This Fusion Startup Is a Strong Newcomer
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- Опубликовано: 15 май 2024
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A new nuclear fusion startup in German is working on a "quasi-isodynamic stellarator". I had a look at what that means and think it's a pretty cool approach that is among the most solid, low-risk ideas in nuclear fusion at the moment. Doesn't mean it will work, but definitely one to have an eye on!
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If you call something a "stellarator" it HAS to work. The word is just too cool.
Well, that's not good because it needs to get really hot.
stellaron moment
Wasn’t that invented by Marty Fly & the Professor in , “Back to the Future”???!!!
Sounds like the “flux capacitor”!
@@annecarter5181 That's right. And it looks like we're finally close to generating that 1.21 gigawatts ("jigawatts"?) of power needed to spin it up.
As somebody said, the issue with fusion reactors is that you need to create the coldest place in the universe and the hottest place in the universe and put them ~1meter apart from each other.
Making a "star in jar" is not enough to get energy out of the device, we need "supernova in a jar".
Yez and pumping in 100millions of watts, just to start it, and the super freezer eats enormous lot of power.......? I think that solar and wind and batterys
are better. And learn how to reduce energy needed. SB.
@@stigbengtsson7026Well, obviously they are better for current performance, but we'll never know if fusion won't become the better technology if we don't research it. After all, solar and wind are both fusion-based energy.
@@stigbengtsson7026 Battery tech is not quite where it should be to cover our needs. Look at Germany (again): they added a ton of solar and wind power, and last year they got half their electricity from renewables. But after they shut down their nuclear power plants, the remainder of that power is mostly generated by coal and even nastier lignite.
@@kaasmeester5903 So it's all about magnetic confinement and precision. Cleary within theoretical constraints.
If you want a carbon-neutral prime mover that has future potential, back fusion. If you need one that works NOW, back fission. Fixed it for ya. Distributed home solar and wind is good for some end users. Grid solar and wind is crap.
Sorry for the double-post, I wanted to fix the issue with the 750 million tons... Thanks for spotting this!
Too bad, a stellarator made of neutronium would be pretty cool. Or hot, probably. 😅
At least you got the heavy lifting out of the way.
Why not Use conventional Propulsion while warping the space around You. What about traveling as fare back in time as time is moving forward useless for traveling to past .but great for traveling distance
It's OK. I watch it twice anyway
It's Finally completed: ruclips.net/video/ULDI-8gIYPM/видео.html
It's important to note that W7-X already used this idea of Quasi-Isodynamicity, as that was one of the main improvements over W7-AS.
I'm guessing this startup just found a field geometry which is slightly more Quasi-Isodynamic.
Well, hopefully LESS quasi-isodynamic. And just more isodynamic
Don't forget that W7-X is not optimized for reducing ITG-Turbulence, which a Power Plant definitely should be. It should be noted as well that W7-X is already optimized to QI but only indirectly through proxies, such as low bootstrap current. Only later were these different classes of Quasi symmetry discovered.
1:40 “by the time ITER finishes its construction in 4500…” HILARIOUS!
I dabbled in magnetically-confined fusion at LBL back in the late 80’s.
It saddens me to still not see it any practical non-weapon. But i am happy i did not tie my career (ie family income) to it.
Maybe Sabine has some insight information...😂
you dabbled? is that like in the video "when someone says I dabble with guitar".
@@drgetwrekt869 When i said “dabbled,” I meant designed accelerator hardware and did control system test.
As the late Dr. Bussard put it about Tokamak "it might never be economic, but it's really good science."
But if you had tied your career to it, you would have a job in the same area for centuries.
I was involved in the building of the UW-Madison HSX Stellerator which predated the W-7 (and the W-7 used a lot of the information on how the HSX actually functioned as a basis for their design).
Stellarators have huge advantages over a tokamaxs. I was told by the physicist that if a tokamax ever reaches steady state that it will melt as it's theoretically impossible to cool that shape faster than it would generate heat. As such it's not suitable for more than pulse power generation.
A stellarator in theory can be cooled faster than it generates heat from fusion - and are thus suitable for steady power production in the future.
I read an article in the last few weeks that there is also a fusion startup company in Wisconsin which is based on stellarators and has key people from the UW-Madison HSX stellarator program involved - including names I recognize from working with them on the construction of the HSX stellarator.
I wish both stellarator startup companies the best...
"As such it's not suitable for more than pulse power generation." The reason for that is a different one though. Tokamaks do run in pulsed mode only by design. It is due to how the magnetic confinement of the plasma is achieved. Its main component is an induced current within the plasma (this current is, by the way, also responsible for heating the plasma). In order to induce this current, you need a primary external magnetic field which has to steadily increase. However, you cannot increase this primary external field indefinitely. After reaching a maximum, induction will stop as well, the confinement and the fusion of the plasma will break down and thus conclude a full cycle. After that you have to start over again with a new cycle.
@@alexanderkohler6439 So, what you're say is that the tokamak design is basically just useful for experimental purposes, and not, in fact, useful for commercial power generation?
@@dondai2880 No, I am not saying that. While this pulsed mode of tokamaks is certainly a disadavantage compared to the continuous mode that stellarators are capable of, we are nevertheless talking about long pulse periods of several minutes. So this is almost continuous. There are other pulsed mode designs which certainly are not useful for commercial power generation, like inertial ignition fusion. There, we would talk about pulse lengths of just fractions of milliseconds. That is certainly not useful for commercial power production.
mmm
Alexanderkohler thanks for the clarification, makes sense!
So now we can have nuclear fusion power within 30 years! As always.
30? That's quite pessimistic.
@@dr.victorvs 30 years ago it was only 10 years away! So given that margin of error, and factor in that we still don't have it, I'd go as far as to predict 40 years from now 😉
35. Take or leave it...
@@-TheUnkownUser I'll leave it. I'll almost certainly be dead by then.
@@TooSlowTube Guess my children would say the same "just 30 years away" thing...
"by the time they finish construction, approximately in the year 4500"
At least your honest and not 'just twenty years away'.
I'm not just here for the German accent. But I did enjoy that.
Next comes Eichhörnchen and Quietscheentchen.
I think Quasi Iso Dynamic has great marketing potential, Fusion sealed with a QIS.
QID is close to "QED". From a marketing perspective, if they could bridge that, I think it would sound good.
I should have included the full name : Quasi Isodymanic Stellerator to make the acronym QIS clear. By the time I realized this i could no loger edit the post.
@@jeffryborror4883 "Fusion sealed with a QIS" is beautiful. You should trademark that.
I was thinking along the limes of SQuID or QuIDS, but man... yours is so much better
@@RussellFlowersiso is greek for latin equi. just call it quasi equidynamic
The best thing about fusion is that it converts billions of dollars of ill accumulated, trust fund wealth (investment funds) and converts it into vapor.
But at least the start up guys hoovering up all that money get to pay for rent and stuff.
Yeah, that's typically how these things work. Salaries are a part of the required funding. Not such a bad thing considering that it gives them the ability to focus exclusively on the work
01:43
_... and what ITER is supposed to use by the time it'll finish construction, approximately in the year 4500._
😂😂😂😂😂
ITERnal power consumption
@@stigbengtsson7026More a money consumption till then.
Yeah and its been the same the last 50 years!
Iter is almost finished construction. First plasma test will begin in 2025... So next year. First net energy is expected in 2035... Maybe sooner since we already achieved net energy gain with JET.
@@khanch.6807 I don't give much for Iter their must be small scale stuff to run for net gain and do some iterations on for many different reserchers!, phun intended!
Thank you for the update on ITER, I'll put a note on my calendar😁
A Sabine video a day, keeps myths away.
Even Sabine cautions that she's not immune to myths.
At least, I think I remember hearing that somewhere on the dark web.
A myth is as good as a mile.
@@jayr526 This is why we use kilometers.
@@dr.victorvs I believe the SI conversion of myth is meme.
I aways get an irrational desire to run up and get a doughnut every time someone shows a Tokamak reactor.
someone should invent a donut filled with chili cream and call it 'the Tokamak'. Oh, and it should be really expensive.
Sounds rational to me.
If the quasi-isodynamic stellarator fails as fusion reactor design perhaps it will succeed as a food item. Then again perhaps pastry chiefs would have more success laying out the shape and baking the shape to get the desired control structure than the current attempt to assemble it. The scale changes on the engineering are hard and a new approach might help.
Mind blowing how quickly you're able to get these videos out.
1:02-1:14
Thank you so much for that. You know us all too well! 😁
I was waiting for this. Since the day you covered multitude of fusion startups, I was waiting for some startup based on stellerator.
As someone with a Brazilian accent, I do enjoy you German accent! With more non native than native speakers around the world, one can say that to have an accent is the correct way to speak English.
As an American I am a native speaker. I also speak Spanish, German, Swedish & Czech. If having an accent "is the correct way to speak English" makes you feel better o.k. When I speak one of the four non-native languages my friends correct my accent so I improve my skill in speaking.
@@douglaswilkinson5700 The question is when an accent becomes correct? Should you work on converting your American accent to British English? Is Indian or Singaporean English acceptable because they grow up with it? What about single cities in other countries with different language majorities?
@@Currywurst4444 The USA is the dominant power and economy in the world. People from all over the world pour in here every day. They learn American English because it leads to success here. So our accent is #1.
If you want your speech to be intelligible, just be sure to get the rhythm of the words right.
@@douglaswilkinson5700 That might be the case but does that really mean that people should work on changing their british accent?
I trust the Sabine review process more than the peer review process ⚛️
I really think you should save up all the fusion videos and have a special April 1st show.
I just wanted to comment that you and I have very similar outlooks on fusion as a whole, and even share about the same level of scepticism and guarded optimism about it so it's both extremely satisfying and very useful for me personally to have you keeping an eye on it and making the new developments so easy to understand
Your "German access joke was good"; but the at 1:48/6:54 when you said "approximately forty-five hundred" I had to pause the video for a good three minutes while I laughed uncontrollably. I do greatly appreciate your sense of humor!!
So the stellarator is the cruller to the tokamak’s donut? But in all seriousness, I find myself wondering if there is some general principle that managing chaos requires more complex designs. As another example, airplane wing designs have gotten more complex over time in part to combat the chaos of turbulence that reduces efficiency.
Excellent example. Nature ha developed something complex like BI driven wings and feathers. (BI=Bird Intelligence).
Now we see an AI driven, accelerating evolution of magnetic confinment Fields, triggerd by Startups and Inter/ NationalResearch projects.
You can maybe think of it as higher order designs. At low energies everything works best with a simple design but once you go into the chaotic domain something more complicated becomes optimal.
Not chaos, they're modeled based on specific symmetries within magnetic field configurations. The idea of some general principle that managing chaos requires more complex designs is because the idea of "simple" is a human construct which is only based on our intuitive ideas of what's basic.
Thank you Sabine... Love getting the Latest Techno Knews. And in less than 10 minutes. Great Stuff!!
Wendelstein-Greifswald! (Also Spracht Sabine)
"also sprach", not Spracht
Small modular thorium reactors are arguably more promoting as they are cheaper and can solve the energy problem
they should call it the SQUIDS method: Superconducting QUasi-IsoDynamic Stellarator
Did you read Goodmans last Paper? He literally calls his new configurations SQUID
Is this a watchmen reference?
Thank you 💚Great startup!
Alternative name proposal:
"Danger pretzel"
Thank you
OMG! I'd estimate about 30 years should do it. Keep the grants flowing....
Most fusion reactor research and construction of test machines is funded privately and not with taxpayers' money (i.e. grants.)
Most fusion startups are in the United States because that is where dollars are printed. It's much easier to come up with capital for risky projects when that capital can be nearly conjured out of thin air!
Fusion is literally thew only tech in development that give sme some hope for the future. Solve energy and you solve SO MANY other problems.
I love it when sabine uses her accent to talk nerdy to me... XD
Sabine actually really does sound excited in the video! It's always awesome to see scientists excited about a project.
One huge advantage of stellarator is reduced requirements of magnetic confinemant resulting in much lower costs of building the reactor. I'm glad to hear this can be optimized even further leading potentially to even cheaper future reactors
Terrific update! Wish we could hear more on these types of scientific advances.
Really interesting indeed! Let's see what they can do. 😊
Thanks, Sabine!
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
0:29 It's better to have 40 small companies each trying a different approach to fusion rather than a few large government-funded projects like ITER. It only takes one company to succeed for the whole world to win. The more ideas that are tried, the greater the probability of success.
but small companies can only try small things, and only governments can make something at the scale of ITER or DEMO. and both are necessary to improve our understanding of fusion for us to maybe in the future find something that has actual practical application.
Bullshyte. Manhattan project produced atomic bomb in 2-3 years. Leaving it to startups would cost you 40-50. Ditto with apollo mission, it got people to the moon in 10 years, current cult of rocket startups only produced useless garbage rockets only good to low earth orbit (LOL at Musk's idiotic idea of sending lander to the moon by only having 12 extra rocket launches to fuel his useless boondoggle when Saturn V and Energia did that in a single rocket) while wasting more money than the apollo project cost already...
One problem is the scaling laws -- which (I think) signifies that these gizmos are anticipated to work better at larger sizes, which also means giant projects with giant budgets. This has arguably led to a bit of comedy -- the current NiF (laser shot at a tiny target) National Ignition Facility is the successor to a series of increasingly bigger and bigger machines. This time it will really work! And NiF works better at fusion than Shiva and other earlier smaller laser machines, but still not remotely close to becoming a net energy source. SABINE: how about some videos about the scaling laws? Why is bigger not just bigger but expected to be disproportionately better?
I love stellarators. Good for them. Hopefully, they are going to apply Wendelstein 7-X. I got to see Wendelstein with a tour from Olaf Grulke when I was in the AWAKE collaboration.
On another note, I was chatting with GPT and it said why bother with a fusion reactor when we have one in the sky known as the sun.
A kW / m^2 is no joke. There are lots of ways to make solar effective and efficient and use some gravity batteries with heavy weights and pullies powered by 3 phase motors.
To combat climate change, fusion will be too late. So in a way, yes. Solar power (direct or indirect*) is the way to go for now.
(* wind and hydro are indirect forms of solar power)
Gravity batteries with weights are terrible idea, they would be too big and impractical, it would be perhaps much better idea to convert as much as possible existing dams to pump-storage power plants. And in case of Germany put those that are now not operational back in full service and possibly increase their capacity if possible.
@@MrToradragon Nice assertion, there. I love it when people just assert how things aren't going to work without doing even an order of magnitude calculation. Here is mine that it will: Put a 100 meter tower in your back yard. Have 10, 2 meter high, 1 meter in diameter lead cylinders that get lifted by a motor when there is some power from something: wind, solar, my rage for people who think just being negative makes them smart, and making me jump on an excercise bike, etc. Let's calculate the stored energy from this.
Start with the volume: let's see, 10 of these things*pi*r^2*L, So we get roughly 16 m^3 of lead. Lead's density is about 11 g/cm^3 so we can do an easy conversion to 1e4 kg/m^3 for lead's density. Now then, we can just say that we have roughly g=9.91 m/s^2, lets round to 10 m/s^2.
So how much force do we have hanging up there if we are only 100 meters off the ground? Roughly 1.6 e6 N or 1.6 MNewtons. We now can just calculate how much gravitational potential energy is stored there to be run with a pulley pulling a turbine to generate some 3 phase or whatever. With 100 meters to travel, it looks like 160 MJ.
Let's compare that to one of my favorite power banks, that I love, that has roughly 1000 W-hrs of electrical energy in it. I hate W-hrs, it is a really ridiculous unit, when we have Joules, but anyway, lets convert it. It is almost like the power company doesn't want you to be able to quickly, clearly, compare energy scales or something.
3.6 MJ in one of these power banks. Hrmm, looks like we would need around 50 of these things wired up to match the energy in the gravity tower.
We should start producing and storing electricity locally so we don't rely so much on distribution networks that can get knocked out by solar flares.
Furthermore, dams have major environmental impacts on waterway wildlife and wetlands. We should try to find ways to live in harmony with the rest of nature, you know, using our imagination, creativity, knowledge, etc. Instead of just asserting nonsense that we learned from someone who ultimately tied back to having some sort of profit motive to trick people into not looking beyond what they tell them.
Good luck to us all, @MrToradragon. Enjoy your shame. You have certainly earned it. Also check my order of magnitude math. I have been known to make mistakes from time to time. It would be a good exercise for you. If you find that I am several orders of magnitude off in my comparison, I will give you a bright shiny gold star ;)
Oh and if you think that the tower is a hazard, make more of them that are shorter than 300 ft high. Also, we have pretty good tensile strength alloys these days on suspension bridges, etc, we could even make carbon fiber stuff. We can encapsulate the lead to make sure it isn't a hazard, and put stabilization locks on the weights with padding around them if there is a hurricane or whatever.
Use your imagination. Don't be boring.
@@JoshtMoody Your 160 MJ at 100m tower is mere 44.4kWh with with efficiency of asynchronous generator around 85 % would mean that around 37 kWh would be recovered. For this you would need 3-4 tesla power walls with cost between 26-46 k USD. I don!t think that you can get to that price with your 100 m tall tower. Not to mention the necessary paperwork. Lead currently costs about 2160 USD per ton your single cylinder would weight about 86 tons. Just for price of one of them you could replace the battery based system roughly 4 times.
If you are looking for local or in general distributed solution (now would solar flares knock out 1, 2, 10 mile long line? I am not sure that they would) you should be looking for things like small pump-storage power plants, especially if they can be created from existing power plants, batteries, flow batteries and possibly thermal accumulation. All those are more practical solutions than 100m tall towers with weights.
@MrToradragon I don't want elon musk overpriced power walls. Please stop strawmanning me. I reject your costs estimates. They are unreasonable. I can source all the materials for way less than 50k.
If everyone had these in their backyards, why would we need to local power plants? Why should I pay distribution fees to greedy companies who overinflate prices and pass the costs of their executives bonuses onto the customers?
I am afraid you are the impractical one. You speak only from boring old convention. I am sorry your mind is so rigid and boring. I asked for a creative solution and you give me more of the same old crap.
Please stop using the ridiculous kW*hr units used to obfuscate energy comparicrop. Use SI or CGS, not some nonsense Edison or Westinghouse came up with. Most people don't understand what a kW is. I am not even sure you do... Good luck Mr. Smartest guy in the room, sincerely, your friendly neighborhood physicist.
I have been very surprised by the stellarator design since I knew it existed a couple years ago and it's so great to know that more and more investigation is undergoing for it
Sabine knows why we're here
I told no one about my fascination with your accent! LOL
Quasi-Isodynamic Stellarator needs a catchy name...
"Qi" can be pronounced "chi" so Qis can be pronounced "cheese." Cheese will take us into the future.
Kiss. Kwasi Isodynamic Smart Stellerator.
77W77 reverse of Se7en :)
@@O_Lee69Kwasi, like Kwasi Kwarteng? Actually, see if the stellarator explodes a month after turning it on - if so then Kwasi is a perfect name.
Lyman Spitzer used stellators at Princeton in the 1950s. He envisioned 4 models: A, B, C, and "D" for Demo. He never got to D - the improvements he expected did not happen, and he moved on to other things. Glad to see someone picking up the cause. One can (perhaps -- I'm no expert) divide fusion efforts into those determined to achieve plasma stability (this stellarator) from those (like Eric Lerner's deep plasma focus) that accepts instability and hope to succeed with that. I hope someone wins..
Fusion is easily the thing I’m most excited to learn about progress for
20 million euro for a Stellarator? this wont cover the paint job🤣
Greetings from the weight watchers😂
Thanks so much!
@SabineHossenfelder barry. The hours may be long, and the teacher cruel. But each of us must walk that path, and only one's ready to go onward are those who have passed through the gateway of experience.😇💥🖖🤌🤙🤟🫰
Barry midday Sunday. Time for a swim. 😂🎉
I mean, stellarator is an amazing name. I could get behind that as a power generator.
In the year 4500, the most accurate date so far. 🤣🤣 Uncle Hartmut allways tells us (no matter what year it is when been asked), it'll get commercial in 40 years. 🤣🤣
It makes me sad to think that Fusion is the most likely world-changing technology because that means that all world-changing technologies are extremely unlikely.
There have been already several wold-changing technologies in the recent past: Solarpanels, Windgenerators, EVS.....
Individual ideas are unlikely to be world changing, but there are many ideas that people are working on and some of them do change the world
Before EVs, electric motors already had a widespread use in automotive industry. And EVS are just as unsustainable as ICE ones. The ideal in that sense is an Electric tram and train infrastructures and banning of cars. Windgenerators are just generators spun by wind. Solar panels and windgenerators are somewhat okay because you can store energy into solid state batterids which are far larger than liquid ones, and last far, far longer. These are all new concepts, not technologies. Technologies are old and barely world changing.@@wolfgangscholtes113
I remember that, in another of your videos, you said that economically usable fusions is about 50 years away, and may always just 50 years away. I’ve got to the stage that I’ll believe it when I see it.
The map at 0:30 had me trippping for a second
for a long time i was looking for some sort of science magazine to read, thank you for suggesting nautilus, i trust your promotions and will give it a try!
A beautiful machine with that fluidic dynamic shape.
you need to get more calls on the air. this twisted torus will make an awesome süßgebäck shape :)
it's dawning on me that the shape of the reactor in the Enterprise in the modern incarnations of the Star Trek movies is a stellarator like I think they filmed it inside stellarator
quasi-isodynamic stellarator reminded me of that engineering video from the 60s that was made as a joke. Turbo Encabulator is basically gibberish but the presenter makes it sound really technical.
Repeating those words with your "German Accent" irrationally made me laugh out loud. Great stuff as always Sabine!!!
Totally unrelated, but I like what you've done with your hair - it's very nice!
your so real I love it
4:43 Non-Isoformic Non-Symmetrical Field-Application Dynamic-Stream-Stellerator. ( I dub thee "NINS-FADS" stellerator)
One way to decrease particle bouncing is to use non symmetrical positioned fields, possibly in combination with field attenuation and periodicity. That would mean that there's no fixed positions for the particles to entrap in, but also the variation in field strength and the duration of the fields dissallow such entrapments. Oscillating the fields at a high frequency makes the time during interaction change for each particle, and thus the outcome of the interaction and with that the vector. The fields also being variable in strength, slightly, does the same, but in a different way yet again from the oscillation. Compounding these two ways in which deliberate non symmetrical interaction is achieved lowers the entrapment to a chance of nearing zero. With the lowered entrapment the chance of damage to the machine is also lowered.
Personally, I don't think fusion will ever become a true power gain, since the production of the fuel also costs money as well as the maintainance (replacement component parts), but still this may help.
I like very much that you emphasize it's more complicated- but that is good. It's right because the Universe is not simple- it's complicated.
Wow, ok you got me. Yea, I was indeed initially fascinated by the accent, then the humor, but mostly the objective and realistic views on things keeps me coming back.
Do a whole “episode” on lithium, someday, please. It seems a highly useful element for energy production: boosting atomic weapons, mixing with fusion plasma and increasing density, use as working fluid in batteries, a salt, a medicine. What the heck!
Thank you!
The fact that this channel has 1 M subs kinds of reassures me 🙌
I doubt if electricity from fusion will be cheap. The fuel may be cheap but the installation is very complicated thus expensive. The sun shines for free, but that doesn't make solar energy automatically cheap. Same for fusion.
As an Argentinian I really like your german accent. It reminds me of granpa.
All jokes aside, I wish we invested way more into fusion. We have had continuous achievements in the last decades and could be a game changer in the climate change fight if we accelerate the progress. It will take decades but would give us an upper hand down the road
Sabina has figured out why I can't get enough of her videos! (It's when she says "Einstein" -- yes, that guy).
Thanks for the post. Maybe you could explain why stellarators need that mobius-inspired shape to achieve better stability than tokamaks and how the various fusion projects around the world are doing?
I am a great fan of your channel. Would love to hear a video on the problem of waste heat if we get "endless cheap energy".
I would LOVE to write a particle article.
Dunno if it's me, but her delivery seems more energetic, upbeat, engaging, whatever, lately.
Very fun to listen and watch.
I've heard someone say once that the Stellarator design should have worked, and has briefly worked in "stutters" in the past but that its initial conception was too unstable in operation. I don't know how true that is but I think it's interesting that the concept is being revisited with improved components and a revised design.
4:56 Maybe the real fusion was the friends we made along the way...
Proxima Fusion, cool name
4500 years....you kill me!! LOL
"aproximately in the year 4500"
You kill me with such jokes
It would be really cool if you could make a video going over why a stellerator's complicated fusion path is more efficient than a tokomak. One would think that adding all those twists and turns would make things less efficient, not more. I'm curious about the physics going on here.
I saw a few videos of you speaking German the whole video lol I can understand because my great grandmother didn't speak English. Sorry I am seeing this late. I hope they Have success at this new facilities being built.
You have the most English sounding German accent ever but it's awesome hehehe, thank you for your amazing content!
Stellarators are such awesomely exciting machines!
With a German accent like that, you should be able to pass the O level German exam I did in England.
I worked for a company that built a linear accelerator based on this fundamental principal. It was a prototype created for DoD call SLIA - Spiral Line Inductive Accelerator. This was in the early 90's...
~~because of my german accent~~
By far neither the only nor the most important incentive to chase after your clips - but a not so side-ish side-effect of that accent is the pleasure of hearing German names pronounced in 'Die einzig wahre Weise'™ aka ' the most minutely true way'.
"...by the time it'll finish construction, approximately in the year 4500" 🤣😂😁 I'm 76 and have been hearing about the promise of fusion since I was a child, so the "just around the corner" promise has long since gone stale. But recent positive news out of Korea, the UK, and the US has given me new hope of seeing commercial fusion in my lifetime. I certainly hope that the QUISST (QUasiISodynamicSTellerator) is a huge success!
"the year 4500" had me laughing for a whole minute. Years ago I made the joke that a half completed ITER would become the center art sculpture to a shopping mall in the future. I got a lot of hate for that.
4:15 Boozers at work! Work hard party harder. I wish this startup luck!
This company is good. I think you should cover ‘Type One Energy’ as well. Great startup!
8 minutes is amazing! I hope they have a way to get energy out of it though.
Fusion power is the world's most expensive pipe dream.
Plasma = superheated
Superconductor = supercooled
Having these two right next to each other ALWAYS requires more energy than the fusion reaction provides and that will NEVER change, no matter how many optimistic press releases they put out.
Writing pessimistic claims in all caps doesn't make you right.
Loud claims were also made that people will never fly in aircraft heavier than air, and similar sh*t. Read some history books my friend. And if you try to claim something about engineering then I'm afraid you'll also need to learn maths, and suffer through proving some actual theorems, and experience all kinds of surprising and counterintuitive results on the way.
This is wonderful news! I have been very excited about the potential of the Wendelstein stellarator project, and a startup looking to refine it even further is exactly the sort of thing that we need right now.
And, as you say, all too often the great leaps in scientific progress occur not because someone has one utterly brilliant new perspective, but hecause of seemingly "small" and "unrelated" developments in some other field. If machine learning gets us a functional stellarator, I'll be quite a bit less critical of that whole branch of computer science, that's for sure!
1:07 Danke, Fräulein! 😅
Always thought trying to confine the plasma in a doughnut was daft! I am totally with this concept. Rather let the plasma do its thing and build around it!
Thanks Sabine, I was wondering if the elegant stellarator design was being developed.
Love that accent! (and that intelligence)
It’s all about energy gain. Assuming a system / technology is developed that achieves sustained fusion, the next step is to extract sufficient energy to enable a worthwhile gain. Current fusion systems require relatively large electrical supply to operate. So a total system energy gain must exceed unity by a significant margin to be of practical use.
Stellerators always sounded like the coolest idea. Using seawater as fuel? Sign me up!
Hey Sabine, thankyou for the video. Covering all this alternative energy research is fantastic. I’m wondering if you could do a video on how your audience can influence the trajectory of climate outcomes.
We all know we have a “carbon footprint”, and the more people learn, the more we realise that reducing our individual impact isn’t enough, and distracts us from the politics of co2 emissions, but I don’t think anyone knows what to do with that information.
I feel that most likely everyone wanting to learn more about these technologies probably has a burning desire, however small or large, to make some meaningful change with this climate crisis, but we don’t know where to place our efforts. Should we become climate influencers for better public awareness? Should we write to or phone our representatives in office? Should we have our unions strike? Protest in the streets? Organise local climate discussion meetups? Do we demand more of our politicians once we vote for the good ones? I know you’re mostly focused on the research side, but it feels as though communicating to individuals is only effective and valuable in the long run if we know what to do with that information.