China broke their own record for straight 7 minute on fusion energy experiment. I wanna know if it's of a same technology or different? Just curious coz you fail to mention it.
your adds are getting out of control, people will just continue to skip them when they are this long. you just spent over a minute on square space, get your shit together, if you cant get the message across in 20 seconds or less you are doing something wrong.
One thing Simon neglected to mention with regards to the reactants is that you need to use ultrapure heavy water to source the deuterium and tritium. Heavy water isn't a huge issue, both the D2O and T2O have pretty well developed production processes. But keeping them ultrapure is an absolute nightmare. To give you an idea of how pure ultrapure water is, let's start with DIW, deionosed water, which is what regular chemists (like me) use regularly. It's an intensive process, but easy enough to do on a large scale to make the water free of ions and other significant impurities, on the order of parts per million. The brave souls in biochemistry use DNAse and RNAse free water, which is designed to be free of any enzymes and other contaminants that might pose a threat to nucleic acids which you are trying to analyse, with purity going from contaminants on the order of parts per million to parts per billion. Nothing about producing and storing DNAse/RNAse free water is easy, and working with it while ensuring purity is quite delicate. And then there is ultrapure water, which you see a lot in semiconductor manufacturing. Impurities aren't in the parts per million, billion, or even trillion. Just, nothing. There is nothing there but water. This is one of the reasons why manufacturing semiconductors is so expensive. You need the most pristine components for every step. So now think about the challenges in maintaining the purity of not H2O, but the rarer D2O and T2O. This becomes extremely difficult quickly. The energy ouput enhancement is one matter, but you also have to consider the precursors. I believe a big frontier for research will be trying to achieve break-even without the ultrapure grade of D2O/T2O needed. DISCLAIMER: My background is organometallic electrochemistry, molecular physics, materials science, and chemical engineering. I am not a nuclear chemist, nor do I ever want to be a nuclear chemist. I just like to read the many amazing research papers in general chemistry, physics, and engineering.
Uh oh. If we need make semiconductors in the USA to reduce strategic risk from a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and we need ultra ultra pure water to make said semiconductoes then why in the blue hell did we build the TSMC USA fab in ARIZONA?!
@@JinKee Because Intel has a huge facility down there already. All the supporting 3rd party infrastructure is already there, as is a suitable work force.
Having been to Los Alamos National Lab a few times I would love a series either here or on Geographics for all the national labs. They are all super unique and cool!
I would like to see those. LANL was a partner with my high-school for a computer science program they called the AIS Challenge, Adventures in supercomputing. It was pretty fun. 😅
The Labs, as we in New Mexico call them, are a great place to be. I'm happy to have had the opportunity to do my Ph.D project there. I can't speak for the DOE or the labs on an organizational level of course. But I can say my individual experience with it has been extremely productive.
If you haven't done a video about the Chicago sewer system yet I recommend it. It's much more fascinating than it sounds. They had to raise the entire city eight feet to build it. They used gigantic jacks cranked by teams to 200 men to lift buildings so that they could lay new foundations underneath them. In addition, they also reversed the course of the Chicago River so that the sewage outflows would flow down to the Mississippi River instead of Lake Michigan.
I’ve taken clients in and out of that place multiple times, and had a security clearance. Never seen the labs or the lasers but still cool that I have 6 degrees of separation with LLM.
In case anyone cares: a lot of the energy an atom posesses is stored in the form of 'binding energy', binding the protons together. Thus, every element has a certain binding energy per nucleon. As you go up the element weight that energy per nucleon (generally) decreaces until you reach iron. If you now fuse two elements that have more binding energy per nucleon to form one bigger one that needs less binding energy per nucleon, the excess energy is given off according to E=mc². Once you reach iron this no longer works bc youd need to put in energy to fuse, hence you go to nuclear fision, which is what we used for decades now. My physics here are a bit rusty, its been some time so feel fre to correct me :)
I could add that mass is basically an emergent property according to quantum mechanics, everything is a (quantum) field and particles are exatations of those fields. So less energy (less exatations in the region of the nucleus) is balanced by released energy (in fusion mostly as a kinetic energy of the reaction products, which means that internal exatations transformed into "directed" exatations of moving particles). It is actually quite easy to visualize how this definition of mass causes intertia without going to deep into quantum mechanics, let's consider some region of space that contains some particles (which are waves in respective quantum fields), we say that the this object is at rest when all the different motions of the waves add up to exactly zero, the more waves are in the region the more work you need to do to make all of them on average change direction in space so they average motions are adding up to zero in new frame of reference which is the frame of reference of the moving object.
@@ukaszlampart5316 thanks for the explaiation of enertia! Never heard that before as i unfortunately stopped my physics education at highschool (and some yt stuff) but that makes sense so thanks
@@sirprise9548 Well I am not saying my explanation is super correct but at least is kind of intuitive and makes a lot of sense so I am sticking with it :)
The final fusion product of iron is significant since this is also what ultimately causes many stars to die. Once they fuse iron in their cores, they can no longer sustain the balance of their energy output resisting the force of their own gravity. Thus, the star collapses since they cannot create enough energy to sustain their own existence.
@@allisonfisher9304 which is also how the heavier elements come to be; the dying star emmits so much energy that it manages to fuse even past iron and create the heavier elements such as uranium
Loved the animation starting around 10:20 - what a spectacular way to visualize the facility also liked that little audible nugget at 10:15; like a guitar string
yeah this is part of the video provided by the lab itself, they show it during tours. i got to see it when i toured it. im nearly positive its also on the LLNL youtube page
Thank you for doing this one. Probably the most exciting and important project in science today. If this can truly be cracked, fossil fuels will become completely obsolete as soon as the plants can be built - though I'm sure the oil companies will fight like hell to slow that process down as much as they can. Then the next step will be finding the optimal plant size - build one huge facility to power tens of millions of homes, or many smaller facilities. In the distant future, could they even find the materials that would allow for plants small enough that each home could have one? Could they fit one in a vehicle? The possibilities are endless, though we surely won't survive to see much of any of that. If we're lucky, we'll live to see these plants begin to power the grid and maybe our children will live to see the end of fossil fuels. God speed, NIF.
It's been pointed out by a few outlets that the total energy in vs out is misleading since the energy in is about 1000 times more since the lasers themselves are only like .1% efficient.
@@KoRntech If you want to be even more specific, it is about collecting data for refining their computer models of nuclear weapons. There is a reason many of the most powerful supercomputers in the US are at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The ultimate goal is to be able to design new weapons and know how well they will work without having to actually build and test them.
I obtained a degree in Nuclear Engineering in 1983. I had a professor at the time heavily involved in Fusion research. I took all of his classes. Fascinating stuff. At the time I graduated we were estimated to be 10 years from the first viable fusion reactors. 10 years later...progress had been made, but we were estimated to be 10 years from the first viable fusion reactor. Another 10 years...more progress...and our estimate for the first viable fusion reactor was...wait for it....10 years. I would love to see the day that occurs...alas now at 61, I have my doubts. It's great to learn of progress like the NIF...but it seems we've learned our lesson...now we estimate the first viable fusion reactor to be about 30 years out (2050s). The promise of a viable fusion reactor is HUGE. But even with all the progress made over the past 40 years....the challenges are even LARGER.
The craziest part to think about is now matter how advanced we get, to the point we're literally harnessing the power of the sun, its also incredibly archaic in the fact we're basically still using steam engines for all this. Thats how nuclear power and even fusion works to produce energy, we're literally using the power of the sun just to heat water into steam and use it to spin a turbine, which spins some magnets around copper and produces electricity.
One thing everyone should keep in mind is that NIF is a research facility, not a power plant. I've read comments from some that think just because NIF isn't going to connect to the grid and power people's homes that it's a failure, which is ridiculous. These experiments are to prove the concept, that's it. Think of what it looked like when someone wondered if you could ignite atomized gasoline in a closed container. They probably started out with something like a pipe with one end plugged tight, and the other with a cork in it...and maybe a simple injector and spark plug in the middle somewhere. When it first went off the casual observer may have thought it was a wasted effort, but those in the know knew exactly what to do from there...
A few comments: Laser fusion is less likely to actually be the way that sustainable fusion for power is going to be produced precisely because it requires these giant shots and then takes so much recharge time. We also in recent years have seen a lot of improvement in some of the techs needed for magnetic confinement fusion, such as better superconductors, but less so with inertial confinement systems like this. Also, note that having a sustained fusion reaction in any system (whether something like the NIF or a more conventional tokamak or stellarator) is a big step from having a system which is at all commercially viable.
@Gerald H Yeah, and the other thing that is good about SPARC Is that they are designing it from the ground up with practical use in mind. So they have tried to make it modular and easy to manufacture and repair major parts.
Would fusion be efficient at cogeneration though? You can have district heating, desalination, etc with fission. And what about the losses. Cs137 can be mined from nuclear waste and used in medicine. Its like shopping at walmart for 10 things and spending $10 vs shopping at 10 stores and spending $0.90 at each but $2.00 on gas, aging your car and spending a lot more time traveling. You saved more by shopping at walmart.
I think that magnetic confinment or some kind of hybrid approach (like Helion energy) will be the first way we harness fusion, pure intertial confinment requires extreme gains to be viable method of power generation: because reaction happens so quickly you need to achieve ignition of the fuel pellet, which means that energy generated from fusion causes more reactions in the fuel pellet mass than it is lost to the surroundings so that you fuse your fuel before it is blown appart. Ultimately for stuff like fusion torch drives (fascinating topic, how one day humanity can conquer the stars, given our current understanding of physics) intertial confinment might be necessary.
NIF is from a power generation point of view less interesting than magnetic or some modern kinetic confinement systems but it would make a really good engine for a spacecraft. With the correct fuel the resulting plasma is electrically charged and can be expelled through a magnetic nozzle, a magnetic field shaped like a rocket nozzle (we do that all the time in magnetoplasma drives). This means there's no need to mess around with converting a miniature h-bomb into energy (though you could do it with charged plasma quite efficiently). Ypu just expell all the energy out the back and you get ok thrust with amazibg efficiency. Basically Expanse style engines that can burn for weeks. Cooling loops can procide plenty of electrical energy too as that reactor will get hot AF. In fact keeping the reactor from melting in seconds from neutron radiation is challeng. But these laser cobfinement schemes have been popular for a long time. Project Daedalus would have used it to propell a Titanic sized craft to 12% the speed of light with 500 t payload to Barnard's star in 50 years.
@Megaprojects you should look into Air Separation Units like the ones produced by Linde PLC. They produce high purity atmospheric gases for the manufacturing of semiconductors (among other things).
Fusion has been making huge gains the whole time in temperature and containment time. It's fusion's time. Forget Thorium. Go check out "Helion Energy" and "Commonwealth Fusion Systems". It's time to think big with fusion, not a variation on a theme via fission using Thorium.
@Aaron Schooley lol fusion is at least 100 years away, if it's even ever going to happen. But sure let's ignore ACTUAL WORKING things like fission/thorium.
Let's just get one thing clear; there are better ways to study fusion for energy production, like using the same technologies that will be used for sustained energy production, not a completely different model system. The National Ignition Facility is completely unlike those systems, yet it closely mimics the implosion of nuclear weapons. To all but the most casual of observers, it is obvious that much of its research is directed at developing better nuclear weapons. "Let's see how much energy we can get out of this amount of nuclear fuel" can easily be masked as "we're just trying to reach and exceed break-even so that nuclear energy production can be economical" but the reality is that you can convert the energy you put into the system back into electricity through the same processes that you capture the heat released by nuclear fusion - getting more energy out of the nuclear fuel isn't nearly as important as figuring out how to *efficiently* collect all of that heat and turn it into electricity. NIF doesn't study that, not in any realistic setting. It's honest research question is "how big of a bomb can we make in how small of a physics package?". And that's fine, but the lies surrounding it are a bit annoying.
i got to tour NIF with my engineering tech program. my brother in law works at LLNL at he worked at NIF for a while. on said nuclear fusion a couple years back. no idea what he does now because it's classified , but its probably just as interesting. i also interviewed there twice but never got in.
We're talking about this releasing more energy than it used. Which is great, but that doesn't mean we could use fusion power. It's a great testing site that produces a reaction for an incredibly short flash of time. Not a reaction that's kept up and harvested for power production. Great deal of work left to do just for the theoretic side, let alone practical production.
Yeah, I personally think Helion Energy or Commonwealth Fusion Systems will be the first to get a production quality reaction and reactor. Both have some compelling designs and an established history of significant improvements with each passing design.
That's exactly what NIF actually is: a nuclear weapons testing site. It doesn't try to harvest the released energy because what it is really harvesting is data to be fed into NNSA computer models of nuclear reactions. The ultimate goal is to have an accurate enough model that new weapons can be designed and tested entirely on computers.
@@JonMartinYXD Nah. The last four generations of nuclear weapons have been designed entirely digitally. The first being in 1978. The ignition facility is exactly what it says in the name. The harvest facility does not exist yet because the ignition research has to be completed first.
@@StoneInMySandal I recommend watching Thunderf00t's two most recent videos on fusion. NIF itself straight out says that this is for nuclear weapons research. In their diagram they call the target cylinder a hohlraum and say that the fuel capsule is crushed by x-rays. That's exactly how one would describe the fusion stage of a thermonuclear bomb, with the notable absense of a plutonium spark plug.
Fusion is gonna one of those things that appears out of nowhere. Suddenly there will be break throughs everywhere, but no one will know what it means. Not unlike fission reactors as power plants back in 50's and 60's.
I thought the most recent fusion breakthrough turned out to just be an advanced weapons test basically. it had very little to do with generating electrical energy and almost everything to do with the United States funding a company for weapons research
Not a company, NIF is owned by the US government. But yes, NIF is all about setting off tiny nuclear bombs to improve computer modelling of nuclear weapons.
Couple of things. 4:22 Deuterium-tritium fusion does not produce "only very low level radioactive waste". D-T fusion produces high energy neutrons that potentially make everything they hit radioactive (a process called neutron activation). This would include the entire reactor vessel. Even if the energy produced could be captured, the neutrons from D-T fusion would be continually destroying the reactor. It would require frequent shutdowns to replace parts that had stopped working because they had been transmuted into some other element, one that was likely highly radioactive. 18:01 That NNSA logo is a big clue what NIF's real purpose is. The National Nuclear Security Administration is tasked with safeguarding US national security through the military application of nuclear science. They maintain the US nuclear stockpile (each warhead costs about $10M per year to keep safe and viable) and develop new warhead designs. The diagram at 13:23 calls the cylinder that held the fuel capsule a "hohlraum" and shows that it was compression by x-rays that led to ignition. That's exactly what the second (fusion) stage of a thermonuclear bomb is. The primary (fission) stage creates x-rays that are reflected by the walls of the hohlraum onto the deuterium-tritium second stage which is crushed and undergoes fusion. NIF has nothing to do with creating a fusion power plant - it is a test chamber for miniature thermonuclear bombs. The data collected its many sensors will be used to refine and verify computer models of nuclear reactions. The ultimate goal is to be able to reliably design and test new weapons entirely on supercomputers (the NNSA has access to some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world). Make no mistake, nuclear weapons scientists in the other nuclear powers had to change their underwear after the NIF announcement. The US showed the world just how far ahead they are in nuclear weapons research and development.
@Gerald H He has worked at nuclear reactors. Plus as this video says they've only generated more power than was put in if you fudge the numbers, if you don't then they are still WAY off at something like 300 in, 1 out. And the longest they've been able to maintain a fusion reaction was 210 seconds - impressive but no where near viable for energy production
@Dr G. Do you have source that documents Philip E. Mason (aka thunderf00t) worked w/ nuclear reactors? Went to his Wikipedia page and could not find anything. Thanks.
@@slimjimnyc270 He did videos during his time there - that's how I remember it. You could look through some of his back catalogue if you want to find them.
Pressure not heat will turn out to be the key. Heat is just the byproduct of the pressure needed. The amount of pressure needed is unimaginably high. Something in the magnitude of one billion times greater pressure than what would be needed to create a diamond. We are just not there yet. But once we can solve that puzzle we will have more energy then we will know what to do with.
Thunderfoot debunked this recently. The NIF are studying fusion for nuclear weapons research. The laser powered nuclear fusion is not scalable and will never generate electricity in large amounts. I have no qualms about their study, as they do important work. It's much more preferable to do this than the detonation of real H bombs. Fusion power stations seem to be 30 years away and always will be, although the work with superconducting tape is promising.
Technically, it’s not “fusion” that powers the cores, MFCs, etc. iirc, if you get close up on the MFC(?) writing, it mentions fission, instead of fusion.
While the NIF is doing fusion, it's not doing power production fusion. All of the work at the NIF is about nuclear weapons research. Now the DoE made a big deal that they got more energy out of the energy going into the capsule, but what they're glossing over is that the original energy for the laser pulse to start the process is roughly 200 times more power required than what they got out as they lose a lot of energy by the various beam splitters and the like before they even get to the ignition chamber. So this is 100% nuclear weapons research and not power production. Our best hope for actual useful power production is not what's happening at the NIF, but at other places like the work with Tokamaks, Stellerators, and other devices/methods that are being worked on.
It wasn't actually a big deal: They got twice as much energy from fusion as they put into the plasma with lasers, but it took about 1000 times as much electrical energy to generate those lasers. CFS expects to produce more energy from fusion than the whole fusion power plant consumes in 2025. 🙂
meanwhile, the biggest operational stellarator (wendelstein 7x) managed to sustain a fusion worthy plasma for several minutes. so after ITER the next magnetic confinement fusion reactor will be probably such a device, not a tokamak anymore.......because a tokamak can only operate pulsed. it will be a great race between the NIF principle and the "classic" magnetic confinement approach
tech for Luddites was well before Thunderfoot. this tech is funded by people who have been ill-informed. we all want it to work, but it will never happen.
Fusion is the ultimate goal for sure. Future humanity will probably need it to even attempt interstellar travel. But it's Unlikely to be part of this century's necessary energy shift from fossil fuels. Germany just took its whole nuclear fleet offline, which is utterly counterproductive.
Some corrections: You stated the NIF was built to do something "useful" with nuclear energy and to keep top nuclear scientists working for the government. No. It was to show that our bombs would continue to work without having the ability to actually test one, thereby maintaining our nuclear deterrence. You also state that fusion is the most powerful reaction by far. Not true. Fusion only is four times more energy dense than fission (an existing, mature, carbon-free and much cheaper alternative). And nuclear fission reactors with nearly 100% fuel burnup have been designed. Fusion will likely never get to 25% fuel burnup.
Have you ever met a human? What you're suggesting is completely against our species capabilities. You're more likely to win the lottery, while being bitten by a shark at the same time you get struck by lightening than you are to EVER see our species learn to co-exist and stop fighting each other.
No we won't. Humans are not supposed to sit in a circle and sing kumbaya. That is a surefire way to ensure progress grinds to a screeching halt before going backwards. Peace is impossible. Grow up.
The international community should all come together to work on this. Especially since it's actually something good for humanity and it would be accomplished faster. But of course we will let nationalism get in the way of that to prove which nation is the best
Yes, one day they're going to figure out how to do that without billions of dollars of laser power and putting in unbelievable amounts of energy to get such a tiny amount out.
Oh no you fell for the headline that this is for boiling water to generate electricity. I can see the Thunderf00t thumbnail for this one. Matt Farrell gets a break.
I dunno Simon, there are more than a handful of governments in the world I don't want having access to nuclear fusion, simply for their propensity for dishing out human suffering and genocide. Who the hell knows what they'd end up doing with nuclear fusion technology?
I am a simple CPA and could never claim to speak with authority on this subject. However, I can remember from my youth an estimate economically feasible fusion would be achieved by the year 2000. At the age of 65 I sincerely doubt I will live to see it.
I truly hope that nuclear fusion isn't always 30 years away. In the meanwhile, nuclear fission is our best source of 'clean' energy. It can bridge us to fusion, if it's ever viable.
Lol at being seven years late with groundbreaking fusion projects. Finnish Olkiluoto, a fission power plant after such a long time of fission power plants is starting next week after being delayed by 13 years throughout the construction and launch.
Hamilton accelerators are certainly a good inroad as we have direct evidence of hamilton fusion process happening around smb radio jets and another rogue blackhole read very small ejected in galaxy collision betwixt two very massive blackholes punched through a gas stream at near relativistic speeds leaving a stream of hamilton ignitions behind also very pretty if you're nowhere near it :)
The NIF's primary mission is Nuclear Weapon Stockpile Stewardship. The fact that it was built just after the comprehensive nuclear test band treaty should clue you in on that. Laser pumped inertial confinement fusion will never, EVER be a practical commercial fusion energy source. At least the French are more open about their facility: Laser Mégajoule - "Laser Mégajoule's primary task will be refining fusion calculations for France's own nuclear weapons. A portion of the system's time is set aside for materials science experiments."
It will always remain a pipe dream. The main benefits are the spinoff technologies and keeping the scientists employed by us and not enemies/competitors. Money should be invested in drilling technology to achieve the capability to drill to 20km deep. With that we will be able to place geothermal plants anywhere in the world and replace fossil fuel buring plants with geothermal plants and simply plug right into the existing steam to electricity systems already in place. The company Quaise, a group out of MIT is working on just that.
Im sorry but the comment at 13:13 is not true. The scientists were basing the output energy of the lasers and not the energy required to power the lasers, which is what is required for the power "gain" .
It's madness, the one thing the world needs more than anything is clean energy. The US spends hundreds of billions on defence, why can't something as important as this get the funding it needs to become a reality in our lifetime.
They haven't figured that part out yet. They haven't even figured out how to prevent a fusion reactor from destroying itself (fusion power isn't clean, it releases high energy neutrons that damage and irradiate the reactor).
@@JonMartinYXD I'm guessing if a fusion reaction had any magnetic properties it might me used to induce electric current , but then the reaction is contained in a magnetic field
@@omarjassar4650 They are fusing two specific isotopes of hydrogen: hydrogen-2 (AKA deuterium - a proton and a neutron) and hydrogen-3 (AKA tritium - a proton and two neutrons). The result is helium-4 (the most common isotope of helium - two protons and two neutrons), some energy, and a neutron. Why use deuterium and tritium? Because that combination is by far the easiest to get to fuse. Other combinations require significantly more energy input.
@@omarjassar4650 Alas it does not have any magnetic properties. Deuterium-tritium fusion produces normal helium, some heat, and a neutron. The neutron does not care about electric or magnetic fields, the only way to contain it is to have it hit something.
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Is there a way to sign up for ALL your channels or do u just have to go through them one by one? (which would take a century)
China broke their own record for straight 7 minute on fusion energy experiment. I wanna know if it's of a same technology or different? Just curious coz you fail to mention it.
your adds are getting out of control, people will just continue to skip them when they are this long. you just spent over a minute on square space, get your shit together, if you cant get the message across in 20 seconds or less you are doing something wrong.
Oxford are at it no?,
One thing Simon neglected to mention with regards to the reactants is that you need to use ultrapure heavy water to source the deuterium and tritium. Heavy water isn't a huge issue, both the D2O and T2O have pretty well developed production processes. But keeping them ultrapure is an absolute nightmare.
To give you an idea of how pure ultrapure water is, let's start with DIW, deionosed water, which is what regular chemists (like me) use regularly. It's an intensive process, but easy enough to do on a large scale to make the water free of ions and other significant impurities, on the order of parts per million.
The brave souls in biochemistry use DNAse and RNAse free water, which is designed to be free of any enzymes and other contaminants that might pose a threat to nucleic acids which you are trying to analyse, with purity going from contaminants on the order of parts per million to parts per billion. Nothing about producing and storing DNAse/RNAse free water is easy, and working with it while ensuring purity is quite delicate.
And then there is ultrapure water, which you see a lot in semiconductor manufacturing. Impurities aren't in the parts per million, billion, or even trillion. Just, nothing. There is nothing there but water. This is one of the reasons why manufacturing semiconductors is so expensive. You need the most pristine components for every step.
So now think about the challenges in maintaining the purity of not H2O, but the rarer D2O and T2O. This becomes extremely difficult quickly. The energy ouput enhancement is one matter, but you also have to consider the precursors. I believe a big frontier for research will be trying to achieve break-even without the ultrapure grade of D2O/T2O needed.
DISCLAIMER: My background is organometallic electrochemistry, molecular physics, materials science, and chemical engineering. I am not a nuclear chemist, nor do I ever want to be a nuclear chemist. I just like to read the many amazing research papers in general chemistry, physics, and engineering.
They are cracking it
Uh oh. If we need make semiconductors in the USA to reduce strategic risk from a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and we need ultra ultra pure water to make said semiconductoes then why in the blue hell did we build the TSMC USA fab in ARIZONA?!
There is a way to create fusion using heavy helium. Tritium is just not feasible for it is way too rare and expensive to extract from seawater.
@@JinKee Because Intel has a huge facility down there already. All the supporting 3rd party infrastructure is already there, as is a suitable work force.
Really interesting 🤔 , thanks for sharing
Having been to Los Alamos National Lab a few times I would love a series either here or on Geographics for all the national labs. They are all super unique and cool!
That’s where Bob Lazar worked!
When were you there?
I would like to see those. LANL was a partner with my high-school for a computer science program they called the AIS Challenge, Adventures in supercomputing.
It was pretty fun. 😅
This. You could make this two part even, easily
The Labs, as we in New Mexico call them, are a great place to be. I'm happy to have had the opportunity to do my Ph.D project there. I can't speak for the DOE or the labs on an organizational level of course. But I can say my individual experience with it has been extremely productive.
If you haven't done a video about the Chicago sewer system yet I recommend it. It's much more fascinating than it sounds. They had to raise the entire city eight feet to build it. They used gigantic jacks cranked by teams to 200 men to lift buildings so that they could lay new foundations underneath them. In addition, they also reversed the course of the Chicago River so that the sewage outflows would flow down to the Mississippi River instead of Lake Michigan.
Yes, I would like to see a video about the Lawrence Livermore Labs. I've lived nearby my entire life so I would really like to know more about it.
I live on the other side of the earth but would like to know more as well 😅
I’ve taken clients in and out of that place multiple times, and had a security clearance. Never seen the labs or the lasers but still cool that I have 6 degrees of separation with LLM.
In case anyone cares: a lot of the energy an atom posesses is stored in the form of 'binding energy', binding the protons together. Thus, every element has a certain binding energy per nucleon. As you go up the element weight that energy per nucleon (generally) decreaces until you reach iron. If you now fuse two elements that have more binding energy per nucleon to form one bigger one that needs less binding energy per nucleon, the excess energy is given off according to E=mc².
Once you reach iron this no longer works bc youd need to put in energy to fuse, hence you go to nuclear fision, which is what we used for decades now.
My physics here are a bit rusty, its been some time so feel fre to correct me :)
I could add that mass is basically an emergent property according to quantum mechanics, everything is a (quantum) field and particles are exatations of those fields. So less energy (less exatations in the region of the nucleus) is balanced by released energy (in fusion mostly as a kinetic energy of the reaction products, which means that internal exatations transformed into "directed" exatations of moving particles). It is actually quite easy to visualize how this definition of mass causes intertia without going to deep into quantum mechanics, let's consider some region of space that contains some particles (which are waves in respective quantum fields), we say that the this object is at rest when all the different motions of the waves add up to exactly zero, the more waves are in the region the more work you need to do to make all of them on average change direction in space so they average motions are adding up to zero in new frame of reference which is the frame of reference of the moving object.
@@ukaszlampart5316 thanks for the explaiation of enertia! Never heard that before as i unfortunately stopped my physics education at highschool (and some yt stuff) but that makes sense so thanks
@@sirprise9548 Well I am not saying my explanation is super correct but at least is kind of intuitive and makes a lot of sense so I am sticking with it :)
The final fusion product of iron is significant since this is also what ultimately causes many stars to die. Once they fuse iron in their cores, they can no longer sustain the balance of their energy output resisting the force of their own gravity. Thus, the star collapses since they cannot create enough energy to sustain their own existence.
@@allisonfisher9304 which is also how the heavier elements come to be; the dying star emmits so much energy that it manages to fuse even past iron and create the heavier elements such as uranium
1:30 - Chapter 1 - Nuclear Fusion 101
4:40 - Mid roll ads
6:05 - Chapter 2 - Proposal , founding & creation
10:05 - Chapter 3 - Mission & mechanisms
15:55 - Chapter 4 - Into the future
18:55 - Chapter 5 - Conclusion
Loved the animation starting around 10:20 - what a spectacular way to visualize the facility
also liked that little audible nugget at 10:15; like a guitar string
yeah this is part of the video provided by the lab itself, they show it during tours. i got to see it when i toured it. im nearly positive its also on the LLNL youtube page
It's just 20 years away. And it will always be 20 years away.
The amount of technological advancement humans have gone through in just 200 years will never cease it astound me.....
I’ve got a working fusion reactor for sale. Tried and tested, ready for use and good for millions of years without any maintenance.
@@1newme425 Sorry, no shipping. It’s collect and go only.
Ahhh, a version of the old "I've got a bridge to sell" you con. It isn't yours to sell.
I've got $3
No thank you but is your Eiffel tower still on sale?
Thank you for doing this one. Probably the most exciting and important project in science today. If this can truly be cracked, fossil fuels will become completely obsolete as soon as the plants can be built - though I'm sure the oil companies will fight like hell to slow that process down as much as they can.
Then the next step will be finding the optimal plant size - build one huge facility to power tens of millions of homes, or many smaller facilities. In the distant future, could they even find the materials that would allow for plants small enough that each home could have one? Could they fit one in a vehicle?
The possibilities are endless, though we surely won't survive to see much of any of that. If we're lucky, we'll live to see these plants begin to power the grid and maybe our children will live to see the end of fossil fuels.
God speed, NIF.
It's been pointed out by a few outlets that the total energy in vs out is misleading since the energy in is about 1000 times more since the lasers themselves are only like .1% efficient.
Lasers are not only incredibly inefficient, their shelf life is also incredibly limited and equally expensive..
@@alexandersimpson3638However: they only need to fire once to get it going.
Thunderf00t did a good explanation too.
Simon was correct about demons in chat
But Mason also said they were not creating fusion for energy the facility is for strategic nuclear testing and development.
@@KoRntech If you want to be even more specific, it is about collecting data for refining their computer models of nuclear weapons. There is a reason many of the most powerful supercomputers in the US are at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The ultimate goal is to be able to design new weapons and know how well they will work without having to actually build and test them.
WOW that must mean its good Thunderfoot is a god.
I obtained a degree in Nuclear Engineering in 1983. I had a professor at the time heavily involved in Fusion research. I took all of his classes. Fascinating stuff. At the time I graduated we were estimated to be 10 years from the first viable fusion reactors. 10 years later...progress had been made, but we were estimated to be 10 years from the first viable fusion reactor. Another 10 years...more progress...and our estimate for the first viable fusion reactor was...wait for it....10 years. I would love to see the day that occurs...alas now at 61, I have my doubts. It's great to learn of progress like the NIF...but it seems we've learned our lesson...now we estimate the first viable fusion reactor to be about 30 years out (2050s). The promise of a viable fusion reactor is HUGE. But even with all the progress made over the past 40 years....the challenges are even LARGER.
The craziest part to think about is now matter how advanced we get, to the point we're literally harnessing the power of the sun, its also incredibly archaic in the fact we're basically still using steam engines for all this.
Thats how nuclear power and even fusion works to produce energy, we're literally using the power of the sun just to heat water into steam and use it to spin a turbine, which spins some magnets around copper and produces electricity.
"If it ain't broke" 😂😂
Steam turbines are extremely efficient despite how old the core technology is.
'Let us know in the comments if you'd'....YES!!!! It's always YES Simon.
1:24 nuclear fusion 101
6:03 proposal, founding, and creation
10:00 mission and mechanisms
15:51 into the future
18:50 conclusion
Bro watched the 20 min vid in 7 minutes just to make this comment for us. What a chad
One thing everyone should keep in mind is that NIF is a research facility, not a power plant. I've read comments from some that think just because NIF isn't going to connect to the grid and power people's homes that it's a failure, which is ridiculous. These experiments are to prove the concept, that's it. Think of what it looked like when someone wondered if you could ignite atomized gasoline in a closed container. They probably started out with something like a pipe with one end plugged tight, and the other with a cork in it...and maybe a simple injector and spark plug in the middle somewhere. When it first went off the casual observer may have thought it was a wasted effort, but those in the know knew exactly what to do from there...
A few comments: Laser fusion is less likely to actually be the way that sustainable fusion for power is going to be produced precisely because it requires these giant shots and then takes so much recharge time. We also in recent years have seen a lot of improvement in some of the techs needed for magnetic confinement fusion, such as better superconductors, but less so with inertial confinement systems like this.
Also, note that having a sustained fusion reaction in any system (whether something like the NIF or a more conventional tokamak or stellarator) is a big step from having a system which is at all commercially viable.
@Gerald H Yeah, and the other thing that is good about SPARC Is that they are designing it from the ground up with practical use in mind. So they have tried to make it modular and easy to manufacture and repair major parts.
Would fusion be efficient at cogeneration though? You can have district heating, desalination, etc with fission. And what about the losses. Cs137 can be mined from nuclear waste and used in medicine. Its like shopping at walmart for 10 things and spending $10 vs shopping at 10 stores and spending $0.90 at each but $2.00 on gas, aging your car and spending a lot more time traveling. You saved more by shopping at walmart.
Tell me you listened to the Lex Friedman podcast with Dennis Whyte without telling me you listened to the Lex Friedman podcast with Dennis Whyte xD
@@murfflyHave not listened to it. Which part did they discuss?
I think that magnetic confinment or some kind of hybrid approach (like Helion energy) will be the first way we harness fusion, pure intertial confinment requires extreme gains to be viable method of power generation: because reaction happens so quickly you need to achieve ignition of the fuel pellet, which means that energy generated from fusion causes more reactions in the fuel pellet mass than it is lost to the surroundings so that you fuse your fuel before it is blown appart. Ultimately for stuff like fusion torch drives (fascinating topic, how one day humanity can conquer the stars, given our current understanding of physics) intertial confinment might be necessary.
Fusion has been 30 years away my whole life - and that's a considerable amount of time.
You're 100 years old ☺
@@AnotherPointOfView944 not quite, but fusion has been 30 years away for the last 70.
You sure they meant earth years?
NIF is from a power generation point of view less interesting than magnetic or some modern kinetic confinement systems but it would make a really good engine for a spacecraft. With the correct fuel the resulting plasma is electrically charged and can be expelled through a magnetic nozzle, a magnetic field shaped like a rocket nozzle (we do that all the time in magnetoplasma drives).
This means there's no need to mess around with converting a miniature h-bomb into energy (though you could do it with charged plasma quite efficiently). Ypu just expell all the energy out the back and you get ok thrust with amazibg efficiency. Basically Expanse style engines that can burn for weeks.
Cooling loops can procide plenty of electrical energy too as that reactor will get hot AF. In fact keeping the reactor from melting in seconds from neutron radiation is challeng. But these laser cobfinement schemes have been popular for a long time. Project Daedalus would have used it to propell a Titanic sized craft to 12% the speed of light with 500 t payload to Barnard's star in 50 years.
Hello Simon have great weekend 😊
@Megaprojects you should look into Air Separation Units like the ones produced by Linde PLC. They produce high purity atmospheric gases for the manufacturing of semiconductors (among other things).
It's been ten years away for at least the last 40 years. Thorium is what we need to figuring out. A NASA moonshot program.
Fusion has been making huge gains the whole time in temperature and containment time. It's fusion's time. Forget Thorium. Go check out "Helion Energy" and "Commonwealth Fusion Systems". It's time to think big with fusion, not a variation on a theme via fission using Thorium.
@Aaron Schooley lol fusion is at least 100 years away, if it's even ever going to happen. But sure let's ignore ACTUAL WORKING things like fission/thorium.
Let's just get one thing clear; there are better ways to study fusion for energy production, like using the same technologies that will be used for sustained energy production, not a completely different model system. The National Ignition Facility is completely unlike those systems, yet it closely mimics the implosion of nuclear weapons. To all but the most casual of observers, it is obvious that much of its research is directed at developing better nuclear weapons.
"Let's see how much energy we can get out of this amount of nuclear fuel" can easily be masked as "we're just trying to reach and exceed break-even so that nuclear energy production can be economical" but the reality is that you can convert the energy you put into the system back into electricity through the same processes that you capture the heat released by nuclear fusion - getting more energy out of the nuclear fuel isn't nearly as important as figuring out how to *efficiently* collect all of that heat and turn it into electricity. NIF doesn't study that, not in any realistic setting. It's honest research question is "how big of a bomb can we make in how small of a physics package?".
And that's fine, but the lies surrounding it are a bit annoying.
We're now only 15 years away from this goal that has been perpetually only 20 years away for several decades.
Simon please make a video about dharavi and its redevelopment projects. It is really really a mega project. Nearly impossible mission.
i got to tour NIF with my engineering tech program. my brother in law works at LLNL at he worked at NIF for a while. on said nuclear fusion a couple years back. no idea what he does now because it's classified , but its probably just as interesting. i also interviewed there twice but never got in.
We're talking about this releasing more energy than it used. Which is great, but that doesn't mean we could use fusion power. It's a great testing site that produces a reaction for an incredibly short flash of time. Not a reaction that's kept up and harvested for power production. Great deal of work left to do just for the theoretic side, let alone practical production.
Yeah, I personally think Helion Energy or Commonwealth Fusion Systems will be the first to get a production quality reaction and reactor. Both have some compelling designs and an established history of significant improvements with each passing design.
That's exactly what NIF actually is: a nuclear weapons testing site. It doesn't try to harvest the released energy because what it is really harvesting is data to be fed into NNSA computer models of nuclear reactions. The ultimate goal is to have an accurate enough model that new weapons can be designed and tested entirely on computers.
That’s the whole point. That’s why it has ignition in its name.
@@JonMartinYXD Nah. The last four generations of nuclear weapons have been designed entirely digitally. The first being in 1978. The ignition facility is exactly what it says in the name. The harvest facility does not exist yet because the ignition research has to be completed first.
@@StoneInMySandal I recommend watching Thunderf00t's two most recent videos on fusion. NIF itself straight out says that this is for nuclear weapons research. In their diagram they call the target cylinder a hohlraum and say that the fuel capsule is crushed by x-rays. That's exactly how one would describe the fusion stage of a thermonuclear bomb, with the notable absense of a plutonium spark plug.
Great videos dude!!
Video on the lab plz and thank you
Fusion is gonna one of those things that appears out of nowhere. Suddenly there will be break throughs everywhere, but no one will know what it means. Not unlike fission reactors as power plants back in 50's and 60's.
Yes. Do make a video about Livermore Lab on Geographics. I eagerly await it.
Can’t believe I mentioned this a few weeks ago, and now there’s a vid on it!
They also have a Pizza maker coming out this Christmas that doesn't need a plug!
I thought the most recent fusion breakthrough turned out to just be an advanced weapons test basically. it had very little to do with generating electrical energy and almost everything to do with the United States funding a company for weapons research
Not a company, NIF is owned by the US government. But yes, NIF is all about setting off tiny nuclear bombs to improve computer modelling of nuclear weapons.
Couple of things.
4:22 Deuterium-tritium fusion does not produce "only very low level radioactive waste". D-T fusion produces high energy neutrons that potentially make everything they hit radioactive (a process called neutron activation). This would include the entire reactor vessel. Even if the energy produced could be captured, the neutrons from D-T fusion would be continually destroying the reactor. It would require frequent shutdowns to replace parts that had stopped working because they had been transmuted into some other element, one that was likely highly radioactive.
18:01 That NNSA logo is a big clue what NIF's real purpose is. The National Nuclear Security Administration is tasked with safeguarding US national security through the military application of nuclear science. They maintain the US nuclear stockpile (each warhead costs about $10M per year to keep safe and viable) and develop new warhead designs. The diagram at 13:23 calls the cylinder that held the fuel capsule a "hohlraum" and shows that it was compression by x-rays that led to ignition. That's exactly what the second (fusion) stage of a thermonuclear bomb is. The primary (fission) stage creates x-rays that are reflected by the walls of the hohlraum onto the deuterium-tritium second stage which is crushed and undergoes fusion.
NIF has nothing to do with creating a fusion power plant - it is a test chamber for miniature thermonuclear bombs. The data collected its many sensors will be used to refine and verify computer models of nuclear reactions. The ultimate goal is to be able to reliably design and test new weapons entirely on supercomputers (the NNSA has access to some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world). Make no mistake, nuclear weapons scientists in the other nuclear powers had to change their underwear after the NIF announcement. The US showed the world just how far ahead they are in nuclear weapons research and development.
Spending vast sums of money to more efficiently kill people.
Thunderf00t recently did a great video on why Fusion will probably never be as viable as Fission already is
@Gerald H He has worked at nuclear reactors. Plus as this video says they've only generated more power than was put in if you fudge the numbers, if you don't then they are still WAY off at something like 300 in, 1 out. And the longest they've been able to maintain a fusion reaction was 210 seconds - impressive but no where near viable for energy production
@@drg9812 Checkout Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion Energy.
@Dr G. Do you have source that documents Philip E. Mason (aka thunderf00t) worked w/ nuclear reactors? Went to his Wikipedia page and could not find anything. Thanks.
@@slimjimnyc270 He did videos during his time there - that's how I remember it. You could look through some of his back catalogue if you want to find them.
Science is soo beautiful when the objectives are the common good.
Now that’s a Megaproject!
Let's see, checking my calendar, yup. Thirty years to go.
After all the 'success' we had with fission, this gives me pause. There are so many unknowns.
Pressure not heat will turn out to be the key. Heat is just the byproduct of the pressure needed. The amount of pressure needed is unimaginably high. Something in the magnitude of one billion times greater pressure than what would be needed to create a diamond. We are just not there yet. But once we can solve that puzzle we will have more energy then we will know what to do with.
Thunderfoot debunked this recently.
The NIF are studying fusion for nuclear weapons research. The laser powered nuclear fusion is not scalable and will never generate electricity in large amounts.
I have no qualms about their study, as they do important work. It's much more preferable to do this than the detonation of real H bombs.
Fusion power stations seem to be 30 years away and always will be, although the work with superconducting tape is promising.
Input energy will always be required to initiate a fusion reaction. A lot of Energy!
A small fission reactor made be needed to kick start fusion.
The fucking science in this thing is absolutely mega insane bonkers sickobamba.
Love it. Lads you need to do the cork harbor forts. Spike island is one and it's well worth a video. Their crazy
Now we want Fusion core tech, like they do in Fallout universe !
Technically, it’s not “fusion” that powers the cores, MFCs, etc. iirc, if you get close up on the MFC(?) writing, it mentions fission, instead of fusion.
Yes please to a video on Lawrence Livermore, also CERN
Paused. Scrolled. Learnt!
Bazzel Brush on hand for when things go Boom, Boom :)
While the NIF is doing fusion, it's not doing power production fusion. All of the work at the NIF is about nuclear weapons research. Now the DoE made a big deal that they got more energy out of the energy going into the capsule, but what they're glossing over is that the original energy for the laser pulse to start the process is roughly 200 times more power required than what they got out as they lose a lot of energy by the various beam splitters and the like before they even get to the ignition chamber. So this is 100% nuclear weapons research and not power production.
Our best hope for actual useful power production is not what's happening at the NIF, but at other places like the work with Tokamaks, Stellerators, and other devices/methods that are being worked on.
It wasn't actually a big deal: They got twice as much energy from fusion as they put into the plasma with lasers, but it took about 1000 times as much electrical energy to generate those lasers.
CFS expects to produce more energy from fusion than the whole fusion power plant consumes in 2025. 🙂
meanwhile, the biggest operational stellarator (wendelstein 7x) managed to sustain a fusion worthy plasma for several minutes. so after ITER the next magnetic confinement fusion reactor will be probably such a device, not a tokamak anymore.......because a tokamak can only operate pulsed.
it will be a great race between the NIF principle and the "classic" magnetic confinement approach
I think @Thunderf00t put it best "Ain't gonna happen" - EVERY FUSION BREAKTHROUGH…. BUSTED! is worth a watch!
tech for Luddites was well before Thunderfoot. this tech is funded by people who have been ill-informed. we all want it to work, but it will never happen.
@Gerald H Sure, so listen to Sabine Hossenfelder - she's saying largely the same thing.
pass
@Gerald H Fair enough, I'll leave you to get all excited about nuclear fusion then.
Good news, scientists say we are only 10 years away from fusion reactors.
The ribbon cutting on fusion is only waiting on flying cars piloted by monkey butlers!
9:48 "a terrawatt of current" 😤
Livermore history would be fascinating
real engineering has a Video on the Company Helion its in my option the most advancet fusion reaktor out ther
Fusion is the ultimate goal for sure. Future humanity will probably need it to even attempt interstellar travel. But it's Unlikely to be part of this century's necessary energy shift from fossil fuels.
Germany just took its whole nuclear fleet offline, which is utterly counterproductive.
Some corrections:
You stated the NIF was built to do something "useful" with nuclear energy and to keep top nuclear scientists working for the government. No. It was to show that our bombs would continue to work without having the ability to actually test one, thereby maintaining our nuclear deterrence.
You also state that fusion is the most powerful reaction by far. Not true. Fusion only is four times more energy dense than fission (an existing, mature, carbon-free and much cheaper alternative). And nuclear fission reactors with nearly 100% fuel burnup have been designed. Fusion will likely never get to 25% fuel burnup.
One day we will decide to stop fighting amongst ourselves and use our knowledge for the good of all.
Laugh!
We already can look at the goverments and how they put us together to fight each other while the rich ger richer
Well that day certainly isn't going to be in any if our lifetimes, nor our children's, or children's children lifetimes, smfh.
Sad really.
Have you ever met a human? What you're suggesting is completely against our species capabilities. You're more likely to win the lottery, while being bitten by a shark at the same time you get struck by lightening than you are to EVER see our species learn to co-exist and stop fighting each other.
No we won't.
Humans are not supposed to sit in a circle and sing kumbaya. That is a surefire way to ensure progress grinds to a screeching halt before going backwards. Peace is impossible. Grow up.
The international community should all come together to work on this. Especially since it's actually something good for humanity and it would be accomplished faster. But of course we will let nationalism get in the way of that to prove which nation is the best
Yes, one day they're going to figure out how to do that without billions of dollars of laser power and putting in unbelievable amounts of energy to get such a tiny amount out.
They've been saying fusion power is only 10 to 20 years away for about 50 years now, so who knows.
When I glanced at the thumbnail, I wondered how in the world anyone managed to ignited ear fusion and what that looked like.
Rutherford Appleton Labs have had a fusion project for the last 30 odd years. Any news on that?
I don't know if you have done one yet i tried searching but what about a video on the SU-27 Flanker or SU-33 Flanker-D?
Dude has like 37 UA-cam channels. Lol. But they are all awesome.
There is no limit how hot it can get
Oh no you fell for the headline that this is for boiling water to generate electricity. I can see the Thunderf00t thumbnail for this one. Matt Farrell gets a break.
I dunno Simon, there are more than a handful of governments in the world I don't want having access to nuclear fusion, simply for their propensity for dishing out human suffering and genocide. Who the hell knows what they'd end up doing with nuclear fusion technology?
Yet only one government has ever used nuclear weapons on humans
I am a simple CPA and could never claim to speak with authority on this subject. However, I can remember from my youth an estimate economically feasible fusion would be achieved by the year 2000. At the age of 65 I sincerely doubt I will live to see it.
I truly hope that nuclear fusion isn't always 30 years away. In the meanwhile, nuclear fission is our best source of 'clean' energy. It can bridge us to fusion, if it's ever viable.
Lol at being seven years late with groundbreaking fusion projects. Finnish Olkiluoto, a fission power plant after such a long time of fission power plants is starting next week after being delayed by 13 years throughout the construction and launch.
Hamilton accelerators are certainly a good inroad as we have direct evidence of hamilton fusion process happening around smb radio jets and another rogue blackhole read very small ejected in galaxy collision betwixt two very massive blackholes punched through a gas stream at near relativistic speeds leaving a stream of hamilton ignitions behind also very pretty if you're nowhere near it :)
Simon you need to watch thunderfoots channel. We are very very far from fusion.
a watt is the unit of measure for power. current is measured in amps.
Cape Horn Geographic. Let's go!
Would like to see more on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory
Tritium isn't just "hydrogen". It also costs 1000x more than pure gold and can only really be made in nuclear reactors.
Getting full TM Spider-Man 2 vibes 😂
The NIF's primary mission is Nuclear Weapon Stockpile Stewardship. The fact that it was built just after the comprehensive nuclear test band treaty should clue you in on that. Laser pumped inertial confinement fusion will never, EVER be a practical commercial fusion energy source. At least the French are more open about their facility: Laser Mégajoule - "Laser Mégajoule's primary task will be refining fusion calculations for France's own nuclear weapons. A portion of the system's time is set aside for materials science experiments."
It will always remain a pipe dream. The main benefits are the spinoff technologies and keeping the scientists employed by us and not enemies/competitors. Money should be invested in drilling technology to achieve the capability to drill to 20km deep. With that we will be able to place geothermal plants anywhere in the world and replace fossil fuel buring plants with geothermal plants and simply plug right into the existing steam to electricity systems already in place. The company Quaise, a group out of MIT is working on just that.
Im sorry but the comment at 13:13 is not true. The scientists were basing the output energy of the lasers and not the energy required to power the lasers, which is what is required for the power "gain" .
Despite some people’s best efforts, science moves forward
It's not routine hydrogen that is used, though. The rare type of hydrogen required makes this expensive and difficult
Fusion is always 20 years away. I hope I'm wrong but I don't think I'll see fusion on a commercial scale in my lifetime
Agreed, barring a sudden advance in technology or, less likely, a secret yet operational process being made public. Bummer.
This looks like a half life experiment in black mesa
As a daemon I can 100% confirm that we are in the youtube comment section.
I hate it, to get summond during daytime....
I tried to insert my e-mail but it got deleted I wanted that daemon knowledge on how I get famous.
A threat to the imperium to be purged.
Begone
Bot!
Every time I see the lasers combine down to one.
The whole thing looks like it's from Tron.
Looks like the jump drive from Event Horizon.
It's madness, the one thing the world needs more than anything is clean energy. The US spends hundreds of billions on defence, why can't something as important as this get the funding it needs to become a reality in our lifetime.
Imagine fusion that bleeds electrons directly so no conversion losses .
So once they achieve sustained and controlled fusion , how would they transfer all the heat " I'm assuming to boil water "
They haven't figured that part out yet. They haven't even figured out how to prevent a fusion reactor from destroying itself (fusion power isn't clean, it releases high energy neutrons that damage and irradiate the reactor).
@@JonMartinYXD thank you , but where do the neutrons come from when hydrogen is smashed together ???
@@JonMartinYXD I'm guessing if a fusion reaction had any magnetic properties it might me used to induce electric current , but then the reaction is contained in a magnetic field
@@omarjassar4650 They are fusing two specific isotopes of hydrogen: hydrogen-2 (AKA deuterium - a proton and a neutron) and hydrogen-3 (AKA tritium - a proton and two neutrons). The result is helium-4 (the most common isotope of helium - two protons and two neutrons), some energy, and a neutron. Why use deuterium and tritium? Because that combination is by far the easiest to get to fuse. Other combinations require significantly more energy input.
@@omarjassar4650 Alas it does not have any magnetic properties. Deuterium-tritium fusion produces normal helium, some heat, and a neutron. The neutron does not care about electric or magnetic fields, the only way to contain it is to have it hit something.
Can you do a video on ND Batteries?
Can you do a Megaproject on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Star Trek into Darkness!!!
What about it?