Why Private Billions Are Flowing Into Fusion
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- Опубликовано: 13 июл 2022
- As the world searches for a way to avoid climate catastrophe, dozens of fusion startups are putting billions of dollars into the risky quest for unlimited clean power.
#PowerMoves #CleanEnergy #BloombergQuicktake
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If startups didn't say they can do fusion on short deadlines (like couple years), then they wouldn't get the investors' money. As such, it would be naive to take their promises for granted due to obvious conflict of interests.
True, but start ups/ private business can move faster than governments. See spacex as an example
Yeah, I think there should be some scientists on the team that decides whether to give out the funds, just so they can understand if what they are promising makes sense
@@LeonardoRiglietti these are private investors. what they do with their money is not something you can control or dictate. not every single person is a scientist. public funds are 100% being channeled into the most realistic and practical approaches, even if they might not be the best, because the ultimate goal is always a return.
@@jonathanodude6660 I think it is more the opposite, private investors want the most practical and promising approaches since they are looking for something to patent and to make money out of, whereas public reasearch is often just for the sake of science.
@@LeonardoRiglietti no, private favours the rapid returns and big ideas while public often favours slow methodical research to explore all avenues that only has big breakthroughs every once in a while. you think insulin was discovered on private research?
I can't even fathom how a device of this type was built given the intricacy it would entail. An absolute marvel of engineering.
I marvel at that lady,
In answer to your question ( general quantum mechanics ) .
My blessings
It can be built but it won't work
More a device is complex, more is prone to failure. This law is just inescapable.
@@sammyd7857
Ah yes. The old "man wasn't meant to fly" trope all over again. Of course it will work, it works already. It's called stars.
This is one of the best examples I've seen of a traditional media company transitioning to new media
yeah this is great!!
I wonder what the best opportunities to invest now are, there are opinions but a little later I find out these opinions don't matter as a totally different turn of events play out with the stocks they discussed therein.
stocks are overrated now. buy gold, 5% in crypto. rest in cash. and wait for the stock/ property/land price to crash. but them after it stops dropping for 7 - 12 months at the bottom.
@Joseph Robert Romero the names rings a bell. she has a webb presence
We're introducing a new Quicktake series: *Power Moves* - an in-depth look into the cutting-edge tech that could revolutionize how we power our modern lives. What do you think about fusion technology? Let us know in the comments!
Try hydrogen, and instead of electrolization, ionizating atomized H2O with high voltage and PWM, just like what happens in a thunderstorm in the clouds (that explosion is not caused by hot air...).
Love this series and your mini-documentaries. Keep it up!
Yes make the new series available on U-tube and podcasts
These series have huge international viewership potential, release the full series on youtube
This Video was amazingly well done. 😎🥂
Very well balanced documentary. I feel you went through effort to present the arguments of both private and public fusion project, without overhypeing, allowing your viewers to reach their own conclusion.
This was a massively over-hyped "documentary". In 2050, fusion will still be 20 years off.
@@stevenrn6640 Congrats, you're the successor of the people who made fun of the prospect of aviation ever happening in the 19th century.
@@stevenrn6640 It was perhaps also reasonable-sounding in 1893 to say "In 1925, commercial air travel will still be 20 years off." (It began on a small scale in 1914.)
90⁰⁰i0l
The problem is we the public do not have the background information to make up our own mind on this and the experts can talk circles around us, thus any conclusion I make from this will be either accidentally correct or it will be mistaken.
I'm now a recently retired Ph.D. Aerospace Engineer with America's largest defense contractor, but i can still remember sitting in my 5th grade science class reading a science primer magazine in 1966 that talked about fission and fusion reactors and it said while fission reactors were already commercially workable it would about 30 years until fusion reactors came online.
It's only 20 years away, again.
Did they teach you how to just make things that work instead of making mass garbage in order to meter everything like a pack of spastics? I was born the next generation they didn't teach us how to make things that work either. So much for education hey. Better off blowing up all the skools & the ppl that run them the world works be a better place.
@@JazenValencia Well Helion is aiming for net electricity in 2024. That is 2 years, not 20... Most of the others are aiming for commercialization in the early 2030ies. That is 10 years. Might accelerate with more money, if they concepts proof viable.
It’s now here 56 years later
What do you know about gang stalking?
It is amazing to live in a time where we can observe the progress in fusion. No matter how long it takes any progress is welcome.
I hope they data share this would be great to solve the energy crisis. Greed shouldn’t play a role we have one planet after all.
Working on such an important mission is what motivates our entire team. We’re living in a historic moment of human history.
@@jeremywilson2878 now that you said it, greed will most likely take a role…
@@jeremywilson2878 well that’s why we have state funded fusion as well, ITER, so it’s not guided by corporate profits. Albeit with the drawbacks of bureaucracy
What about it ? Lol fusion happens all the time
Like space colonies and finding alien life, fusion reactors are something I've heard for decades... since I was a kid. But it is still something that feels within reach in my lifetime. It is still exciting.
When I talked to a physicist working on fusion-related topics a few years ago, the inspiring answer to “when” was “maybe in 30 years”. That’s 20 years less than 50 years ago which sounds like a joke, but it’s actually a change of timescale. It is getting closer.
it's almost here! hang on tight
It may take another century or two of testing and fine tuning for it to work. Meanwhile, fossil fuels are here to stay as they're highly reliable. Don't forget the current level of human technology and development wouldn't have been possible without fossil fuels.
@@paulheydarian1281 Fossil Fuels are reliable only in causing massive destruction worldwide. I don’t understand how you can still peddle fossil fuel while today half the European countries are devastated by raging wildfires and even the UK - that damp country of fog and eternal rain - gets fire problem.
@@ArneBab yeah I remember in 90s was gonna be 30 years or whatever.
If they achieve this, be well worth the wait.
Your power bill might even go down a lil.
That last bit was a joke.
There's a huge difference between finally getting to net gain, and being profitable and more viable than other energy sources. Fusion will cost a LOT for many years before we can scale it and master it.
what costs more is failing to spend it on this!
If ever.
Its well worth the try
I would be happy if germany would go big on this and spend 20 billion a year on this instead of spending 40 billian annually on lazy muslim migrants
I think you’re right and I think fusion will be massive once it get’s to scale. Having net gain is definitely the first step to profitability.
3:53 "producing more energy than any fusion experiment in history" - we should add that it produced less energy than was put in. The energy out/in ratio is improving, but has not exceeded one, i.e. no fusion reactor has produced net energy output. This is covered later in the video, but I didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea.
Agree with you. Even if the plasma heat generation gain exceeds 1 --ie Q_plasma >1 , the TOTAL energy needs to be considered. Cooling the magnets, running the facility etc.
Also the industry never ever discuss the conversion efficiency of converting the plasma heat to electricity which is much less than 50%. All said and done , even if Q-plasma is 5 or 10 time more efficient , it might not be enough to even break even.
Yeah this is often conveniently not mentioned when talking about fusion experiment records. We are still so very far away from commercial breakeven.
@Zichen He : I don't see it..how do you plan to convert the energy to electricity?
@Zichen He : Conventional way not very efficient. Fusion is also a long way off; I predict that quantum to electric energy conversion will happen within 2 years.
@Zichen He : quantum to electric is what Nichola Tesla did originally, not the photoelectric effect, which is worse than the solar as you stated.
The last fusion lab I worked in was Helion Energy. Before that I worked at the Redmond Plasma Physics Lab, part of the University of Washington. It was nice to see some of my handiwork in a video.
What is your opinion about fusion viability & commercialization? How long would that could take
@@rayhans7887 I think if Helion’s approach works, then about 10 years. I am confident that Helion’s approach is the right way to go. I don’t think Tokamaks will ever work. I’ve been told that by guys that spent their careers working on Tokamaks.
Thank you for your contribution to the future. I do wonder if fusion really is clean though. I'd imagine instead of meltdown worries, we'd have gamma & x-ray worries.
Nice
so cool!
This video changed my perception of the private fusion industry. Even if it doesn’t get to net positive fusion first, or fulfill its promises on time; the diversity of zany strategies and ideas being cooked up could end up contributing in the future. No one car company can take credit for even half the major innovations in the past 100 years.
I like the diference beteween Public and private, public its all about pushing the limits, making fusion longer, bigger, private is all about cutting cost, if you can´t make it long then make it repetition, instead of using steam use pistons or proyectiles.
Is very different mentalities and they are necessary for things to advance
@@Motorata661 yes I agree ☝️ plus private may bring in new minds that otherwise would not be working on Fusion. While Public will likely move in the most straightforward (not over promising) and publicly transparent fashion.
@@Forge17 mercedes
My thought exactly. They may not be the first to net+, but ideas such as the pulsing "engine" style fusion reactor, or the smaller fusion reactor could play a significant role if they end up being feasible.
...but consider that each of the companies that do not succeed first are likely to go bankrupt once one of the others do succeed and everyone jumps on that ship. Because of this, and because of how beneficial collaboration is in general, I think it would probably be better if all these companies weren't racing to make billions against each other, but all "fusing" (pun intended) into one organization made of separate teams working on different technologies
Today is Historic moment, it happened. It's finally a tangible source of power. 10 or 20 years from now we may have commercial fusion power.
and it will lead to a drastical reduction in power related conflicts
That's the joke... it's always "20 years away." Has been for decades.
They said that 10 years ago, the latest breakthrough is just another prove of concept. They put 100x the energy recovered into this, and they could only do it once a day. For it to work we will need some crazy breakthroughs in laser technology so it (lasers) can generate 100x the energy and do it more directly then we need to be able to do it over and over again to make it commercially viable. Sadly.
@Tacolucious Source? Or just speculation?
@@talkingmudcrab718 yea its just another fake news to get investors
Watched Particle Fever movie 10 years ago a couple times when it came out. This video is a blessing bringing updates to such wonderful developments. Thank you for sharing this.
I'm 29 years old. Really hoping we get to widescale commercial fusion within my lifetime
im 49 :( can i see it too?
@@LTDANMAN44 I am 15🔥. I am best
@@simabhaider7985 lucky
We will sooner than you think. These will be the decades of breakthroughs
It only took 20 years go to from the nuclear bomb to nuclear power stations, so I would say it's safe to say that you will likely see it in your lifetime
Love it, this kind of documentary are those who help inspire the next generation to step into the unknown, the future.
0:10 the joke is: "nuclear fusion is 30 years away and always will be".
(to spare you the google search)
Best documentary about fusion I've ever seen, great job.
Excellent. The best documentary on current fusion technology I've seen so far.
Just props for how well this video was made, loved how you showcased all the different fusion startups from across the globe and their different methods of reaching net output. Thanks guys
and again geothermal is ignored even mm wave drilling is now available
@@niko-laus it’s not “ignored”, it’s just not available everywhere. The nations who are lucky enough to have vulcanic activity should definitely use it, but we need a solution for all the others.
@@niko-laus I looked into millimetre wave drilling and it has a few hurdles to go. Temperature and pressure, plus maintaining the waveguide are significant technical challenges, but I'm all for it.
uds s di das s gitu td s werden yg
@@niko-laus und ich 6zwsyyyd die esse ya eey h ga ddsd
Scientists say it'll take decades, but business owners currently accepting investment capital say "It's right around the corner!"
Exactly the level of journalism I expect from Bloomberg. Woof.
Yeah, it's Bloomberg. They're not in this for the science. All they want to do is take advantage of riling up investors and getting people to throw their money around. Still, the sentiment seems positive overall. I just wonder which one the producers placed all their casino chips on. One always has to look at financial media with a healthy dose of skepticism. Not the science part, just the message and the purpose behind it.
On Dec. 5, 2022, a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history
There used to be an old saying that goes: "Fusion power is only 30 years away and always will be."
Plasma temperatures run at 100 MILLION degrees, NOT 100,000.
I admire the persistence of all the people and money involved in this venture. And I really appreciate them!
You admire the persistence of money?
Yikes
This is the best chance we have approaching a problem from all directions
Is this a joke about those pressures pistons that surround the reactor? I like it
The running joke is “Fusion is the Energy of the Future…and always will be…”
Ever since I heard of ITER its been a dream of mine to help with the project. Thank you for talking about this wonderful project and bringing it to the attention of so many more people.
I hope I can help on a fusion project someday. This is a technology that could change the world as we know it in a profound and positive way.
You can make one yourself. no need for gargantuan billion dollar government science projects. Look into aneutronic fusion. Get a 3d printer, a vacuum pump and some household electronics.
@@Vino3437 All our energy problems could have been solved by nuclear fission and is still our best working option at the moment.
@@elosant2061 agreed its much easier to split hydrogen atoms per say then to combine them.
What kind of college majors would one need to pursue in order to work on fusion reactors?
@@test_account939 physics/nuclear physic then specialization
Scientists, real life superheroes. Ya'll are the best of us.
true
...And the worst.
@@Martin-117 you say that as if most scientists are bad
@@aetheriox463 he's a trump supporter so it's no surprise he said that
@@lukebalderose334 how do you know?
I work in industrial maintenance & I would love to work on these and build them this seems so interesting!
4 months ago, they thought it would take 20 years. Anything’s possible.
Inspiring stuff. Godspeed to these hard-working people
indeed.
Yes ! It must be so exciting and frustrating at the same time to work on it and be so close yet so far away from a industrial product !
Karma !
@@lordwallie24 Why karma?
yes, they are the best stuff
The quality of these short documentaries is stellar.
It's great to see different groups working on this project.
The final answer may be something that no one has imagined yet. 🙂
We're waiting for the "eureka moment".
"The time scale of 20 years is really realistic." LOL, sounds like my software engineers giving a time line which I automatically triple.
I loved it's idea of excluding Turbines and steams as to cut down cost and prevent undermining efficiency
Simply to the point period.
It's also the least pragmatic, because they're claiming "net zero" in 2 years. Nearly every real scientist sees their 2-yr claim as hucksterism. They do it to target non-scientific (naive) investors, such as Peter Thiel. Many of these CEOs "talk a big game," but to scientists they sound like children playing with big words they don't understand. The business world is full of the "who can you fool" model.
Helion Energy's wish to directly transfer vast amounts of electrons (i.e. immense currents - which create heat) from super-hot plasma's into room-temperature electrical wires requires other "alchemy" that they skipped in the video - because it's too difficult to do. They need to have the fusion reactor-vessel (at 100+ million degrees C) be very close/adjacent to superconducting wires (at near-absolute-zero) to "pull away" the very high-current electricity. How do you have one space at 10^8 degrees, and next to it space at 10^-2 degrees (10 orders of magnitude difference in temperature = 10 billion degrees Celsius separated by 3 feet). Such a large temperature gradient will destroy (at a minimum, will quickly erode) the wires & equipment itself. They conveniently "ignored" this real problem (and other serious problems). Much of silicon valley "talks big" but doesn't delivery. You never hear about the 1000s of companies that vanish.
Yeah I’d never heard of that method before and if they can get it to work, it makes a lot of sense
I personally doubt the idea. In my opinion, Helion's "electromagnetic harvesting" would work like inductive coupling, and it's a really inefficient power transmission
however it must be said that the Rankine-Hirn cycle is something that has existed for more than a century and is reliable and known, adding other innovations to a project that already has tight deadlines in the field of fusion (a field still in the experimental phase) would mean increasing further the risk of failure of the entire project
yeah, harness the EMP inductively. Only needs to be 30% efficient to beat the best heat to steam turbine efficiencies.
Every resource on the planet needs to be focused on this problem. It quite literally is humanity's only savior. Let's get busy people.
Well now it looks like ITER won't be the first fusion reactor to reach net gain. In California, they achieved net gain just months after this video.
You fell for the propaganda from the Livermore team. They reported increased plasma efficiency (Qplasma) but the total efficiency (Qtotal) is still abysmal. The input energy to laser beams used in the experiment was 300 MJ, only 2 MJ made it to the fusion fuel target and fusion reaction created 3MJ output (heat energy).
They only quoted the Qplasma = 3 / 2 ratio achieved in the experiment.
Qtotal = 3 x 40% / 300 = 0.01 (even this is generous because 3MJ output heat needs to be converted to the electrical energy and I generously assigned the 40% efficiency here assuming that it is possible to extract the heat energy from this device and then use it to create steam and power steam turbine.
@@usneome to be fair Q total for iter wont be over 1 either but much better than lasers
@@usneome I've seen this exact same reply in other videos. What benefit do these people have from downplaying a very important breakthrough?
@@SaiRyan1 Honest reporting is needed. Since national labs are using billions of USD for research, they should report their progress without hype. Current administration in Washington should not manipulate facts to play politics.
ITER project promised Qplasma = 10; this is six times as much as Qplasma for laser fusion project.
@@usneome there is nothing dishonest about what they have done, they got more energy out of the reaction then put into the reaction which has not been done before. You don't understand what the problem was nor understand what has happened. The problem they were solving wasnt efficiency, it was can it even be done. Can the reaction create more energy then it took to create the reaction. How much energy it took to start the reaction is irrelevant
Physics breakthroughs always have impact in chemistry research, which then impacts biology and medicine research.
We’ve been waiting for this and it’s finally here!
So are thorium fission reactors...
One of the best documentaries I've seen in a long time
0:15 "nuclear fusion is always fifty years away".
Took me 7 words to deliver the joke. That guy's gift of overcomplicating things is next level.
"Fusion energy is just 30 years away.. and always will be."
I had no idea there were so many different approaches. Fascinating stuff.
Fantastic to see the energy being put into this research (no pun intended) 👍🔥
Yep so much so that even if they do the impossible and get it to work consistently, it will never be able to make more power then it uses, cos of a pesky little thing called thermodynamics. It is the definition of a non-starter. Just think what all that time, money and resources could of done for nuclear fission...
You sir are a liar. (honesty intended)
Living in a country dominated by murdoch media, I nearly forgot how informative balanced journalism can be, thanks folks!
I'm assuming you're also from the UK. Horizons on BBC2 do similar documentaries
@@HaggardPillockHD or Australia
or anywhere, really. News stations have every reason to be biased and manipulative. The only thing they want is your money.
@@General12th says someone on RUclips that wants your money by proxy of third party propaganda (advertisements).
@@HaggardPillockHD No Australia, we have it even worse then the UK or America. Rupert owns 70 percent of the news media here.
When I saw the concept of fusion power many many many many moon ago , my heart knew it will become reality one day and my heart still beats in that same game , we are humans we are magnificent
Would magnetic movement of pulse around the coils by lowering power in multiple coils spaced out evenly or even circular movement of the coils physically help make it work?
Man, I love science and engineering. So passionate about it. Projects such as these gives me so much joy in life.
This is so awesome! I’ve been following fusion progress for longer then I can remember. It seems like we’re so close to this amazing breakthrough. I really wish i was in some way apart of this amazing science. Nevertheless I’m still very proud of the individuals that are.
@Whgu ybnm you can help by pitching in money.
Research has been going longer than 50 years with no viable reactor to this date
@@pablo-cw1wg And? The important part is that we're making a lot of progress. Predictions about when it will actually be commercially available are less significant.
Just as we cannot perfectly replicate the same conditions as on earth during space flights, we are also not yet able to replicate the sun on earth. But I believe it will be possible in a few thousand years.
nice 😀I have mine built by a friend (a scientinst that study this for over 15 years) and since I use it I feel marvellous. Plus I got rid of a fibroid and now I start to reset my consciosness🥰he doesn't sell them commercially so his interests are purely scientific. When it's about multiwave oscillators he knows the subject in and out. In the last 90 years since Lakhovski invented his machine technology advanced and now the machine can be build with higher precision and way more efficient than back in the 1900s. There are few other things that my friend added to the machine that for me work WOW.
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great report. I am rooting for fusion since I was a little kid. And I hope to see it being out there in my lifetime. This is the kind of change humanity desperately needs if we want to advance any further. The energy problem needs to be solved. Just think about how the abundance in processing power and storage has transformed the world. Having an abundance of energy would be many tenfolds of that magnitude.
It's only 10 years out. 😆
We have Sun - the biggest thermonuclear reactor. Floating photo-voltaic batteries on oceans are the solution. We need around 1 mln km2 for our needs.
@@peceed I hope you are correct.
I’ve been rooting for it too. I learned when I was 10. I’m 60. They said it would take 50 years. I’m still waiting for flying cars.
@@tinyrick6264 capitalism slowed it all down
It's like a marathon where it doesn't matter who wins as long as someone finishes the race. The more runners there are, the more likely someone will finish and the sooner it will happen.
ok let's say China cracks it first
@@6Sparx9 The fact that copyright theft is associated with China is only because all the other countries don't have the care or need to do it themselves (at least not publicly). China builds one, a western project will "suddenly" appear - with similar technology of course.
Amazing video! Thank you, very informative and very entertaining!
It was not the private sector that got this discovery! It wasn’t Oxford either! Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California nabbed the power of the sun!
Well, NIF is still quite a ways off from a practical power plant in every aspect. The lasers only have a 0.3% efficiency and that was not factored in.
@@elmarmoelzer2229 You are raining on their parade.
Plasma efficiency (Qplasma) factor bigger than 1.0 is a small step forward. However, we are still far away from achieving overall efficiency (Qtotal) bigger than 1.0
I often think of Thomas Edison's quote on subjects like this "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Hopefully there will be a similar scientist/s who makes the key breathrough in this complex fusion puzzle soon.
General Fusion and Helion Energy both have complimentary ideas and technologies. If they're gonna inductively recapture energy by careful design of their apparatus, that could be applied to General Fusion's reactor chamber, granted Helion's approach is more linear, whilst General Fusion's is more radial, but I digress.
clever comment, nice
Thank you. A great source of information
Those two ending statements have me so so sold on working on it too. Pre-industrial atmosphere? A utopia for our kids? jesus christs lets go.
Great video, but there are a bunch of key startups with promising technology that should have been included for example MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems with over 2 billion in funding, TAE Technologies , Zap Energy ...
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Those last possibilities are just mind blowing
20:12 Thank you. THIS is the point that outweighs all other points.
Never seen a single time that they quoted total power in electricity and total power they would get out in electricity. Hope they do it but I don’t see it for 50-60 years. The net gain they will quote will be in energy in and energy made not that the energy out when turned to electricity will be 40% of the energy made as heat even for ITER
Yeah. There is a danger with misleading expectations: Other mitigation strategies maybe neglected on the grounds this is the answer worth waiting for; loss of credibilty may even affect core funding.
Yeah when the dude said one of those "projectiles" in his fusion reactor creates enough power to last one household 2 years, and that they can fire one every 30 seconds... I felt like that was insanely low. And those are projections that he HOPES for. Not to mention they're still barely in the testing phases, so he hasn't even built one yet.
No shade and we should explore all possibilities, but we really need to be putting more focus on things that we already know work - nuclear.
Yup that's the real question. One of the first thoughts that came to mind. Not only is the energy output questionable, the entire issue of conversion efficiency makes it a tough case for practical use. We need a better energy conversion technology.
@@jajajinks1569 yes nuclear especially MSR. The power out maybe enough for 2 years but he did not mention he power in it took or that when he tried to convert the power to electricity he would only have 30-40% of that power. In uk he would need to fire one of those pellets every second to get the power for everyone and convert them at 100%. Plus store the power at off peak and deliver at peak can they even make 1 of these pellets per second probably took them ages to make the pellet
@@jajajinks1569 Dude you don't understand. Nuclear Power is destroying our planet. Cossing global warming & with that comes massive weather changes, massive earthquakes, killer heat waves, our earths outer blue sphere that protects mankind from burning to death from the sun is deteriorating because of fossil fuel use.
In 2006 MIT President Hochfield visited my alumni club in Dallas. After a great presentation she asked for questions. I said "In 1971 I worked on a problem set for a fusion reactor containment vessel. It's been 35 years, so where are they?" She replied that the head of the Nuclear Engineering Department had told her "Thirty five years, but this time we mean it".
It's been 16 more years Where are they? Some of this seems promising, but I want to see something before I hit 100.
As far as I know it is still a problem not completelly solved. Many may not realise, but fusion can be this first peculiar form of power production, where the fuel is not the real significant consumable, but the structural, and sacrificial materials of the reactor device itself.
What if tech originally developed for fusion were transferable to another energy project adequate to solve the GHG problem? Gyrotrons are the key tech for a geothermal energy startup called Quaise Energy. They use the gyrotron to vaporize basement rock, cutting borehole costs by an order of magnitude whilst vitrifying the sides of the hole and stabilizing it against the impending pressure. Their system also builds on oil industry expertise in pipes, geology, pumps, etc.
As to fusion itself: it looks still a distant prospect, but at least we're throwing more darts at the board with slightly better aim.
I don't believe the Tokamak type reactor has much promise. With neutrons constantly bombarding its innards, making it internally radioactive, and causing structural decay, I have a problem with this. Clean thermal fusion in a Tokamak simply isn't so. The Quaise Energy concept is much cleaner, as mentioned by kreek22, but could destabilize plate tectonics if improperly used. The bullet approach to aneutronic fusion looks more promising. Keeping the flow in one direction is much easier than trying to contain a neutron bomb completely. Basically, an aneutronic fusion rocket strapped to an MHD generator.
Meanwhile stuff like molten salt fission breeders get nothing. Worked in the 60s, far cheaper, safer than current commercial (solid-fuel/water-cooled) designs, and have most if not all of the benefits claimed for fusion. Hybrid fission/fusion designs might even help get fusion here faster. I'm not anti-fusion, just pro common sense.
It’s because we waste money on submarines not hospitals and fusion
Department of Energy pulled off net positive before the private sector. that's crazy. very cool video though, hope everyone keeps at it
I guess it depends on how you define "net positive".
21:32 YES! THANK you for the plug for Climeworks!
Management - I need you to give birth in 1 months instead of 9, here's 8 engineers.
Very typical of the private industry, funny enough there's was an experiment regarding productivity and rewards, it scale up when the task is mostly labor intensive but when incentives increase to complex task you don't see the same.
A lot of private/silicon valley bravado is a joke. If you consider the total amount of money used in private industry/silicon valley - versus what we get out (a few companies successful, but 1000s that failed)... it's not so efficient. Millions of investors lose big money on so many so-called "startups".
The mythical man month: 728 guys trying to get it done by lunch.
I can't help but think about how computers used to be so large, expensive, and hardly optimal and compare it to this. Just imagining that a future beyond my time there could possibly be these types of reactors in much smaller capacities like how we have hand held computers as our mobile devices gives me hope to the potential of humanity.
What about wave power from the oceans? I’d heard at some point in the past that it’s just a matter of harnessing it to provide energy. Seems that would be a kind of cheap power that wouldn’t also create a hazardous waste product that would create other problems like causing cancers etc. just wondering... I’m not a scientist or anything other than a curious but uneducated person who is just a member of the general public (in so far as science is concerned), who is curious but has no idea about any of this.
This is false analogy. Progress of computation and energy generation are very different things. There are many technical fields where miniaturization was limited or never happened.
@@bonnieklapel1825 fusion won't generate hazardous waste.
Also, harvesting de necessary energy from the oceans would take an intensive use of very special and reinforced materials. It may make sanse for some niche applications but is unfeasible for global production ( also, delivering energy to inland locations would account for i me sé loses as well as you would need a lot of redundancy since waves are not exactly predictable.
D+T Fusion power can create large amounts of low-level waste due to neutron capture. Especially sucks when that waste is expensive electromagnets... I hope this issue can be solved somehow
Experts working on this, the world is watching, we need this as soon as possible, please, never tire and do 100% to save our species.
I’ve been expecting fusion every 20 years, it never quite seems to be there:)
Question?
Q = E out ÷ E in
What are the elements considered in Q ?
Would you measure the energy that was used to make the materials of the project / reactor? When will that achieve break even.
Not only power input is "Q E in".
Footprint of all elements must be considered.
So if the highest break-even is 0.7 what were the factors used to measure this.
Thank you.
Of course these private companies are going to say fusion is right around the corner because that is how they get people to invest in their company
Yep 👍
Great documentary, but I'm shocked Mass Commonwealth Fusion tech isn't represented here. General Fusion is my first bet but Mass Commonwealth Fusion is my 2nd bet. Stellerators have come a long, long way... (And some of these other ideas I wasn't even aware of, they look pretty solid too...)
Net-zero is ambitious, but it's exciting to see this coming online! My mom will be so excited!
I like Tokamak Energy in that they quickly jumped to build magnetic coils from now-available high-temperature-superconductor wires. A lot in fusion scales very favourably (and strongly) with increasing magnetic field, so cheap, strong magnets are key to business.
yes exactly, that's what I'm on about... it's all in the materials science
They don't use superconductors, it's literally just copper, that's all that's been needed and that's all they think they will need
@@tusharbhudia9421 Liquid nitrogen-cooled copper in ST40. But I wouldn't be categoric when discussing future needs. Hard to believe they really are...
Something that wasn't talked about: The fuel.
Short version: the technical challenge with fusion is not only the getting the plasma hot enough part efficiently enough
Long versione:
The lowest temperature fusion reaction we can do is deuterium (D) + tritium (T) to helium and a neutron. All other reactions require factors more of temperature/particle energy.
Deuterium you can get from water (although it only makes up ~0.02% of the hydrogen in natural water). Tritium is radioactive and has a short half-life, so every bit of tritium on earth was generated by humans, either through atom bombs or nuclear reactors or accelerators.
You can use the neutron that comes out of the D-T fusion to do another nuclear reaction with lithium that produces one tritium atom and a helium atom. But the technologies surrounding the entire process of recovering that tritium are not completely solved either.
The whole thing is a non starter. Even if the reaction itself produced overall net energy which so far isn't even close, the fuel would be far too expensive and energy intensive to supply. 60 years of research and we've got nowhere.
what is the reason, they cannot fuse regular hydrogen?
@@zazethe6553 The reactions for regular hydrogen only happen at much higher temperatures/pressures
@@zazethe6553 regular hydrogen does not have neutrons, it is 1 proton and 1 electron. Deuterium also has one neutron, while Tritium has two
Lower the goalposts and shoot for synthesis of helium.
There is a dwindling supply of that, and maybe you’ll run into some bigger fusion breakthroughs later.
I hope we come up with a valid approach to sustained fusion.
Imagine a world with cheap energy and no more fossil fuels.
The approach that I liked is the direct energy transfer rather than going to steam as most other methods mentioned here.
You could make a windmill move to drive the generators, but as long as it doesnt output more than it is useless to think abt transport efficiency.
Felicitaciones a Bloomberg por su video sobre el creciente interes de empresas privadas en invertir en proyectos de fusión nuclear con reactores revolucionarios!!!
A fusion reactor uses deuterium and tritium for fuel. Deuterium can be extracted from water but tritium is radioactive and must be synthesized and it must be made in the actual reactor. Since the reactor consumes the same number of deuterium as tritium atoms it is far from evident that enough tritium to keep the reactor running can be produced. That is only one of the many hurdles that the the fusion startups will have to overcome.
One of the companies that are presented in the video is General Fusion. I have followed their winding path from their start in 2002 and I have come to the conclusion that the method they propose to compress the liquid lithium cannot possibly work. They claim that it does, but to the best of my knowledge they have not presented any proof to support the claim. Please enlighten me if I am wrong.
I was curious what companies were ranking in the billions aforementioned.
Thank you for your critique. It is true that little research has gone into the production of the radioactive tritium to generate enough to fuel the reactor and produce a cost-effective generation of electrical power at the same time. The following critique of the ITER mentions this rarely presented problem.
ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy (The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists)
The inventor of the Television , Philo T. Farnsworth, went on to develop a room sized fusion reactor that used specially designed vacuum tubes for the project. I T & T controlled the Farnsworth patents and refused to allow Farnsworth to proceed any further with the project.
Whenever readers come across an article regarding a fusion energy 'breakthrough' in the goal to achieve fusion energy ask yourself was their any evidence that any, or a significant amount of fusion reactions were detected. In the vast majority of cases the claimed 'breakthrough' experiments involve no DT fusion fuel and so no fusion reactions were detected. Most are simply experiments that compress normal hydrogen isotope nuclei (protons) so there is no way any significant amount of fusion reactions will occur. The announcements are often intended to attract investor, or government funds for further research. The write-ups are often misleading fluff to attract interest.
@@core3673 you truly believe he invented a room sized fusion reactor from vacuum tubes… our species is doomed
What an amazing documentary.
You guys nailed it.
Great explanation of a complex system to the layman level.
Thank you.
You have earned a new subscriber 👍👍
The fact that i am not 18 yet and its 2022 and will probably witness this in my lifetime is insane.
to capture electrons i uses slowing valve. The valves become negatively and positively charged and help the reactor to produce more fuel.
Progress is definitely being made. Very exciting times. Am particularly impressed by the "direct to electricity" technology. My bet is a private company will generate Net Energy first. I sure hope they find multiple pathways to generating Net Energy.
Money runs the world, new world ownership will be for those daring enough to invest in a power source of this kind.
📞hi, it’s Jeff Bezos..”
@@denzali Who cares Elon Musk is on line 2 make Bezos endure the music.
The problem is that we are not yet desperate enough to have to rely on those startups. Even if they progress beyond what is considered net plus, they will be bought up or stifled until they are gone, just to hold up fossil fuels. We are the lazy composers of our own downfall.
@@deadralynx1288 yes we are, but the people in charge of building it realise it's not feasible at relatively small scales (compared to the mass of the sun). But they're stuck because they based their entire careers on it. If they release something with a Net Gain that's really small, it'll be commercially viable, sure, but it'll be a ticking ecological time bomb, producing billions of tonnes of radioactive isotopes from valuable, life-giving water.
@@denzali money is just a completely virtual number we assign to actual resources. It can't bend the laws of physics.
Long term vision: "mining asteroids"
Germany currently: using coal and going back to burning wood.
That's the end result of rabid environmentalism.
@@Captain-Sum.Ting-Wong thats basically due to people being so patriotic that they refuse to put a wind turbine anywhere close to where people live
I’m seriously impressed by the scientific importance and the world wide scientists dedicated to solving the hundreds of problems found attempting to solve the fusion over the decades on this problem. However there are two serious questions I have . First off gravity. Right now we are using superconductors under 1 g but what would happen if we were to say use this in space under 0g or under huge pressure such as deep sea to replicate other atmospheric conditions or gravity close or on to super gas giants or close to our own sun , surly this would alter the plasmas ?
My second question is in regards to energy production- right now we are attempting to generate enough power so it can sustain and produce power of unlimited levels , but up till now power stations have had to be flexible enough to cope with the chaotic grid where energy demand fluctuates the ultimate goal isn’t that it can generate more power but the fact that it can ramp up or down as no country has a constant demand and the cost to wire this up nationwide would have as many technical hurdles as creating fusion without the huge losses
My final question come regarding fusion reactor design- with so much heat why are the scientists not looking at secondary capture to generate power from the heated sections no only to generate power but help self sustain the reaction demand requirements, surly we can use the principles behind solar thermal and geothermal to generate huge amounts of power indirectly
Instead of trying to generate more power than it consumes, we get the reactor to be self sustaining and generate via secondary methods instead to power turbines , heat salt banks , water to steam generators etc
I'd say to those questions.
I would change the exact way you'd perform the fusion, but if you were able to build a working fusion reactor under one set of circumstances, you'd have the theatrical knowledge to build one under others, much as we can build a petrol engine that can power a car, a lorry, a ship or a submarine, albeit one that would take much much effort.
Grid power needs to be rapidly delivered, but we already have power plants that take a while to switch on or off - it takes hours to fully turn on or off nuclear power plants or even coal ones. Grid fluctuations can be solved by turning on power stations before the grid reaches a failure point and selling electricity more cheaply. The word you use 'losses' shows why fusion would be so useful as a power source; energy would potentially be so cheap, it wouldn't matter if we wasted energy turning on or off these plants because it would be so affordable, much as you don't worry about 'wasting' heat from an oven used to cook food. IDK about the third question.
@@josephkoppenhout6034 your wrong unlimited energy is a huge problem for the grid ,power delivery as I have said is uneven, it has predictable peaks usually between 6-9pm and 6-8 am but throughout the day demand can fluctuate a lot including excessive energy right now when it goes into negative we do things such as pump energy into hydro storage to cope with the peak but the way fusion is up till now being developed is an always on high output, you can’t do that with the grid , to much unused can cause cascade failure even nuclear energy can be ramped up or down, that’s why the grid has to balance that through the country , fusion cannot do that that is why I say scientists look into secondary generation methods as primary generation from already established methods that can use the super heated plasma created from generation and use that to run steam or principles behind geothermal as well for instance we have a fusion reactor double the output we normally get from nuclear able to generate 3-4 gwh constantly, but using it’s wasted heat that comes from the byproduct of generating power it feeds that heat to generate in say building 12gwh which is quite possible since we are talking plasma at Over a million degrees , this is the power station that can then be ramped up or down depending on demand thus only two would be needed to power the U.K., 6 could power the USA , 9 could power Russia.
In 1992 I heard a lecture on fusion technology. The lecturer had been researching fusion technology for twenty years and prophesied that it would be producing all the electricity the world would need within twenty years. It is now 2022, 40 years on and they are still quoting availability in twenty years time.
Yeah, one does wonder, sure getting skeptical about Tokamaks, think we need a radical breakthrough to have anything economically viable.
Monorail.
As long as capitalism is the driving force behind such projects, they are all doomed to fail.
"They" will not allow any new energy source to supplant the old one until the old one has been completely tapped out.
Until then, all we will get is teasers and more esoteric calls for a brighter future.
P.S.
Nuclear (thorium) works, but they don't want to be financially responsible for the mess they've already created with their boiling water reactors.
@@bhatkat But if you actually look at what these alternatives are, it is very easy to see how utterly absurd these are.
Lets assume for a moment that we can achieve fusion with initial confinement with both the liquid Metall idea and the laser heating idea, in the sense that the fusion energy divided by input energy is >1.
Than what? You still need way more energy to power the lasers than what their output is to slightly warm up the chamber.
How is that useful?
A usual fission Reaktor evaporates enormes amounts of water, high temperatures and high energy output for a rather small machine.
That is what makes it cost effective.
Fusion is a technology 30 years away, and has been for 50 years
its 30 years away until its not!
@@austeyen5628 you’re right, the breakthrough could happen tomorrow but today it’s still 30 years away
@@thsxi nt with that attitudue!
@@thsxi yeah i meant even with many wrong guesses, 30 years will be an accurate guess EVENTUALLY
@@austeyen5628 eventually, but we won’t know when that eventually is, we’ll be right but we won’t know it until 30 years later it’s done and then we track back, but until it is done, it’s still ‘30 years away’, even if it’s 1 day away
Very exciting times. I wish I was my nephews age. They'll be in there mid-20's when this technology is coming into it's own.
Commercial fusion reactors were since my childhood 10-15 years away. Classic moving target. Now 60 years later I am afraid that I will never see it in action 🥺
you will, I'd bet 20 to 1
Until governments like the US or others take it seriously... firstly LFTR fission as something like that on a Manhattan project scale would be provide a fully functioning LFTR plant in 3 years or so.
While a Manhattan project for fusion would still probably take 10 years.
At the scale and pace of ITER and even that of Wendelstein 7x which is only doing plasma control research mostly... with some additions as time goes on such lithium wall tritium breeders in another decade or so after. All research for the most part only. Not pushing such research to be completed quickly (which would cost lots of money)... and moving toward an actual Demo prototype.
And these private deals... are mostly research, they just can't tell their investors that they're literally burning their money up. They gotta sound like it's gonna happen "soon". Not at their scale and pace.
Fusion would be great . But in the meantime , why aren’t we going with walk away safe environmentally friendly long proven Thorium molten salt reactors that doesn’t need to be by a body of water and can built almost any where ?
China is pushing hard to have these plants and is almost past the pilot plant stage and since thorium is very abundant it makes for long lasting cheap clean energy.
you calling clean to radioactive waste? Interesting
You don't need to wait for some decades until that chinese lab shows some results, for then to be adopted by your country, and then a plant to be built near your region.
Wake up, solar is already here.
Thorium fission can be used to power nuclear fusion as well like in a hydrogen bomb so you get more energy yield per thorium.
@@aoeu256 And we may be able to separate Thorium from seawater, then breed it into Uranium in a reactor. Upcycling is the new recycling
A better investment for this capital would be to research construction of safer and cheaper fission reactors and spent fuel reprocessing. Fusion is a money pit that may never be commercially viable.
we don't really have any other bets apart from nuclear
Plenty of money is going into next generation small liquid sodium molten thorium pebble modular blahblah fission startups: NuScale, Terrapower, that Rolls Royce thing, ... They're closer to viability than fusion, which means they're facing the reality that wind and solar are and will be much cheaper than the first few units they build.
Just want to throw this out. Fusion makes 4x what fission makes and can create elements up to lead. You basically have a star
@@skierpage Fission reactors and solar/wind are not comparable, therefore neither is cheaper than the other. Now, solar/wind plus storage can be compared to fission reactors. And that comparison doesn't pan out so well for solar/wind.
@@spencervance8484 Up to lead via fusion? You sure about that?
As for 4x the energy, we're talking about just H fusion.
Right now hydroelectric is the best we got. While not available to all places in the world it's definitely the most efficient and cleanest we got. Super excited for fusion power!!!
"No, we're gonna make it a little bit worse, but get it done a year earlier" isn't exactly a statement I find comforting.
They mean less powerful (the next machine is still only an experiment). They want to get to a stage where they can test it sooner, then refine and build the next bigger machine. Fast iteration is helpful. If you go slow, you get ITER (and the stigma of "forever 30 years away").
19:02 Really dumb to say that NASA is "unmotivated" to pursue the tech SpaceX has. There's a difference between being extremely underfunded and unmotivated. If the US government put a fraction of the money they put into the military into NASA they would have innovated even more.
highly underrated comment.
@@alexanderlau770 thank you sir
When I was working on controlled fusion in the 90s, I came to the conclusion that it was the philosophers stone of our time. I have seen nothing since to make me change my mind, but I desperately hope that someone will prove me wrong.
Can I ask, what, as simply as you can describe, made it seem a fools errand?
@@ahklys1321 At that time the main approach was magnetic confinement. The problem in general with magnetic confinement is that there is monstrous feedback between the plasma and the containing fields. Furthermore, the higher energy and higher density your plasma gets, the higher the feedback gets. It just doesn't seem to make sense. For ICF the problem is different. Because it is an impulse system, for any type of you have the problem that you need to clear out any reaction products from the previous shot before you can do the next shot. This seems somewhat more feasible, but that much.
@@thekinginyellow1744 oh, that makes a bit of sense, I guess.
Thanks 👍
Like putting a propeller on a bike, the harder you pedal the more energy the propeller consumes.
There have been a dozen or so major developments in the last 10 years concerning a) high temperature super conductors, b) MIMO control techology and high-speed chips for controlling such systems, c) actuators ( I imagine ), d) simulation technology, e) fundamental science / physics, f) new simulators that have come out of Princeton et al, new algorithms, g) deep learning and 'AI' techniques applied to predicting plasma instabilities better... And probably far more stuff that I'm not aware of because I'm just a spectator (although I have a ph.d. in systems engineering and mathematical optimization...). But my point is that a great many things have changed in the last 10 years. And the fact that the billionaires are coming in cause they smell blood in the water, so to speak, reinforces that idea in my mind. This is a different ball game. I don't think you're up with the times, lately.
I like the company in seattle's idea most, it does feel like your missing something substantial when you've got fusion on the 1 side then on the other is steam.. it just doesn't look right
Thank You!
world need this technology a lot