When i think about that scene these days it makes no sense. A fusion reactor can't have a runaway reaction, just the opposite. Also why the hell would he install a fusion reactor inside a NYC apartment building? How would anyone allow that?
We should just hope that international politics will stay calm and that there will still be enough money put into science to fund programs like that. I am just a bit afraid that after 2020 there will happen more bad things.... But let's try to be optimistic :D
I hope there will still be oil at a relative cheap price in that time range, because without cheap available oil, humanity will be stuck most likely forever on earth.
@@Kabodanki It is currently estimated that there are enough oil reserves in the world that if you were to burn it all at once, we would all die from suffocation so I am not worried about that lol.
ITER will do a 10 minute Deuterium-Tritium demonstration 2035, so it's 14 years and change away. You can follow ITERs progress on youtube where they post videos of the latest parts installed.
@@Yattayatta fusion reactions have already been achieved, ITER is planned to be the first to sustain a reaction without producing an energy deficit. If it works then it is still at least 15 to 20 years or more for working reactors that are not an experimental prototype to be designed, built, commissioned and connected to grids around the world. My point stands.
@@2secondslater That is pretty obvious, the first time we achieved fusion on earth, or rather, willed it to happen was all the way back in 1952. I thought you meant sustaining a plasma, which we will achieve as soon as ITER is operational. I didn't think you meant sustainable as in economically viable. Economically viable fusion might never be achieved, because that depends on how alternative power sources develop. Sustaining a self feeding plasma will happen in 14 years.
I heard a theory once that movies, anime and other audio-visually based creations influence ours way of thinking without us noticing, for we were not evolved to differentiate real memories with this kind of creations. The more a look, the more i see it
@@Hgulix62 Yeah probably making all these bizarre technology in movies to make us get used to it because they and the government knew if we found out about these technologies were real, we would freak out and pitchfork them as magic
The reason I'm so hopefully for fusion is that it used to be "always 30 years away" 50 years ago, "10 years away" 20 years ago, and now it's "5 years away", the estimate is always going down, until it eventually gets to zero
@@watema3381 to be fair ITER is a project funded by the the EU and several other governments outside Europe. And with its 10:1 power output predictions in I think 5-10 years you could say they are
@@sheepketchup9059 Sorry about that! I'm a bit of a pessimist / realist. I see evil everywhere. The potential of "clean, pure 100%" blah blah energy just sounds too good to be true knowing today's world / reality / corrupt governments.
7 is way too precise of a number. If someone said they will make you a sandwhoch is 7 minutes, youre goibg to expect that sandwhich is 7 minutes. If they tell you they'll make you a sandwhich in 5 minutes, and then when that 5 minutes rolls around they come in and tell you 'due to unforseen circumstances, we had to delay sandwhich making to 10 minutes', you wouldnt be as mad. The numbers just add up so nicely, your brain barely registers them.
Things are in the future until they happen. Sounds obvious, but a lot of people don't seem to realize just because projections have been wrong it doesn't mean it'll never happen.
None of my Ph.D physicist friends who study the basic science of fusion have mentioned being "5 years away." Last time I asked if we were within 20 years, they said, "who knows?"
Don't hold your breath. The first Tokamak I saw was at Oak Ridge.... 45 years ago. The first fusion project I was involved with was 35 years ago at Sandia National Laboratory. The physics of fusion is one thing... actually building a workable device is quite another. I'm 72 and I seriously doubt I'll live to see a fusion reactor that can continuously produce more power than it takes to run it.
Fusion already work, the problem is how are we going to convert those into electricity and sustain the fusion process. 100 million Kelvin in nanoseconds.
It's cutting edge unachieved subject matter what do you expect? There's more and more constraint pathways with more and more complicated goals. Innovation of the new much stronger superconducting magnet could of been the bottleneck to achieving more then net zero fusion, you never know. Only promise's and slow progress in fields like these I smile and wait patiently for because even if it will never to be to a benefit of my own the future of our species will reap the rewards.
@Oshe Shango statements are by definition rhetorical, thats why we go though the effort of separating questions form statements. because one asks for a responce and the other, often being the responce, doesn't not. this ain't even unique to English. its a fundamental pattern of human language.
What a lot of people seem to be failing to realise is that its not just governments that are now doing research into fusion. Numerous private ventures are now developing their own fusion reactors. This was not the case a number of years ago. Clearly industry is seeing fusion now as a good investment. These private ventures are built upon the research produced by government funded projects. This is why government funded research is so important. It lays the groundwork for industry to become interested in an area of research.
Sorry for let y'all down, but q=2 is not puting electricity to grid. The efficiency of heating elements and electricity generation requires around q=10 to have net electricity gain. But let's hope that the efficiency can increase over the next few years. But we have never explore that parameter space, so we may have some surprise , either bad or good.
@Oshe Shango Did you see multiple Nuclear Fission disasters in our history? Yup, that's why Nuclear Fission only makes up such a small portion of power generation those accidents neutered the industry. Fusion has no such stigma's associated with it as a new technology. Besides even Nuclear Fission may make a come-back in the interim, the new generation of reactions are just about done testing and they are safer, easier to build.
@Oshe Shango Yes because they are experimental and everything about their design and fabrication is unique with majority of their components needing to go through dozens of revisions before a final product is ready. The scale of a reactor can change along with dozens of other variables affecting the cost. Once that has been completed however the actual manufacturing costs come down significantly and that is when you see private enterprises jump onboard.
@Oshe Shango Also the validation process for a reactor is extensive, gen 4 Nuclear Reactors have been in the labs and performing smaller scale testing in reactors for months and still won't be available for years.
I just discovered you. I love your stuff! I wish, however, that you did not look sneakily to your left every few seconds. It gives me the feeling like someone in a choir who thinks people won't notice if they keep their head pointing forward but look left or right to see things (e.g. a monitor displaying the choir). Besides that, which you will no doubt remedy, what a wonderful treat your talks are. Wow, all the time you take in preparing and learning, and I get to see it all for free. Thanks *so* much!
The majority of satellites are solar-powered, and the majority of new generation is solar power and wind. Solar power is fusion power that works today.
I was born in 1951, the year serious research began on fusion energy. I've heard this pie-in-the-sky stuff and the optimistic forecasts my entire life and they NEVER NEVER NEVER pan out. I don't expect much for this new "5 year" prediction.
If high temperature superconductors provide the magnetic field in a tokamak, the magnets would still be cooled to very low temperature. This makes it possible to run more current and create a stronger field than conventional superconductors can. For this reason the machine can be made smaller which helps a lot.
@Oshe Shango funding frome the U.S government but they never mad it past the drawing board and no the gravity problem wasn't even thought about back then hell i don't even think they were even worried about the van allen radiation belt
Metallurgy(like these new magnets) is always that silent sister in the background of innovation, that everything we build today relies on, but no one really thinks about.
Exponential growth of innovation excites me and only one of the few things that helps me believe in a prosperous future for Humanity. Kudos to all researchers, frontliners, scientists, and philantrophists of the World 💕 Through all of you, Humanity progresses step-by-step!
The fact that they are completely open about their science and it has been reviewed and accepted by the scientific community, gives me a lot of hope. It proves they aren't trying to defraud anybody and are serious about their work. It won't be long before quantum computers and fusion reactors are just normal life for humanity. What an incredible time that will be...
The most important problem to solve is to find a way to control the plasma, the disruptions get way too high to control once we reach fusion temperature.
I think SPARC really is the most promising fusion project currently in development. The main breakthrough is the ability to create superconducting magnets that are twice the strength of the previous best which allows you to build a much smaller reactor. They also allow for a design that is modular so that individual segments of the torus can be replaced as neutron damage accumulates. Check out the videos on MIT's channel for more info.
Very simply put, energy from fusion comes in form of fast neutrons, that escape confinement as soon as they are generated: part of the whole inner wall (the "first wall") is actively cooled by water or molten salts, transferring thermal energy to standard turbines+alternators groups for electricity production.
if steve jobs were alive he would go to his team and say: I wan fusion in the iphone in 5 years. employess would suffer for 5 years and then we would have it.
In stark contrast to ITER where gov’t workers seem to assemble a screw or two a day.... I mean c’mon, a test run in... [drumroll]... 14 years!! Say what now...?!? What additional effin’ stuff do they need to do or make that could possibly take F-O-U-R-T-E-E-N years to put together?! OK if the project timeline was 14 months, but this is just outrageous. Bet some participating nations are stalling the project so their own competing reactor development won’t be overtaken :(
Not a fan of the emotive music. Makes me feel like I'm being targeted by marketing material. My money is still n focus fusion, but thanks, I'll be looking into this further later.
"A working fusion reactor has never been achieved" - Yes it has, fusion has been achieved many many times and there are many reactors in existance today in operation. None however yield equal or more power than it takes to run them though.
We need this fusion tech so bad. I just want to live in space so bad. Maybe even use a fusion drive to power a generation ship to Proxima or Alpha Centari.
@@ChrisHarmon1 if that's the way you feel about humanity, then why don't you start by deleting yourself? You're human and therefore part of your own problem.
Ah yes, nothing better that drifting into the dark space for decades, seeing ones body decaying while slowly losing sanity and the touch with reality only to land on a planet that is inhospitable to our weak carbon-based, water-dependent, oxygen-consuming bodies. Add to this the unstable politics of Earth and you have the perfect scenario for a space-depression movie.
The big goal is sustaining Fusion indefinitely. The fact that you have to maintain these temperatures on earth to get this power output is impressive and daunting all at the same time. It's going to be hard to see how they do it. But it will be necessary if we want to cut burning Fossil fuels altogether. I just pray they can deliver. Though at least we have our first nominal power outputs from a recent test of 1.3 MJ. Little under half of Grand Coulee Dam's Yearly quota in the blink of an eye.
I remember a lecture I watched here on UA-cam where an MIT professor was talking at a CA university about what might be this exact fusion project in 2016
The joke about fusion power always being a few decades away ignores all the breakthroughs we had in fusion power. We already have mutliple working fusion reactors following different concepts. We already sustained fusion for helium AND hydrogen. The only thing that we have yet to achieve is net positive energy. And for that we've already have had a solid timeline even without SPARC. The ITER project said to be finished (with all its testing) in the 2030s and DEMO in the 40s afterwards.
this week I learn about nuclear fusion and fision reactor technology, and you post a fusion tech. 4 years in physics, i was yet interested in nuclear tech, but i've learn particle, molecular, quantum gravity, astrophysics, biophysics, condensed matter, etc
I think not developing a clean powerful energy in the 80's or 90's is a major co-culprit of many huge problems we have today. In every futuristic society such a clean, cheap and powerful power source is always taken for granted. I hope the big step is near.
3:22 Yes, it is on purpose! I saw a talk that the head of this project gave about a year ago, and he said that the students, being Marvel fans, chose that acronym on purpose.
I think leaders of ITER project have already stated that they intend to integrate as many new technologies as possible as they come along during the construction. Though it might be impractical to retrofit magnets, they're not at that stage yet. Another point for ITER is that at current schedule they are going for ignition and self-sustaining plasma by 2024-5. So that's already in the same timeframe as SPARC. Even if ITER doesn't benefit from new superconductor technology, it's still likely to achieve the set goal before 2050. And as far as climate crisis is concerned, 2050 is already much too late anyway.
I've always heard 20 years away, seems like they're both common comments. Bring on fusion though, then lots of desalination plants, massive irrigation, automated factories and transit...then we're looking like a promising civilisation!
Pretty interesting stuff for anyone interested: lppfusion.com/technology/dpf-device/ They use a proton and boron fuel, which has the rare and lucrative gas, helium, as a fusion waste product which can be captured and sold to be used for scientific and medical uses. The device can be entered safely within hours of fusion cessation because you’re not dealing with radioactive materials, just heat and electricity. The nature of the fusion produced by the dense plasmoid pinching mechanism also confines the energy released into two individual beams, one of ions and one of X-rays which can be captured to obtain net energy gain and fire another shot.
The incredible reality of Fusion is that we haven't stopped studying it, and we haven't stopped learning from it. It's only a matter of time before we master it.
Not really. I mean JET was at .67 efgiciency unless you counted the electrical current they put into it which got us to 4 percent. 96 is a long way to go, it might not even be possible. Well possible to make net energy, its definitely possible for the scientists to get their pensions. Thats in no danger at all.
The current series of Fusion attempts seems more hopeful then they've been for some time. And SPARC shouldn't be particularly ambitious in many a way, being more a logical enough outcome of the various scaling laws seen in Fusion so far. Though we'll have to see if they can build it to the hoped for spec still, as well as secure enough budget to build at the rate they want. Still, it does seem likely that by 2030 we'll probably have managed to achieve a major breakthrough in fusion and full scale system might be in our grasp to build by then.
It’s kind of ironic because in fallout 4 the main antagonist group is called the Institute which is under the MIT ruins. (referred to as the CIT in the game) They also managed to make a fusion reactor too.
I love that their plan is not secret. That's compassion for ya. Reminds me of jonas salk and his vaccine for polio. It's more about improving humanity and less about profit.
It's been 5 years away for a while now. The SPARC project was proposed in 2015... Lockheed martin said they'd have a functioning nuclear reactor within 5 years, in 2014...
I've still got my fingers crossed for Lawrenceville Plasma Physics to get focus fusion off the ground. Aneutronic fusion is the approach we should be going after, plus the size is the reactors are so small. Less waste, less radiation, easier to obtain fuel
Would have been great if a bit more technical detail could have been included. Is their breakthrough just that they'll use modern, cheaper, higher temperature superconductors? Are they using more advanced containment field shapes or combinations of other advancements? I feel like a lot of important info has been missed? Will have to check it out.
High temp superconductors still need to be pretty cold, like negative 120 c or colder depending on the specific material or super pressurized and negative 75 c. Granted that's still 150-200 degrees c warmer than the original superconductors we found but it's not exactly easy to keep stuff that cold near fusion plasma. I sure hope these projects are successful but I think material science still has a way to go before we start making fusion power plants of the type which will eventually be used for commercial energy production.
These superconductors don't have to be much hotter to already be significantly cheaper and easier to use. Just a tiny difference in temperature is enough to put it above the boiling point of nitrogen, which is the simplest cryogenic refrigerant and much easier to deal with than helium, which is what's normally used on low temperature superconductors.
We already have a near limitless source of clean power, one that doesn't require any energy to keep it going, only fuel, and which already produces close to the same amount of power per unit of fuel as fusion does. Fission reactors. In a thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeder, you'd also completely eliminate all long term waste, and assuming you're using a FLiBe salt, you'd also have the ability to produce the tritium that fusion reactors require to even work.
@@henrytjernlund Helium is rare on earth, but during the fusion reaction it can be a problem because it slows down the process and even make it unsustainable, it's like putting CO2 in a car engine
@@SuperLP4E What you say is true; to facilitate helium expulsion right now people are trying various magnetic configurations with an "escape" point where heavier particles tend to exit and impinge easier on an appositely studied component, the divertor.
As much as I love SPARC for not being the already obsolete bloated mess that ITER is, the fact remains that its still an inherently expensive way to boil water. Renewables have matured and grid scale energy storage is next. Simple will always win over complex when it comes to basic economics.
SPARC may be a little quicker to market but its greatest benefit may be that it is more easily replicated across the globe and more rapidly due to the reduced costs of each installation.
"The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand"
Dr. Octopus
R.I.P.
Proceeds to
*BLOW UP THE CITY*
When i think about that scene these days it makes no sense. A fusion reactor can't have a runaway reaction, just the opposite. Also why the hell would he install a fusion reactor inside a NYC apartment building? How would anyone allow that?
@@idonthaveagoddamnname2623 It's like a perpetual rubber band. Rubber bands are a privilege not a right.
Not every one can get this legendary comment 🙏🙏🙏🙏
Used to be 40 years away for 40 years
Then 30 years away for 30 years
last decade was 20 years away
Now it's 5 years.
Negative asf take that energy on some where else
At least it’s decreasing
@@Coyote47998
You need some logic.
@@xgerra16 This guy gets it.
I see this as progress.
This comment is a placeholder for when we see this video again in 5 years :)
Don't forget to edit you comment once you get enough likes
And it's still going to be 5 years away.
this is a really good idea
Safe a link to this video in your calendar
ok
The World: "Fusion, I'm tired of you cheating on me."
Fusion: "No baby, this time will be different, I swear."
This meme, however, will remain the same.
missing a zero, (50 years )
we'll all be dead in 2070
Our sun works just fine, right now.
Wasting time & money.
you made my day with that!!! so funny!! and true
Sometimes, I just feel like we are going in circles... x
@@jamesmorton7881 na, sub dont give enough power, we need so much that we could conquer the galaxy and invent immortality
I think there’s a lot of things that are just 5 years away lol people don’t realize how truly fast technology is moving
it's very exciting
We should just hope that international politics will stay calm and that there will still be enough money put into science to fund programs like that. I am just a bit afraid that after 2020 there will happen more bad things.... But let's try to be optimistic :D
We just need to survive that long...
@@robertmitchell806 we will lol it’ll take more then a virus and a hostile political environment to kill the human race we are a Resilient species
Like what??
QUICK someone write it down before it ceases to exist in 5 years
69 someone in next 5 years make this 420
Conclusion: sustainable fusion power is still 30 years away
I hope there will still be oil at a relative cheap price in that time range, because without cheap available oil, humanity will be stuck most likely forever on earth.
@@Kabodanki It is currently estimated that there are enough oil reserves in the world that if you were to burn it all at once, we would all die from suffocation so I am not worried about that lol.
ITER will do a 10 minute Deuterium-Tritium demonstration 2035, so it's 14 years and change away. You can follow ITERs progress on youtube where they post videos of the latest parts installed.
@@Yattayatta fusion reactions have already been achieved, ITER is planned to be the first to sustain a reaction without producing an energy deficit. If it works then it is still at least 15 to 20 years or more for working reactors that are not an experimental prototype to be designed, built, commissioned and connected to grids around the world. My point stands.
@@2secondslater That is pretty obvious, the first time we achieved fusion on earth, or rather, willed it to happen was all the way back in 1952. I thought you meant sustaining a plasma, which we will achieve as soon as ITER is operational. I didn't think you meant sustainable as in economically viable.
Economically viable fusion might never be achieved, because that depends on how alternative power sources develop.
Sustaining a self feeding plasma will happen in 14 years.
" Tony Stark build this in a cave!!"
Scientists in fusion research: " we are not Tony Stark but we did make an arc"
I heard a theory once that movies, anime and other audio-visually based creations influence ours way of thinking without us noticing, for we were not evolved to differentiate real memories with this kind of creations.
The more a look, the more i see it
@@Hgulix62 Yeah probably making all these bizarre technology in movies to make us get used to it because they and the government knew if we found out about these technologies were real, we would freak out and pitchfork them as magic
@@Hgulix62 reality imitating
art.
Yep, we've seen billions wasted, and all to prove it can be done without regard for whether it can ever be done economically.
@Tunishq Von Agreed but Good Jokes can be timeless
The reason I'm so hopefully for fusion is that it used to be "always 30 years away" 50 years ago, "10 years away" 20 years ago, and now it's "5 years away", the estimate is always going down, until it eventually gets to zero
Untill Governments say thats it's a waste of money
@@watema3381 to be fair ITER is a project funded by the the EU and several other governments outside Europe. And with its 10:1 power output predictions in I think 5-10 years you could say they are
until it gets 0.000001 ms away, and then 0.0000001 ms and then...
@@watema3381 how optimistic.
@@sheepketchup9059 Sorry about that! I'm a bit of a pessimist / realist. I see evil everywhere. The potential of "clean, pure 100%" blah blah energy just sounds too good to be true knowing today's world / reality / corrupt governments.
3:17 "they got one thing down, the name: ARC" LMAO hell yeah they had to take that name quickly haha
SPARC, ARC lol
At this point you guys should use other numbers like 7 rather than multiples of 5
Tho I still believe in fusion energy for now. Let's go!
7 is way too precise of a number. If someone said they will make you a sandwhoch is 7 minutes, youre goibg to expect that sandwhich is 7 minutes. If they tell you they'll make you a sandwhich in 5 minutes, and then when that 5 minutes rolls around they come in and tell you 'due to unforseen circumstances, we had to delay sandwhich making to 10 minutes', you wouldnt be as mad. The numbers just add up so nicely, your brain barely registers them.
@@kitty.miracle no
@@shantanutiwari4006 no
Okay so who else rolled their eyes when the read the title?
My brain: playing thunderf00t theme song.
Yeah it’ll be decades before it’s a Reality
Here, sadly.
@@jenson1569 literally what the video said, 30 years before a commercially viable reactor
plus, solar panels are harnessing the power of sun, a massive fusion core, so technically, we are already using fusion energy*.
I think it’s time to change the name of this channel to “maybe someday it could perhaps be plausible”
Hypothetically I think it could be possible in the near future
Just like a trip to the moon
"This time is different"
- Scientists every year the past 60 years
No - media every year for 60 years.
well, things ARE very different over that time lmao
Things are in the future until they happen. Sounds obvious, but a lot of people don't seem to realize just because projections have been wrong it doesn't mean it'll never happen.
@@Gomlmon99 Quite, media over simplifying and not following up.
None of my Ph.D physicist friends who study the basic science of fusion have mentioned being "5 years away." Last time I asked if we were within 20 years, they said, "who knows?"
*fusion energy could be ready in less 5 years*
Me: hey, i heard this one before.
Don't hold your breath. The first Tokamak I saw was at Oak Ridge.... 45 years ago. The first fusion project I was involved with was 35 years ago at Sandia National Laboratory.
The physics of fusion is one thing... actually building a workable device is quite another.
I'm 72 and I seriously doubt I'll live to see a fusion reactor that can continuously produce more power than it takes to run it.
Love What You Do Seeker Love from India
I also
@@rajibsarmah6744 Too me
me too
WOW, oh wait it’s always five years away.
Soon it’ll always be 10 minutes away.
It's always 3 seconds away
@@vyliad 1 second of black hole.
@@vyliad That’s 80 years away. In 1000 years it’ll be .001 seconds away
@@user-Void-Star thats infinite
5 years i'll be 5 more years, oh wait maybe more.
What if fusion actually works but the longer the joke lasts the more energy is stored
that's the joke. same thing I will tell my kids every time they ask me, "are we there yet?". my answer, "five more minutes". every. time.
Ok boomer
@@annastasijaspellman2536 decade or so off from when they first started promising this crap
Fusion already work, the problem is how are we going to convert those into electricity and sustain the fusion process. 100 million Kelvin in nanoseconds.
Not going to hold my breath. Too many promises from similar projects that just drag on forever.
@Oshe Shango they never once even hinted that they where talking about elon musk, but ok
It's cutting edge unachieved subject matter what do you expect? There's more and more constraint pathways with more and more complicated goals. Innovation of the new much stronger superconducting magnet could of been the bottleneck to achieving more then net zero fusion, you never know.
Only promise's and slow progress in fields like these I smile and wait patiently for because even if it will never to be to a benefit of my own the future of our species will reap the rewards.
@Oshe Shango cool, no still not relevant though
@Oshe Shango correction, it was a rhetorical general statements
@Oshe Shango statements are by definition rhetorical, thats why we go though the effort of separating questions form statements. because one asks for a responce and the other, often being the responce, doesn't not.
this ain't even unique to English. its a fundamental pattern of human language.
1:08
100 million Celsius is equal to 180 million and 32 fehrenhiet
What a lot of people seem to be failing to realise is that its not just governments that are now doing research into fusion. Numerous private ventures are now developing their own fusion reactors. This was not the case a number of years ago. Clearly industry is seeing fusion now as a good investment. These private ventures are built upon the research produced by government funded projects. This is why government funded research is so important. It lays the groundwork for industry to become interested in an area of research.
We always left with
"We need to wait 5 year"
I see you every where
@@MrAhmed42069 😂😅
Where where..?🤔
Yeah, wouldn't it be awesome if progress could be made without doing any time-consuming work?
Sorry for let y'all down, but q=2 is not puting electricity to grid. The efficiency of heating elements and electricity generation requires around q=10 to have net electricity gain. But let's hope that the efficiency can increase over the next few years. But we have never explore that parameter space, so we may have some surprise , either bad or good.
Hopefully we'll see massive scale of Commericalization of Nuclear Fusion Reactors
@Oshe Shango Did you see multiple Nuclear Fission disasters in our history? Yup, that's why Nuclear Fission only makes up such a small portion of power generation those accidents neutered the industry.
Fusion has no such stigma's associated with it as a new technology. Besides even Nuclear Fission may make a come-back in the interim, the new generation
of reactions are just about done testing and they are safer, easier to build.
@Oshe Shango There will also be massive government subsidies to mage a push for it just like there often is for disruptive technologies like this.
@Oshe Shango Yes because they are experimental and everything about their design and fabrication is unique with majority of their components needing to go through dozens of revisions before a final product is ready. The scale of a reactor can change along with dozens of other variables affecting the cost.
Once that has been completed however the actual manufacturing costs come down significantly and that is when you see private enterprises jump onboard.
@Oshe Shango Also the validation process for a reactor is extensive, gen 4 Nuclear Reactors have been in the labs and performing smaller scale testing in reactors for months and still won't be available for years.
@Oshe Shango "fusion will also be massively expensive at first." so was literally every billion dollar industry
I just discovered you. I love your stuff! I wish, however, that you did not look sneakily to your left every few seconds. It gives me the feeling like someone in a choir who thinks people won't notice if they keep their head pointing forward but look left or right to see things (e.g. a monitor displaying the choir). Besides that, which you will no doubt remedy, what a wonderful treat your talks are. Wow, all the time you take in preparing and learning, and I get to see it all for free. Thanks *so* much!
Imagine a world where fusion powers the lightbulbd in your house to the systems on spacecrafts.
i want to see fusion reactor on spaceship with plasma propulsion.
I still want it to power my hoverboard. When's 2015 again?
Technically everything we use is powered by fusion because every energy we use originated from the sun exept nuclear powerplants
@@Landgraf43 Technically correct is the best kind of correct!
The majority of satellites are solar-powered, and the majority of new generation is solar power and wind. Solar power is fusion power that works today.
I was born in 1951, the year serious research began on fusion energy. I've heard this pie-in-the-sky stuff and the optimistic forecasts my entire life and they NEVER NEVER NEVER pan out. I don't expect much for this new "5 year" prediction.
1:28 yeah thats Iron Man arc reactor!!!
If high temperature superconductors provide the magnetic field in a tokamak, the magnets would still be cooled to very low temperature. This makes it possible to run more current and create a stronger field than conventional superconductors can. For this reason the machine can be made smaller which helps a lot.
Yeah, they’ve been banging this drum since the seventies.
we were already drawing up plans for interstellar spacecraft in the 70's too so I wouldn't be surprised
@Oshe Shango the British interplanetary society
yeah
@Oshe Shango you know NASA had planned for interstellar space ships i think they go back in the late 60 early 70
@Oshe Shango funding frome the U.S government but they never mad it past the drawing board and no the gravity problem wasn't even thought about back then hell i don't even think they were even worried about the van allen radiation belt
Metallurgy(like these new magnets) is always that silent sister in the background of innovation, that everything we build today relies on, but no one really thinks about.
Exponential growth of innovation excites me and only one of the few things that helps me believe in a prosperous future for Humanity.
Kudos to all researchers, frontliners, scientists, and philantrophists of the World 💕 Through all of you, Humanity progresses step-by-step!
The fact that they are completely open about their science and it has been reviewed and accepted by the scientific community, gives me a lot of hope. It proves they aren't trying to defraud anybody and are serious about their work. It won't be long before quantum computers and fusion reactors are just normal life for humanity. What an incredible time that will be...
*wE aRE 5 YEaRs aWaY*
Idea:
In 30 years, we could have portable fusion reactors on spaceships.
"energy-positive fusion" is NOT utility scale power
Not yet
Thanks professor
The most important problem to solve is to find a way to control the plasma, the disruptions get way too high to control once we reach fusion temperature.
That's what Wendelstein hopes to overcome.
If things keep going like this, fusion will "always be 10 years ago" in less than 20 years, I can't wait!
10 years ago?
I think SPARC really is the most promising fusion project currently in development. The main breakthrough is the ability to create superconducting magnets that are twice the strength of the previous best which allows you to build a much smaller reactor. They also allow for a design that is modular so that individual segments of the torus can be replaced as neutron damage accumulates. Check out the videos on MIT's channel for more info.
This is the only joke that gets funnier each time you tell it.
Superinteresting and well done. But, gosh, couldn't get over his reading from the screen in front of him.
This time, we'll actually have fusion in 30 years!
Fun fact: probably no
How does the energy released by the fusion reaction get ‘harvested?’
Very simply put, energy from fusion comes in form of fast neutrons, that escape confinement as soon as they are generated: part of the whole inner wall (the "first wall") is actively cooled by water or molten salts, transferring thermal energy to standard turbines+alternators groups for electricity production.
this gives me hope, especially since MIT is involved.
Once again an outstanding job by Seeker!! Right on the very cusp of cutting-edge Technology!
if steve jobs were alive he would go to his team and say: I wan fusion in the iphone in 5 years. employess would suffer for 5 years and then we would have it.
In stark contrast to ITER where gov’t workers seem to assemble a screw or two a day.... I mean c’mon, a test run in... [drumroll]... 14 years!! Say what now...?!? What additional effin’ stuff do they need to do or make that could possibly take F-O-U-R-T-E-E-N years to put together?! OK if the project timeline was 14 months, but this is just outrageous. Bet some participating nations are stalling the project so their own competing reactor development won’t be overtaken :(
Elon Musk could pull this off too.
Nicely explained.
Not a fan of the emotive music. Makes me feel like I'm being targeted by marketing material.
My money is still n focus fusion, but thanks, I'll be looking into this further later.
The "ARC" acronym almost knocked me of my sofa! ;-)))
We've been 5 years away from fusion for the past 50 years.
ITR: we are so clever for that acronym! Sparc? Get it like electricity?
NASA: those are rookie acronyms, you gotta bummed them up
Fusion is just 30 years away 😂
@Oshe Shango about 30 years
@Oshe Shango I was joking but yeah I guess we could discover biological immortality in the next few decades
"A working fusion reactor has never been achieved" - Yes it has, fusion has been achieved many many times and there are many reactors in existance today in operation.
None however yield equal or more power than it takes to run them though.
We need this fusion tech so bad. I just want to live in space so bad. Maybe even use a fusion drive to power a generation ship to Proxima or Alpha Centari.
Only goal worth while besides maybe pushing the "delete" button on humanity.
@@ChrisHarmon1 if that's the way you feel about humanity, then why don't you start by deleting yourself?
You're human and therefore part of your own problem.
Ah yes, nothing better that drifting into the dark space for decades, seeing ones body decaying while slowly losing sanity and the touch with reality only to land on a planet that is inhospitable to our weak carbon-based, water-dependent, oxygen-consuming bodies. Add to this the unstable politics of Earth and you have the perfect scenario for a space-depression movie.
The big goal is sustaining Fusion indefinitely. The fact that you have to maintain these temperatures on earth to get this power output is impressive and daunting all at the same time. It's going to be hard to see how they do it. But it will be necessary if we want to cut burning Fossil fuels altogether. I just pray they can deliver. Though at least we have our first nominal power outputs from a recent test of 1.3 MJ. Little under half of Grand Coulee Dam's Yearly quota in the blink of an eye.
oh great its five years now. me lving in 2025
2025 Nuketown boiiis
The Thumbnail was awesome
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Fusion is 5 years away, since 1950.
I remember a lecture I watched here on UA-cam where an MIT professor was talking at a CA university about what might be this exact fusion project in 2016
*Did you know?*
While awake, a "human brain" can generate enough energy to power a light bulb (between 10-23 watts) !!
~ Facts by Curious JB
and many led's
I use potatos
The curious fact is how insanely low that is,compared to an equivalent computer.not that the brain can compare to any computer currently built.
Can it take 10-23 watts back too? Asking for a friens
what about while sleep? can it powered a house?
Title and start of video: By 2025
End of video: By 2050
Reality: bY NeXt 2 MoNtHs
Why has basically the same video been posted 4 times in a row?
The joke about fusion power always being a few decades away ignores all the breakthroughs we had in fusion power.
We already have mutliple working fusion reactors following different concepts.
We already sustained fusion for helium AND hydrogen.
The only thing that we have yet to achieve is net positive energy.
And for that we've already have had a solid timeline even without SPARC.
The ITER project said to be finished (with all its testing) in the 2030s and DEMO in the 40s afterwards.
Please memorize the text instead of reading it. Your eyes are driving me crazy
Its not subtle at all either
He should move the camera and the teleprompter further away from him and use longer focal length lens. Eye movement would be much less noticeable.
this week I learn about nuclear fusion and fision reactor technology, and you post a fusion tech. 4 years in physics, i was yet interested in nuclear tech, but i've learn particle, molecular, quantum gravity, astrophysics, biophysics, condensed matter, etc
Fusion reactor= arc reactor
Commonwealth Fusion systems... Ah those Fallout 4 vibes
the fact its not called massachusetts fusion really disapoints me
Thats pretty cool. Thnx for sharing this news
I think not developing a clean powerful energy in the 80's or 90's is a major co-culprit of many huge problems we have today. In every futuristic society such a clean, cheap and powerful power source is always taken for granted. I hope the big step is near.
I think it’s awesome that we are close to creating fusion power that’s like what goes on in the sun. And it’s all been in the last century or two
We aint close... At all
I just hope the big time Oil and coal corporations don't sabotage the research
Field strength isn't enough field quality also matters, I worked on Tokamaks 30 years, I would be happy to see it finally achieve operation.
SPARC's acronym game is on fleek.
Great video, high quality and entertaining. Thank you.
3:22 Yes, it is on purpose! I saw a talk that the head of this project gave about a year ago, and he said that the students, being Marvel fans, chose that acronym on purpose.
I think leaders of ITER project have already stated that they intend to integrate as many new technologies as possible as they come along during the construction. Though it might be impractical to retrofit magnets, they're not at that stage yet. Another point for ITER is that at current schedule they are going for ignition and self-sustaining plasma by 2024-5. So that's already in the same timeframe as SPARC. Even if ITER doesn't benefit from new superconductor technology, it's still likely to achieve the set goal before 2050. And as far as climate crisis is concerned, 2050 is already much too late anyway.
I've always heard 20 years away, seems like they're both common comments.
Bring on fusion though, then lots of desalination plants, massive irrigation, automated factories and transit...then we're looking like a promising civilisation!
Promising, hope they can deliver. BTW if they use the Stellarator concept they can save even more...
I know I’m a little late but how do they produce the temperature needed to create the arc? Is negative kelvin involved in some way?
Tokamak energy seem to be much further ahead, CFS have never even built a prototype. CFS has a lot of money though, so that may help
TE founded 2009,
CFS founded 2018.
You guys should do a story on LPP’s Dense Plasma Focus fusion device.
Pretty interesting stuff for anyone interested:
lppfusion.com/technology/dpf-device/
They use a proton and boron fuel, which has the rare and lucrative gas, helium, as a fusion waste product which can be captured and sold to be used for scientific and medical uses.
The device can be entered safely within hours of fusion cessation because you’re not dealing with radioactive materials, just heat and electricity.
The nature of the fusion produced by the dense plasmoid pinching mechanism also confines the energy released into two individual beams, one of ions and one of X-rays which can be captured to obtain net energy gain and fire another shot.
The incredible reality of Fusion is that we haven't stopped studying it, and we haven't stopped learning from it. It's only a matter of time before we master it.
This plus the new superconducting material at 15° is a game changer.
Not really. I mean JET was at .67 efgiciency unless you counted the electrical current they put into it which got us to 4 percent. 96 is a long way to go, it might not even be possible. Well possible to make net energy, its definitely possible for the scientists to get their pensions. Thats in no danger at all.
You can't make the title "Fusion Energy Could Be a Reality in Less Than 5 Years" and then start with the 30 years joke! Lmao
The current series of Fusion attempts seems more hopeful then they've been for some time. And SPARC shouldn't be particularly ambitious in many a way, being more a logical enough outcome of the various scaling laws seen in Fusion so far. Though we'll have to see if they can build it to the hoped for spec still, as well as secure enough budget to build at the rate they want.
Still, it does seem likely that by 2030 we'll probably have managed to achieve a major breakthrough in fusion and full scale system might be in our grasp to build by then.
It’s kind of ironic because in fallout 4 the main antagonist group is called the Institute which is under the MIT ruins. (referred to as the CIT in the game) They also managed to make a fusion reactor too.
This is like old window pc progression bar. I said 1h less, when u come back 1hour later and it said 20mn left.
It blows my mind how smart some people are, I will be very proud of mankind for once if we crack this.
I love that their plan is not secret. That's compassion for ya. Reminds me of jonas salk and his vaccine for polio. It's more about improving humanity and less about profit.
It's been 5 years away for a while now. The SPARC project was proposed in 2015... Lockheed martin said they'd have a functioning nuclear reactor within 5 years, in 2014...
I've still got my fingers crossed for Lawrenceville Plasma Physics to get focus fusion off the ground. Aneutronic fusion is the approach we should be going after, plus the size is the reactors are so small. Less waste, less radiation, easier to obtain fuel
Lucy tricking Charlie Brown with the football 🏈 and Charlie Brown never getting the joke.
Would have been great if a bit more technical detail could have been included. Is their breakthrough just that they'll use modern, cheaper, higher temperature superconductors? Are they using more advanced containment field shapes or combinations of other advancements? I feel like a lot of important info has been missed? Will have to check it out.
2020: Nuclear fusion by 2025
2025: Nuclear fusion by 2030
2030: Nuclear fusion by 2035
2035: Nuclear fusion by 2040
High temp superconductors still need to be pretty cold, like negative 120 c or colder depending on the specific material or super pressurized and negative 75 c. Granted that's still 150-200 degrees c warmer than the original superconductors we found but it's not exactly easy to keep stuff that cold near fusion plasma. I sure hope these projects are successful but I think material science still has a way to go before we start making fusion power plants of the type which will eventually be used for commercial energy production.
These superconductors don't have to be much hotter to already be significantly cheaper and easier to use.
Just a tiny difference in temperature is enough to put it above the boiling point of nitrogen, which is the simplest cryogenic refrigerant and much easier to deal with than helium, which is what's normally used on low temperature superconductors.
We already have a near limitless source of clean power, one that doesn't require any energy to keep it going, only fuel, and which already produces close to the same amount of power per unit of fuel as fusion does. Fission reactors. In a thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeder, you'd also completely eliminate all long term waste, and assuming you're using a FLiBe salt, you'd also have the ability to produce the tritium that fusion reactors require to even work.
I'm curious to see how the problem linked to the production of helium in the reaction is going to be solved
Just release into atmosphere , everyone will be talking like chicken.
M A S S A U T O M A T I O N
Helium is actually in short supply.
@@henrytjernlund Helium is rare on earth, but during the fusion reaction it can be a problem because it slows down the process and even make it unsustainable, it's like putting CO2 in a car engine
@@SuperLP4E What you say is true; to facilitate helium expulsion right now people are trying various magnetic configurations with an "escape" point where heavier particles tend to exit and impinge easier on an appositely studied component, the divertor.
As much as I love SPARC for not being the already obsolete bloated mess that ITER is, the fact remains that its still an inherently expensive way to boil water. Renewables have matured and grid scale energy storage is next. Simple will always win over complex when it comes to basic economics.
SPARC may be a little quicker to market but its greatest benefit may be that it is more easily replicated across the globe and more rapidly due to the reduced costs of each installation.