I think Sabine's contention wasn't the state of Qplasma, it was the apparent intentional conflating of Qplasma and Qtotal. It would be like a company misleading investors by misrepresenting revenue with profit.
Agreed. And ironically this video trys to do diversionary tactics similar to the investor hype that was mentioned in Sabine's video. Also, this video is incorrect as she didn't try to imply that it was more important to improve the heat to power inefficiency factor.
@@alexit123 what's diversionary? I thought it clearly distinguished between Qplasma and Qtotal , and agreed that news coverage was misleading and ultimately damaging to the enterprise.
@@FredPlanatia Sorry, but this video did EXACTLY what Sabine complained about. It dangled the prospect that a Qplasma on the order of 10 was "just around the corner at MIT". That is not reality, only an optimistic projection, i.e. complete bullshit. And the reason is obvious, this YT channel is a partisan cheerleader for fusion research -- gotta keep those research grants flowing.
I love how you essentially agree with Sabine, but clarify the usefulness of looking Qplasma alone, with great references and further info. Thanks to both of you for these excellent videos.
She didn’t say anything about the importance of using Q plasma in research. She only addressed the way it’s used for funding. To say to a layman that they have .7% net gain when they are really closer to .07% net gain is deceptive at best. Most likely it’s intentionally misleading to get funding.
A few years ago I saw a documentary called "The Sun in a Bottle" (or similar). Towards the end Michel Laberge the Canadian CSO of General Fusion said words to the effect that "ITER is totally impractical as a power station, but it would be absolutely necessary to answer important questions that nothing else could do because it had the power to do it." Adding perspective to that, Laberge has a totally different technology called magnetized target fusion (MTF) and he was saying how important ITER was. What Sabine was totally right about is the money grabbing by promoters and Universities. I did my degree in aerospace and then started to go into university based research. I ended up walking away in disgust at the money issues. There's at least 1 RUclips channel I have seen that goes into that subject of how research is forced to chase money and what it causes. Its a soul and career destroying subject that's not discussed much.
honestly i think she sometimes does it on purpose. as in, she deliberately goes in direct opposition to the mainstream opinion even if she knows perfectly well that it's a bit of a stretch.
@@Alexander_Sannikov The question is... Is it worth pouring billions into plasma fusion? I had been in favour of it, once Sabine confirmed what I'd heard from other sources I flipped. I now think we're pouring too much cash at what is best viewed as a side-bet.
@@chrisreed5463 Even if SAFIRE turns out to be fake, I think research into mid-temperature fusion & self-organizing plasma is good money spent, along with traditional high-temp and also commercial fission research. Why? Because the world needs more nuclear physicists. Keep in mind that Germany spent $400B on wind & solar and didn't reduce their greenhouse gas footprint. How? They foolishly shut down their nuclear reactor fleet. Imagine $400B in nuclear research.
Sabine video was clearly and unequivocally talking about science communication, and not about how scientists communicate with each other. The additional context is very interesting and very welcome, but I don't really see any disagreement with her video.
I agree and I do think Sabine made a good video. I just wanted to point out why Qplasma is the quantity talked about and give at least one example (such as I-mode on Alcator) of how valuable technological progress can be made even when it doesn't seemingly push Qtotal up immediately.
@@ImprobableMatter Absolutely, and that point was perfectly made in your video. It seems that I assumed wrongly that a "response" would imply a disagreement, but obviously it is not the case. Please don't take this as a discouragement, your video was very interesting and I would love to see more like this.
@@ImprobableMatter Good video and you are both right from a different perspective (she had an issue with the media representation, but you explained very well why otherwise Qtotal is not at all the only important metric of a fusion device)
Media sensationalism is not a problem confined (a little accidental humor there) to fusion or scientific research but happens in all fields. Asking fusion scientists to deal with it is like asking you to be responsible for your drunk uncle at the Christmas dinner.
There is another metric that is being ignored and that is the economic viability of a system. We very well could get Qplasma to 20, Qtotal to 1.1 and not have a real world viable fusion power because of the financial cost...
"We need to build a rocket to save humanity from a catasrophe that'll wipe out all life". "Yeah, but how much will it cost?" Capitalism will destroy this planet.
Some econometric studies say that a energy source that hasn't an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) at least in the range of 5-10:1 is utterly useless to sustain our current economical and social arrangement. Oil had an eroei that was 50:1in the 1950 (now about 15:1). Fusion is just a pie in the sky, and will ever be.
I think this channel made the wave first because RUclips recommended the Qplasma video from this channel (to me) first before Sabine publish her Qplasma video. However there must been a hidden confounding actor that is making an impression on both RUclipsr to upload a Qplasma video with such a close proximity in timing (both videos were uploaded 1 month ago).
Sabine video actually helped me to understand that ITER most likely will never be a real power plant but more like LHC with different purpose. Before i was quite sure that they would get some electricity out of it. Maybe not much but at least something.
even the ITER's successor DEMO isn't going to be a real power plant, that's gonna be in 2050s according to the timeline. If everything goes as planned, the first commercial fusion plants are here in 2060s-70s.
@@Czeckie Ima let you in on something, its not going to be 2050, nor 2080, now 2180. Fusion stands zero chance as long as these experiments are getting funded 10s of billions of dollars. I know it sounds counter intuitive however this road is far too difficult. Its become scammy because of those difficulties which is not good despite what this video seems to suggest and at the end of the day its going to take a breakthrough like LCF from NASA to ever get us to where we need to be. These billion dollar novelty store Plasma globes are never going to get it. They have no incentive to. Everyone involved is already richer except the investors. Sad part is they likely are also as they arrange the scammy press releases so they can pass their loses onto lower level investors. We need innovation yet when we get it people like this guy shit on it which really just makes me think he is one of the people standing on the plasma globe with his hand out talking about how the next larger machine will definitely produce Q>100. 100 billion dollars later Qplasma comes back at .9 and they promise just another 100 billion, a larger machine... and 30 years and everyone's gonna be rich!
ITER was never intended to generate electricity, and it never will. It's a physics experiment. Adding on the infrastructure to generate electricity would add cost without adding a whole lot of new science knowledge. DEMO is a prototype design, and will aim to generate some electricity, and may be connected to the grid.
Next video will be up in about a month on a slightly different topic (hopefully still interesting to science and technology fans). I will then continue the "How fusion works" series; the next episode will cover plasma confinement in general, stars, thermonuclear weapons and inertial fusion like the NIF.
a physicist actually proved that the plasma instability will ALWAYS kink in a torus due to 6 degrees of freedom due to dynamic interaction with the field and the plasma. he was black balled and his paper banned.
a great video with very relevant information and good delivery, i liked it. particularly the example with antennas that could easily be optimized for a particular frequency if the goal was a working reactor rather than an experimental machine. i kind of did not realize that.
I think she wanted people to be pragmatic about fusion research and the prospects of fusion energy, particularly in the context of mass media coverage. This also applies to ITER, which is still all numbers on a piece of paper until it proves gains in reality. Even those prospective gains are a good decade away at best. Long steady progress is what the media should be communicating, not sensationalist headlines blowing up expectations.
It's good to be pragmatic but she implied the field is founded on a fib and was a deadend money sink. This is a feeling she sells from a good story, but it is not rooted in reality.
@@willis936 the fib is that Qplasma>1 is synonymous with power generation I don't think anyone who decides how to grant money was filled though, only the general public
Loved the video, I was not aware of the ways in which efficiency trades off against flexibility in fusion approaches. I didn’t think it was “clickbait” at all.
When I saw Sabine's video one of the first things I thought about was your channel, so thankyou very much for making this response video, as it really helped clarify things.
Excellent work, thank you! I humbly disagree with your justification for the stalled progre$$ in Q since JET, but that's a minor point. This is an excellent and rare presentation of the state of the field. Keep it up!
I'm with this guy. I like Sabine, but the Q issue she built a 'not soon' argument where it's all about the Q>1. But I see plenty of reporting saying very clearly that Q=or>10 to 25 is needed for power generation. The ARC reactor is a pretty exciting possibility for reaching those numbers. I do get investors saying "look how close we are to Q=1!" But Sabine was both clickbaity and, well, wrong. Total Q is the goal but Tony Stark was actually right when he tested the MKII. Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk. The wheels metaphor in the video here is good, but I have a better nonmetaphor: we're trying to get a star in a bottle made out of magnets. Let's understand all the moving parts before we make one, eh?
Its not that complicated guys, in layman accounting terms, Qplasma is like revenue that only accounts for the cost of goods but not cost of operations. Qtotal is the actual profits. If you are in product R&D, you should be concerned about raising Qplasma, if you are in operations, management, media or just an investor, you should be concerned in raising Qtotal.
Very nice and persuasive video. I recently read an interview with someone on the ITER project, and they were asked to comment about the confusion between q plasma and q total. Their reply (which I'm paraphrasing) was that it doesn't really matter in the real world. For the small portion of people who have even heard of q, their takeaway is that it needs to get to some high level before fusion power is commercially viable, and broadly speaking that's true. The public might not precisely understand why it's true, but the broad stroke understanding is the correct one.
True, but we have to be careful because "broad stroke" understanding can lead to a variety of conclusions in peoples minds. It leaves room for unicorn thinking. It has to be accompanied by a conclusion that matches the data, ie the story that is told should be unbiased. With millions of investor funding at stake, its difficult to be.
It's however sensationalized that Q of 1 or just above 1 is what's needed for a reactor by the science media. Whereas, the argument from both this and Sabines video is that Qplasma=1 isn't anything special, basically a made up goal because you can describe a difference between q1
In echo to the comments below, I would like to say this: wouldn’t it be great if all disagreements could be of this nature! Polite, respectful, and above all informative and constructive. As a result, rather than destroying each other, the two presentations complement each other, clarify things for the audience, and everyone is better off. Should we show them both to politicians just to prove it is actually possible to behave like adults, rather than like ever squabbling brats? Or perhaps it may be more productive to show them to high school and college students: at least with them we can have some hope. Echoing everyone else below, thanks to both for these very informative presentations.
The point of Sabine's video is very valid: in 20 or 30 years when ITER is a success everybody is going to be asking about their free energy, because that's what they are expecting, that's what I was expecting before I watched her video. And then when they ask for half a trillion dollars for a real fusion power plant, they are not going to get it, because everyone is going to feel robbed, because no one explain to them what Sabine did.
Only one point of her video is not valid; that we must not focus our research on Q -Plasma but put our resources on Q total. This video shows convincingly how focusing on Q total and bypassing Q Plasma is misguided
@@chris2kgreat The point she made was not that the scientists should focus on Q total instead of Q plasma, but that the public relations departments of those scientific institutions should present and explain both values to the investors, as well as the general public, because as it stands at the moment, they are intentionally misleading both audiences.
@@chris2kgreat if we want a working fusion reactor, it is what we should be focusing on. One of the points of this video is that we are focused on it, since we're working on multiple things in parallel, like laser improvements. The results of each aren't being combined in how progress towards a working reactor are communicated though
Great video, thanks! I recently started my masters degree thesis in fusion topic and had no idea about what Sabine told in her video. Yours gave me the arguments to back my thought that nuclear fusion research was still something important to do in spite of that.
Nice response. Just goes to show how semantics are important. It would be nice to have a term that clearly communicated the progress toward fusion success that was easy to distinguish from another term that indicates progress toward power generation success.
It's just standardization in thermodynamics for describing energy transfer Even Qtotal is only a part of the metric for whether a fusion power plant should be made and whether it's successful. At that point you're talking about the costs to build and fuel the thing, and how much you can charge for the electricity it creates, and how that works with the variety of nuclear, renewable, and fossil fuel based plants
You and Sabine have valid, but differing points. Hers was mostly about how this information is mis-communicated outside the field. While many scientists and enthusiasts will understand why Q-plasma is a vital starting point, even within the sciences, people don’t always understand that what is being reported or discussed is only a small part of the equation for producing net power out (Q-total). I see it all the time and I’m thankful for her video because people have argued with me when I’ve explained this before her video. I’m “nobody” so how could I know more than what they believe some article is stating. Now I have at least one credible source to refer them to. That’s been a vital missing piece. But proving that we can, in reality, not just theory, produce Q-plasma great enough to even seriously consider spending time and money researching and eventually building all of the other systems that would be necessary to produce a net energy return (Q-total) > 1 is an essential first step. When Q-plasma was near 0.1, all of those external systems were nearly pointless pursuits. Now, with Q-plasma nearing 1.0, with signs it will likely to continue to improve considerably, it makes sense to fund both the core technology for pushing Q-plasma to >10, and developing the external systems that would be needed to produce a full fusion reactor with a Q-total > 2. Obviously, 1 < Q-total < 2 is a net return, but almost certainly not useful in practice, so the target needs to be somewhere above 2, and higher is better. I could be wrong, maybe fusion reactors having Q-total between 1.5 and 2 would be practical, but that seems unlikely.
Even the Q-total is nothing. You need a Q-grand_total, that describes how actually the plant will build and dispose of itself. Solar panels, for example, go like 25 years, of which 7 they work for producing themselves, disposal not accounted. Here, it quite easily may happen, that even at good Q-total, the plant still can not reproduce itself.
@@2L40K no, it doesn’t take 7yrs for solar panels to produce the amount of electricity needed to produce them. If you can’t get the basic facts straight, you should stay away from making claims.
@@geoffstrickler Yes it does. ROI of 20% at best. If you are only on solar and wind - it gets even worse. You will need to produce batteries on top of that. And stop talking like a bot, politician or something alike. Say more with less empty words.
@@geoffstrickler Solar generation has a bell shaped curve during the day. Factory production has almost flat curve day and night. All your electrical infrastructure must be built for that top of that bell curve - approximately 3 times over average. On top of that daily variation, there is also a seasonal variation. So, in the example of an offgrid system - you design it for the worst case in the winter. As a result, in the summer there is a lot of useless energy generated, and all of the infrastructure is calculated around that top peak summer production. And you can't explain all that without the use of "the magical grid of infinite capacity". Moreover, domestic power use is even worse - it peaks early in the morning and late in the evening. In all cases it's way out of that solar generation bell peak. In "the future of electric transportation" things go even worse.
In the end you need both parameters... Probably doesn't hurt to publish both. And the ratio between the two itself is interesting, the closer we are to a real plant design
I think the critical point of contention between these two videos is “how easily can you get a useful Qtotal once you have a useful Qplasma?” Sabine argues that that will be a huge challenge in itself, likely taking many years, while this video implies that it will happen quickly (e.g. by using new lasers that are already being developed). Both agree that experiments to raise Qplasma are valuable, and both agree that the public should not be misled by pointing to Qplasma improvements without explaining the challenges that remain with Qtotal, but the videos are at odds because they have different expectations on how difficult those remaining challenges will be to overcome.
The degradation of the reactor walls and the copious amount of radioactive waste is also one of the biggest engineering challenges, and one which the "clean" energy pundits routinely ignore.
Well done in getting across a valid (but nuanced) argument. One feature of ITER Is the provision of more than one mechanism for carrying out certain processes in the fusion reactor - for example multiple methods for heating plasma (if I understood things correctly). That is another example which characterises ITER as an experiment not a prototype.
Yes, you're totally right. ITER will have 4 broad types of heating: Neutral Beams, Ion Cyclotron, Electron Cyclotron and Lower Hybrid (as well as inductive, but this is not sustainable long term). The ARC proposal, being more focused on performance as a reactor has just 2: Ion Cyclotron and Lower Hybrid. Both approaches are correct, given their aims: ITER will have the breadth to experiment, while ARC would be tightly focused on demonstrating electrical output.
@@ImprobableMatter Last I heard, ITER is not planning on installing Lower Hybrid. MIT is advocating for it, but my understanding is the consensus would prefer to see 20MW more ECRH.
Good to recognize scientific and journalistic dishonesty about progress. I was research chemist (Oxy Research 1980s) and understand that demonstrating fundamental principles is vastly different than commercialization. Point taken that fusion experiments are optimized for the former, but the latter (goal) must be kept in mind along with practicality. We did both at Oxy. The lab next door to me had a large nuclear fusion apparatus, which never went anywhere, nor did my experiments on in-situ coal liquefaction. In fact, few projects were commercialized - like oil shale that is now used. In the 1800s HG Wells wrote about travel to the moon - very exciting - but the technogy was out of reach until the 1960s. Sabine's video focused on that issue along with integrity issues. Q-plasma could be 1000, but without practical implentation, it's just an expensive science experiment in the end. She at least set our expectations.
Great video, I suspected that something like what's explained in the video was the reason why researchers are so interested in qplasma. However, the main point of Sabine's videos is not that Qplasma is a meaningless concept but rather that people deceiving uninformed people (politicians etc) into believing this thing is anywhere close to generating usable energy. If these experimental reactors that will not generate usable energy are still a worthwhile scientific investment, it should be argued as such without relying on deception. This is a very very important distinction. I can easily see how a bunch of politicians could figure "ahh well, even if the scientific benefits arent worth it (which i cant assess anyways), itll still double up as a reactor! win win :)"
Good point that it isn't exactly useful to use Qtotal figures for an experimental device which is purposefully inefficient to allow for a broad range of experimentary conditions, while the final reactor would be designed with maxium efficiency and produced to specifications. Also funny people are arguing that this video and channel are overoptimistic on fusion alongside the previous "Why we wont have fusion by 2040" video. =8)-DX
Me: "We won't have fusion by 2040" Comments: "You're a shill paid by the fossil fuel industry!" Me: "Some good progress is being made" Comments: "Deluded shill for big fusion!"
I think you are misrepresenting her video. She wasn’t stating that Qplasma should be ignored in favor of optimizing Qtotal. Merely that researchers and companies shouldn’t intentionally conflate the two in order to exaggerate progress and secure funding.
I will cover it in a technical video, but in short - while it has broken records for its class of machine (stellarator), it has only achieved a temperature of around 40 million degrees, while the tokamak has gone up to 300 million. So, still somewhat behind the tokamak approach.
Sabine's not wrong. You're not wrong, but you are constructing a straw man argument. You're not undoing anything she suggested. You're just arguing to a different point. It still will take a long time.
Humanity needs efficient energy production today, not in 40 yrs. Given limited funding, Rate of Return is more important than total ROI. Improvements in solar and fission would provide a much higher ROR. I believe this is what Sabine @skdh is addressing as she has been an outspoken critic of building a larger LHC, too. Fusion appears to suffer sunk cost fallacy, IMO.
The future collider is dumb because it probably won't discover any new particles. But fusion is an achievable goal, and we'll need it if we ever want to get interstellar travel.
I think fusion is in more of an unsunk cost state. For instance in a 2018 book The Future of Fusion Energy they note that the yearly US budget for fusion is half of the budget for peanut subsidies - and under the amount where a projection in 1976 predicted it might never occur. I think what is likely to happen is one or more of the experiments will get a Q of 1 or more and then the field will actually start to get funded. The start of commercial fusion is arguably 100-200 billion dollars away as much as a certain number of years away. The Paris Accord proposes spending of a trillion, per year I don't see energy storage as likely to provide an answer to the half or so of baseload power needed to be replaced faster than fusion though both should be explored. I agree with you on fission but I think public acceptance is simply too uncertain and even meltdown proof plants have a proliferation risk. This leaves fusion as the known unknown that could do it in my opinion.
As a species we invest a laughably small amount in anything even remotely sustainable. More money was spent on developing the next iPhone than was spent so far on fusion research in the last 5 years. We should be investing far more into both fusion, and other technologies that harness it less directly. Solar and wind, tidal, orbital solar, etc.
@@Teth47 The thing is, such research is really unpredictable and any significant return can only be expected after a few decades. Because of that, you can hardly find a company willing to pursue it. At best you can hope for some benevolent billionaire to throw their money at this or for government officials to get lobbied enough by the right researchers. Both of these strategies are quite unreliable. Billionaires don't get rich by throwing money out, and closest we have right now is Musk developing reusable rockets (more tangible goal then fusion) and Bezos trying to surpass him. On the other hand, governments are inherently wasteful - they lack proper incentive structure (prices) to operate efficiently and optimize behavior (they don't go out of business for wasting funds or pursuing dumb ideas). Furthermore, it's not really fair to force everyone into paying for stuff they don't want. Finally, how would one even design a law that picks worthwhile research ideas and discards unrealistic ones? We really need a way to (crowd?)fund these things. It would be immensely useful and also rather fun. We have the resources to (e.g. countries do way more funds than currently goes into research, while this money stems from taxes and inflation almost exclusively). It's just no good system for this currently exists.
@@mskiptr It's almost like the government should be directing some of its astronomical military budget into the "unprofitable"/fundamental research so that it gets done, putting it into a public repository as it was paid for by the public, for all to use. You know, like it used to.
I understand your point, and definitely agree with it. Everybody in the fusion community is aware of it. The problem Sabine makes, however, is that the public is being misled, by making them believe fusion reactors are "around the corner." I posted the following in Sabine's video: Excellent video! It's great you set the record straight in this matter. I'm actually fond of fusion and wish it will be a successful source of energy, but I cringe every time these people cheat (that's the word, not "confuse") the public into believing fusion is almost there... "whether they are physicists or humans." Paraphrasing Eduardo Galeano, fusion reactors are like the horizon; it moves farther as you approach it, but it keeps us moving, and advancing in the effort. One comment on the video: Although I understand you are speculating how much electric power ITER would produce, figuratively speaking, it should be clear that it isn't designed to produce electric power.
Well, this RUclips vid sounds like a paper for a reviewed journal, references and all. That is very nice. To me the salient point is that if all the energy must come form plasma, then making Q_plasma>>1 must be the priority now. And that was clear even while watching the SH video. The contribution of this one is to point out that when Q_plasma>>1 is achieved, it will be possible to increase the ratio Q_plasma/Q_overall by improving the efficiency of ancillaries.
Thank you for your clarifications. Since this video was posted I've learned other aspects that were not covered in it. I believe that it has been standard practice, in the field, to not explain the difference between Q-fusion and Q-total, when providing press releases and related presentations to the press, the public and to investors. The extremely arcane nature of the physics and engineering is being used a a tool to withhold key parameters and that process spawns misunderstandings among the receivers. I include most of the workers in this field as also being misled. Around the time this video was produced the ITER project encountered two major defects as they were assembling the vacuum chamber segments. The management recently announced that it is expected to cost an additional 5-million eros to remedy those issues. They also stated that they don't expect to achieve first plasma until 2035 and that there first D/T fusion reactions may not occur until 2039. They stated this will be to late to deal with the rapidly decaying Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) situation. Other nuclear fusion energy projects, such as SPARC, have assumed that their designs would soon benefit from ITER's fusion energy experiments. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) was funded in return for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) ending their decades-long full-scale nuclear explosion program at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). They were required to end it due to the signing of the nuclear test ban treaty. NIF has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research tool. That includes upgrades and modification of the existing H-bombs in the nation's massive nuclear arsenal. One estimate has put the cost of NIF at $11-billion. The management has always been masterful in obscuring that purpose when addressing the press and general public. Around the time this video was posted the SPARC designers had eliminated electrical energy generation, and breeder blankets from there plans. Personally, I believe the ARC design plans are premature until SPARC has solved numerous issues that the planners suggest will all be cured with their high field superconducting magnet technology. It appears that all tokamaks, and most other MCF devices, will need to operate in a pulse mode when operating near their full fusion power point. This is due to sustaining the fusion plasma and due to the heat load limits of the surrounding structure. SPARC is expected to sustain 10 second full fusion pulses. The off, or recovery time, isn't stated. I suspect it will be far greater than 10 seconds. The Q-fusion value for all experimental devices only includes the 'on' period of the pulse. No efforts are being made by experimenters to provide Q-total values for the average 'off and on' times, or for any extended period of operation, such as for a day. The experiments began in the 1950s. All the original experimenters are either dead, or long retired. Most of the young experimenters today have no clue as to all the difficulties those early experimenters encountered. There have been many dozens of nuclear fusion energy machines created and utilized for experiments. My guess is that over $100-billion has already been expended in the search for this suggested holy grail. Perhaps it would have been better directed at technologies such as photovoltaic and wind turbine farms. We no longer have a couple of decades left to turn this 'Titanic' around. List of fusion experiments (Wikipedia)
I like Sabine's clear cut explanations. The episode mentioned was a hard kooky to swallow. Your explanation alleviates that somewhat. But still it is far from honest the way the field of nuclear fusion informs the public.
You are negating a statement, that Sabine never did make in this form. I mean: I watched Sabines Video too and ... nope, what you alleged is not really what she said. This is known as "straw man", there is a wikipedia page about that. So ... why? Despite that, your video was really informative, but I would like it more if it would not contain such an ... kind of ... unexplained phenomena. Without strawman argumentation this would be one of the best videos about that topic on RUclips. Man, how could that happen? Your technical and scientific arguments for being mor confident and optimistic about nuclear fusion are great, so no straw men should be needed.
Do I understand it correctly, that the major "stumbling block" on the way to a stable confinement, are the instabilities inside the plasma, like, for example Alfven instability? If yes, then, why don't we hear more about what has been done in researching those instabilities and finding ways to minimize them? If we speak about conducting interesting experiments, then, I would assume, we need to talk more not about the "magic Q-number", but rather about the physics that prevents long-term plasma confinement. Also, it would be interesting to hear about Tritium problem, how it is being handled. As always, IMHO.
Yes, instabilities and turbulence are the biggest hurdle to achieving fusion. Which type of instability has the greatest detriment on confinement curiously depends on the specialization of the scientist standing nearby. ;) While there is a lot of academic research being done on these instabilities, the surest way to combat them is to build larger or higher field strength machines. I will cover tritium breeding issues in a future technical video.
@@ImprobableMatter Do you think that the larger stellarators will give you a more uniform magnetic field, so you will have less "destructive" instabilities? But the larger devices imply larger surfaces, thus the boundary effects will be more pronounced. Just wondering.
Hard to say very specifically. W7-X has set a temperature record 10 lower than the best tokamak performance and 100 times lower triple product, so the stellarator is not a magic solution. Would a bigger stellarator be superior? Yes, but it would also be harder to engineer. You mentioned a new physics regime when alpha particle heating begins to dominate - if they drive currents this would be great for tokamaks and destabilizing for stellarators, and vice versa. In any case, we are committed to the tokamak route in the near future, so hopefully any physics solutions we come up with will also transfer over.
@@ImprobableMatter I did not realize that you are running a tokamak, my apologies. I got a "whiff" of tokamak physics, when I was studying plasma physics, as it was the design that was promoted by Kadomtsev. Cheers!
I did work on a tokamak, but I meant "we" as a species - the major machines being built now are all tokamaks with a heritage back to T-3 at the Kurchatov Institute.
With reference to your final comment in the article, the problem is that when it comes to reporting on fusion power generation, most reporting is click-baity to some degree. Even 'genuine' high reputation news sources tend to focus on the promise of feeding the grid within the elusive 30 years.
A better car analogy would be that you can't design better tires if you don't know the shape, size, and weight the engine will have. And the engine efficiency dominates the tire efficiency while the engine is also much more complicated, so working the other way around, trying to design a working engine to go with theoretically perfect tires, is nonsensical.
There is the Qtotal issue Then the tritium issue. Then the béryllium issue. Then the disruption isssue. Then the neutron destroying everything issue. Then the divertor being stupidely monkeyhammered issue. Then houra you have a functionning fusion reactor that only cost 10 times more than a comparable nuclear fission plant. Amazing.
i was enjoying this until the author used the word "profitable" at the 5:49 time mark. Its one thing to have a fusion reactor that works in an engineering sense (net electrical energy production). its another thing to deliver a technology that is not so expensive that it has no commercial consequence. In the world beyond 2040 we will have both cheap renewable energy (we already have this but it will get cheaper) and mature (cost effective) grid scale energy storage. It is highly unlikely that fusion reactors will compete given this commercial reality - except in some niche uses. I don't mind spending tens of billions on physics experiments. That's probably worth it. We may even perfect fusion energy for space propulsion. But its going to have little relevance to electricity supply on Earth.
The most representative metric would probably be a sort of economical feasibility score, similar to the scoring systems we have for various Six Sigma tools.
I think Sabine is not complaining about the importance of improving Qplasma, and indeed not even discrediting the research in the field. She complained about the false statements used by researchers to get money from funding agencies. I have heard people justifying this approach, as it is currently needed to convince funding agencies even when using lies. I am with Sabine instead. On the lo by run, this approach leads to people outside science not trusting scientists. There is a need, in science, to change approach in the way fundings are given, and success is recognised.
i feel like there is a deliberate effort by the powers that be, academia, whoever, to stifle our progress on this front. it's time to smash barriers. we should be in jetson's era by now
I'm confused on the Qplasma being infinite for the stellarator. Don't you have to do work on something to put it into a container? Use electricity to make the fields that do the confining?
We will surely get there with Q-plasma at some point, but it is the neutron issues which are now the greatest challenge: capture neutrons to make enough tritium, while not allowing them to wreck the machine walls.
@@Alexander_Sannikov yeah it's kind of discouraging. I've been following the development of a few different fusion start ups because it seems like once private money gets into the game, that usually means we're close to something going to market. I'm super glad that improbable matter has made these videos to put it all in perspective, but also kinda disheartened with the realization that we're much further than buzzy articles make it sound.
@@ImprobableMatter I've heard it say that ITER is going to actually get to a Qgain of more than 1, but have they addressed the neutron issue your talking about here? I don't think I've read anything about neutron capture/tritium breeding with ITER.
ITER is aiming specifically for Q-plasma of 10, which would translate to Q-total of less than 1 with the kind of systems they have. For the reasons mentioned in this video, it does not make sense to build in an actual electric generation infrastructure. Also as mentioned, some of the inefficiency is to allow experimental freedom. One major selling point of ITER is that it will be able to test the issue of neutrons and tritium breeding, as it has several slots for different member countries to try out breeding blankets in realistic conditions. Based on those kinds of tests, it is hoped and expected that a subsequent demonstration power plant could be built with the tritium issue largely solved.
Mr Improbable Matter, I enjoy your thorough analysis of physics and engineering topics greatly. But could you please reveal who you are?? Maybe a brief bio in your channel 'about' tab? Thanks in advance.
I will cover inertial fusion in the video after next (hopefully out in 2 months). The biggest problem I see is going from a facility like the NIF with ~2 shots per day to 1 to 10 shots per second. This is the equivalent of going from an extremely slow-firing musket to a machine gun, which is a technical challenge. I actually think that the laser aspect can be made to work quite readily. Lasers which are simultaneously powerful, efficient and have high repetition rates may be a great development to come out of this approach to fusion.
one of the major challenges is simply final optics. how do you protect the final laser focusing lens or protective window in front of it that the laser passes through before hitting the target from exploding target debris destroying its surface and optical quality? currently these optics have to be replaced on present lasers after 100-200 shots or around once every month. on a power generating laser that operates the same way that would need to happen after every 10 seconds.
This is a good video but I think the point remains that fusion reactors use a lot energy beyond that which is used to heat the plasma, such as to cool the magnets, and this energy in fact considerably exceeds the heating input. So Q_plasma of greater than 1 certainly does not mean that net energy is being created even without regard to electrical generation.
What Ms Hossenfelder wants to say is simply that we are still very far from having an industrially applicable fusion reactor and when the press states that next generation (after ITER) will deliver power, this in reality does not seem really true. And even if it is true, the next generation will not need 20 years to be developed but maybe 30-40. So, concluding, we won't have a nuclear fusion power station before the year 2050-2070.
Thrust SSC broke the land speed record long at close to 1200 km/hour. If its wheels were spinning normally, the tops of its wheels were momentarily going 2400 km/hour in the forward direction, for one short instant during each revolution. Sure, you can correlate the speed of the top of the wheel to the speed of the car (divide by 2), but it's not a figure the average lay person expects to see quoted in a glowing press releases. Qmax of 2400 km/hour is entirely inside baseball. And sure, some guy in the pit crew knows that the top of the wheels is the first part of the car to break the sound barrier, so Qmax is an engineering figure of merit. But still, it would bamboozle the public something fierce if that was the number they mainly quoted. I was entirely sympathetic to Sabine's video at the time I watched it. Needed to be said.
The developers of a commercial fusion reactor do not know or understand how to make a commercial fusion reactor. If they knew and understood, they would do it in 3-5 years! They mislead the investors to get the money.
This is why we have to get on with safe, reliable fission. Fusion as a source of mankind's energy needs is probably still a century away, too far off to assist with the climate challenge.
Good to know, I’ve always supported the idea that Fusion will be the only really viable solution for clean, non carbon dependent, economy. So how about these high temperature superconducting materials? Who has them? Are these being used in newly designed machines? What about ITER does it use these materials or is already obsolete before even starting?
The new superconductors will only go into new machines: converting an existing one would be harder than just building from scratch at this point. Many, including in the comments of my videos, certainly have the view that ITER is "obsolete before even being built", because it will have taken 40 years from agreement to opening. I would still say that there is a lot of science and technology progress that will be made on it: things like tritium breeding blankets, testing the physics of a high Q-plasma (which has some technical differences from the plasmas tested do far). Again, just as I say in this video: just because it would not have a high Q-total, does not mean that it doesn't have the experimental freedom to make good progress.
Sabine has a point here, IHMO. The efficiency factors, especially for ITER, were intentionally communicated in a misleading way over many years "10 times more energy output than used as input" etc.
@@ivanleon6164 science communication is a vital part of science. It's the responsibility of every scientist who talks to media to get what they want to communicate across clearly and to not use the journalist's unfamiliarity with their research to lie to them to eventually get more grant funding.
Thanks for this. When I watched Sabine's video I was shaking my head, because she was overcompensating...making Qplasma seem useless when that's what we need to concentrate on right now, not Qtotal. Once we get Qplasma at something like what, 12?...THEN Qtotal becomes easy because investor money will flood in like crazy for a Qtotal solution.
No matter how you put it, Sabine Hossenfelder is 100% right. We are nowhere close to a fusion reactor for the Q-total is much lower than 1 even for that big fat elephant named ITER.
you dont say something totally different that Sabine says. You say that Q_plasma is imortant, yep, for scientists. For polititians the important is if Q_total can become adequate.
I think you are incorrect when you assume @ 2:00 that her video was to focus on raising Q Total. She did say that it is a worthy goal in order to finally create a working fusion power plant, but her video was clearly on raising awareness on the misrepresentation of scientists and journalists (smear merchants) to the public. I think her video was clear, and she states what her video is about very clearly. She doesn't state that Q Total should be the focus, she just states that it is misrepresented and not talked about. She points out clearly that Q Total is by far lower than Q Plasma, and because of that, people are hiding that fact and claiming we are on the verge of fusion power. However, what you claim is also correct. I do believe we should still strive to increase Q Plasma as much as possible, and I believe she would agree. Hers was a warning about mixing politics with science and how small omissions (lies) can waste large amounts of resources, while your video is just a continuation of what she probably would have said if her video wasn't about a political message in that we still should research and improve on our technology.
Thanks for the video. I watched an MIT graduate student say that making a viable fusion reactor is simply a matter of increasing the Q over 1. Question...... What do you think about General Fusion's approach? Thankyou! Bill
The approach by General Fusion is as susceptible as any other confinement method to instabilities, which are the main reason fusion power is so hard to achieve. It is up to the company to show very good evidence that their approach works.
@@ImprobableMatter Agreed 100%. General Fusion's machine design has changed substantially through the years, but their web site has not commented on the reasons for those changes, as far as I have noticed. Their present animation shows a radially-disposed array of pistons driving into the swirling liquid metal. A lot more liquid metal than the pistons can displace magically appears as the compression proceeds, and the inner surface of the liquid remains amazingly calm as the surface shape smoothly changes from cylindrical toward spherical. Imagine poking a non-rotating object into a rotating fluid. Imagine hitting a fluid with a hammer. Normally, there will be lots of turbulence, waves, and splatters produced. It seems they are going to face the same uniformity of compression issues, and then some, that have plagued the National Ignition Facility (NIF) with their 192 lasers. (The NIF people added a hohlraum but continue to have uniformity issues.) How does General Fusion swirl the liquid metal at sufficient speed against a stationary housing? Is General Fusion going to spin the whole contraption? Where is the extra liquid metal coming from? How will they damp out the instabilities? They did show one paper where they addressed the instabilities that might arise as a result of the interactions of the plasma with the surface, but they haven't publicly addressed these other basic issues, as far as I can tell. Their approach is fascinating, but I have great difficulty understanding how it can succeed. Good luck to them. Perhaps they have lots of secret methods. 🙂
If the confinement is good enough, the fusion reactions will output enough energy to maintain the conditions for further fusion. No need then for power input to the plasma (the denominator in Q-plasma).
Fusion energy has more problems than just hitting a high enough Q by any measure, Qtotal or Qplasma. There are many radiation damage problems to be worked out. Material inadequacies are among the hardest to get past. Radiation-induced stress-corrosion cracking is a severe issue. Fusion looks like a *real* long shot to be economically successful. Slow down fusion research spending. 'Bigger' isn't always enough.
Excellent video, but IMHO it expands Sabine's intentions into directions that may not have been part of her plan... IAC, we have two well-presented discussions on an important subject... A face-to-face would be extremely interesting...
Imagine if the production of nuclear fission power plants had been delayed. If more testing, and international cooperation had occurred, like is happening now with fusion power, perhaps we would have seen safer and fail safe reactors. With fewer or maybe no meltdowns, public sentiment for nuclear reactors may have remained high, and cheap, safe power would now already be abundant. Jumping straight to making a working but unsafe and unreliable fusion reactor would doom it to the same fate as traditional fission reactors. It’s more important that we get it right than we get it quickly.
Fact of the matter remains that nuclear fusion is not "around the corner" as many media suggest. Also, given the engineering challenges after the Q-plasma increase, one must also assess the economic (ir)relevance. Many investments were made by governments with the goal to achieve electric energy output with the "too cheap to meter" paradigm. Sabine's criticism is pointed to that misinterpretation. Nuclear energy, in all its forms, will never be able to compete on economic grounds.
Building the foundation before the building is definitely a must. Jumping the gun and promotional hype are what gave us VHS - an inferior and more complicated system to BETA.
Many of the nuclear fusion energy researchers have learned to put their 'foot in the doorway' to keep encouraging increasing financial support. It is the case with ITER > DEMO and with SPARC > ARC. The future designs continue despite real fusion results being many years away. In the case of ITER those results likely won't start appearing until about 2040.
@@vernonbrechin4207 Nicely done - that is the most inventive way to lie to the pocket books. Or if you will "Pie in the sky", assumptions made: "fusion results by 2040. I have been following fusion since 1968 and it has always been 30 years away and now you give it 16 years despite the insolvent engineering problems.
@@Hogger280 Thanks! The master hyper CEO of Helion Energy is pitching a series of future upgraded future machines though the current operating machine hasn't achieved highly significant levels of fusion reactions. There is another privately financed machine in GB, that employs an inertial approach, where, again before they have achieved anything of real worth they claim their next series of machines will hit the jackpot. I've followed the field since the early 1960s. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) was preceded by a series of three smaller Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) machines, all advertised as aiming to achieve a nuclear fusion energy powered future while actually being primarily funded to simulate thermonuclear explosions on a microscopic scale to add to their H-bomb research. The prior one was touted as working out all the kinks before NIF was funded. NIF was expected to achieve its 'breakeven' shot by 2012 but failed by a factor of over 100. It took a decade of tweaking, and about $11-billion in funding, before the they achieved the announced shot on December 5, 2022. It has been extremely difficult to repeat. A weapons related target was included in that test that was only mentioned later. My guess is that most of the private investors are relying upon 'critical assessments' crafted by fusion energy fans.
The point is that Q plasma is conflated with Q total, which is deliberately misleading. Most people on the internet who have an opinion on nuclear fusion seem to now think we've ALREADY reached the "break even point" when we're nowhere even near it, despite any improvements the fusion "test reactors" may enable in future.
Fair enough. So if I'm understanding this correctly, net gain generation from fusion *is* actually feasible and *is* actually on the horizon (century or less)?
I think Sabine's contention wasn't the state of Qplasma, it was the apparent intentional conflating of Qplasma and Qtotal. It would be like a company misleading investors by misrepresenting revenue with profit.
Agreed. And ironically this video trys to do diversionary tactics similar to the investor hype that was mentioned in Sabine's video. Also, this video is incorrect as she didn't try to imply that it was more important to improve the heat to power inefficiency factor.
@@alexit123 what's diversionary? I thought it clearly distinguished between Qplasma and Qtotal , and agreed that news coverage was misleading and ultimately damaging to the enterprise.
Exactly, Sabine is not saying the researchers shouldn't use Q-plasma. She’s saying the media, politicians, and investors should focus on Q-total.
@@FredPlanatia Sorry, but this video did EXACTLY what Sabine complained about. It dangled the prospect that a Qplasma on the order of 10 was "just around the corner at MIT". That is not reality, only an optimistic projection, i.e. complete bullshit. And the reason is obvious, this YT channel is a partisan cheerleader for fusion research -- gotta keep those research grants flowing.
Very well said.
I love how you essentially agree with Sabine, but clarify the usefulness of looking Qplasma alone, with great references and further info. Thanks to both of you for these excellent videos.
She didn’t say anything about the importance of using Q plasma in research. She only addressed the way it’s used for funding. To say to a layman that they have .7% net gain when they are really closer to .07% net gain is deceptive at best. Most likely it’s intentionally misleading to get funding.
A few years ago I saw a documentary called "The Sun in a Bottle" (or similar). Towards the end Michel Laberge the Canadian CSO of General Fusion said words to the effect that "ITER is totally impractical as a power station, but it would be absolutely necessary to answer important questions that nothing else could do because it had the power to do it." Adding perspective to that, Laberge has a totally different technology called magnetized target fusion (MTF) and he was saying how important ITER was.
What Sabine was totally right about is the money grabbing by promoters and Universities. I did my degree in aerospace and then started to go into university based research. I ended up walking away in disgust at the money issues. There's at least 1 RUclips channel I have seen that goes into that subject of how research is forced to chase money and what it causes. Its a soul and career destroying subject that's not discussed much.
@@tonywilson4713 it all comes down to money in the end. Eggheads can only do what they do with funding. Period.
Great response! THIS is what an intelligent discussion should look like: descriptive, well sourced, and addressing the issues rather than the person.
S. the fup
Agreed! Hard to believe we are on youtube innit :-D
If Sabine’s video only achievement was triggering your excellent response, then it was worth it. Thank you both :)
honestly i think she sometimes does it on purpose. as in, she deliberately goes in direct opposition to the mainstream opinion even if she knows perfectly well that it's a bit of a stretch.
@@Alexander_Sannikov I agree.
@@Alexander_Sannikov The question is... Is it worth pouring billions into plasma fusion? I had been in favour of it, once Sabine confirmed what I'd heard from other sources I flipped. I now think we're pouring too much cash at what is best viewed as a side-bet.
@@chrisreed5463 i think it's worth it even if it's 50+ years away. the humanity has practically no choice.
@@chrisreed5463 Even if SAFIRE turns out to be fake, I think research into mid-temperature fusion & self-organizing plasma is good money spent, along with traditional high-temp and also commercial fission research. Why? Because the world needs more nuclear physicists. Keep in mind that Germany spent $400B on wind & solar and didn't reduce their greenhouse gas footprint. How? They foolishly shut down their nuclear reactor fleet. Imagine $400B in nuclear research.
Sabine video was clearly and unequivocally talking about science communication, and not about how scientists communicate with each other. The additional context is very interesting and very welcome, but I don't really see any disagreement with her video.
I agree and I do think Sabine made a good video. I just wanted to point out why Qplasma is the quantity talked about and give at least one example (such as I-mode on Alcator) of how valuable technological progress can be made even when it doesn't seemingly push Qtotal up immediately.
@@ImprobableMatter Absolutely, and that point was perfectly made in your video. It seems that I assumed wrongly that a "response" would imply a disagreement, but obviously it is not the case. Please don't take this as a discouragement, your video was very interesting and I would love to see more like this.
@@ImprobableMatter Good video and you are both right from a different perspective (she had an issue with the media representation, but you explained very well why otherwise Qtotal is not at all the only important metric of a fusion device)
Media sensationalism is not a problem confined (a little accidental humor there) to fusion or scientific research but happens in all fields.
Asking fusion scientists to deal with it is like asking you to be responsible for your drunk uncle at the Christmas dinner.
There is another metric that is being ignored and that is the economic viability of a system. We very well could get Qplasma to 20, Qtotal to 1.1 and not have a real world viable fusion power because of the financial cost...
@Shimmy Shai gravity-based storage is a scam though unless it is a hydro-electric energy storage
"We need to build a rocket to save humanity from a catasrophe that'll wipe out all life".
"Yeah, but how much will it cost?"
Capitalism will destroy this planet.
THANK YOU!!!!!!
@@markpurcell8075 everything has a cost, it is not about capitalism
Some econometric studies say that a energy source that hasn't an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) at least in the range of 5-10:1 is utterly useless to sustain our current economical and social arrangement.
Oil had an eroei that was 50:1in the 1950 (now about 15:1). Fusion is just a pie in the sky, and will ever be.
Glad to see that Sabine is making waves!
And opinions aside, I like very much to see Science explained clearly to the public, keep it that way!
I
I think this channel made the wave first because RUclips recommended the Qplasma video from this channel (to me) first before Sabine publish her Qplasma video. However there must been a hidden confounding actor that is making an impression on both RUclipsr to upload a Qplasma video with such a close proximity in timing (both videos were uploaded 1 month ago).
The fact that this response video exists shows that Sabine is doing her job well.
@@xponen Im confused... are you trying to say this Video was released before Sabrina published her video?
@@seditt5146 no, a different older video. This channel is small so people didn't notice it talked about that topic first, so I'm pointing it out.
Sabine video actually helped me to understand that ITER most likely will never be a real power plant but more like LHC with different purpose. Before i was quite sure that they would get some electricity out of it. Maybe not much but at least something.
Well, it was kind of stated from the beginning.
even the ITER's successor DEMO isn't going to be a real power plant, that's gonna be in 2050s according to the timeline. If everything goes as planned, the first commercial fusion plants are here in 2060s-70s.
@@Czeckie Ima let you in on something, its not going to be 2050, nor 2080, now 2180. Fusion stands zero chance as long as these experiments are getting funded 10s of billions of dollars. I know it sounds counter intuitive however this road is far too difficult. Its become scammy because of those difficulties which is not good despite what this video seems to suggest and at the end of the day its going to take a breakthrough like LCF from NASA to ever get us to where we need to be. These billion dollar novelty store Plasma globes are never going to get it. They have no incentive to. Everyone involved is already richer except the investors. Sad part is they likely are also as they arrange the scammy press releases so they can pass their loses onto lower level investors. We need innovation yet when we get it people like this guy shit on it which really just makes me think he is one of the people standing on the plasma globe with his hand out talking about how the next larger machine will definitely produce Q>100. 100 billion dollars later Qplasma comes back at .9 and they promise just another 100 billion, a larger machine... and 30 years and everyone's gonna be rich!
ITER was never intended to generate electricity, and it never will. It's a physics experiment. Adding on the infrastructure to generate electricity would add cost without adding a whole lot of new science knowledge. DEMO is a prototype design, and will aim to generate some electricity, and may be connected to the grid.
This channel embodies what it means to a be a big brain. 10/10
Next video will be up in about a month on a slightly different topic (hopefully still interesting to science and technology fans). I will then continue the "How fusion works" series; the next episode will cover plasma confinement in general, stars, thermonuclear weapons and inertial fusion like the NIF.
a physicist actually proved that the plasma instability will ALWAYS kink in a torus due to 6 degrees of freedom due to dynamic interaction with the field and the plasma. he was black balled and his paper banned.
a great video with very relevant information and good delivery, i liked it. particularly the example with antennas that could easily be optimized for a particular frequency if the goal was a working reactor rather than an experimental machine. i kind of did not realize that.
they already work/are projected to work at 30 % eff., what could you expect? 40 %?
I think she wanted people to be pragmatic about fusion research and the prospects of fusion energy, particularly in the context of mass media coverage. This also applies to ITER, which is still all numbers on a piece of paper until it proves gains in reality. Even those prospective gains are a good decade away at best. Long steady progress is what the media should be communicating, not sensationalist headlines blowing up expectations.
It's good to be pragmatic but she implied the field is founded on a fib and was a deadend money sink. This is a feeling she sells from a good story, but it is not rooted in reality.
@@willis936 the fib is that Qplasma>1 is synonymous with power generation
I don't think anyone who decides how to grant money was filled though, only the general public
Loved the video, I was not aware of the ways in which efficiency trades off against flexibility in fusion approaches. I didn’t think it was “clickbait” at all.
When I saw Sabine's video one of the first things I thought about was your channel, so thankyou very much for making this response video, as it really helped clarify things.
Excellent work, thank you! I humbly disagree with your justification for the stalled progre$$ in Q since JET, but that's a minor point. This is an excellent and rare presentation of the state of the field. Keep it up!
Excellent video 🙏
You’re fast becoming one of my favourite physics channels
Can't tell if it's Liam Neeson or the dude who reads your bio in civ5 but he sure does a good nuclear scientist
I'm with this guy. I like Sabine, but the Q issue she built a 'not soon' argument where it's all about the Q>1. But I see plenty of reporting saying very clearly that Q=or>10 to 25 is needed for power generation. The ARC reactor is a pretty exciting possibility for reaching those numbers. I do get investors saying "look how close we are to Q=1!" But Sabine was both clickbaity and, well, wrong. Total Q is the goal but Tony Stark was actually right when he tested the MKII. Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk.
The wheels metaphor in the video here is good, but I have a better nonmetaphor: we're trying to get a star in a bottle made out of magnets. Let's understand all the moving parts before we make one, eh?
This is my favorite new channel. Extremely clear delivery of complex topics, with humor too!
So if I understand you correctly, focusing on Qtotal, is like trying to run a steam engine when we don't even know how to properly kindle a fire.
Yes, I agree.
Its not that complicated guys, in layman accounting terms, Qplasma is like revenue that only accounts for the cost of goods but not cost of operations. Qtotal is the actual profits. If you are in product R&D, you should be concerned about raising Qplasma, if you are in operations, management, media or just an investor, you should be concerned in raising Qtotal.
Summed up quite well, but I feel too many on here will not understand still.
Great job, I hope you continue doing videos like this. Thank you, I hope you may not be discouraged and find or create a supportive community
Very nice to have this discussed in detail from intimate knowledge of the topic. Thank you for the explanation.
Very nice and persuasive video. I recently read an interview with someone on the ITER project, and they were asked to comment about the confusion between q plasma and q total. Their reply (which I'm paraphrasing) was that it doesn't really matter in the real world. For the small portion of people who have even heard of q, their takeaway is that it needs to get to some high level before fusion power is commercially viable, and broadly speaking that's true. The public might not precisely understand why it's true, but the broad stroke understanding is the correct one.
True, but we have to be careful because "broad stroke" understanding can lead to a variety of conclusions in peoples minds. It leaves room for unicorn thinking. It has to be accompanied by a conclusion that matches the data, ie the story that is told should be unbiased. With millions of investor funding at stake, its difficult to be.
It's however sensationalized that Q of 1 or just above 1 is what's needed for a reactor by the science media.
Whereas, the argument from both this and Sabines video is that Qplasma=1 isn't anything special, basically a made up goal because you can describe a difference between q1
In echo to the comments below, I would like to say this: wouldn’t it be great if all disagreements could be of this nature! Polite, respectful, and above all informative and constructive. As a result, rather than destroying each other, the two presentations complement each other, clarify things for the audience, and everyone is better off. Should we show them both to politicians just to prove it is actually possible to behave like adults, rather than like ever squabbling brats? Or perhaps it may be more productive to show them to high school and college students: at least with them we can have some hope.
Echoing everyone else below, thanks to both for these very informative presentations.
The point of Sabine's video is very valid: in 20 or 30 years when ITER is a success everybody is going to be asking about their free energy, because that's what they are expecting, that's what I was expecting before I watched her video. And then when they ask for half a trillion dollars for a real fusion power plant, they are not going to get it, because everyone is going to feel robbed, because no one explain to them what Sabine did.
The half trillion is probably a low estimate.
And the point of this video is that she misses the point and so did you
Only one point of her video is not valid; that we must not focus our research on Q -Plasma but put our resources on Q total. This video shows convincingly how focusing on Q total and bypassing Q Plasma is misguided
@@chris2kgreat The point she made was not that the scientists should focus on Q total instead of Q plasma, but that the public relations departments of those scientific institutions should present and explain both values to the investors, as well as the general public, because as it stands at the moment, they are intentionally misleading both audiences.
@@chris2kgreat if we want a working fusion reactor, it is what we should be focusing on.
One of the points of this video is that we are focused on it, since we're working on multiple things in parallel, like laser improvements.
The results of each aren't being combined in how progress towards a working reactor are communicated though
Excellent discussion, thanks and keep these vids coming.
Thank you for straightening this matter.
It is truly appreciated.
Great video, thanks! I recently started my masters degree thesis in fusion topic and had no idea about what Sabine told in her video. Yours gave me the arguments to back my thought that nuclear fusion research was still something important to do in spite of that.
Nice response. Just goes to show how semantics are important. It would be nice to have a term that clearly communicated the progress toward fusion success that was easy to distinguish from another term that indicates progress toward power generation success.
It's just standardization in thermodynamics for describing energy transfer
Even Qtotal is only a part of the metric for whether a fusion power plant should be made and whether it's successful.
At that point you're talking about the costs to build and fuel the thing, and how much you can charge for the electricity it creates, and how that works with the variety of nuclear, renewable, and fossil fuel based plants
I found both the Sabine and this video well done and quite informative. Together, they provide a clear picture of the state of fusion research.
You and Sabine have valid, but differing points. Hers was mostly about how this information is mis-communicated outside the field. While many scientists and enthusiasts will understand why Q-plasma is a vital starting point, even within the sciences, people don’t always understand that what is being reported or discussed is only a small part of the equation for producing net power out (Q-total). I see it all the time and I’m thankful for her video because people have argued with me when I’ve explained this before her video. I’m “nobody” so how could I know more than what they believe some article is stating. Now I have at least one credible source to refer them to. That’s been a vital missing piece.
But proving that we can, in reality, not just theory, produce Q-plasma great enough to even seriously consider spending time and money researching and eventually building all of the other systems that would be necessary to produce a net energy return (Q-total) > 1 is an essential first step. When Q-plasma was near 0.1, all of those external systems were nearly pointless pursuits. Now, with Q-plasma nearing 1.0, with signs it will likely to continue to improve considerably, it makes sense to fund both the core technology for pushing Q-plasma to >10, and developing the external systems that would be needed to produce a full fusion reactor with a Q-total > 2. Obviously, 1 < Q-total < 2 is a net return, but almost certainly not useful in practice, so the target needs to be somewhere above 2, and higher is better. I could be wrong, maybe fusion reactors having Q-total between 1.5 and 2 would be practical, but that seems unlikely.
Even the Q-total is nothing. You need a Q-grand_total, that describes how actually the plant will build and dispose of itself. Solar panels, for example, go like 25 years, of which 7 they work for producing themselves, disposal not accounted. Here, it quite easily may happen, that even at good Q-total, the plant still can not reproduce itself.
@@2L40K no, it doesn’t take 7yrs for solar panels to produce the amount of electricity needed to produce them. If you can’t get the basic facts straight, you should stay away from making claims.
@@geoffstrickler Yes it does. ROI of 20% at best.
If you are only on solar and wind - it gets even worse. You will need to produce batteries on top of that.
And stop talking like a bot, politician or something alike. Say more with less empty words.
@@2L40K you’re misinformed. Go on, supply your proof, so I can demonstrate where you screwed up.
@@geoffstrickler Solar generation has a bell shaped curve during the day. Factory production has almost flat curve day and night. All your electrical infrastructure must be built for that top of that bell curve - approximately 3 times over average.
On top of that daily variation, there is also a seasonal variation. So, in the example of an offgrid system - you design it for the worst case in the winter. As a result, in the summer there is a lot of useless energy generated, and all of the infrastructure is calculated around that top peak summer production.
And you can't explain all that without the use of "the magical grid of infinite capacity".
Moreover, domestic power use is even worse - it peaks early in the morning and late in the evening. In all cases it's way out of that solar generation bell peak.
In "the future of electric transportation" things go even worse.
Thanks, I'm glad to see you clearing up misunderstandings around the hype of these achievements on this and other channels. +1 and subscribed!
In the end you need both parameters... Probably doesn't hurt to publish both. And the ratio between the two itself is interesting, the closer we are to a real plant design
Your videos are great. Thank you for your efforts!
I think the critical point of contention between these two videos is “how easily can you get a useful Qtotal once you have a useful Qplasma?” Sabine argues that that will be a huge challenge in itself, likely taking many years, while this video implies that it will happen quickly (e.g. by using new lasers that are already being developed). Both agree that experiments to raise Qplasma are valuable, and both agree that the public should not be misled by pointing to Qplasma improvements without explaining the challenges that remain with Qtotal, but the videos are at odds because they have different expectations on how difficult those remaining challenges will be to overcome.
If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.
The degradation of the reactor walls and the copious amount of radioactive waste is also one of the biggest engineering challenges, and one which the "clean" energy pundits routinely ignore.
Well done in getting across a valid (but nuanced) argument.
One feature of ITER Is the provision of more than one mechanism for carrying out certain processes in the fusion reactor - for example multiple methods for heating plasma (if I understood things correctly). That is another example which characterises ITER as an experiment not a prototype.
Yes, you're totally right. ITER will have 4 broad types of heating: Neutral Beams, Ion Cyclotron, Electron Cyclotron and Lower Hybrid (as well as inductive, but this is not sustainable long term). The ARC proposal, being more focused on performance as a reactor has just 2: Ion Cyclotron and Lower Hybrid.
Both approaches are correct, given their aims: ITER will have the breadth to experiment, while ARC would be tightly focused on demonstrating electrical output.
@@ImprobableMatter Last I heard, ITER is not planning on installing Lower Hybrid. MIT is advocating for it, but my understanding is the consensus would prefer to see 20MW more ECRH.
Very well done explanation, I can't understand why people think it's clickbait or drama (well, ok, we know why)
Good to recognize scientific and journalistic dishonesty about progress. I was research chemist (Oxy Research 1980s) and understand that demonstrating fundamental principles is vastly different than commercialization. Point taken that fusion experiments are optimized for the former, but the latter (goal) must be kept in mind along with practicality. We did both at Oxy. The lab next door to me had a large nuclear fusion apparatus, which never went anywhere, nor did my experiments on in-situ coal liquefaction. In fact, few projects were commercialized - like oil shale that is now used. In the 1800s HG Wells wrote about travel to the moon - very exciting - but the technogy was out of reach until the 1960s. Sabine's video focused on that issue along with integrity issues. Q-plasma could be 1000, but without practical implentation, it's just an expensive science experiment in the end. She at least set our expectations.
You said it at the outset. Sabine's critique is 100% correct.
Great video, I suspected that something like what's explained in the video was the reason why researchers are so interested in qplasma.
However, the main point of Sabine's videos is not that Qplasma is a meaningless concept but rather that people deceiving uninformed people (politicians etc) into believing this thing is anywhere close to generating usable energy. If these experimental reactors that will not generate usable energy are still a worthwhile scientific investment, it should be argued as such without relying on deception. This is a very very important distinction. I can easily see how a bunch of politicians could figure "ahh well, even if the scientific benefits arent worth it (which i cant assess anyways), itll still double up as a reactor! win win :)"
Good point that it isn't exactly useful to use Qtotal figures for an experimental device which is purposefully inefficient to allow for a broad range of experimentary conditions, while the final reactor would be designed with maxium efficiency and produced to specifications. Also funny people are arguing that this video and channel are overoptimistic on fusion alongside the previous "Why we wont have fusion by 2040" video.
=8)-DX
Me: "We won't have fusion by 2040"
Comments: "You're a shill paid by the fossil fuel industry!"
Me: "Some good progress is being made"
Comments: "Deluded shill for big fusion!"
I think you are misrepresenting her video. She wasn’t stating that Qplasma should be ignored in favor of optimizing Qtotal. Merely that researchers and companies shouldn’t intentionally conflate the two in order to exaggerate progress and secure funding.
Could you please do a video describing the results and or progress made with the German weindelton-7x stellorator reactor?
I will cover it in a technical video, but in short - while it has broken records for its class of machine (stellarator), it has only achieved a temperature of around 40 million degrees, while the tokamak has gone up to 300 million. So, still somewhat behind the tokamak approach.
2:28 - we dont have that in Poland
Please keep it up, I love your content
The really important metric is Qeconomic, namely the value of the electricity generated vs the capital costs and running costs of the plant.
So Sabine is correct, and GOOD FOR HER for pointing this out.
Hopium and excuses don't change the basic facts or status.
Love your work, can you cover recent breakthroughs in nuclear fission energy
Sabine's not wrong. You're not wrong, but you are constructing a straw man argument. You're not undoing anything she suggested. You're just arguing to a different point. It still will take a long time.
An excellent video! Thanks for posting.
Humanity needs efficient energy production today, not in 40 yrs. Given limited funding, Rate of Return is more important than total ROI. Improvements in solar and fission would provide a much higher ROR. I believe this is what Sabine @skdh is addressing as she has been an outspoken critic of building a larger LHC, too. Fusion appears to suffer sunk cost fallacy, IMO.
The future collider is dumb because it probably won't discover any new particles. But fusion is an achievable goal, and we'll need it if we ever want to get interstellar travel.
I think fusion is in more of an unsunk cost state. For instance in a 2018 book The Future of Fusion Energy they note that the yearly US budget for fusion is half of the budget for peanut subsidies - and under the amount where a projection in 1976 predicted it might never occur. I think what is likely to happen is one or more of the experiments will get a Q of 1 or more and then the field will actually start to get funded. The start of commercial fusion is arguably 100-200 billion dollars away as much as a certain number of years away. The Paris Accord proposes spending of a trillion, per year
I don't see energy storage as likely to provide an answer to the half or so of baseload power needed to be replaced faster than fusion though both should be explored. I agree with you on fission but I think public acceptance is simply too uncertain and even meltdown proof plants have a proliferation risk. This leaves fusion as the known unknown that could do it in my opinion.
As a species we invest a laughably small amount in anything even remotely sustainable. More money was spent on developing the next iPhone than was spent so far on fusion research in the last 5 years. We should be investing far more into both fusion, and other technologies that harness it less directly. Solar and wind, tidal, orbital solar, etc.
@@Teth47 The thing is, such research is really unpredictable and any significant return can only be expected after a few decades. Because of that, you can hardly find a company willing to pursue it.
At best you can hope for some benevolent billionaire to throw their money at this or for government officials to get lobbied enough by the right researchers.
Both of these strategies are quite unreliable. Billionaires don't get rich by throwing money out, and closest we have right now is Musk developing reusable rockets (more tangible goal then fusion) and Bezos trying to surpass him.
On the other hand, governments are inherently wasteful - they lack proper incentive structure (prices) to operate efficiently and optimize behavior (they don't go out of business for wasting funds or pursuing dumb ideas). Furthermore, it's not really fair to force everyone into paying for stuff they don't want. Finally, how would one even design a law that picks worthwhile research ideas and discards unrealistic ones?
We really need a way to (crowd?)fund these things. It would be immensely useful and also rather fun. We have the resources to (e.g. countries do way more funds than currently goes into research, while this money stems from taxes and inflation almost exclusively). It's just no good system for this currently exists.
@@mskiptr It's almost like the government should be directing some of its astronomical military budget into the "unprofitable"/fundamental research so that it gets done, putting it into a public repository as it was paid for by the public, for all to use.
You know, like it used to.
I understand your point, and definitely agree with it. Everybody in the fusion community is aware of it. The problem Sabine makes, however, is that the public is being misled, by making them believe fusion reactors are "around the corner." I posted the following in Sabine's video:
Excellent video! It's great you set the record straight in this matter. I'm actually fond of fusion and wish it will be a successful source of energy, but I cringe every time these people cheat (that's the word, not "confuse") the public into believing fusion is almost there... "whether they are physicists or humans." Paraphrasing Eduardo Galeano, fusion reactors are like the horizon; it moves farther as you approach it, but it keeps us moving, and advancing in the effort. One comment on the video: Although I understand you are speculating how much electric power ITER would produce, figuratively speaking, it should be clear that it isn't designed to produce electric power.
Well, this RUclips vid sounds like a paper for a reviewed journal, references and all. That is very nice. To me the salient point is that if all the energy must come form plasma, then making Q_plasma>>1 must be the priority now. And that was clear even while watching the SH video. The contribution of this one is to point out that when Q_plasma>>1 is achieved, it will be possible to increase the ratio Q_plasma/Q_overall by improving the efficiency of ancillaries.
thank you very much for the Q >> 1 content
Thank you for your clarifications. Since this video was posted I've learned other aspects that were not covered in it. I believe that it has been standard practice, in the field, to not explain the difference between Q-fusion and Q-total, when providing press releases and related presentations to the press, the public and to investors. The extremely arcane nature of the physics and engineering is being used a a tool to withhold key parameters and that process spawns misunderstandings among the receivers. I include most of the workers in this field as also being misled.
Around the time this video was produced the ITER project encountered two major defects as they were assembling the vacuum chamber segments. The management recently announced that it is expected to cost an additional 5-million eros to remedy those issues. They also stated that they don't expect to achieve first plasma until 2035 and that there first D/T fusion reactions may not occur until 2039. They stated this will be to late to deal with the rapidly decaying Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) situation. Other nuclear fusion energy projects, such as SPARC, have assumed that their designs would soon benefit from ITER's fusion energy experiments.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) was funded in return for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) ending their decades-long full-scale nuclear explosion program at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). They were required to end it due to the signing of the nuclear test ban treaty. NIF has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research tool. That includes upgrades and modification of the existing H-bombs in the nation's massive nuclear arsenal. One estimate has put the cost of NIF at $11-billion. The management has always been masterful in obscuring that purpose when addressing the press and general public.
Around the time this video was posted the SPARC designers had eliminated electrical energy generation, and breeder blankets from there plans. Personally, I believe the ARC design plans are premature until SPARC has solved numerous issues that the planners suggest will all be cured with their high field superconducting magnet technology. It appears that all tokamaks, and most other MCF devices, will need to operate in a pulse mode when operating near their full fusion power point. This is due to sustaining the fusion plasma and due to the heat load limits of the surrounding structure. SPARC is expected to sustain 10 second full fusion pulses. The off, or recovery time, isn't stated. I suspect it will be far greater than 10 seconds. The Q-fusion value for all experimental devices only includes the 'on' period of the pulse. No efforts are being made by experimenters to provide Q-total values for the average 'off and on' times, or for any extended period of operation, such as for a day.
The experiments began in the 1950s. All the original experimenters are either dead, or long retired. Most of the young experimenters today have no clue as to all the difficulties those early experimenters encountered. There have been many dozens of nuclear fusion energy machines created and utilized for experiments. My guess is that over $100-billion has already been expended in the search for this suggested holy grail. Perhaps it would have been better directed at technologies such as photovoltaic and wind turbine farms. We no longer have a couple of decades left to turn this 'Titanic' around.
List of fusion experiments (Wikipedia)
I like Sabine's clear cut explanations. The episode mentioned was a hard kooky to swallow.
Your explanation alleviates that somewhat. But still it is far from honest the way the field of nuclear fusion informs the public.
You are negating a statement, that Sabine never did make in this form. I mean: I watched Sabines Video too and ... nope, what you alleged is not really what she said. This is known as "straw man", there is a wikipedia page about that. So ... why?
Despite that, your video was really informative, but I would like it more if it would not contain such an ... kind of ... unexplained phenomena. Without strawman argumentation this would be one of the best videos about that topic on RUclips. Man, how could that happen?
Your technical and scientific arguments for being mor confident and optimistic about nuclear fusion are great, so no straw men should be needed.
The last video I have watched on ITER, in a french channel, was stating both Qtotal and Qplasma transparently.
Do I understand it correctly, that the major "stumbling block" on the way to a stable confinement, are the instabilities inside the plasma, like, for example Alfven instability? If yes, then, why don't we hear more about what has been done in researching those instabilities and finding ways to minimize them? If we speak about conducting interesting experiments, then, I would assume, we need to talk more not about the "magic Q-number", but rather about the physics that prevents long-term plasma confinement. Also, it would be interesting to hear about Tritium problem, how it is being handled. As always, IMHO.
Yes, instabilities and turbulence are the biggest hurdle to achieving fusion. Which type of instability has the greatest detriment on confinement curiously depends on the specialization of the scientist standing nearby. ;)
While there is a lot of academic research being done on these instabilities, the surest way to combat them is to build larger or higher field strength machines. I will cover tritium breeding issues in a future technical video.
@@ImprobableMatter Do you think that the larger stellarators will give you a more uniform magnetic field, so you will have less "destructive" instabilities? But the larger devices imply larger surfaces, thus the boundary effects will be more pronounced. Just wondering.
Hard to say very specifically. W7-X has set a temperature record 10 lower than the best tokamak performance and 100 times lower triple product, so the stellarator is not a magic solution. Would a bigger stellarator be superior? Yes, but it would also be harder to engineer.
You mentioned a new physics regime when alpha particle heating begins to dominate - if they drive currents this would be great for tokamaks and destabilizing for stellarators, and vice versa. In any case, we are committed to the tokamak route in the near future, so hopefully any physics solutions we come up with will also transfer over.
@@ImprobableMatter I did not realize that you are running a tokamak, my apologies. I got a "whiff" of tokamak physics, when I was studying plasma physics, as it was the design that was promoted by Kadomtsev. Cheers!
I did work on a tokamak, but I meant "we" as a species - the major machines being built now are all tokamaks with a heritage back to T-3 at the Kurchatov Institute.
With reference to your final comment in the article, the problem is that when it comes to reporting on fusion power generation, most reporting is click-baity to some degree. Even 'genuine' high reputation news sources tend to focus on the promise of feeding the grid within the elusive 30 years.
A better car analogy would be that you can't design better tires if you don't know the shape, size, and weight the engine will have. And the engine efficiency dominates the tire efficiency while the engine is also much more complicated, so working the other way around, trying to design a working engine to go with theoretically perfect tires, is nonsensical.
Hold up, how do we raise Q plasma anyway?
There is the Qtotal issue
Then the tritium issue.
Then the béryllium issue.
Then the disruption isssue.
Then the neutron destroying everything issue.
Then the divertor being stupidely monkeyhammered issue.
Then houra you have a functionning fusion reactor that only cost 10 times more than a comparable nuclear fission plant.
Amazing.
I lol'd, but you're right.
i was enjoying this until the author used the word "profitable" at the 5:49 time mark. Its one thing to have a fusion reactor that works in an engineering sense (net electrical energy production). its another thing to deliver a technology that is not so expensive that it has no commercial consequence. In the world beyond 2040 we will have both cheap renewable energy (we already have this but it will get cheaper) and mature (cost effective) grid scale energy storage. It is highly unlikely that fusion reactors will compete given this commercial reality - except in some niche uses.
I don't mind spending tens of billions on physics experiments. That's probably worth it. We may even perfect fusion energy for space propulsion. But its going to have little relevance to electricity supply on Earth.
Fair enough. Consider it to mean "profitable in terms of energy", rather than money.
The most representative metric would probably be a sort of economical feasibility score, similar to the scoring systems we have for various Six Sigma tools.
They won't do that, because if that were carried out the fusion project (particularly tokamak fusion) would be cancelled almost immediately.
I think Sabine is not complaining about the importance of improving Qplasma, and indeed not even discrediting the research in the field.
She complained about the false statements used by researchers to get money from funding agencies.
I have heard people justifying this approach, as it is currently needed to convince funding agencies even when using lies.
I am with Sabine instead. On the lo by run, this approach leads to people outside science not trusting scientists.
There is a need, in science, to change approach in the way fundings are given, and success is recognised.
i feel like there is a deliberate effort by the powers that be, academia, whoever, to stifle our progress on this front. it's time to smash barriers. we should be in jetson's era by now
I'm confused on the Qplasma being infinite for the stellarator. Don't you have to do work on something to put it into a container? Use electricity to make the fields that do the confining?
So, fusion is some 30-40 years away now, eh?
Well is not that the goals are moving, is that we are not walking as fast as needed - read investments
@@simonebernacchia and it seems to be actually harder then it seems. I just hope it not *always* harder then it seems....
If you had a magic wand and could "fix" or "solve" one issue with our current understanding of Fusion, what would it be?
We will surely get there with Q-plasma at some point, but it is the neutron issues which are now the greatest challenge: capture neutrons to make enough tritium, while not allowing them to wreck the machine walls.
@@ImprobableMatter unfortunately these issues are not even on the news yet. as in, the public is not even aware yet that these issues exist.
@@Alexander_Sannikov yeah it's kind of discouraging. I've been following the development of a few different fusion start ups because it seems like once private money gets into the game, that usually means we're close to something going to market. I'm super glad that improbable matter has made these videos to put it all in perspective, but also kinda disheartened with the realization that we're much further than buzzy articles make it sound.
@@ImprobableMatter I've heard it say that ITER is going to actually get to a Qgain of more than 1, but have they addressed the neutron issue your talking about here? I don't think I've read anything about neutron capture/tritium breeding with ITER.
ITER is aiming specifically for Q-plasma of 10, which would translate to Q-total of less than 1 with the kind of systems they have. For the reasons mentioned in this video, it does not make sense to build in an actual electric generation infrastructure. Also as mentioned, some of the inefficiency is to allow experimental freedom.
One major selling point of ITER is that it will be able to test the issue of neutrons and tritium breeding, as it has several slots for different member countries to try out breeding blankets in realistic conditions. Based on those kinds of tests, it is hoped and expected that a subsequent demonstration power plant could be built with the tritium issue largely solved.
Mr Improbable Matter, I enjoy your thorough analysis of physics and engineering topics greatly. But could you please reveal who you are?? Maybe a brief bio in your channel 'about' tab? Thanks in advance.
Would love to see NIF challenges video. Is one of them quality of laser output vs efficiency?
I will cover inertial fusion in the video after next (hopefully out in 2 months). The biggest problem I see is going from a facility like the NIF with ~2 shots per day to 1 to 10 shots per second. This is the equivalent of going from an extremely slow-firing musket to a machine gun, which is a technical challenge.
I actually think that the laser aspect can be made to work quite readily. Lasers which are simultaneously powerful, efficient and have high repetition rates may be a great development to come out of this approach to fusion.
one of the major challenges is simply final optics. how do you protect the final laser focusing lens or protective window in front of it that the laser passes through before hitting the target from exploding target debris destroying its surface and optical quality? currently these optics have to be replaced on present lasers after 100-200 shots or around once every month. on a power generating laser that operates the same way that would need to happen after every 10 seconds.
This is a good video but I think the point remains that fusion reactors use a lot energy beyond that which is used to heat the plasma, such as to cool the magnets, and this energy in fact considerably exceeds the heating input. So Q_plasma of greater than 1 certainly does not mean that net energy is being created even without regard to electrical generation.
did you even watch the video?
What Ms Hossenfelder wants to say is simply that we are still very far from having an industrially applicable fusion reactor and when the press states that next generation (after ITER) will deliver power, this in reality does not seem really true. And even if it is true, the next generation will not need 20 years to be developed but maybe 30-40. So, concluding, we won't have a nuclear fusion power station before the year 2050-2070.
Thrust SSC broke the land speed record long at close to 1200 km/hour. If its wheels were spinning normally, the tops of its wheels were momentarily going 2400 km/hour in the forward direction, for one short instant during each revolution. Sure, you can correlate the speed of the top of the wheel to the speed of the car (divide by 2), but it's not a figure the average lay person expects to see quoted in a glowing press releases. Qmax of 2400 km/hour is entirely inside baseball. And sure, some guy in the pit crew knows that the top of the wheels is the first part of the car to break the sound barrier, so Qmax is an engineering figure of merit. But still, it would bamboozle the public something fierce if that was the number they mainly quoted. I was entirely sympathetic to Sabine's video at the time I watched it. Needed to be said.
The developers of a commercial fusion reactor do not know or understand how to make a commercial fusion reactor. If they knew and understood, they would do it in 3-5 years! They mislead the investors to get the money.
This is why we have to get on with safe, reliable fission.
Fusion as a source of mankind's energy needs is probably still a century away, too far off to assist with the climate challenge.
Exactly, fission and other renewables.
Good to know, I’ve always supported the idea that Fusion will be the only really viable solution for clean, non carbon dependent, economy.
So how about these high temperature superconducting materials? Who has them? Are these being used in newly designed machines? What about ITER does it use these materials or is already obsolete before even starting?
The new superconductors will only go into new machines: converting an existing one would be harder than just building from scratch at this point. Many, including in the comments of my videos, certainly have the view that ITER is "obsolete before even being built", because it will have taken 40 years from agreement to opening. I would still say that there is a lot of science and technology progress that will be made on it: things like tritium breeding blankets, testing the physics of a high Q-plasma (which has some technical differences from the plasmas tested do far). Again, just as I say in this video: just because it would not have a high Q-total, does not mean that it doesn't have the experimental freedom to make good progress.
The good old fission IS viable source for clean, lowest-carbon economy. Fusion is pipe dream.
Sabine has a point here, IHMO. The efficiency factors, especially for ITER, were intentionally communicated in a misleading way over many years "10 times more energy output than used as input" etc.
PR is one thing, real science is another one, she focused on the PR side.
@@ivanleon6164 science communication is a vital part of science. It's the responsibility of every scientist who talks to media to get what they want to communicate across clearly and to not use the journalist's unfamiliarity with their research to lie to them to eventually get more grant funding.
@@ooooneeee i didnt said it was not important, i said she focused on the PR side.
Thanks for this. When I watched Sabine's video I was shaking my head, because she was overcompensating...making Qplasma seem useless when that's what we need to concentrate on right now, not Qtotal. Once we get Qplasma at something like what, 12?...THEN Qtotal becomes easy because investor money will flood in like crazy for a Qtotal solution.
No matter how you put it, Sabine Hossenfelder is 100% right. We are nowhere close to a fusion reactor for the Q-total is much lower than 1 even for that big fat elephant named ITER.
you dont say something totally different that Sabine says.
You say that Q_plasma is imortant, yep, for scientists. For polititians the important is if Q_total can become adequate.
This is more of a companion piece to her video
I think you are incorrect when you assume @ 2:00 that her video was to focus on raising Q Total. She did say that it is a worthy goal in order to finally create a working fusion power plant, but her video was clearly on raising awareness on the misrepresentation of scientists and journalists (smear merchants) to the public. I think her video was clear, and she states what her video is about very clearly. She doesn't state that Q Total should be the focus, she just states that it is misrepresented and not talked about.
She points out clearly that Q Total is by far lower than Q Plasma, and because of that, people are hiding that fact and claiming we are on the verge of fusion power. However, what you claim is also correct. I do believe we should still strive to increase Q Plasma as much as possible, and I believe she would agree. Hers was a warning about mixing politics with science and how small omissions (lies) can waste large amounts of resources, while your video is just a continuation of what she probably would have said if her video wasn't about a political message in that we still should research and improve on our technology.
Thanks for the video. I watched an MIT graduate student say that making a viable fusion reactor is simply a matter of increasing the Q over 1. Question......
What do you think about General Fusion's approach?
Thankyou!
Bill
The approach by General Fusion is as susceptible as any other confinement method to instabilities, which are the main reason fusion power is so hard to achieve. It is up to the company to show very good evidence that their approach works.
@@ImprobableMatter Agreed 100%. General Fusion's machine design has changed substantially through the years, but their web site has not commented on the reasons for those changes, as far as I have noticed. Their present animation shows a radially-disposed array of pistons driving into the swirling liquid metal. A lot more liquid metal than the pistons can displace magically appears as the compression proceeds, and the inner surface of the liquid remains amazingly calm as the surface shape smoothly changes from cylindrical toward spherical.
Imagine poking a non-rotating object into a rotating fluid. Imagine hitting a fluid with a hammer. Normally, there will be lots of turbulence, waves, and splatters produced. It seems they are going to face the same uniformity of compression issues, and then some, that have plagued the National Ignition Facility (NIF) with their 192 lasers. (The NIF people added a hohlraum but continue to have uniformity issues.)
How does General Fusion swirl the liquid metal at sufficient speed against a stationary housing? Is General Fusion going to spin the whole contraption? Where is the extra liquid metal coming from? How will they damp out the instabilities? They did show one paper where they addressed the instabilities that might arise as a result of the interactions of the plasma with the surface, but they haven't publicly addressed these other basic issues, as far as I can tell.
Their approach is fascinating, but I have great difficulty understanding how it can succeed. Good luck to them. Perhaps they have lots of secret methods. 🙂
Could somebody explain to me the basic theory behind a Q = ∞ Stellerator?
If the confinement is good enough, the fusion reactions will output enough energy to maintain the conditions for further fusion. No need then for power input to the plasma (the denominator in Q-plasma).
@@ImprobableMatter But is there, in this regard, a fundamental difference between Tokamaks and Stellarators? I think that both can reach Q = ∞.
@@bernhardschmalhofer855 A tokamak must always have an external input of power (to the plasma) to drive an electric current. A stellarator does not.
Excellent video and response!
Fusion energy has more problems than just hitting a high enough Q by any measure, Qtotal or Qplasma. There are many radiation damage problems to be worked out. Material inadequacies are among the hardest to get past. Radiation-induced stress-corrosion cracking is a severe issue. Fusion looks like a *real* long shot to be economically successful. Slow down fusion research spending. 'Bigger' isn't always enough.
What do you think of the spherical tokamak approach as taken by e.g. Tokamak Energy?
Excellent video, but IMHO it expands Sabine's intentions into directions that may not have been part of her plan... IAC, we have two well-presented discussions on an important subject... A face-to-face would be extremely interesting...
Imagine if the production of nuclear fission power plants had been delayed. If more testing, and international cooperation had occurred, like is happening now with fusion power, perhaps we would have seen safer and fail safe reactors. With fewer or maybe no meltdowns, public sentiment for nuclear reactors may have remained high, and cheap, safe power would now already be abundant. Jumping straight to making a working but unsafe and unreliable fusion reactor would doom it to the same fate as traditional fission reactors. It’s more important that we get it right than we get it quickly.
Great video!
Thanks! Better job than uni or collage
Nice clip, thanks 👍
Fact of the matter remains that nuclear fusion is not "around the corner" as many media suggest. Also, given the engineering challenges after the Q-plasma increase, one must also assess the economic (ir)relevance. Many investments were made by governments with the goal to achieve electric energy output with the "too cheap to meter" paradigm. Sabine's criticism is pointed to that misinterpretation. Nuclear energy, in all its forms, will never be able to compete on economic grounds.
Building the foundation before the building is definitely a must. Jumping the gun and promotional hype are what gave us VHS - an inferior and more complicated system to BETA.
Many of the nuclear fusion energy researchers have learned to put their 'foot in the doorway' to keep encouraging increasing financial support. It is the case with ITER > DEMO and with SPARC > ARC. The future designs continue despite real fusion results being many years away. In the case of ITER those results likely won't start appearing until about 2040.
@@vernonbrechin4207 Nicely done - that is the most inventive way to lie to the pocket books. Or if you will "Pie in the sky", assumptions made: "fusion results by 2040. I have been following fusion since 1968 and it has always been 30 years away and now you give it 16 years despite the insolvent engineering problems.
@@Hogger280 Thanks! The master hyper CEO of Helion Energy is pitching a series of future upgraded future machines though the current operating machine hasn't achieved highly significant levels of fusion reactions. There is another privately financed machine in GB, that employs an inertial approach, where, again before they have achieved anything of real worth they claim their next series of machines will hit the jackpot. I've followed the field since the early 1960s. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) was preceded by a series of three smaller Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) machines, all advertised as aiming to achieve a nuclear fusion energy powered future while actually being primarily funded to simulate thermonuclear explosions on a microscopic scale to add to their H-bomb research. The prior one was touted as working out all the kinks before NIF was funded. NIF was expected to achieve its 'breakeven' shot by 2012 but failed by a factor of over 100. It took a decade of tweaking, and about $11-billion in funding, before the they achieved the announced shot on December 5, 2022. It has been extremely difficult to repeat. A weapons related target was included in that test that was only mentioned later.
My guess is that most of the private investors are relying upon 'critical assessments' crafted by fusion energy fans.
The point is that Q plasma is conflated with Q total, which is deliberately misleading. Most people on the internet who have an opinion on nuclear fusion seem to now think we've ALREADY reached the "break even point" when we're nowhere even near it, despite any improvements the fusion "test reactors" may enable in future.
Fair enough.
So if I'm understanding this correctly, net gain generation from fusion *is* actually feasible and *is* actually on the horizon (century or less)?