if math were invented differently it would have other objects and other reasonings but would still be able to describe how to make a fusion reactor...
(math major here) I agree. The current form of our mathematics is just "what follows logically from this set of axioms". Due to how our mathematics were invented, these axioms apply well to physics. Having different mathematics doesn't change anything to reality, and while the mathematical abstractions used to create the reactor would be different, the physical principles would still be the same. Their mathematical abstraction of gravity may be different but the actual phenomenon is the same. Of course some specifics may change because of the different point of view but, assuming they have nuclear fusion and we haven't missed anything huge, they should have something similar to ITER
Something I've always wanted to ask a fusion engineer is: once we have this technology fully realised, would the fusion if properly controlled allow us to create specific elements? To clarify, would it allow us to fuse specific elements in a way that allows us to produce heavier elements, things like gold/lithium etc and if so, wouldn't this be true alchemy?
The short answer is no. Fusing hydrogen to helium gives off the greatest amount of energy. Fusing heavier elements together requires a lot more energy input and yields less energy output, so it's far more difficult to do. And once you get into elements that are heavier than iron, fusion actually *costs* energy overall - that is, the entire process doesn't produce any energy at all, it actually absorbs it and stores the energy as extra mass in whatever elements you produced. Even in stars, most heavy elements like gold aren't produced via fusing lighter elements together but rather from merging (exploding) neutron stars where you don't start with any atoms at all, just an incredibly dense soup of neutrons.
Really enjoyed this video. Came from practical engineering. Love your explanations and interjection of additional details along with great visuals. Excited to go through the other videos. :)
Please visit some of the private fusion companies too please, they are more... optimistic, but the physics they explore are pretty cool. Helion Energy, General fusion, Commonwealth fusion systems, Zap energy, Tokamak energy and so forth
Your guide is wrong about the private companies. They are doing pretty well and quite far along for being so young. It's because they use other types than traditional tokamaks. But it won't take 5-10 years, it's maybe 15-20 years. But not 60 years
Most people who work at ITER haven't actually looked into what the private companies are doing, because they don't have time to look close enough, and it's so complex.
My favorite thing about fission and fusion is that we have all this high level science that goes behind the basics of the energy generation and at the end of it, we run a steam turbine like from the 1700s. We still haven't figured out a way to get the energy out more efficiently to generate electricity, it's ridiculous.
The bit about how generating temperatures close to the sun requires surrounding them by temperatures colder than Pluto blew my mind. Like, I get how it's explained, but that kind of logic is so opposite to what I'd think instinctively.
Excellent, Jade. I visited JET a few years ago, and although it was brilliant science it was clearly far too small for net energy generation. The main problem seemed to be that of extracting the heat without everything melting. I intend to visit ITER next summer.
Nuclear fusion has actually performed many tomes so far, and it has always produced (mega)tons of energy! The trick is to harness the energy instead of blowing it all around ;)
The one time it got more out than put in was a bit misleading ya it put out more than put in with just the lasers but that didn't include any of the other systems that will have to be included to consider it a net gain
Richard laid down the gauntlet. He started by saying that it won’t start till after he retired. Then he said that it won’t be viable till 2080. You Youngin’s need to step it up!
The helium ash and most of the heat will be dumped into the diverter, which is the ring-shaped ash-tray at the bottom of the vacuum chamber. At 11:23 you can see it for a second in the drawing (the CGI animations are lacking that part unfortunately). I think they have that part of the process pretty much figured out, as they already did it in JET at a smaller scale. Also, tokamaks are not made for continuous heating anyway, because the central solenoid needs to recharge periodically (after inducing lots of current inside the plasma, which is not just for heating but mainly for stabilizing the plasma). For an easier-to-operate (but harder-to-build) alternative concept that could work continuously, see stellarators such as Wendelstein-7x.
The real challenge is actually: how do you get rid of the helium (alpha particles in this case) before it becomes detrimental to the reaction of deuterium and tritium?
I think it’s important to note that the National Ignition Facility experiment achieved only 1.5 times more energy generated than reached the target. Personally, I’d say they didn’t break even when taking into account the losses from electric grid to lasers. All of the 192 lasers consumed 100 times more energy than was generated. Still important progress nonetheless! I just took issue with you stating they broke even.
If aliens are able to visit us then the odds should be 'fairly good' that they have also cracked how the stars work. The question whether aliens would use their mathematics or ours doesnt seem as important just as long as we can all agree that stars and their fusion reactions are real and very much exist out there. It would simply task any alien civilization with the challenge of making sense of it, somehow. I think in the end of the day it is more likely that aliens use a technology of energy production that we can easily observe in the universe, rather than something more exotic and mysterious.
This might be a stupid question, but - when the reaction reaches the "self-heating" phase, how do you shut it down? For example with a nuclear power plant you can remove the fuel rods. What's the equivalent here?
I admire the work that is being done, and I specially admire Richard's frankness. But honestly every time I see anything about fusion I become more and more convinced that battery storage technology becoming viable for baseload is a million times more likely and economically viable than fusion ever will be.
For me the highlight is using magnets weighing tons to contain the plasma based on plasma's own magnetic property. All the time i was looking for this only...how are they going to contain it ? Read about ITER in 2008 and now i am looking at this in 2023. I am jealous of the people involved with it.
Thank you for this! For Richard Pitts, a quote: "Blessed are old people who plant trees knowing that they shall never sit in the shade of their foliage." I remember getting excited enough about nuclear fusion and the tokamak to write an essay on it during my senior year of high school, a few years before Reagan and Gorbachev met on the topic. I didn't win the essay competition, and I was more interested in optical physics for my own postsecondary work, but the excitement is still there.
fantastic video jade. I LOved, it. keep up the good work on your VidEos, i'm sure You enjOy making them. i was Unsure about how fission worked, PLEASE make more of the greatest viDeos AbouT sciEnce, makes ME happy seeing fellOw scieNcE goers make stuff they kNow very well to Interest others into Getting into the topic. and again, Hearing abouT fission is mindblowing, thanks again.
Nice video, however I have a very important point which I made also in Lex Fridman interview with fusion physicist Dennis Whyte: about fusion vs fission. Namely that the current problem with fission is the cost and complexity of fission power plants. The cost of fuel is minimal. But the problem is the same with fission. We're still running a heat engine. Even if fusion produces 100x more energy for its fuel or reactor size, and costs nothing, you are still dealing with same size of heat energy. Even though there may be less waste, the cost and complexity of fusion power plants will likely be greater (?). It is far from guaranteed the fusion will be cheaper (and thus consuming less resources including labor) than fission at least when it is introduced. In fact with prediction markets and market futures, you could actually bet real money on that, helping to allocate scarce resources. The problem with long-lived waste can be minimized with reprocessing and Onkalo-type storage facilities. Most long-lived isotopes can be converted to short-lived ones. And there's very little real danger from nuclear accidents relative to other forms of power. Don't get me wrong I'd love to have fusion working, but Like Richard said, we need base load capacity for until 20XX (2080?), and nuclear fission is great for that. In reality it might be easier to market fusion than fission to public because of (less of) perceived danger. Also a good reason to investigate fission as well is that Gen IV reactors are evolutions of proven designs, and can possibly create also hydrogen which at least our future airplanes will likely use due to (lack of) emissions. Also there's the fact that either with fission or fusion, there's a like gigawatts of waste heat which could actually be used. I did once back of the envelope calculations and basically I'm really curious why most of that is basically wasted. Although district heating only type of nuclear power plants are being made. Could also be used as process heat for factories. In any case, its really nice to see people working hard for better future as you said! Also many discoveries regarding plasma physics and superconductors are made in the side. :) I think what Helion is doing is very interesting as well. Its not a heat engine but electricity is created directly. Very clever. Let's see if that works. In general I'm happy to see many different approaches to fusion. Even if one fails, others might succeed.
It’s possible to hype up fission without misrepresenting fission as dangerous. The only dangerous fission meltdown was chernobyl. Fukushima, as a contrast, was so safe that an orderly evacuation killed a lot more people than would have died if they’d not evacuated (that’s including deaths from cancer decades later)
SPARC currently being constructed in Devens, MA will produce the same amount of fusion power as ITER, but it uses much more powerful magnets to make it much smaller, cheaper, and easier to construct, and they expect to finish it next year. :-)
Props to Richard and Sabina whom's heads are torqued to spec. Treat the public like civilized, capable, thinking humans and you'll convince them to support your endeavors. Very different from the media or any lofty marketing. Awesome video Jade.
In our college days, we did visit one of these tokmak prototypes that happened to be nearby, and the size of that was still huge as a research candidate. I can only imagine this is like 100 times bigger than that one with all those supporting equipment. If anyone is wondering, the reactor is only turned on a few times over the years to collect the data as heating it up and running constantly is a big challenge even at this date. And we need more and more data to make decisions thats in favour of reducing this supporting structure and exploiting natural phenomena to make the process more efficient. I'm just glad to see almost all countries trying to make this thing a reality no matter how big the challenge is. We humans are stubborn, and stubbornness in these things is good for humanity!! Looking at the progress, this will take 5 more years before it's operational as they will have to tune it and then be able to collect real data which would take another 5 years to be analysed and make progress from findings as modifying these experiments comes at cost both in terms of time and budgets.
Greetings from a viewer of Grady's! Dunno how your channel escaped my notice all these years, but I'm here now with some catching up to do! Being a sci-fi nerd, the discussion of initially heating the plasma caused my mind to leap to all of the small "fusion" reactors we see in sci-fi, and how that future could come about. That's a lot of infrastructure to put on everything that uses fusion. To borrow a term from the power producing industry, I wonder if that means we'll end up with a few large "black start" reactors that produce the plasma, which "fuel" smaller reactors with that plasma already in its self-heating state. If not every reactor needs to be ITER, that would really help with building at scale. Thus, leading to the logical result: fusion-powered steam trains! 🚂😁👍
Heh it would be a ridunculously complex connection between those reactors... To transfer any plasma outside the containment which is already mightily hard and betrays predictions at times.
@@u1zha Fair point, but I'm sure jet engines and fission could have had similar things said about them once upon a time. Metal forges already have the ability to move molten metal using nothing but magnetic fields. While the penalty is obviously much higher in the event of a malfunction, I would expect something like that could be the start of a means to move that plasma.
Since these powerstations will be so expensive dont expect the price of electricity to go down, nuclear energy is even cheaper and so far it has not had a great effect on the electricity price.
This is such awesome information! You are a very nice and energetic narrator and teacher on here also. Great video! I’ll see what else I can learn on your channel.
Really interesting video! My final year project at university is a CFD analysis of heat transfer within the breeding blanket. Really interesting to see all the work that's going on at ITER, looking forward to when it becomes operational!
Are you collaborating with any breeding blanket researchers for that project? My colleague/internship advisor recently finished his dissertation on obtaining heat transfer correlations via MHD simulations of breeding blankets, so just curious if there's any overlap.
Don't forget about the net positive output in the reaction vs the net positive output in the power plant. The latter has not been achieved yet, and it would take at least an order of magnitude larger output to be reached.
We can already harvest nuclear fusion with the use of solar panels and arguably wind turbines for a fraction of the price. Even though fusion would be an elegant solution imo we need to reduce CO2 emissions right now, not in 80 years. We have the "intermitten-problem" with renewables which needs to be addressed with more ressources for better H2 production from electricity and possibly new ideas along the line.
While they are aiming for 500MW of "fusion energy" output, how much of that will be thermal energy that is actually collectable via the "armor blanket"? Modern PWR fission nuclear generators are about 33% efficient at converting their heat energy to electricity. But those contain their heat energy in fairly small area of a specific thermal conductor (water in PWRs.) Tokamaks have quite a large area the thermal energy dissipates over. They're putting 50MW in, but if they aren't very efficient, they might not actually get that much out of it.
In my opinion aliens may have similar machines, because engineers don't follow abstract mathematical laws, they follow the laws of nature. For example if we boil water we will have increased volume or pressure and we will have always the same result no matter what mathematics we are using to describe or understand this phenomenon. I think basic algebra and geometry are real discoveries, but their are parts of mathematics witch were invented. For ex. the number of "i" and even the square of negatives are just inventios, because we don't have real world equivalent of those. And mathematicians are not even hiding this : they say "imaginary numbers"
29:31 it's not about how you calculate it (human made math), but the possibilities of the universe which allow us to do these kinds of projects, which aliens will also be constrained by.
[Richard]🤝🏻[Improbable Matter] It's just his segment just _screamed_ that channels (fusion) content. Even though some people in the comment section doubted him some, I feel like I've enough projects like this to know that it's better to err on the side of "it _won't_ be here on time" or at the very least if it is... it will likely be in a manner in which we don't expect...
3:25 Just because the fuel might be cheap the energy produced might not be cheap. Honestly not much about fusion energy looks cheap to me. I honestly never have seen calculations estimating the price of fusion energy.
The only problem with this is it an other experimental design to create a sustainable fusion reaction. It is not going to be a working fusion reactor. So far the Lawerence Livermore lab in California is the only facility that has been able to create the longest sustained reaction that created a net energy output and it uses a totally different design. The design at this facility featured has not been able to do this but I wish them the best of luck for the sake of humanity.
At 18:08, where the discussion of neutrons begins, is where "the devil is in the details" needs to be brought up. Indeed, fusion produces neutrons -- a lot of them. And fusion neutrons are very energetic (aka "fast") neutrons. And since neutrons don't have any electrical charge they don't interact very often with other atoms. So the "blanket" Richard describes that will absorb the neutrons is still very much a work in progress. RUclips won't let me include a URL here, but if you google "IAEA neutrons blast fusion materials" it will lead you to an IAEA document that talks about one of the biggest challenges in harnessing nuclear fusion is that of dealing with the material damage caused by all the fast neutrons. And Jade is correct that fusion produces no long-lived radioactive byproducts like fission does, but the lithium which will be part of the blanket will get transmutated into tritium, which is radioactive with a half-life of 12.3 years. So things are not as black-and-white as they might first appear and this is another reason any commercial fusion power plant is still a very long ways off.
I hope you enjoyed the tour of ITER! Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: go.nebula.tv/upandatom
Watch my exclusive video on whether math is invented or discovered: nebula.tv/videos/up-and-atom-is-mathematics-invented-or-discovered
Ooooh! A LEGO fusion reactor at 0:21...
I enjoy hearing about what we're doing about nuclear fusion. It's been a topic I've read about since I was a lad 50 years ago. Even then, I had no idea that we'd been thinking about it since the early 1950s. Last December's "baby step" fusion success gave me such hope. We'll get there in the end. It will STILL require solar and wind and fission power to continue to advance and grow until we can completely arrive at nuclear fusion power for everyone. I hope you'll see all this come to fruition before too long.
@jade ... Did you ask if the 50 MW input is the actual power consumed by all the equipments used in the reaction, or is it only the energy that is injected in ... Because every equipment actually has some degree of loss .
The problem is not technical but ethical.
Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme ~ Rabelais.
2:48 Seems like you don't watch Kyle Hill. Nuclear waste is locked up in thick containers, while fossil waste is in the atmosphere, in your lungs, giving you cancer. And also lasts for thousands of years. BY FAR nuclear energy caused the fewest deaths per TWh out of ANY source of energy, even when you account for accidents. So don't make it out to be a bigger problem than it really is.
5:25 I would direct you to Thunderf00t for that.
Thanks for not asking me to try and explain nuclear fusion, Jade!
?
Hahaha next time it'll be quantum mechanics
Thank you for introducing me to this excellent channel!
I thought haha that's funny Grady and Jade both release a video on ITER on the same day, what a coincidence. Excellent pair of videos, I watched Grady's first though
C'mon Grady! It's a simple explanation.
Phase 1: Smoosh atoms together
Phase2: ...
Phase 3: Profit!
When I began my physics degree I was discussing the potential of nuclear fusion research with one of the professors acting as a departmental advisor. He told me that "to be realistic", there was not likely to be any payoff for "at least 25 years", but the work that was going to have to be done, was going to have to be done by _someone_
That was in 1984
Let's just say that I feel for your guide
My physics professor told me she doesn’t think it’ll be 100% until like 2075? Do you agree? She’s a particle physicist
@@esteban4284 watch the video, it won't be a substantial part of our power grid until later than 2080. Realistically, 2130 or later, I reckon.
@@mfmageiwatch We get ITER in 2035, DEMO construction will have started by then making it complete in 2050. By then partner's will have already planned their own reactors so that will bring us to 2070 by the time they start construction, giving us a 2080-2085 timeline for grid power. So pretty good estimate!
That will be 200 years from discovering quantum mechanics, and 150 years from discovering fusion is possible, to toasting my bread with fusion energy.
Not bad!
your professor is an optimist 😀@@esteban4284
good guess,.... of course assuming thet everything goes to plan..@@mfmageiwatch
Whenever I see tours of places like ITER or CERN or the Chernobyl Containment building, I just think about the tradesmen who do stuff like wire the lighting or tile the floors or put up the drywall. Like, how surreal to do such mundane work in buildings with such non-mundane purposes.
That's exactly how I felt when I toured Fermilab. Especially as, at the time, it was being converted into a facility for Proton Therapy-between the high tech of science fiction and the sterility of a medical facility, it was jarring to find that the _real magic_ is mostly exposed ductwork, industrial equipment and control technology from the 1970s.
I think it's cool to have the perspective of someone like Grady, the civil engineer. It's easy to focus on the insane physics behind what's going on, but making something that's in real life takes a lot more.
The stupid have to be looked after by someone.
Having worked with a lot of cabling installers in the past, I'd suspect you're overthinking that question. Most of the time a subcontractor only gets called in for a piece of the overall work scope, and so "I'm doing drops in what's going to be a mega-security switching headquarters" loses head space to "I have x drops to run today and this block to punch tomorrow" or whatever.
That said, I did have an opportunity to do a summer internship at Los Alamos National Lab, where the junior guy on the team only had a masters degree in EE and so he was the experimentation tech. Now, he got to do surreal things like building simple charging circuits from scratch for a 25kV capacitor. To him every day was a wondrous adventure of creation, while to a network installer it's probably not much worth thinking about due to the nature of the assignment.
Just another day at work
it never ceases to amaze me just how many ways we've come up with to boil water, and just how complicated we can make it!
Dyson sphere + steam turbines. Lets go!!!!
It surprised me that making electricity boiled down to boiling water (not incl wind, hydro, solar)
Boil water... and then boil it some more!
@@ASLUHLUHC3 hydro is still water and solar you can heat water with it 😂
I agree that it was actually very refreshing to see someone involved in the project not get carried away with extolling it. Good on Richard.
I love seeing back of the envelope calculations literally written out on the back of an envelope. 👍
You can build a huge fusion reactor and it costs only as much as 20 miles of new railway in UK? Wow.
Nice to hear that Richard is informed on the subject of energy production and has presented a realistic timeline.
A lot of the promise of these commercial ideas is that they're going to beat the ITER timeline (even NIF gets on that hype once in a while). Whether any of them will pan out remains to be seen of course. Certainly nobody would expect another Tokamak to beat ITER but that doesn't mean alternate methods can't be achieved faster. The ones that try to combine inertial and magnetic confinement (ie: NIF and ITER) could potentially do better than either mode separately can manage.
Or maybe not. But as long as rich people keep thinking there's an RoI to be had and are willing to put lots of money toward these projects, I'm not ruling out the possibility that one of them might succeed.
Still won't happen fast enough to "solve" climate change though. Even the most promising (aka: hyped) tech managing to meet its goals wouldn't be commercially viable for another decade or more, and then we have to figure out how to build several thousand of them (none come close to ITER's designed power output so that 600 number would be drastically lowballed). Oh, and we'd still have to deal with the fossil fuel industry doing everything in their power to prevent these things from succeeding at a political level on top of everything else.
It should be noted that the nuclear waste and meltdown issues with fission are a consequence of old and aging reactor designs. We have (mostly theoretical) Gen IV reactor designs that would be physically incapable of melting down while simultaneously burning waste as fuel, and recycling what is left on site. We are not gonna run out of fuel any time soon, and it is much simpler and cheaper technologically speaking, the problem is mostly of PR and lobbying (as usual).
Loved the video, and that you got such an awesome opportunity that I'm so jealous of! One note I'll add is on the nuclear fission dismissal at the beginning. Obviously, fission is a viable form of energy generation that's used on a large scale all over the world. Per unit of energy generated, it's the safest way to make electricity, including renewables (double down: that thing that lots of people are afraid of? It's safer than wind energy). And there's a solution to nuclear waste that's been known since the early 60's: reprocessing. Basically, at the end of most fuel cycles today, more than half of the initial fuel (U-235) is thrown away, along with about 75% by mass U-238, which could be made into new fuel. Only 5% by weight of the contents of dry-cask waste disposal actually contains fission waste products. If you're going to do a video on fusion, it might be beneficial to do a follow-up on fission, highlighting where it could be made better. Just a thought :)
100%. China knows this which is why they are building loads of reactors over the next 10 years. Plenty of interesting science going on in the Uranium mills!
When Richard was talking about retiring before plasma will be made, it made me think of that proverb “Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit”
This is a really cool look into how the project is going! Though I would heartily recommend some sort of image stabilization - at some points the footage is really hard to watch because of the shaking.
It's important to remind people that the "2 megajoules" of energy input by the National Ignition Facility (to get 3 megajoules out) is the laser energy. It took 300 megajoules of electricity to generate that 2 megajoule laser shot. So, it's not a gain of 50%, it's a loss of 99%.
That is an inside secret of the fusion research community that they keep so well hidden that almost all external journalists and observers miss it...
It's also important to rember, as very clearly stated in the video, that we're taking about an experimental reactor made to understand how to build, hopefully, a real reactor capable of producing energy. ITER has been made to research and understand, not to become a power plant.
Love that you cooperated with Grady! Thank you both! 🎉
Nuclear fusion will indeed create nuclear waste. Those "blankets" will absorb those stray neutrons, however, as well all know from nuclear fission, sometimes those neutrons will cause spontaneous fission if it’s absorbed by an atom thats no longer stable with that extra neutron.
10:05 ... she said it! She said a "buttload"! It's real scientific jargon now lol
Great video! Very interesting insights. I really hope this technology brings peace, like Sabina said. Science is always for good, an achievements this size can only bring people together.
Small correction: at 17:25 you say 4 K = -296 °C, but it's actually - 269 °C. You got your digits mixed up! Below the absolute zero is definitely colder than Pluto :P
Hah, glad I haven't had to scroll much for the correction! :D
I was just about to write a comment about this! I was like -296 Celsius is impossible since absolute zero is -273.15 Celsius.
Bigger correction that 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 such 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 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.
Just to clarify, the fusion breakthrough last year only technically produced positive energy. The power of the lasers output was only 2 MW, but to actually run the lasers took 100MW.
That is the big problem with communication by fusion researchers. They tell us "the reactor had more output than input" but they do not emphasize enough that this is only concerning the actual reactor and measured at convenient forms of energy, not the achievable result for a power station.
To have a usable power station, the efficiency of the reactor still has to be improved by at least two orders of magnitude, if not more.
Well said better than my comment but basically the same i just have the technical jargon 😂
Didn't sry
Same with ITER. The designed power output will still result in a net Q
So it's really easy. We only need to invent a 100% efficient laster.
5:23 this is simply not true, although journalists tried to "sell it" this way. The "net positive" result was only achieved through "creative accounting" - if you consider only the energy of the laser blast vs. energy of resulting fusion energy. But if you consider also the energy needed to ramp up the lasers it turns out they got back about 1% of the energy.
1:10 Let's acknowledge Jade's driving skills for adapting to the right side of the road
One thing to comment on: If an alien civilization meets us, there's gonna be 3 possible scenarios in which it can occur, us going to their home stellar system, them visiting ours, and both of us meeting each other during our respective colonization efforts. Any civilization that can visit other star systems is advanced enough to harness something as basic as nuclear fusion, otherwise they would not get to be an interstellar species in the first place. On the other hand, if they're a not-so-advanced species, and we reach them first, then obviously, they might not have cracked the nuclear fusion engineering marvel. This is the beauty of physics, whatever mathematical framework we build for quantifying the observable physics, the physics is not subjective, rather it's an universal observable truth. So, if fusion is harnessed by any sentient civilization, it's going to be done exactly this way, because physics is not different for different observers -- one of the vague postulates of the theory of relativity.
Awesome collaboration. Thank you so much for the edification, and helping to set realistic expectations. I'm very excited for this, even if I never get to witness it in my lifetime.
I think Richard had a very realistic perspective of this experimental technology. Thank you for this excellent video.
I started Naval Nuclear Power School in 1970. Our physics instructor was very sure we were going to have practical fusion tech by the year 2000. So now we are 23 years past that prediction and we still are running experiments to TRY to create a sustainable, controllable fusion reaction.
The other point that needs to be addressed is that fusion reactors, when they become available, cannot replace all other energy systems. As was pointed out in the Practical Engineering video, it takes a LOT of megawatts to run the support equipment, form the containment field and then create and heat the plasma. Only when those conditions have been met can we start to inject the lithium and Tritium needed to create actual output power so that the fusion reactor facility can make enough power to run itself.
A few emergency diesel generators will not be able to do that. You will need fossil fuel and/or nuclear fission plants that CAN be started up with backup diesel generators to get things going.
So if the the climate change crisis is really as bad as is claimed by many, we had better start building nuclear fission power plants NOW and use them to replace the fossil fuel plants in use all around the world. I say that because fusion power is NOT going to be coming on line in time to meet the predictions of the climate change crowd.
DOA. Fission is too expensive & Fusion (if it worked) would be 50 times more expensive than fission. The cost of ITER (500 MWth) will be between $45B and $65B, and still won't have the means to produce electricity or breed tritium.
Among other things, I think I find one of the most impressive things is that a bunch of countries that can barely get along managed to come to an agreement to have this jointly built and have their scientists and engineers works together on it.
I'd kind of nitpick that fusion bombs also produce energy gains of greater than one - so if "fusion history" includes weapons then the US National Ignition Facility's test last year wouldn't have been the only time in fusion history that output was greater than input. Only time in fusion reactor history maybe, not not in all of fusion history.
Yeah its a bit of a sloppy wording. She (and most other people these days now that fusion power is all over the hype train) mean the first _controlled_ reaction with net gain.
@@altrag Even then, it's still sloppy wording. At NIF, they had 2.05 MJ of laser energy, and got 3.15 MJ of energy output. That is only a gain relative to the laser input, ignoring the energy required to create the laser beams in the first place. The lasers required around 300-400 MJ of energy to produce the 2.05 MJ laser input. Gain = Ouput/Input = 3.05/400 = 0.007625. That's still FAR from being actual energy gain of over 1, by a factor of over 131.
@@lukas_berger Hence the "with net gain" caveat. But yes that's still a little confusing and there was a lot of science reporters at the time who went out of their way to clarify that distinction (how many were successful at their attempts is an exercise left for the reader).
But that's a fairly typical "science doesn't always use words in their colloquial sense" issue that plagues all of the sciences regularly, whereas mixing up nuclear energy vs nuclear weaponry is a fairly large distinction relative to simple definition misunderstandings.
I'm always bewildered by the topic of nuclear fusion but all I end up with is daily confusion. Cheers, Jade! 🥰🤓😍
Well done, as always. I did enjoy the part where Richard put the concept of powering the world with just 20% of fusion produced electricity into perspective. Truly a goal none of us are likely going to be around to see achieved, if it happens at all.
Great video! However, -296 degrees C stood out to me, as being not so correct. :) 17:25
I think so too, 4K should be -269°C (ignoring decimals).
I had no clue it would be so big. Seeing the beginnings of the plasma ring drove that home. 😳Also, remember in Sagan's "Contact", The Machine? This is that kind of scale. 😅
Your intro on Practical Engineering was great: a good mix of concise and detailed.
Correction for your information about the gain of 1.5 at Lawerence Livermore's National Ignition Facility in 2022. The achievement is called "Ignition" and it means they released more energy from the fuel pellet fusing than they delivered to the pellet. Because lasers are not 100% efficient in converting electricity to heat or pressure, in this case, the experiment required many times the energy released. ITER hopes to solve this problem by scaling up and we'll have to see if that works. The reactor was expected to take 10 years to build, and ITER had planned to test its first plasma in 2020 and achieve full fusion by 2023, however the schedule is now to test first plasma in 2025 and full fusion in 2035. Thus making very real the joke that Fusion is always just ten years away.
So helium is the 'waste' product. That means we can take the tour and bring back home a few souvenir balloons. They could print on them: "I visited Iter and all I got was this lousy balloon!"
Yes, I did catch that they need lots of liquified helium for cooling. So you can't call it a waste product.
This is going to be the cathedral of our generations and I am so excited for our children and grandchildren to see and run it.
Even the net positive of the laser fusion breakthrough is not taking into account the power the lasers use to shooting the laser ... Its net positive only when you take the energy that hits the target ..
I found a little error at 17:27, it was said 4K are -296°C but it should be -269°C instead, so just a number twist.
Yh, its fu*ing colder then absolute zero 😆😆
Excellent presentation here! Just two things short of being perfect:
*1.* The 3 heating methods mentioned seem to be designed to work on plasma. However, the fusion fuel obviously isn't yet a plasma when it is first introduced into the reactor. Which heating methods do they use to turn the fuel into plasma in the first place?
*2.* The extremely long construction time and extensive supporting facilities for ITER seem to suggest that the logistics for a fusion plant would dwarf that of a fission plant, possibly even taking a century just to build?! Looking at all the bureaucratic and political mess around fission plants today, this could be even worse for a fusion plant. There is a very real possibility that even if technical feasibility doesn't kill fusion, plain old logistics, politics and the like might still doom it in the end.
I'm all for science for pushing the boundaries of what we know and can do, but as the scientist says at the end, it's going to be vastly undersized and colossally expensive, then times 600. $20B and growing and 10 years and growing - would be far better to carpet areas around the world with solar and battery farms. Up and running in months, safe, cheap, well-understood, easy to repair, recyclable.
With fusion, why can't we use the energy more directly? Seems like it still ends up being used to heat up water, make steam, power a turbine with a generator and then get electricity.
You can't make electricity directly from deuterium and tritium combining together.
@@ZainPhilippe no, but why can't the circular rotation of the plasma, which is held in place by strong magnets, not also be used to rotate the magnetitic field on a generator? That's all the steam is doing in a turbine (powering the rotation).
Hope you liked your trip in France :)
For the question about maths, I'd say that althought we invented maths the way it is, if math were invented differently it would have other objects and other reasonings but would still be able to describe how to make a fusion reactor...
(math major here) I agree. The current form of our mathematics is just "what follows logically from this set of axioms". Due to how our mathematics were invented, these axioms apply well to physics. Having different mathematics doesn't change anything to reality, and while the mathematical abstractions used to create the reactor would be different, the physical principles would still be the same. Their mathematical abstraction of gravity may be different but the actual phenomenon is the same. Of course some specifics may change because of the different point of view but, assuming they have nuclear fusion and we haven't missed anything huge, they should have something similar to ITER
As I had commented myself: aliens are constraint by the same universe we are, doesn't matter how they do their calculations (like human math or not).
Something I've always wanted to ask a fusion engineer is: once we have this technology fully realised, would the fusion if properly controlled allow us to create specific elements?
To clarify, would it allow us to fuse specific elements in a way that allows us to produce heavier elements, things like gold/lithium etc and if so, wouldn't this be true alchemy?
The short answer is no. Fusing hydrogen to helium gives off the greatest amount of energy. Fusing heavier elements together requires a lot more energy input and yields less energy output, so it's far more difficult to do. And once you get into elements that are heavier than iron, fusion actually *costs* energy overall - that is, the entire process doesn't produce any energy at all, it actually absorbs it and stores the energy as extra mass in whatever elements you produced. Even in stars, most heavy elements like gold aren't produced via fusing lighter elements together but rather from merging (exploding) neutron stars where you don't start with any atoms at all, just an incredibly dense soup of neutrons.
Here on Grady's recommendation, subscribing because of the great quality of the channel.
Ditto!
Really enjoyed this video. Came from practical engineering. Love your explanations and interjection of additional details along with great visuals. Excited to go through the other videos. :)
Please visit some of the private fusion companies too please, they are more... optimistic, but the physics they explore are pretty cool. Helion Energy, General fusion, Commonwealth fusion systems, Zap energy, Tokamak energy and so forth
Your guide is wrong about the private companies. They are doing pretty well and quite far along for being so young. It's because they use other types than traditional tokamaks. But it won't take 5-10 years, it's maybe 15-20 years. But not 60 years
Most people who work at ITER haven't actually looked into what the private companies are doing, because they don't have time to look close enough, and it's so complex.
Plasma Channel did a great video on them.
This is top-tier science communication! Thanks for the awesome video Jade.
My favorite thing about fission and fusion is that we have all this high level science that goes behind the basics of the energy generation and at the end of it, we run a steam turbine like from the 1700s. We still haven't figured out a way to get the energy out more efficiently to generate electricity, it's ridiculous.
I think in some processes a supercritical carbon dioxide working fluid is more efficient, but it's still turning a special shaped wheel.
there are some non-Tokamak fusion proposals which use a more direct energy capture approach but they are all in private company / start-up land.
The bit about how generating temperatures close to the sun requires surrounding them by temperatures colder than Pluto blew my mind. Like, I get how it's explained, but that kind of logic is so opposite to what I'd think instinctively.
Great video Jade. Very insightful and intriguing. Plus your excitement and enthusiasm is always so charming and contagious.
Excellent, Jade. I visited JET a few years ago, and although it was brilliant science it was clearly far too small for net energy generation. The main problem seemed to be that of extracting the heat without everything melting. I intend to visit ITER next summer.
The timescale is interesting. It’s not going to be a fast track.
Nuclear fusion has actually performed many tomes so far, and it has always produced (mega)tons of energy!
The trick is to harness the energy instead of blowing it all around ;)
The one time it got more out than put in was a bit misleading ya it put out more than put in with just the lasers but that didn't include any of the other systems that will have to be included to consider it a net gain
Richard laid down the gauntlet.
He started by saying that it won’t start till after he retired. Then he said that it won’t be viable till 2080.
You Youngin’s need to step it up!
I hope the commonwealth fusion breakthrough are quicker than 20 years away!
Fossil fuel lobbies won't allow that "Manhattan project" style collaboration, unfortunately.
Curious how the extra Helium is pulled off as too much would eventually reduce the fusion.
The helium ash and most of the heat will be dumped into the diverter, which is the ring-shaped ash-tray at the bottom of the vacuum chamber. At 11:23 you can see it for a second in the drawing (the CGI animations are lacking that part unfortunately).
I think they have that part of the process pretty much figured out, as they already did it in JET at a smaller scale. Also, tokamaks are not made for continuous heating anyway, because the central solenoid needs to recharge periodically (after inducing lots of current inside the plasma, which is not just for heating but mainly for stabilizing the plasma).
For an easier-to-operate (but harder-to-build) alternative concept that could work continuously, see stellarators such as Wendelstein-7x.
The real challenge is actually: how do you get rid of the helium (alpha particles in this case) before it becomes detrimental to the reaction of deuterium and tritium?
that last conversation is pretty poetic about the scientific/research community and the casual / lay people
I think it’s important to note that the National Ignition Facility experiment achieved only 1.5 times more energy generated than reached the target. Personally, I’d say they didn’t break even when taking into account the losses from electric grid to lasers. All of the 192 lasers consumed 100 times more energy than was generated. Still important progress nonetheless! I just took issue with you stating they broke even.
Actually already harvesting nuclear fusion power : solar cells
They should invest on a Dyson Sphere instead.
If aliens are able to visit us then the odds should be 'fairly good' that they have also cracked how the stars work. The question whether aliens would use their mathematics or ours doesnt seem as important just as long as we can all agree that stars and their fusion reactions are real and very much exist out there. It would simply task any alien civilization with the challenge of making sense of it, somehow. I think in the end of the day it is more likely that aliens use a technology of energy production that we can easily observe in the universe, rather than something more exotic and mysterious.
This might be a stupid question, but - when the reaction reaches the "self-heating" phase, how do you shut it down? For example with a nuclear power plant you can remove the fuel rods. What's the equivalent here?
I admire the work that is being done, and I specially admire Richard's frankness. But honestly every time I see anything about fusion I become more and more convinced that battery storage technology becoming viable for baseload is a million times more likely and economically viable than fusion ever will be.
For me the highlight is using magnets weighing tons to contain the plasma based on plasma's own magnetic property. All the time i was looking for this only...how are they going to contain it ?
Read about ITER in 2008 and now i am looking at this in 2023. I am jealous of the people involved with it.
Thank you for this! For Richard Pitts, a quote: "Blessed are old people who plant trees knowing that they shall never sit in the shade of their foliage." I remember getting excited enough about nuclear fusion and the tokamak to write an essay on it during my senior year of high school, a few years before Reagan and Gorbachev met on the topic. I didn't win the essay competition, and I was more interested in optical physics for my own postsecondary work, but the excitement is still there.
That back of the envelope math was an eye opener. We're so far away from solving climate change and it shows how slow we're actually moving.
Grady and you are 2 of my favourite people to watch🙃
Amazing to get a glimpse of the incredible engineering feats being achieved.
fantastic video jade. I LOved, it. keep up the good work on your VidEos, i'm sure You enjOy making them. i was Unsure about how fission worked, PLEASE make more of the greatest viDeos AbouT sciEnce, makes ME happy seeing fellOw scieNcE goers make stuff they kNow very well to Interest others into Getting into the topic. and again, Hearing abouT fission is mindblowing, thanks again.
Nice video, however I have a very important point which I made also in Lex Fridman interview with fusion physicist Dennis Whyte: about fusion vs fission. Namely that the current problem with fission is the cost and complexity of fission power plants. The cost of fuel is minimal. But the problem is the same with fission. We're still running a heat engine. Even if fusion produces 100x more energy for its fuel or reactor size, and costs nothing, you are still dealing with same size of heat energy. Even though there may be less waste, the cost and complexity of fusion power plants will likely be greater (?). It is far from guaranteed the fusion will be cheaper (and thus consuming less resources including labor) than fission at least when it is introduced. In fact with prediction markets and market futures, you could actually bet real money on that, helping to allocate scarce resources.
The problem with long-lived waste can be minimized with reprocessing and Onkalo-type storage facilities. Most long-lived isotopes can be converted to short-lived ones. And there's very little real danger from nuclear accidents relative to other forms of power. Don't get me wrong I'd love to have fusion working, but Like Richard said, we need base load capacity for until 20XX (2080?), and nuclear fission is great for that. In reality it might be easier to market fusion than fission to public because of (less of) perceived danger.
Also a good reason to investigate fission as well is that Gen IV reactors are evolutions of proven designs, and can possibly create also hydrogen which at least our future airplanes will likely use due to (lack of) emissions.
Also there's the fact that either with fission or fusion, there's a like gigawatts of waste heat which could actually be used. I did once back of the envelope calculations and basically I'm really curious why most of that is basically wasted. Although district heating only type of nuclear power plants are being made. Could also be used as process heat for factories.
In any case, its really nice to see people working hard for better future as you said! Also many discoveries regarding plasma physics and superconductors are made in the side. :)
I think what Helion is doing is very interesting as well. Its not a heat engine but electricity is created directly. Very clever. Let's see if that works. In general I'm happy to see many different approaches to fusion. Even if one fails, others might succeed.
Mind blowing video! Will replay with my kids around they will go nuts for this! I love the direction this channel is taking! Awesome work Jade!!
It’s possible to hype up fission without misrepresenting fission as dangerous. The only dangerous fission meltdown was chernobyl. Fukushima, as a contrast, was so safe that an orderly evacuation killed a lot more people than would have died if they’d not evacuated (that’s including deaths from cancer decades later)
SPARC currently being constructed in Devens, MA will produce the same amount of fusion power as ITER, but it uses much more powerful magnets to make it much smaller, cheaper, and easier to construct, and they expect to finish it next year. :-)
3:45 - “That’s why we’re shelling out $20 billion to crack it”
Cracking would be fission…
Shoutout to the calculations being written on the back of an an envelope 😊
Props to Richard and Sabina whom's heads are torqued to spec. Treat the public like civilized, capable, thinking humans and you'll convince them to support your endeavors. Very different from the media or any lofty marketing. Awesome video Jade.
Your video is amazing to watch !!! You Absolutely did an amazing job making this video as always !!!
In our college days, we did visit one of these tokmak prototypes that happened to be nearby, and the size of that was still huge as a research candidate. I can only imagine this is like 100 times bigger than that one with all those supporting equipment.
If anyone is wondering, the reactor is only turned on a few times over the years to collect the data as heating it up and running constantly is a big challenge even at this date. And we need more and more data to make decisions thats in favour of reducing this supporting structure and exploiting natural phenomena to make the process more efficient.
I'm just glad to see almost all countries trying to make this thing a reality no matter how big the challenge is. We humans are stubborn, and stubbornness in these things is good for humanity!!
Looking at the progress, this will take 5 more years before it's operational as they will have to tune it and then be able to collect real data which would take another 5 years to be analysed and make progress from findings as modifying these experiments comes at cost both in terms of time and budgets.
Greetings from a viewer of Grady's! Dunno how your channel escaped my notice all these years, but I'm here now with some catching up to do! Being a sci-fi nerd, the discussion of initially heating the plasma caused my mind to leap to all of the small "fusion" reactors we see in sci-fi, and how that future could come about. That's a lot of infrastructure to put on everything that uses fusion.
To borrow a term from the power producing industry, I wonder if that means we'll end up with a few large "black start" reactors that produce the plasma, which "fuel" smaller reactors with that plasma already in its self-heating state. If not every reactor needs to be ITER, that would really help with building at scale. Thus, leading to the logical result: fusion-powered steam trains! 🚂😁👍
Heh it would be a ridunculously complex connection between those reactors... To transfer any plasma outside the containment which is already mightily hard and betrays predictions at times.
@@u1zha Fair point, but I'm sure jet engines and fission could have had similar things said about them once upon a time. Metal forges already have the ability to move molten metal using nothing but magnetic fields. While the penalty is obviously much higher in the event of a malfunction, I would expect something like that could be the start of a means to move that plasma.
Since these powerstations will be so expensive dont expect the price of electricity to go down, nuclear energy is even cheaper and so far it has not had a great effect on the electricity price.
This is such awesome information! You are a very nice and energetic narrator and teacher on here also. Great video! I’ll see what else I can learn on your channel.
Really interesting video! My final year project at university is a CFD analysis of heat transfer within the breeding blanket. Really interesting to see all the work that's going on at ITER, looking forward to when it becomes operational!
Are you collaborating with any breeding blanket researchers for that project? My colleague/internship advisor recently finished his dissertation on obtaining heat transfer correlations via MHD simulations of breeding blankets, so just curious if there's any overlap.
Great video. Needed much more stable and clear video for first look entering the reactor room 9:17
On a sidenote, modern nuclear is safer than coal, and that is including radioactive contamination, as even that is worse with coal.
Would it be possible to skip the heat engine and just capture the electromagnetic field of the plasma to induce current?
I'd be interested in seeing some graphics comparing size, cost and complexity to the Large Hadron Collider - just from an engineering perspective.
Love the editing! Such great cuts and right on the beat, love it!
What was also implicit in his argument is that reduction of fossil fuel consumption to net zero before 2080 is also a total pipe dream.
Don't forget about the net positive output in the reaction vs the net positive output in the power plant. The latter has not been achieved yet, and it would take at least an order of magnitude larger output to be reached.
Pretty simple. H + H --> He + energy . A small amount of mass is lost and converted to energy using E= mc2
We can already harvest nuclear fusion with the use of solar panels and arguably wind turbines for a fraction of the price. Even though fusion would be an elegant solution imo we need to reduce CO2 emissions right now, not in 80 years. We have the "intermitten-problem" with renewables which needs to be addressed with more ressources for better H2 production from electricity and possibly new ideas along the line.
While they are aiming for 500MW of "fusion energy" output, how much of that will be thermal energy that is actually collectable via the "armor blanket"? Modern PWR fission nuclear generators are about 33% efficient at converting their heat energy to electricity. But those contain their heat energy in fairly small area of a specific thermal conductor (water in PWRs.) Tokamaks have quite a large area the thermal energy dissipates over. They're putting 50MW in, but if they aren't very efficient, they might not actually get that much out of it.
nuclear CONfusion: 100 units of energy go in, 1 goes out! Now give us another billion.
In my opinion aliens may have similar machines, because engineers don't follow abstract mathematical laws, they follow the laws of nature.
For example if we boil water we will have increased volume or pressure and we will have always the same result no matter what mathematics we are using to describe or understand this phenomenon.
I think basic algebra and geometry are real discoveries, but their are parts of mathematics witch were invented. For ex. the number of "i" and even the square of negatives are just inventios, because we don't have real world equivalent of those. And mathematicians are not even hiding this : they say "imaginary numbers"
5:35 also they needed a lot more power to power the laser which was used to power the reaction
6:42 euh... I think they were going to build DEMO first ? Which again, as I understand it, is not a commercial reactor.
29:31 it's not about how you calculate it (human made math), but the possibilities of the universe which allow us to do these kinds of projects, which aliens will also be constrained by.
[Richard]🤝🏻[Improbable Matter]
It's just his segment just _screamed_ that channels (fusion) content. Even though some people in the comment section doubted him some, I feel like I've enough projects like this to know that it's better to err on the side of "it _won't_ be here on time" or at the very least if it is... it will likely be in a manner in which we don't expect...
3:25
Just because the fuel might be cheap the energy produced might not be cheap.
Honestly not much about fusion energy looks cheap to me. I honestly never have seen calculations estimating the price of fusion energy.
The only problem with this is it an other experimental design to create a sustainable fusion reaction. It is not going to be a working fusion reactor.
So far the Lawerence Livermore lab in California is the only facility that has been able to create the longest sustained reaction that created a net energy output and it uses a totally different design.
The design at this facility featured has not been able to do this but I wish them the best of luck for the sake of humanity.
Not controlled, not net energy
At 18:08, where the discussion of neutrons begins, is where "the devil is in the details" needs to be brought up. Indeed, fusion produces neutrons -- a lot of them. And fusion neutrons are very energetic (aka "fast") neutrons. And since neutrons don't have any electrical charge they don't interact very often with other atoms. So the "blanket" Richard describes that will absorb the neutrons is still very much a work in progress. RUclips won't let me include a URL here, but if you google "IAEA neutrons blast fusion materials" it will lead you to an IAEA document that talks about one of the biggest challenges in harnessing nuclear fusion is that of dealing with the material damage caused by all the fast neutrons. And Jade is correct that fusion produces no long-lived radioactive byproducts like fission does, but the lithium which will be part of the blanket will get transmutated into tritium, which is radioactive with a half-life of 12.3 years. So things are not as black-and-white as they might first appear and this is another reason any commercial fusion power plant is still a very long ways off.