the people who make that joke don't understand the progress made and why it stalled, luckily, MRI machines drove investment in high temperature superconductors like REBCO tape that is now available by the yard. Demonstration of net energy gain fusion is only 5 years away, and on grid maybe 10-15 years away.
@Greg Moonen Right. Because throughout human history, there's such a strong inverse correlation between the degree to which a nation is capitalist and the rate of technology development coming from that country. It's true that there are worthwhile projects which are large enough that it's difficult to justify them at the level of even the largest companies, due to some combination of the size of the initial investment, the time it will take to recoup that investment, and/or the difficulty in controlling the benefits of the technology so as to recoup the investment at all. Governments can make a positive difference in these cases, though when looking at the value of government action in these cases you should really include all waste that results from government backing of bad ideas that go nowhere. But I've never understood the belief that the US government is controlled by big oil companies, who are apparently so dedicated to fossil fuels that they would rather try to squelch superior energy sources rather than developing and profiting from them. I mean, if I were the CEO of EXXON I know I would consider myself the head of an energy company rather than the head of an oil company. That means that I would see any potentially superior sources of energy as an opportunity to be exploited rather than as something to try to stop. Now, you can argue that things like inexpensive, high efficiency solar cells are a threat to big oil companies simply because the resulting energy is harder to control and turn into a revenue stream, but that certainly doesn't apply to nuclear fusion power plants. If and when big oil companies see fusion power plants as economically viable they won't be trying to stop government funding of it - they'll be trying to get the government to subsidize their investments in it. Maybe some of the top oil executives are too stupid to see the benefit of doing that, but I'm pretty sure most of them didn't get where they are by being stupid.
It's still hilarious to me that with all the impressive ways we generate power, it still always comes down to "and then we boil some water that spins a turbine." Why isn't _that_ part of the process being improved?
@@OmegaMegalodon Actually it can be extinguished very easily. You can quench it by injecting some heavy element gas that will quickly radiate most heat without participate in the fusion reactions. Spiderman 2 was not a documentary, you know.
There are options like kinetic dance floors for demonstration, riots and stampedes... Like that thing the US president and Senate like to do these days.
Needless to say the movie wasn't a super accurate representation of the process. And of course Tritium absolutely is not a solid metallic substance, and I doubt a lump of it as big as what was shown in the movie has ever existed on earth
Major Fusion going on in my stomach right now, after this wicked super burrito. I don't know how to contain the emanating plasma either. But I'm positive there's potential energy to be harnessed there.
Thank you. Because of this video, for the first time, I’m starting to understand all the problems with fusion. I knew it had to be serious issues but I couldn’t understand the inherent problems. Now I’m beginning to understand.
"Nuclear fission creates radioactive byproducts". "Nuclear fusion avoid all that". "Deuterium/tritium produces neutrons that make the surrounding material radioactive". Care to explain all of this?
Sam Lutfi And here I was, also aiming for “petulant”. That would have given me the “Three P’s”, as it were. Back to the drawing board, I guess. (Also, is a “pompous pick” what happens in a basketball game when you play against Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth?. And if so, is that a zone defense, man-to-man, or royal-to-commoner defense?)
The fusion products are not radioactive (He). But yes, the inside wall of the fusion vessel does become radioactive. But it is radioactive in a way that it is safe in decades, instead of thousands of years for fission. And its a far smaller amount of material.
The Wendelstein 7-X is also an alternative twisted design of a tokamak. It sustains fusion reactions far longer than ITER or JET, but it has a much low temperature. Feels like we can’t win no matter how hard we try!
Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (such as Fusor & Polywell) design also achieves fusion very easily, but same situation; the temperature is too low to sustain itself.
Wendelstein 7-X is of a stellarator design and not "twisted tokamak". The operating principles of both differ quite a bit. The basic idea of stellarator desing was concived by Lyman Spitzer during 1950's and tokmak desing is of a Soviet Union origin also from the beginning of 1950's.
In the fifties we thought to know which combination of pressure and temperature was neededto produce fusion, based on H bomb experience. However practically it is technically impossible to maintain pressures like in an H bomb. So we thought to compensate for that by raising the temperatures to overcome the coulomb forces. Failing experiments indicated that the temperatures needed to be much higher than predicted by the models. The models were obviously wrong. Raising the temperature means a higher velocity of the nuclei and a higher velocity means a stronger Lenz-effect. So imho, instead of ever higher temperatures we had better aim for higher pressure instead.
W7X is of "low" temperature only because it only came online in 2016 and needed to prove the viability of it's supercomputer optimized design. It's done that, and very well. Now it is being upgraded with more plasma heating and active vessel/diverter cooling. So when it comes back online in 2020 it could very well demonstrate a bigger jump yet in temp, density, and time.
"Next gen reactors are perfectly safe! Be skeptical of everything--except claims by the nuclear industry!" --all the dorks in all the comments sections. Nuclear fundamentalists.........
Well for consuming nuclear waste you really want to use the U-Pu-cycle but LFTR uses (per definition) the Th-U Cycle. Futher to use the U-Pu cycle pprl needs a fast reactor, and well a fast reactor needs more inventory => need bigger reactor so no you can't, howerver you may make a fast reactor with liquid salt.
that's called 'radioactive waste'. Fusion's waste is either helium, not radioactive, or tritium--slightly radioactive, but it's about 20 years not 10,000+ and it has commercial uses and can be used as fusion fuel with the right reaction.
I really like Sci Show and enjoy your videos. However, it seems that in this video you only covered the most long stand-standing (and perhaps a bit outdated) Fusion projects. There are several new projects that have accomplished A LOT and have impressive deadlines, new approaches, and answers to some of the problems you listed in your video. Checkout General Fusion and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, for example. They also hope to achieve net positive energy output before 2030. Which is only 11 years away...
@@tbird-z1r I agree, this science channel is almost like watching a less dumb down bill nye, one of the biggest red flags for this channel was in their good and evil moral dilemma they still use the Christian religion as their base for why humans act certain ways.
At this point renewables seem to have taken the market on cost and batteries and other storage solutions are improving at such a rate that its intermittent nature is less problematic by the day. If there is a future role for nuclear, it will be a niche one, probably in space.
Yeah, that seems ridiculous, especially considering that last year they broke records and contained the plasma for over 100 seconds. They expect to have over 30 minutes and potentially continuous operation by 2021 (with plasma densities high enough for a future power plant). That project is by far the closest to a feasible fusion plant that we have right now.
@@AlexanderPavel but the temperature is one of the lowest. It's going to take that high temperature for it to be successful. It really doesn't matter how long you can get the reaction to last, it's all about getting to the temperature were it will start the chain reaction.
I always wonder with things like this. How long would it take to get to where we want if all of humanity came together and said "We need to do this, no matter how much it costs."
Saying we need something is the standard? What if it's not doable? What if it's not feasible? What if the scientists at ITER are more interested in funding than finding a solution? What if quantum tunneling needs something only the sun can provide?
When I was in high school is 1980, I thought sure fusion would be powering this world by now, the 30 years away joke. I often say if the US would commit to a Manhattan Project of Apollo type program where we as a nation would be willing to comity to the resources required to achieve such a goal the whole question of climate chance and limited fuel resources would be resolved. #greennewdeal
Nice summary!! The only thing I'd like to mention is the other MCF approach called stellerators has made huge leaps in recent years too with Germany's fusion reactor Wendelstein 7X leading in progress.
Despite breaking a record last year 😭. Wendelstein 7-X could be really promising and compared to ITER it already operational. (Currently being upgraded). But it's not designed to Fuse Deuterium and Tritium.
No mention of the *other* MCF Design, Stellerator? The Wendelstein-7X deals with the turbolent plasma flow by ... building a turbolent arranged magnets! It's a sick machinery.
Just another hole to throw money in to for it to never be seen again. YAAY! As if all the tokamaks, spheromaks and RFP reactors weren't enough waste of resources already.
Talon Juel probably because the complexed geometry, the twisted chamber of a Stellarator made it not so appealing... which I thought these parts are made by metal 3D printing (or otherwise might be too difficult to manufacture). But, no fusion reactor is a simple machine, so that’s not the biggest concern.
We're pretty sure that we will have experimental proof that we can have self-sustaining, energy-positive fusion in a few years, when the ITER reactor goes online. That will be a huge step, because it will exponentially increase funding, because then we know that it's only a money-race. This funding will be needed, because going from an experimental proof to a reactor that can run 24/7 is a huge undertaking. The engineering challenges involved with that might be even bigger than the scientific ones.
ITER is nice in the sense that it conveys a growing support and belief in the field by the people and politicians... But, as most governmental institutions, it is inefficient and unpractical. Private companies like General Fusion will be the ones who change the world and should be supported. (Very similar to SpaceX for space travel, for example)
@SciShow please do an episode on the teaser you dropped at the end about advancements in nuclear fission! There really is awesome work being done there
What the author of this video didn't realize is that Lockheed Martin just got a patent for fusion tech last year. We ARE moving forward with it. www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19652/lockheed-martin-now-has-a-patent-for-its-potentially-world-changing-fusion-reactor
John Bash-on-ger bigger collider with higher energies. Unlike with the higgs bison that was predicted to be at a certain energy level, that they built the LHC to find, this new collider wouldn’t have a goal as the standard model is “complete” and we don’t know what, and if there is anything to be found at higher energies.
The biggest jump forward in fusion technology has been higher temperature superconductors for the electromagnets that confine the plasma. The newest ones only need liquid Nitrogen temperatures instead of liquid Helium, making them much more energy efficient. MIT has a good video here on UA-cam about this topic. It also covers some of the alternate fusion paths, including some that do not produce nuclear waste.
Could you do a video on thorium reactors at some point? I know there’s a lot of hype behind it but from what I’ve seen there is a lot of potential. Thanks! And keep up the awesome work!
The one thing I find interesting is that the majority (not all) of Power Plant and electric generation have the same formula: Fuel + Heats up -->Boils water -->Produces steam --> Spins a turbine with magnetic --> releases electrons = Electricity. It has been this way since the 1880s. The only thing that changes is the fuel. You have coal, oil, natural gas, some solar, fission, and even in this video fusion. Renewables like photovoltaic, hydro, wind, and tides rely on a different process, but the issue is storage and demand. You either need large batteries like that Telsa is producing or other means to store energy. The storage of potential energy and electricity are some of the bigger challenges for the future. It will be interesting to see if the old model of a power plant will change in the future too and replace the steamcentric idea of energy production.
Too many recent news videos on Fusion (including this one) have omitted some advancements on magnetic confinement. A number of projects were unfunded because of ITER as it was to have been finished by now and up an running already. It's only about half way built. New, more powerful superconducting magnet materials (REBCO) have been invented and no projects have yet to use them yet. MIT's SPARC design might be the first to do so. The Japan JT60 reactor might have reached break even if it was able to handle tritium. Both EAST (China) and KSTAR (N. Korea) have made advancements in plasma containment. And I think the one to watch is Germany's W7X supercomputer optimized stellarator design is one to watch. Before shutting down for 2 years of upgrades, it achieved 100-second long plasma control. After it's upgrade, around 2020, it might reach 30-minute long (effectively continuous) plasma control. So there is more progress than this episode shows.
He's called Son Gokū And "kamehameha" has "wave" in it. The last "ha" can be translated as "wave" It's "kame-hame-ha" i.e kamehame-wave. Don't add another "wave" to it.
it doesnt really produce radioative waste so much as it produces radioactive equipement. waste is the leftover fuel that didnt get used along with the biproducts that got caught in it. what happens with fusion is like, the entire reaction chamber becomes radioactive.
Can you do an episode about what is/causes winter itch!? Doesn't matter what kind of socks I wear in the winter, when I take them off, wherever they were touching my skin just itches like MAD! And if I give in to scratching I could scratch until I'm raw!
Aneutronic fusion may have been worth discussing. While being a very lofty goal, pB11 might be something worth aiming for. There are other IEC designs like the polywell trying to achieve this. I know one 10 minute video doesn’t have time to talk about the dozens of interesting designs out there.
@SM96 - storing passwords on remote storage, not linked to the server, is by far one of the safest ways to store your information. Made even safer by encryption. @Bass - Auto-loading your passwords is a safer practice than continuously re-entering it.
Two questions: 1. Does the energy gain take into account the energy needed to collect the deuterium and tritium? 2. Are the deuterium and tritium only needed to get the reaction going and can use hydrogen after that?
correction: you said they blast it with a beam of neutrons, that's not what "neutral beam injection" is. it's actually way cooler! they put duterium nuclei (proton+neutron) in a particle accelerator, but since the nucleus is positively charged, it can't penetrate the magnetic confinement. so they fire electrons at the nuclei while they're going top speed, towards the inside of the reactor, so it becomes a neutral composite particle (a whole atom) that deposits its kinetic energy in the center of the reactor when it bumps into the plasma inside, and the beam de-couples into plasma once inside. so imagine, you're running 100mph towards a brick wall, and then at the last second somebody fires something at you that turns you into a ghost so you can move straight through the wall
Easy steps to get a very strong password: 1-Type a "shape" on your keyboard. 2-Substitute the actual letters for leet 3-Roll a joint or something, you were basically done at step 1.5
add the first and last letter from the website at the beginning and end of the password and you have a unique and rememorable password for every website, further insulating you from a hacking event. also, hit the joint again
"they're renewable don't cause climate change" yike, someone needs to edit the script a little probably note : this is not a 'haha climate change isn't real' comment - i believe climate change is real. it's just that it feels like somebody replaced the phrase 'global warming' with 'climate change' entirely to make it more technically correct. this was a criticism directed at the writing, rather than the actual content.
What is your point ? Climate change is real , global warming is oversimplifying the issue. You're probably murican in which case enjoy dealing with the cold
@@YounesLayachi I'm not American, but thanks for asking. As I had mentioned in my comment, I do acknowledge that climate change is real. But I bet any non-professional writer could write a sentence better than "They're renewable and don't cause climate change." You don't have to be a professor of literature to notice that it's a terrible sentence. Like I had also mentioned, this is a critique of the art/writing and not the content itself. But sure, please, make no actual attempt at trying to understand my point and call me an American for no good reason.
@@ThePrimevalVoid I don't really see what is wrong with the sentence from an artistic standpoint. Maybe I do need to be a professor of literature in order to see it after all.
Research fusion reactors typically use plain hydrogen plasma (that doesn't fuse at all) for experiments to avoid regulatory difficulties. The results can then be extrapolated to D-T plasma. And the current experiments are also more specific, they focus on particular nuances of plasma behavior.
videos like this it usually goes: several minute greeny preach speech about why we need fusion (most normal people get bored here and move along) several minute primer on the theory of operation (nerds usually get bored here and move along) talk about one of many high budget big fusion projects (the ones that fuse cash into broken dreams) end of video i want to see more polywell love in fusion videos. i want those infinite range naval vessels bristling with railguns ive been promised.
"Why dont we have nuclear fusion yet" because stars are a great place for fusion and bad place for people and earth is a great place for people but a bad place for fusion.
You can produce fusion in your own home -- it's been done by high school students. You can build a Farnsworth Fusor. This is much easier to achieve fusion using a Fusor, but they don't require HUGE budgets, so they are not popular with fusion researchers. However, some promising work has been done in this field recently.
The main problem is it takes so much heat energy to generate fusion, you might as well use that as the heat source. At these insane temperatures you can only draw energy from neutrons to heat a medium such as water. What we should do is tap the magnetic field of the plasma itself. Charged particles in motion generate a magnetic field. (Neutron embrittlement will be a big problem)
Thermonuclear bombs are still mostly atomic bombs. They use the second fusion stage to generate neutrons which causes fast fission (i.e. more complete fission that otherwise possible) in a third fission stage. Most of the energy released by a thermonuclear bomb is from fission. The exception is the Tsar Bomba which had it's third uranium stage removed at the last minute. As originally designed it was supposed to be 100 megatons but even the soviets got nervous about that.
Nuclear Fusion 1:53 "Doesn't produce radioactive fuels as waste." Also Nuclear Fusion 7:00 "Nueutrons released ..tend to make the surrounding material radioactive" Yea I dunno..
Fusion doesn't produce radioactive waste as a standard byproduct. What does, eventually, become radioactive is the material the structure is built from, but the neutrons are confined to a small area so it's only the immediate components of the reactor itself. In time, these materials would need to be replaced due primarily to them weakening as the radiation disrupts their structure, but this is very different from the waste produced by fission. For one, it would mostly be in the form of heavy isotopes of the materials used in the structure, which means that they'll be far less dangerous the byproducts of fission reactions. Second, this would be a very small amount of waste compared to the output of fission.
Something that has struck me about these designs is how we try to keep the reaction almost motionless, contained to a small region of space. Keeping energetic things positionally stable with electromagnetic fields is a daunting task which quantum probability suggests must be almost impossible. Why then is the fusion reaction not designed to flow, as directing a stream of particles through a loop or figure 8 using some type of harmonics not used? Would it require too much additional energy? Particle accelerators can control the stream of particles to incredible precision at incredible speeds using these techniques. The particles are still contained, but within a predictable stream allowing for chain reactions, rather than within a tiny region of space. I suspect it has to do with the variation of particle mass to charge ratios involved in the reaction creating difficulties with coherence. It's a technology worth pursuing though. Looks like 2018 was another one of the warmest years on record.
It should be noted that fusion isn’t perfectly clean because anything on the inside of the reactor will become radioactive. The reactor will also slowly degrade in a way similar to fission reactors such that the materials are transmuted into incompatible materials. Edit: I didn’t watch the whole video before posting this. Thank you for covering this.
Why wouldn't they just make the walls out of something that is as transparent to neutrons as possible. Then surround that with a liquid that is very good at absorbing neutrons? The liquid could keep the solid walls cool and the nuetronically saturated liquid could be pumped out and and chemically or physically separated out (depending on how neurons affected the properties of the liquid) and replaced with new fluid.
Also, magnetic confinement fusion isn’t restricted to the tokamak design. Tokamaks are most well known and studied reactor design, but they are not the only one.
Could it be possible to coat the pellet with a thin metallic element, and just put a bunch of magnets around it that once activated have the same charge as the outside of the coating. The electric field would push the coating evenly into the pellet, causing it to implode.
As for fission, it is currently the safest mode of energy production by far. Any wastes that are produced are not only handled properly and quarantined from the rest of the environment, but that said wastes can be also reused due to recent technological developments, actually up to 80% is reusable, thereby shrinking a 3000 year period of radioactivity down to about 600. Nuclear wastes are also the only kinds of waste that get less hazardous as time progresses, unlike, say mercury which is spewed like mad from coal reactors.
So basically base on my understanding, it is harder to fuse elements (fusion ) than to let them decay (fission) naturally.. We can fuse them, but not practical as the power we need to fuse them surpass the amount of energy it could generate.
Don't know if the scientist on these Fusion reactors watch videos like this but a quick slightly uneducated suggestion but how about taking the pellets less use for the laser Fusion and creating a shaped like a dodecahedron and giving it a massive rotation while also heating it up at the same time with the lasers will help to get a even distribution of heat and pressure to help it undergo a fusion because it seems that rotation plays a huge roll in something like the Sun where fusion occurs often or it's just me that thinks that rotation please roll and evenly Distributing heat and pressure to an object but anyways hope this helps on the quest to better energy for all of us
"The old joke, 'fusion is always 30 years away.'" I'm old enough to remember when fusion was only 20 years away.
the people who make that joke don't understand the progress made and why it stalled, luckily, MRI machines drove investment in high temperature superconductors like REBCO tape that is now available by the yard. Demonstration of net energy gain fusion is only 5 years away, and on grid maybe 10-15 years away.
@@ppatil3655 Really? 5 years? 10-15? Really?
@Greg Moonen Right. Because throughout human history, there's such a strong inverse correlation between the degree to which a nation is capitalist and the rate of technology development coming from that country.
It's true that there are worthwhile projects which are large enough that it's difficult to justify them at the level of even the largest companies, due to some combination of the size of the initial investment, the time it will take to recoup that investment, and/or the difficulty in controlling the benefits of the technology so as to recoup the investment at all. Governments can make a positive difference in these cases, though when looking at the value of government action in these cases you should really include all waste that results from government backing of bad ideas that go nowhere. But I've never understood the belief that the US government is controlled by big oil companies, who are apparently so dedicated to fossil fuels that they would rather try to squelch superior energy sources rather than developing and profiting from them. I mean, if I were the CEO of EXXON I know I would consider myself the head of an energy company rather than the head of an oil company. That means that I would see any potentially superior sources of energy as an opportunity to be exploited rather than as something to try to stop. Now, you can argue that things like inexpensive, high efficiency solar cells are a threat to big oil companies simply because the resulting energy is harder to control and turn into a revenue stream, but that certainly doesn't apply to nuclear fusion power plants. If and when big oil companies see fusion power plants as economically viable they won't be trying to stop government funding of it - they'll be trying to get the government to subsidize their investments in it. Maybe some of the top oil executives are too stupid to see the benefit of doing that, but I'm pretty sure most of them didn't get where they are by being stupid.
200 years, maybe. It is just that hard.
@@ppatil3655 I'd be happy to see that, but as others here pointed out, that is exactly what people said 25 years ago.
It's still hilarious to me that with all the impressive ways we generate power, it still always comes down to "and then we boil some water that spins a turbine." Why isn't _that_ part of the process being improved?
Because it is the most effective way to converting heat to electricity.
Steam power is so 19th century.
@@criskity electricity is so 19th century
Vincent Jack use a fluid with a lower boiling point, turbines with less friction, lighter turbines
@@OmegaMegalodon Actually it can be extinguished very easily. You can quench it by injecting some heavy element gas that will quickly radiate most heat without participate in the fusion reactions. Spiderman 2 was not a documentary, you know.
Too bad nobody has thought of harnessing all the hot air emanating from political rhetoric.
There are options like kinetic dance floors for demonstration, riots and stampedes... Like that thing the US president and Senate like to do these days.
You could do your part by capturing the energy from this hot take
We are trying to find a non-polluting source of energy. 🤔
@@fionafiona1146 Imagine piezo electric sidewalks and roads so that people moving around returns energy to the grid
That would probably fix the problem...
2:44
Me: * hears tritium *
Me: “*THE POWER OF THE SUN IN THE PALM OF MY HAND*”
I understood that reference!
Explain.
Until radioactivity melts your hand off
PIZZA TIME!!!!!
Same!!
Damn disappointed we don’t have Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future yet. Science needs to get on that.
Love how his haircut changes at the end
Who needs nuclear fusion power when we have flex tape?
But how will you power your flex tape?
Ever thought of that smartypants?
@@johnbash-on-ger flex power
Michael Jackson Space geek
Tape that ozone
Flex tape is good, I'll give you that.
DATS UHLAHTTUH DYAMEEAGE
Wait, isn't that what Dr. Octopus tried to do in spider man 2?
Yeah, even Tridium was mentioned in the movie.
Needless to say the movie wasn't a super accurate representation of the process. And of course Tritium absolutely is not a solid metallic substance, and I doubt a lump of it as big as what was shown in the movie has ever existed on earth
Using his own body to shield from the heat and radiation of a small sun, yes, that was approximately what he was trying to do.
@amar ek I guess someone told him that with great power comes great electricity bill.
I had that thought too!
Major Fusion going on in my stomach right now, after this wicked super burrito. I don't know how to contain the emanating plasma either. But I'm positive there's potential energy to be harnessed there.
While an explosion is the easiest way to dissipate the energy, a slow release is most effective.
Slow release is easier on the system as well.
It's actually more of a chemical exothermic reaction
Thank you. Because of this video, for the first time, I’m starting to understand all the problems with fusion. I knew it had to be serious issues but I couldn’t understand the inherent problems. Now I’m beginning to understand.
"Nuclear fission creates radioactive byproducts".
"Nuclear fusion avoid all that".
"Deuterium/tritium produces neutrons that make the surrounding material radioactive".
Care to explain all of this?
Sam Lutfi
And here I was, also aiming for “petulant”. That would have given me the “Three P’s”, as it were.
Back to the drawing board, I guess.
(Also, is a “pompous pick” what happens in a basketball game when you play against Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth?. And if so, is that a zone defense, man-to-man, or royal-to-commoner defense?)
The fusion products are not radioactive (He). But yes, the inside wall of the fusion vessel does become radioactive. But it is radioactive in a way that it is safe in decades, instead of thousands of years for fission. And its a far smaller amount of material.
All the radiatioin stops when the reactor does, so there are no spent rods that still radiate like fission.
@Jwad Deuterium is 1 in about 6420 hydrogen atoms in almost all water. It's very far from 7%.
@Jwad Go check your 'facts'.
The Wendelstein 7-X is also an alternative twisted design of a tokamak. It sustains fusion reactions far longer than ITER or JET, but it has a much low temperature. Feels like we can’t win no matter how hard we try!
Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (such as Fusor & Polywell) design also achieves fusion very easily, but same situation; the temperature is too low to sustain itself.
Wendelstein 7-X is of a stellarator design and not "twisted tokamak". The operating principles of both differ quite a bit. The basic idea of stellarator desing was concived by Lyman Spitzer during 1950's and tokmak desing is of a Soviet Union origin also from the beginning of 1950's.
In the fifties we thought to know which combination of pressure and temperature was neededto produce fusion, based on H bomb experience. However practically it is technically impossible to maintain pressures like in an H bomb. So we thought to compensate for that by raising the temperatures to overcome the coulomb forces. Failing experiments indicated that the temperatures needed to be much higher than predicted by the models. The models were obviously wrong. Raising the temperature means a higher velocity of the nuclei and a higher velocity means a stronger Lenz-effect. So imho, instead of ever higher temperatures we had better aim for higher pressure instead.
W7X is of "low" temperature only because it only came online in 2016 and needed to prove the viability of it's supercomputer optimized design. It's done that, and very well. Now it is being upgraded with more plasma heating and active vessel/diverter cooling. So when it comes back online in 2020 it could very well demonstrate a bigger jump yet in temp, density, and time.
mikey_d I actually did know that but it’s been a while since I finished an undergrad project on it haha
Fission with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) can actually run by consuming nuclear waste.
And its very safe!
Cool
A MSR, breeders can do it too, nuclear reprocessing is also a thing but that's banned in the US
"Next gen reactors are perfectly safe! Be skeptical of everything--except claims by the nuclear industry!" --all the dorks in all the comments sections. Nuclear fundamentalists.........
Well for consuming nuclear waste you really want to use the U-Pu-cycle but LFTR uses (per definition) the Th-U Cycle. Futher to use the U-Pu cycle pprl needs a fast reactor, and well a fast reactor needs more inventory => need bigger reactor so no you can't, howerver you may make a fast reactor with liquid salt.
it's always nice to see when multiple countries work together. Brings us closer to our next step as a species, exploring the universe.
"It doesn't generate radioactive waste, but it does generate radioactive 'stuff' that we have to dispose of"
Yes the containers and stuff. Not radioactive coolants that can leake.
that's called 'radioactive waste'. Fusion's waste is either helium, not radioactive, or tritium--slightly radioactive, but it's about 20 years not 10,000+ and it has commercial uses and can be used as fusion fuel with the right reaction.
I really like Sci Show and enjoy your videos. However, it seems that in this video you only covered the most long stand-standing (and perhaps a bit outdated) Fusion projects. There are several new projects that have accomplished A LOT and have impressive deadlines, new approaches, and answers to some of the problems you listed in your video. Checkout General Fusion and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, for example. They also hope to achieve net positive energy output before 2030. Which is only 11 years away...
By 2030 it will be 30 years away
It's so easy to just sit on your hands and make fun of those who are at least trying.
Tri-alpha is also very interesting
It's true
@@tbird-z1r I agree, this science channel is almost like watching a less dumb down bill nye, one of the biggest red flags for this channel was in their good and evil moral dilemma they still use the Christian religion as their base for why humans act certain ways.
I'm sure you've been asked this a lot, but could you guys do a video on 4th gen nuclear fission reactors?
Hank did a lftr video a few years ago, but I agree they should do a more recent on
But nuclear energy bad. [Insert outdated strawman here].
Im pretty sure they only take suggestions from their patreon
At this point renewables seem to have taken the market on cost and batteries and other storage solutions are improving at such a rate that its intermittent nature is less problematic by the day.
If there is a future role for nuclear, it will be a niche one, probably in space.
@@ChilukarAnd....what is the source of all renewable energy? The Sun, which is a giant stellar fusion plant.
No mention of the W7X? or stellerators in general?
I know ,Right?
Yeah, that seems ridiculous, especially considering that last year they broke records and contained the plasma for over 100 seconds. They expect to have over 30 minutes and potentially continuous operation by 2021 (with plasma densities high enough for a future power plant). That project is by far the closest to a feasible fusion plant that we have right now.
Yeah... Where is the wendelstein?
@@AlexanderPavel but the temperature is one of the lowest. It's going to take that high temperature for it to be successful. It really doesn't matter how long you can get the reaction to last, it's all about getting to the temperature were it will start the chain reaction.
Stellerators are basically tokomaks with more complicated field geometries.
I always wonder with things like this. How long would it take to get to where we want if all of humanity came together and said "We need to do this, no matter how much it costs."
Saying we need something is the standard? What if it's not doable? What if it's not feasible? What if the scientists at ITER are more interested in funding than finding a solution? What if quantum tunneling needs something only the sun can provide?
When I was in high school is 1980, I thought sure fusion would be powering this world by now, the 30 years away joke. I often say if the US would commit to a Manhattan Project of Apollo type program where we as a nation would be willing to comity to the resources required to achieve such a goal the whole question of climate chance and limited fuel resources would be resolved. #greennewdeal
Problem is they will never consider it. If you even think about anything but fossil fuels they'll shut you down hard
Nice summary!! The only thing I'd like to mention is the other MCF approach called stellerators has made huge leaps in recent years too with Germany's fusion reactor Wendelstein 7X leading in progress.
I agree. W7X could turn out to he the best design, especially if made with the newer and more powerful REBCO magnets.
Not even a single mention about the Wendelstein 7-X?
ikr, didn't even mention the stellarator design :(
MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY SIR
Despite breaking a record last year 😭.
Wendelstein 7-X could be really promising and compared to ITER it already operational. (Currently being upgraded). But it's not designed to Fuse Deuterium and Tritium.
I agree
But isnt that the Wendelstein AKA the tokamak
@@azmanabdula No, Wendelstein X-7 is a stellarator.
It’s like trying to herd hundreds of uncooperative cats
ThEy JuSt KeEp TrYiNg To ExApE
Uncooperatives cats... is a pleonasm.
oh i forgot you're the same AI that says it's never her fault; it can't be you just being boring.
Ex-ape LOL
No mention of the *other* MCF Design, Stellerator?
The Wendelstein-7X deals with the turbolent plasma flow by ... building a turbolent arranged magnets!
It's a sick machinery.
Just another hole to throw money in to for it to never be seen again. YAAY! As if all the tokamaks, spheromaks and RFP reactors weren't enough waste of resources already.
@@MegaBanne This guy sciences ami right
Stellarators have much more stable plasma than tokamaks, the fusion can last half an hour instead of a minute or so
@@kerbodynamicx472 yeah, can't believe no ones talking about it
Talon Juel probably because the complexed geometry, the twisted chamber of a Stellarator made it not so appealing... which I thought these parts are made by metal 3D printing (or otherwise might be too difficult to manufacture). But, no fusion reactor is a simple machine, so that’s not the biggest concern.
"humanity hasn't... energy.. fossil fuels... yadda yadda." No, the ECONOMIC MODEL is the problem!
Viva la revolution! /s
Please do a vidoe on thorium reactors liftor
What we need is a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor.
Thorium is the future.
Do you mean sodium cooled thorium reactors?
We're pretty sure that we will have experimental proof that we can have self-sustaining, energy-positive fusion in a few years, when the ITER reactor goes online. That will be a huge step, because it will exponentially increase funding, because then we know that it's only a money-race.
This funding will be needed, because going from an experimental proof to a reactor that can run 24/7 is a huge undertaking. The engineering challenges involved with that might be even bigger than the scientific ones.
ITER is nice in the sense that it conveys a growing support and belief in the field by the people and politicians... But, as most governmental institutions, it is inefficient and unpractical. Private companies like General Fusion will be the ones who change the world and should be supported. (Very similar to SpaceX for space travel, for example)
X's Blog I’m sleep deprived and came to the conclusion you’re from 2080
@SciShow please do an episode on the teaser you dropped at the end about advancements in nuclear fission! There really is awesome work being done there
You're a joy to watch. Why couldn't my high school teachers and college professors have been half so engaging?
*Ackshually*
It can produce tritium which is radioactive.
And stop exaggerating the amount of "harm" nuclear reactors pose.
im also the true antichrist and im the only one with eyes
Viccbol irtad hogy "Ackshually" ?
just dump it all on the moon. . . or fire it into the sun
We should just move forward with LFTR reactors NOW.
agreed, away with the old conventional reactors, in with molten salt thorium reactors whilst upping the funding and reasearch in fussion
What the author of this video didn't realize is that Lockheed Martin just got a patent for fusion tech last year. We ARE moving forward with it.
www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19652/lockheed-martin-now-has-a-patent-for-its-potentially-world-changing-fusion-reactor
Could we get a video about the new proposed cern and what that would mean for future experiments?
That be a very interesting video to watch
What is that new proposal about?
John Bash-on-ger bigger collider with higher energies. Unlike with the higgs bison that was predicted to be at a certain energy level, that they built the LHC to find, this new collider wouldn’t have a goal as the standard model is “complete” and we don’t know what, and if there is anything to be found at higher energies.
The LHC is 27km long and the new proposed collider would be 100km long. Other than that I really haven't read much.
@@stefanozurich Thanks, but don't you mean Higgs boson, not bison.
The biggest jump forward in fusion technology has been higher temperature superconductors for the electromagnets that confine the plasma. The newest ones only need liquid Nitrogen temperatures instead of liquid Helium, making them much more energy efficient. MIT has a good video here on UA-cam about this topic. It also covers some of the alternate fusion paths, including some that do not produce nuclear waste.
Could you do a video on thorium reactors at some point? I know there’s a lot of hype behind it but from what I’ve seen there is a lot of potential. Thanks! And keep up the awesome work!
The joke is "Nuclear fusion will always be the energy of the future"
On track to having Fusion reactors by 2050, just like in Sim City 3000!
Litteraly every video about fusion:
"Fusion will probabily be good but we haven't invented yet"
Not really “probably”. If we can get it to work, it WILL be good.
We already have invented it actualy.
We just have problems containing it in such a way that would make the energy production safe.
The one thing I find interesting is that the majority (not all) of Power Plant and electric generation have the same formula: Fuel + Heats up -->Boils water -->Produces steam --> Spins a turbine with magnetic --> releases electrons = Electricity. It has been this way since the 1880s. The only thing that changes is the fuel. You have coal, oil, natural gas, some solar, fission, and even in this video fusion. Renewables like photovoltaic, hydro, wind, and tides rely on a different process, but the issue is storage and demand. You either need large batteries like that Telsa is producing or other means to store energy. The storage of potential energy and electricity are some of the bigger challenges for the future. It will be interesting to see if the old model of a power plant will change in the future too and replace the steamcentric idea of energy production.
Too many recent news videos on Fusion (including this one) have omitted some advancements on magnetic confinement. A number of projects were unfunded because of ITER as it was to have been finished by now and up an running already. It's only about half way built. New, more powerful superconducting magnet materials (REBCO) have been invented and no projects have yet to use them yet. MIT's SPARC design might be the first to do so. The Japan JT60 reactor might have reached break even if it was able to handle tritium. Both EAST (China) and KSTAR (N. Korea) have made advancements in plasma containment. And I think the one to watch is Germany's W7X supercomputer optimized stellarator design is one to watch. Before shutting down for 2 years of upgrades, it achieved 100-second long plasma control. After it's upgrade, around 2020, it might reach 30-minute long (effectively continuous) plasma control. So there is more progress than this episode shows.
....... Couldn't we just use thorium? At least till we get fusion right?
I hear someone fused a pen and a pineapple a while back...
I also hear glossolalia is just a crumb
I wish you mentioned Fusion startups such as Tokamak Energy or General Fusion
Awesome show keep up the good work
FUN FACT: The move Star Trek Into Darkness used the National Ignition Facility as the set for the Enterprise's Warp Core.
Nuclear fission is still the best we have. New reactor designs can even use our current waste as fuel
They only mentioned the largest funded fusion reactors they missed a whole bunch of other promising designs!
Just get Goku to fire a Kamehameha wave.
He's called Son Gokū
And "kamehameha" has "wave" in it. The last "ha" can be translated as "wave"
It's "kame-hame-ha" i.e kamehame-wave. Don't add another "wave" to it.
@Younes Layachi imgur.com/gallery/TKyAy
@@TiredToadSage ha.
But then youd need to feed him. That miggt cost more in the long run.
@@YounesLayachi
Thank you!
9:48 When you get a haircut but still need the video to be consistent so you wear the same shirt during filming
I love that it still comes down to steam-powered turbines.
Cats! The perfect comparison for herding molecules!
Its 10 years away. It's always 10 years away.
Do not underestimate the power of exponential growth.
Says nuclear fusion doesn't leave radioactive waste then proceeds to tell you that it does produce radioactive waste
it doesnt really produce radioative waste so much as it produces radioactive equipement. waste is the leftover fuel that didnt get used along with the biproducts that got caught in it. what happens with fusion is like, the entire reaction chamber becomes radioactive.
The chamber can become radio active. However it will be at safe levels in decades vs the thousands of years required for nuclear waste to be safe.
Doesnt work this way.
To stop the chain reaction you just have to stop supplying the fuel.
It's not like fission, where the fuel is already inside.
sebastian cuello nuclear fission creates waste, not fusion
@@OmegaMegalodon sorry dude but that's some BS you wrote there
Only Sci video that has put me to sleep so much info dam
Last Pass is wondeful! Also holy cow i really hoped we were closer to fusion.
Fusion has been 30 years away for the last 60 years.
Nah, it's been 20 years away for the last ten years.
@@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself borderlandresearch.com/book/lost-science/the-fusor-reactor-philo-farnsworth/10
*"Fusion is just a cheap tactic to make weak gems stronger."*
@ God does not exist.
@ God is imaginary.
@ Believe in God is a delusional lie.
Statements that don't invoke desire to discuss. @@johnbash-on-ger
@ Sometimes truth is just that plain and simple.
But I saw a guy who built a fully functional fusion reactor in his shed that produces unlimited power. He said so himself...
Was he able to split a beer atom using Emc?
Can you do an episode about what is/causes winter itch!?
Doesn't matter what kind of socks I wear in the winter, when I take them off, wherever they were touching my skin just itches like MAD!
And if I give in to scratching I could scratch until I'm raw!
Aneutronic fusion may have been worth discussing. While being a very lofty goal, pB11 might be something worth aiming for. There are other IEC designs like the polywell trying to achieve this. I know one 10 minute video doesn’t have time to talk about the dozens of interesting designs out there.
yeah no, passwords shouldn't be stored on a remote service's storage even if it's encrypted.
Right? And having them autofill on your laptopr is not a good idea either ..
@SM96 - storing passwords on remote storage, not linked to the server, is by far one of the safest ways to store your information. Made even safer by encryption.
@Bass - Auto-loading your passwords is a safer practice than continuously re-entering it.
It's because scientists haven't drawn a Polymerization card yet.
How do I deaw it?
Imagine if the entire global military budget was put into fusion power and warpdrive research....
Warp drive? Are thinking of Alcubierre?
Two questions:
1. Does the energy gain take into account the energy needed to collect the deuterium and tritium?
2. Are the deuterium and tritium only needed to get the reaction going and can use hydrogen after that?
correction: you said they blast it with a beam of neutrons, that's not what "neutral beam injection" is. it's actually way cooler!
they put duterium nuclei (proton+neutron) in a particle accelerator, but since the nucleus is positively charged, it can't penetrate the magnetic confinement.
so they fire electrons at the nuclei while they're going top speed, towards the inside of the reactor, so it becomes a neutral composite particle (a whole atom) that deposits its kinetic energy in the center of the reactor when it bumps into the plasma inside, and the beam de-couples into plasma once inside.
so imagine, you're running 100mph towards a brick wall, and then at the last second somebody fires something at you that turns you into a ghost so you can move straight through the wall
Just go with Thorium and call it a day!
Easy steps to get a very strong password:
1-Type a "shape" on your keyboard.
2-Substitute the actual letters for leet
3-Roll a joint or something, you were basically done at step 1.5
add the first and last letter from the website at the beginning and end of the password and you have a unique and rememorable password for every website, further insulating you from a hacking event.
also, hit the joint again
No.
"they're renewable don't cause climate change"
yike, someone needs to edit the script a little probably
note : this is not a 'haha climate change isn't real' comment - i believe climate change is real. it's just that it feels like somebody replaced the phrase 'global warming' with 'climate change' entirely to make it more technically correct. this was a criticism directed at the writing, rather than the actual content.
What is your point ? Climate change is real , global warming is oversimplifying the issue.
You're probably murican in which case enjoy dealing with the cold
@@YounesLayachi I'm not American, but thanks for asking.
As I had mentioned in my comment, I do acknowledge that climate change is real. But I bet any non-professional writer could write a sentence better than "They're renewable and don't cause climate change." You don't have to be a professor of literature to notice that it's a terrible sentence. Like I had also mentioned, this is a critique of the art/writing and not the content itself.
But sure, please, make no actual attempt at trying to understand my point and call me an American for no good reason.
The Primeval Void do you mean at 1:10 ? He says they’re renewable and don’t cause climate change
Edit: I meant 1:07
@@ThePrimevalVoid
I don't really see what is wrong with the sentence from an artistic standpoint. Maybe I do need to be a professor of literature in order to see it after all.
Research fusion reactors typically use plain hydrogen plasma (that doesn't fuse at all) for experiments to avoid regulatory difficulties.
The results can then be extrapolated to D-T plasma. And the current experiments are also more specific, they focus on particular nuances of plasma behavior.
videos like this it usually goes:
several minute greeny preach speech about why we need fusion (most normal people get bored here and move along)
several minute primer on the theory of operation (nerds usually get bored here and move along)
talk about one of many high budget big fusion projects (the ones that fuse cash into broken dreams)
end of video
i want to see more polywell love in fusion videos.
i want those infinite range naval vessels bristling with railguns ive been promised.
"Why dont we have nuclear fusion yet" because stars are a great place for fusion and bad place for people and earth is a great place for people but a bad place for fusion.
So what you're saying is that stars ARE fusion reactors. We harness their energy via solar panels.
Nuclear power is da bomb!
* cries in Nagasaki *
I see what you did there
@@HenkdeUA-camsteen I'm crying in Hiroshima
And quite literally, in some cases.
fu sion pow
fu sion pow
I just realized that my thumbnail backgrounds might unintentionally be similar to SciShow's. It's a really cool design.
Perhaps a way of containment is by adding motion to create some forces of inertia, such as centrifugal and gyroscope like effects.
I have no idea what he is talking about 🤔
I am fusion confusion cause we don’t have a solution to this pollution.
'A' for effort. :)
Scott Manley where art thou
you could also be playing dumb to avoid something but then that just means you don't know me
Wei Zhao what in the name of sweet Horny Mary and Jesus assfucking anal Christ are you talking about?
You can produce fusion in your own home -- it's been done by high school students. You can build a Farnsworth Fusor. This is much easier to achieve fusion using a Fusor, but they don't require HUGE budgets, so they are not popular with fusion researchers. However, some promising work has been done in this field recently.
The main problem is it takes so much heat energy to generate fusion, you might as well use that as the heat source. At these insane temperatures you can only draw energy from neutrons to heat a medium such as water.
What we should do is tap the magnetic field of the plasma itself. Charged particles in motion generate a magnetic field.
(Neutron embrittlement will be a big problem)
Cause no Human has ever done the Fusion Dance right.
Gotta Have Sayain blood for that
Potara Earring is more powerful.
We will never run out of Thorium, or U238, for that matter.
Fission is easy. Fusion is hard. Very hard.
Narration is too fast, there is no break between the sentences
Playback speed controls exist.
Thermonuclear bombs are still mostly atomic bombs. They use the second fusion stage to generate neutrons which causes fast fission (i.e. more complete fission that otherwise possible) in a third fission stage. Most of the energy released by a thermonuclear bomb is from fission. The exception is the Tsar Bomba which had it's third uranium stage removed at the last minute. As originally designed it was supposed to be 100 megatons but even the soviets got nervous about that.
great video, really interesting :)
Nuclear Fusion 1:53 "Doesn't produce radioactive fuels as waste."
Also Nuclear Fusion 7:00 "Nueutrons released ..tend to make the surrounding material radioactive"
Yea I dunno..
Fusion doesn't produce radioactive waste as a standard byproduct. What does, eventually, become radioactive is the material the structure is built from, but the neutrons are confined to a small area so it's only the immediate components of the reactor itself. In time, these materials would need to be replaced due primarily to them weakening as the radiation disrupts their structure, but this is very different from the waste produced by fission. For one, it would mostly be in the form of heavy isotopes of the materials used in the structure, which means that they'll be far less dangerous the byproducts of fission reactions. Second, this would be a very small amount of waste compared to the output of fission.
Something that has struck me about these designs is how we try to keep the reaction almost motionless, contained to a small region of space. Keeping energetic things positionally stable with electromagnetic fields is a daunting task which quantum probability suggests must be almost impossible. Why then is the fusion reaction not designed to flow, as directing a stream of particles through a loop or figure 8 using some type of harmonics not used? Would it require too much additional energy? Particle accelerators can control the stream of particles to incredible precision at incredible speeds using these techniques. The particles are still contained, but within a predictable stream allowing for chain reactions, rather than within a tiny region of space. I suspect it has to do with the variation of particle mass to charge ratios involved in the reaction creating difficulties with coherence.
It's a technology worth pursuing though. Looks like 2018 was another one of the warmest years on record.
Great job, that's good explanation.
It should be noted that fusion isn’t perfectly clean because anything on the inside of the reactor will become radioactive. The reactor will also slowly degrade in a way similar to fission reactors such that the materials are transmuted into incompatible materials.
Edit: I didn’t watch the whole video before posting this. Thank you for covering this.
Hey, on a sunny day the interior of my parked car reaches 150,000,000 degrees C.
I was going to make the “well it’s the power of 20 years in the future”, joke.... but you beat me to it in the first minute of the video....
Rip
Why wouldn't they just make the walls out of something that is as transparent to neutrons as possible. Then surround that with a liquid that is very good at absorbing neutrons? The liquid could keep the solid walls cool and the nuetronically saturated liquid could be pumped out and and chemically or physically separated out (depending on how neurons affected the properties of the liquid) and replaced with new fluid.
Also, magnetic confinement fusion isn’t restricted to the tokamak design. Tokamaks are most well known and studied reactor design, but they are not the only one.
Could it be possible to coat the pellet with a thin metallic element, and just put a bunch of magnets around it that once activated have the same charge as the outside of the coating. The electric field would push the coating evenly into the pellet, causing it to implode.
Well you got it done now. Congrats
As for fission, it is currently the safest mode of energy production by far. Any wastes that are produced are not only handled properly and quarantined from the rest of the environment, but that said wastes can be also reused due to recent technological developments, actually up to 80% is reusable, thereby shrinking a 3000 year period of radioactivity down to about 600. Nuclear wastes are also the only kinds of waste that get less hazardous as time progresses, unlike, say mercury which is spewed like mad from coal reactors.
So basically base on my understanding, it is harder to fuse elements (fusion ) than to let them decay (fission) naturally.. We can fuse them, but not practical as the power we need to fuse them surpass the amount of energy it could generate.
So much great information about mcf and not one mention about a
Stellerator. It also seems very promissing.
Don't know if the scientist on these Fusion reactors watch videos like this but a quick slightly uneducated suggestion but how about taking the pellets less use for the laser Fusion and creating a shaped like a dodecahedron and giving it a massive rotation while also heating it up at the same time with the lasers will help to get a even distribution of heat and pressure to help it undergo a fusion because it seems that rotation plays a huge roll in something like the Sun where fusion occurs often or it's just me that thinks that rotation please roll and evenly Distributing heat and pressure to an object but anyways hope this helps on the quest to better energy for all of us
All the Fusion was stolen by a Time Traveling Delorean