The sign of true progress towards fusion won’t be a a firm saying that they are 6 years away from achieving fusion, it would be when the same firm says they’re 4 years away in 2 years.
"When I studied, my professor told us we are only 5 years away from having functional nuclear fusion reactors and now 20 years later it is my turn to tell you the same thing." - My university professor 7 years ago 😂
@@charlessaintpe8574 We had nuclear fusion reactors 70 years ago, alas, they where the sort you had to drop on peoples heads to delete their cities. Thankfully we've resisted the urge to deploy those in their intended roles , so far.
@@charlessaintpe8574 - There's this really powerful fusion reactor I've witnessed all my life -- it even wakes me up in the morning, if I don't keep my blinds down -- so it's like a fusion reactor and an alarm clock all rolled into one
does anyone ever ask what happens to the gravity which supplies the constant pressure to run the sun's nuclear fusion, whose energy is then expelled into the universe...
You are correct. It would be cheaper and easier to just issue a stipend to fusion energy scientists and have them research something that is possible. Controlled fusion for energy production is impossible on the Earth. Sanjosemike (no longer in CA)
No kidding. Kind of an evolution of professors hawking theirs and friends books students have to buy wheree it evolves into the manufacturing industries where the designs have to be made by certain manufacturers. It's billions more than books.
Early in the nineteenth century it was noted that when the fires went out in the boiler a steam engine stopped. From this the so called “laws” of thermodynamics were deduced and that the sun must be burning fuel and must go out leading to the heat death of the universe. No coal or oxygen was detected in the sun so it was deduced that the fuel must be hydrogen and must run out. Modern science is so beholden to religion that it cannot accept a universe that has always been has no limit in size and will continue.
The sign of true progress towards fusion won’t be a a firm saying that they are 6 years away from achieving fusion, it would be when the same firm says they’re 4 years away in 2 years.
I was going to point the same thing. The initial promise was to have it ready by 40 years, then it was 20 years away, then 6, etc. etc. With all its history of botched realization, nuclear fusion should be considered a corollary of one of Zeno's paradoxes.
So you don’t know how funding works ? Reality is it’s at least 60 years away. All other challenges aside, look up tritium. Current estimates suggest only about 20 kg of tritium exists worldwide. Even with breeding, maintaining a high-enough tritium supply for multiple reactors is the number one challenge for fusion reactor concepts.
I love the way you teach Sabine. You bring your subject matter to life, you have an amusing take on the material, and all figures, photography, and examples truly illuminate the subject. Just the fact that I am watching this episode instead of wrapping Christmas presents so early Christmas morning says alot. Merry Christmas Sabine, to you and yours. Learning from you is a great gift in and of itself. Sincerely, Anita
You can't, so we will never be 3 yrs away! Maybe Elon can give you? But he's trying to get the wealthiest among us to escape planet earth for the damage they've done to the rest of us!
10 years ago (October 2014) Lockheed Martin announced they were only five years away. Now we're only six years away, so at least we're holding our own (almost).
Yeah, but that Lockheed Martin reactor was always an obvious scam. Nobody half way serios ever believed in it. It's like Helion Fusion right now. There are actually promising apporaches like Commonwealth Fusion (2 years delay isn't all that bad) and the one Sabine talked about in this video.
Yeah, but that Lockheed Martin reactor was always an obvious sc*m. Nobody who knows anything about fusion ever believed in it. It's like Helion Fusion right now. There are actually promising apporaches like Commonwealth Fusion (2 years delay isn't all that bad) and the one Sabine talked about in this video.
Six years is a very good number. It is short enough to attract investors, but also long enough for the CEO to make a lot of money. In 6 years, it will extend for a few more years and attract additional investment. By the time this company dissolves, the CEO can retire comfortably with multi-million dollar retirement fund.
2035 😂 any of them know about the tritium problem ? Heck did they ask where are they getting lithium 6 from ??? Did you know there is company in usa that bio refines free food garbage into gas to power 100,000 homes, now that an investment that will pay out in 6 years.
@@soundtrancecloud5101 Biofuels are incredibly dirty pollutionwise and basically undo all the CO2 capture that plants are good for, not a direction we should be going as a species at all.
@@soundtrancecloud5101 We already have nuclear, and currently, it's the safest energy source (not the cheapest, but that's because it's not subsidized). We don't need any other tech to power human civilization for thousands of years, let alone tech that involves burning hydrocarbons. It's a PR problem, not an engineering or science one.
@@soundtrancecloud5101 - sure, ignoring the fact they spend in the process energy / money enough to buy energy, at today prices, to power 150 000 houses... 🤣🤣🤣
Exactly! Like any research that takes a little too long to reach its objective, it becomes an industry on which many jobs depend on it and... human nature does the rest.
A promise of 5 years in the private sector is like 20 years in the public sector. When a university scientist says something is 20 years away, he means there is no real timeline but will eventually get it so give us a grant. The same thing when somebody in the private sector says 5 years. It means we have no timeline or real plan but give us money because we think it will work eventually.
Raising funding for fusion energy is one of those grifts that con artist can run without the specter of going to prison when the backers discover they were bilked out of their money for nothing in return
@@TheSulross Unfortunately that is what some of those startup are doing. They aren't in it for the science, but for the quick bucks, before closing shop a few years later... They use the initial funds raised to get a nice big hangar, a niece team of talented people (mind you), output carefully space out experiments to show they are doing something, put outlandish claims and timelines on their polished website, produce nice uplifting videos and try to keep the illusion as long as possible to get as much money as possible, before having to close shop when it becomes to obvious... They basically see Nazi Musk doing the same thing on a much larger scale with plenty of idiotic tech bro investors dumping money in his vaporware claims (carefully mixed with the actual material output of Tesla and SpaceX to maintain some credibility, along billions of taxpayer money) and just ask themselves: "why not me?"... I'm sure the team is motivated and genuinely think they may have a shot at making their project succeed but I'm cynically also sure that the heads of the company have more nefarious motivations. Wouldn't be the first time. So yeah, the "fusion in 6 years" is just bull crap for naive people. Do note that the same kind of scams are popping up more and more on the _supersonic commercial jet_ side as well...
When I was a kid in the late 60s, we had these things called encyclopedias, I had a preference for the Science Volume, one of my favorite articles was the one on Fusion, I remember thinking that Fusion being "20 years away" was forever.
In 1980 my high school physics teacher told us to keep an eye on KMS Fusion because they were just a few years away from achieving a sustained reaction.
Yep, that and roon temp superconductivity. And Ceramics were going to be the next Plastic etc etc etc. Lest we forget the whole Fuzzy Logic > Neural Nets > Machine Learning > Deep Learning > AI Venture Capital seeking rebranding as well.
Turns out the ancient profecy of the end of the world requires that a fusion reactor breach to bring about the apocalypse. Our rereading says that the end of the world should happen sometime in the next 30 years.
I remember sometime during the 1970s reading a Popular Science magazine article about fusion power. It confidently predicted that a working reactor was 15 years away.
The best thing abut Nuclear Fusion is that it's been 6 years away from commercial production for decades. No other field of science has been quite so imminently successful as Nuclear Fusion.
Recently I heard a physicist explain why it's impossible to produce efficient energy using fusion, because fusion always require significantly more energy than it creates. Unfortunately, I'm _NOT_ a physicist, and I have severe ADD, so I cannot remember precisely how he presented his explanation.
@HighlanderNorth1 Not to mention the efficiency of actually being able to capture the released energy and convert it to a usable form. Creating a net positive system in regards to total energy released is just half the battle.
I am 28 years old, and I’ve heard at least 6 or 7 similar statements so far. I'll probably keep hearing them until my 50s without seeing any concrete results.
Yeah I'm 36 and heard this BS my whole life. Fusion isn't sustainable in a controlled environment. Temps hotter than the sun right next to super cooled magnets and not enough tritium to supply one reactor let alone dozens.
4 години тому
I'm almost in my 50's and I saw the same claims in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines in the 80's.
Yay. Sabine, I've commented to you on this a couple of times from down here in NZ and you've finally responded. Although a year ago the company did say it would succeed in 3yrs and now it's 6yrs. Luv U Sabine.
Nuclear fusion is like the lottery. You're unlikely to win it, but if you do, the difference will be unfathomable. I don't think many people realize how much of a difference a hydrogen/nitrogen economy would make compared to a carbon economy.
I imagine one way to deal with the turbulence in the plasma could be to transfer it to another container very quickly by activating some other magnets which "suck" it away from where it normally resides. This of course would significantly increase the complexity of the reactor's structure.
I'm in New Zealand and my first thoughts on Openstar was that they were just after government money. However, they are making progress and considering the difference it would make for human civilisation, I hope they succeed. I'd be very glad to be proven wrong about them.
For as long as I lived, everytime somebody was just ten years away from a working fusion reactor generating more energy than one must put in. I'm older than ten. Much older. Schöne Weihnachten!
Fusion has been 20 years away for the last 50 years. A moving target. Long time ago, when reports were printed on paper, a fusion physicist (who?) said: the only way to get electric power out of fusion is to burn the fusion reports in a steam boiler 😀
I remember reading about Levitating Dipole Experiment ¬20 years ago. They seemed to be very optimistic about this design back then. Then they went silent. I wonder what went wrong...
Decades ago (in the mid 1970's) a CalTech colleague of mine working at Lawrence Livermore Lab (then LLL) was touting hydrogen from fusion energy, the latter being too cheap to meter. I questioned this, and Terry G told me it was a directive from the lab director. Fusion is claimed to be "clean" but Terry discussed the "first wall problem" where neutrons were madly irradiating everything in its sight, not without consequence. We are nearly 80 years from the start of the FEP (fusion employment program). In my view, all these new startups are all babes-in-the-woods. Nonetheless, I'm please that there are new players are in the game. p.s. LLL was using a flowing lithium wall to absorb the neutrons, at least conceptually.
@presence5426 I follow mostly in the popular press. I'm skeptical of the potential practicality of their work. It needs review. Claims of net positive energy ring hollow
@@whydidnttheyaskevans2431 Ok. They've achieved net positive power generation. My thing is, every barrier to workable fusion is an engineering problem. Humanity has solved many engineering challenges. It's kind of the only thing that had driven progress.
As a New Zealander I would be stoked if we were first to crack nuclear fusion, but I'm not holding my breath. Instead I will be installing solar next year, more for energy _security_ than cost. Cyclone Gabrielle was a wake up call, and then just last week the entire region lost power due to a lightning strike on the 220KV lines. In the next 6 years renewables will get even cheaper, and cheaper battery storage will make solar even more attractive. We already have a fusion reactor beaming huge amounts of energy to us every day - just have to make use of it!
What I like about OpenStar's approach is that the plasma configuration seems naturally stable. Levitating a magnet is something that is not that tough to do. The question is about how they can cool the floating magnet properly (which they are working on). I think that may be a much easier problem than stabilizing plasma using feedback control.
Thank you Sabine for producing these delightful programs which entertain while also educating. I've seen a very few lecturers in college level courses who manage to entertain while also imparting knowledge, but never anyone who does it as well as Sabine. I hope you are finding time and resources to also continue your efforts in music as well.
Yes, it's exciting. Is it practical - no Will it be cost effective - no Will it substantially address our power needs in the medium term (before 2050) - no Does it absorb a ridiculous amount of innovation/R&D funding, denying more practical, realistic, and valuable innovation from accessing that capital - yes
You’re incorrectly assuming that people investing in fusion would invest into something else instead. Additionally, research being difficult is a very bad argument for not committing to it - with that logic we wouldn’t get done anything at all. Fusion is arguably the most valuable tech research we are doing.
@CanIHasThisName I never said anything about the level of difficulty in relation to investment, just the return in value. Private R&D investment is dominated by tax credit investment, i.e. the volume of capital available is because people are looking to offset liability and get a high return. In other words if they don't invest in one tech they look to invest in another, because that's how they get their tax benefit. The state investment on the other hand is dominated by civil servants' decisions, politicians looking for sexy messaging, and scientists looking for funding, the complex interplay between them is why it gets so much funding - that may or may not get relocated to other techs. In the long term, if it's possible to solve the problems of fusion (it needs an efficiency increase of more than 100x at the moment), then it may be of value for energy in space but it's highly likely not to have any commercial value on Earth because of the cost. It gets the volume of investment that it does because the whole industry isn't being honest about its viability and time to commercialisation.
@mickmccrohon what, do you mean monk Eilmer of Wiltshire Abbey? It would have been the same - there's a lot we have to learn before we crack that problem. It's estimated that (in real terms) $400bn has been spent in fusion research, over a 70 year period, yet there's still a need to increase efficiency by 2 orders of magnitude (100x) just to MATCH the power in, let alone get useable power out. Let's say to really make it efficient you need another order of magnitude that's 1000x more efficiency that's needed, and even if we have that today there would be a need to build the power plants, and that takes decades!! Fusion isn't anywhere near that stage of commercialisation it needs to be at to command the level of investment that it's getting. Don't get me wrong, there would still be government funding, but not the amount it is getting or mega projects like ITER where they're basically trying to brute force the problem to get it to only lose half the power put in (input estimates are 300-500MWe, output is 175-200MWe)
Any safe form of nuclear energy is worth trying to achieve. We may yet have to first try proven Thorium LFTR reactors and only then move to fusion if needed. Fusion is achievable visa self-organizing plasma's as focused specific energy is what is needed, not so much high temperatures. Nontheless. We need nuclear for the backbone of future energy supply. Without it there will be no long term prosperity, growth and perhaps even peace. So the more attention on nuclear energy the better...thnx Sabine
My chemistry professor in college came in one day and said that some tokomak somewhere had just nearly hit the break-even point and we could expect fusion power very soon. That was in '93. First of many times Ive been told fusion power was right around the corner.
First of many times of people not understanding what was actually going on. It's a bit sad that it came from a chemistry professor, but I guess at least it wasn't a physics professor.
Even if someday in the sweet bye and bye someone achieves 'net energy output' we would still be years away from a device you can attach an electrical outlet to.
I've never heard anybody ask these companies, pointedly, how they plan to get the energy out to, say, a turbine. So what if you can generate energy by fusion in a torus of plasma surrounded by superconducting magnets at very low temperatures--how are you going to get that energy out and boil water (or other fluid) to spin a turbine, to turn a generator? I've never seen even a concept of a plan. Somewhere there has to be a heat exchange system, and a fluid flowing from hot to cold and back to hot again. That's thermodynamics. There's not even hand-waving. (OK, maybe magnetic fields? Maybe radiant heat transfer? But wait, we can get lots of radiant heat from all that light coming from the big fusion reactor in the sky. Storage is difficult, but way easier than controlled fusion.) I'm old. All these companies sound like Popular Mechanics from the 1960's.
Thank you. Dead on. Regardless of the scheme, everything I have seen for 50+years has left me with, "Okay, maybe. But how will you get the surplus energy OUT of it? What access is physically or thermally possible? Can the device itself take the heat of a sustained event?"
LOL Yep. There goes the free energy, when you have to repair and maintain turbines, replace turbines, replace piping, fix door hinges and supply coffee, while using only parts all rated for nuclear power plants.
I asked chatgpt, "Would a nuclear fusion plant's design for energy transfer from the hot core be similar to that of current fission reactors?" and it replied more or less, "Yep, heat is transferred from the hot core to primary coolant and then energy is transferred to a secondary steam plant." To verify my understanding I asked chatgpt, "If the nuclear reactor and primary loop of a nuclear submarine were replaced with a fusion reactor and plant, could the secondary components in the submarine's propulsion plant remain unchanged?" and it replied generally yes with the exception that because of the high temperature fusion reactors operate that the primary coolant would not be water and that necessitates replacing the steam generators, the components that perform the heat transfer between primary and secondary sides of the system.
@@DoctorManglerThere are two big problems. You are alluding to the second one, making money. If it costs too much, it won't matter. The first problem is getting more energy out of it, than you put into it, and I'm not talking heat. I have a heat pump that can do that. I mean electricity.
Yeah every so called 'plan' for fusion power seems to be some variant of 1.spend a mountain of (other peoples) money (or five) to build a mindbogglingly complex, incredibly finicky machine, 2. produce marginally more energy than you put into the reaction, 3. ????, 4. build utopia from limitless fusion energy!!
I'm pretty sure we can't just go for fusion immediately. We need to advance material science to a degree where we can model the properties of any alloy and any compond in a practical timeframe. So we can create more easily manufactured superconductors, more heat or activation resistant materials for the inner sheilding, or make the manufacturing process for the current designs easier. So basically first quantum computers, then high temp superconductors, and only then fusion
Happy Christmas, Sabina. Regarding fusion, like fission, the product is heat. You then need a heat engine to produce power. The heat has to come out of the reaction vessel. Probably means plumbing in a heat receptor and piping it out. UK power stations are mostly gas cooled, but the problem is getting enough energy out without it being too hot for the reactor components. To make a useful small power station, say 100MW, (let's not be too ambitions), you probably need around 350 MW of heat piped out in fluid or gas, and a steam turbine (or Stirling engine?) to make mechanical energy to drive a generator. You know how hard this is in a fission power station, with the temperature quite low, so efficiently of conversion is also quite low. Do these New Zealand engineers have any plan for doing that?
From what I've seen, none of these projects have a firm plan for the operational power station. Obvious things like maintenance of the irradiated components, the turbine cycle, etc are all "implementation details" that are assumed to be easy once they actually go far enough past break-even to work as a power plant. Seeing how quickly solar and batteries are dropping in price, I think PV will be our "fusion" power for some time yet.
And there's the dark secret no one wants to bring up with fusion: even assuming these reactions EVERY produce a significant amount of excess energy, HOW THE HECK DO YOU USE IT? As of yet NO ONE has put forth a design to actually recover and convert the energy from one of these fusion reactors into a useful form!
In the computer industry, this is called vaporware. Great for acquiring investors, not so much for delivering on promises. Also, Happy Holidays to Sabine and all here and everywhere.
The interesting difficulty with this design is that the levitating torus can't be actively cooled (it doesn't touch anything and is completely surrounded by hot plasma), which means that this design must necessarily run in intervals of burning and re-cooling the levitating torus - if I understand this correctly.
@@pietgeursen7023 Wow, thanks for chiming in! How much energy is radiated to the reactor chamber walls in such an interval compared to the energy needed to put in the levitating torus for cooling and the current in the current test? What are the remaining challenges?
@@jth4242 First off: the current magnet does not and will not do fusion. The goal of this first machine is to build something similar to the ldx experiment (mentioned in the video) but with high temperature superconductor. If the heart of your question is about energy in vs out then energy out of the plasma is 0 because there's no fusion. I'm not 100% sure how much energy we use to cool. But to give you some ball park intuition: we have 2 grunty off the shelf cryocoolers that run for ~2 days to cool from room temp. Re-cooling from a plasma shot cycle took ~2h. But that warming of the magnet is not from plasma, it's internal heat leak between the warm parts (the electronics + batteries at room temp) and the cryogenic parts of the magnet. The power to charge the magnet is surprisingly low. ~100W for ~2days. Very ball park numbers. Disclaimer: I'm just some guy who works there replying to yt comments while on holiday. This isn't official comms from the company lol.
Wilbur and Orville were extending already proven technology, and did not need superconductors or temperatures approaching those on the surface of the sun to do it. Show me one of these gadgets that will charge my phone or heat my house for twenty seconds and I'll jump right on the bandwagon.
Right. But how long did it take to fly 1h (I guess 1915-18 something, World War 1, 12 years)? How long did it take to cross the atlantic (1933, 30 years later). Do you see similar steps in fusion? I don't!
these startups that are just draining infinite money need to be held accountable for making false promises when none of them have any significant results in 6 years. that's the people's money they are wasting.
"draining infinite money". No they are not. Entire global investment is a tiny fraction of the Pentagon budget - or Elon Musk's pile. And it's the beancounters not the engineers that have set this up. US bureacracy does not even separate capital investment from recurrent; very quaint.
Fusion in New Zealand ? Finally putting those flightless damn Kiwis to work ! If you throw kiwis in the particles accelerator... we'll not much happens but maybe six years from now they will fuse together.
Have you heard of Ernest Rutherford? Do you know what he achieved and where he came from? A company recently celebrated its 20th. anniversary producing Superconducting devices exclusively... do you know where that company has operated for the last 20 years or it's name?
In a sense, this is true, earth operated on this mode for millions of years. All biological life does this! But we are now a high tech society which need vast amounts of "artificial" energy, coal, gas, electricity every day.
Sehr interessanter Vortrag. (Danke für das Stichwort) Man braucht einen zweiten künstlich kippbaren Pol damit man überhaupt erst ein 3 D - Phasen Transformatormagnetfeld im Tokamack erzeugen kann. Dazu legt man z.B. elliptisch verschachtelte Spulen her aus einzeln verschachtelten Flachbandspulen (x -Phase) mit Schichtflachbandspulen aus Neodymnickelblech und einer Schicht isoliertes Kupferblech. Um diese legt man noch eine Facettenphase =(z-Phase) und ordnet das ganze im Kreis wie viele Facetten an. Darüber legt man eine kreisförmige spiralige Flachbandspule (y-Phase) auch aus Neodym und Kupferblech . Oben und unten legt man diese in den Boden und in den anderen Ring - Generator in die Decke gegenüberliegend. Hierdurch bekommt man bei impulsartiger gegenüberliegender Gradientenansteuerung einen zusätzlichen polaren Kippmagneten, den man im Kreis als Wanderfeld herumbewegen kann, wie einen echten 3 D - Phasentransformator. (Den es ja eigentlich noch gar nicht im Tokamak oder bei Iter voll umsetzbar und realisiert gibt.) Durch circuläre Phasenabgriffe kann man dann die dritte Phase erstmalig realisieren, indem man den bisher nur 2 - 1/2 phasigen Tokamak voll im Kreis herum dann ansteuern kann mit kippbaren Polmagneten. Auch kann man die ineinander verschachtelten Elliptischen Spulen durch verschiedene Phasenanschnittsteuerungen linear abgleichen und dann recht gut ansteuern. Das Verschachtelungsmodell von 3:12 zeigt nur zwei gegenüberliegende teilverschachtelte elliptische Spulen mit fehlenden Phasenabgriffen und einem massiven Endmagneten auf der falschen Seite, eher außen rudimentär zur trapezförmigen Formanpassung. (wenn in die Mitte, die Tokamak - Zentral - Spule noch rein soll). Die 120 cirkulären einzelnen x - verschachtelten (10 x ineinander flachen verschachtelten) Ellipsenbandspulen, die außen umgebenden genauso etwas geformten z - Gegen - Phasenimpulsfacettenspulen, und die spiralig darüber gelegte y Phase, auch mit Phasenabgriffen für runde Polmagnetfelder außen (die beliebig dann nach innen oder außen steuerbar sind ), die in der zusätzlichen Höhenachse als Kippgradienten parallel oder gekreuzt je nach Beschaltung sich gegenüberliegend befinden, erzeugen das echte variable zusätzliche scharf umrandete Kippmagnet - 3 D - Phasenfeld. (das wäre nämlich mein perfektes Grund - Modell). Außen kommen die Vollspulenabgriffe. Innen kommen noch die 1/4 Phasen - Spulenabgriffe dran, damit nichts durcheinanderwirbelt. Aber trotzdem die abgestimmten Pol - Kipp - Phasen, präzise, wie bei einer einstellbaren Zentrifuge im Kreis antreibt. Über horizontale Reluktanzgeneratoren entstehen polare Kippachsenfelder.
Fusion predictions are always paced so that by the time the prediction fails the researchers have all retired. The 6 year prediction doesn't mean we'll have fusion in 6 years, it means that the researchers think that AI will put them all on the scrap heap in 6 years!
Since this is the private sector, I think the timeline is more that in 6 years the company will have folded and a few will have run off with some of the VC money but that's enough time for the news cycle to move on and for people to have forgotten about it.
I have a hypothesis that one thing that brings technologically clueless companies to invest in such experimental enterprises is it provides the investors with a greenwashing opportunity. It appears that many of the private investors depend upon nuclear fusion energy fans who operate consulting businesses. There are very few sources, of truly independent, critical assessments.
Einstein thought that we will never be able to use energy of the atom. He was one of the smartest scientists of the time, but was wrong nonetheless. Who are we to say that fusion is not achievable on Earth, especially when it has been demonstrated? It's an engineering problem, and the question is not "is it possible", it's "when".
Theres' a saying "Fusion power is 5 to 10 years away and always will be." This has proven to be true for the last 60+ years and show no signs of ever changing.
That's something I never would have thought of, but I think this just sort of moves the problem under a different rug fundamental to Tokamaks. I genuinely don't think the fusion nut will be cracked until more Stellarators are built and tested
I'm old enough to remember the Zeta project in the late 1950s. Unlimited fusion energy was just round the corner then and still is. If I was in charge of research funding , it would be going towards Thorium
For your stance of defending tho in your weird illuminating way the cookiest theories as well instead of just saying "dats wrong" i award you the gift of well wishes on this xmas season.
You might want to make a video about fusion breeding. Tritium--deuterium fusion gives 17.6 Mev, but if you use the neutron to breed either U233 from thorium or P39 from U238, you can get 200 Mev from fission. It might be possible to get more than one fissile nucleus from each fusion, which gives more than 10 times more energy. That means that the existing fusion devices can produce net energy.
I've been hearing this for half a century, with estimates between 5 and 20 years. I'll hope for the best, keep tabs on the research, but expect nothing.
I'm so glad that I switched in graduate school 30+ years ago from plasma physics (working on tokamaks) to particle physics to pure math. I've would've spent my entire career seeing no progress in my field.
Thank You Sabine for all the information and entertainment You have shared with us this year. Merry Christmas and Best Wishes to You and Your Family for the Holiday Season !
You are absolutely right about energy access. And that is why the powers that be banned/restricted fission. And it stays that way despite the new tech that makes it safe, cheap, reliable. They POB can't have that. Its all about control. If its starts to look like fusion is a thing that is going to work on a commercial scale the resistance will be whipped up over something.
Very much hoping it'll work this time around with all these start up and the breadth of the funding! I remember all too well when I graduated from university early 1990s and in my last Physics class we looked at feasibility - though back then we only tackled the confinement approach with the magnetic fields and were hoping twenty years or better. That was 30+ years ago.
at University in 1981 I had a corse "Alternative Energies" - so at the time we talked about two Nuclear fision projects, one in Germany, the other in Paris. They managed to run for a fraction of e second - Like the Thorium salt reactor it was just sadly neglected - 'Studing Electrical engineering - I was fascinatet - everybody neglects that the closed off area around Tschernobyl seems to be around half the size of Germany. Smart solutions would be great
I am mostly interested in the following, China has plans to develop a new approach to nuclear fusion using electric fields. In September 2022, the Chinese government approved the construction of a nuclear fusion reactor that utilizes a 'Z-pinch' machine. This technique generates a powerful electric field to compress and heat deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen, enabling nuclear fusion to occur. That could be really interesting.
I wish you all Happy Holidays and a Merry Christmas! Thank you all from being here and for all the interesting conversations.
😂
The sign of true progress towards fusion won’t be a a firm saying that they are 6 years away from achieving fusion, it would be when the same firm says they’re 4 years away in 2 years.
Thanks in return for all your effort you do for us.
Wesłych Świąt od Polsce!
ps. my OH desnt always wrk!
"When I studied, my professor told us we are only 5 years away from having functional nuclear fusion reactors and now 20 years later it is my turn to tell you the same thing."
- My university professor 7 years ago 😂
a huge dose of skepticism is the sign of a good scientist, no doubt, i mean, the opposite, doubt a lot
We have nuclear fusion reactors, it's just that the energy output is less than the energy input.
@@charlessaintpe8574 Also that they only run a few seconds at a time with months between runs.
@@charlessaintpe8574 We had nuclear fusion reactors 70 years ago, alas, they where the sort you had to drop on peoples heads to delete their cities. Thankfully we've resisted the urge to deploy those in their intended roles , so far.
@@charlessaintpe8574 - There's this really powerful fusion reactor I've witnessed all my life -- it even wakes me up in the morning, if I don't keep my blinds down -- so it's like a fusion reactor and an alarm clock all rolled into one
There is a reason why the sun's magnetic orientation changes every 5 or 6 years... it's negotiating with the universe for more funding.
does anyone ever ask what happens to the gravity which supplies the constant pressure to run the sun's nuclear fusion, whose energy is then expelled into the universe...
You are correct. It would be cheaper and easier to just issue a stipend to fusion energy scientists and have them research something that is possible. Controlled fusion for energy production is impossible on the Earth.
Sanjosemike (no longer in CA)
I would like to laugh about this, but i'm afraid it could be true.
The celestial political cycle must be approximately that long?
There's so many 'orientations' even the Sun is confused...
Good to hear that in 6 yrs we'll be only 6 yrs away.
Lol
Hope none of these are near the rising oceans.
I was about to post the same comment.
No kidding. Kind of an evolution of professors hawking theirs and friends books students have to buy wheree it evolves into the manufacturing industries where the designs have to be made by certain manufacturers. It's billions more than books.
Yeah sounds more promising than being 30 years away in 30 years.
I remember 60 years ago they were 10 years away. If you plot that as a linear function, in another 60 years we will be only 3.6 years away.
That's exponential, not linear
That's much more than the half-life of a bad idea.
Early in the nineteenth century it was noted that when the fires went out in the boiler a steam engine stopped. From this the so called “laws” of thermodynamics were deduced and that the sun must be burning fuel and must go out leading to the heat death of the universe. No coal or oxygen was detected in the sun so it was deduced that the fuel must be hydrogen and must run out. Modern science is so beholden to religion that it cannot accept a universe that has always been has no limit in size and will continue.
@@DestroManiak No. It was orignally 10 years ago and after 60 years it's 6 years closer. That has nothing to do with exponential.
@@DestroManiak Logarithmic.LOL
The sign of true progress towards fusion won’t be a a firm saying that they are 6 years away from achieving fusion, it would be when the same firm says they’re 4 years away in 2 years.
So what did they say 2 years ago?
@@curtishorn1267 probably the same thing they were saying every year.
I was going to point the same thing. The initial promise was to have it ready by 40 years, then it was 20 years away, then 6, etc. etc. With all its history of botched realization, nuclear fusion should be considered a corollary of one of Zeno's paradoxes.
When it comes to nuclear fusion I have the impression that the time scale is actually logarithmic...
I am 80. I have been waiting for fusion for 30+30+20 years. Now that I am older and wiser, it going to be 300 yrs. I can’t wait.
Fusion has gone from always being 20 years away to being always 6 years away. It's progress!
20 years away was from physicists with government grants. Venture capital is not 20 years patient.
Used to be 30 years away in the 60's. And it was going to be so cheap they would not meter it...... Heard that before?
Funny how the number of remaining years goes down with the passage of time.
So you don’t know how funding works ? Reality is it’s at least 60 years away. All other challenges aside, look up tritium. Current estimates suggest only about 20 kg of tritium exists worldwide.
Even with breeding, maintaining a high-enough tritium supply for multiple reactors is the number one challenge for fusion reactor concepts.
@@soundtrancecloud5101I'm glad someone is talking sense here.
I love the way you teach Sabine. You bring your subject matter to life, you have an amusing take on the material, and all figures, photography, and examples truly illuminate the subject. Just the fact that I am watching this episode instead of wrapping Christmas presents so early Christmas morning says alot. Merry Christmas Sabine, to you and yours. Learning from you is a great gift in and of itself. Sincerely, Anita
If I can raise 12 billion dollars I will say that we are 3 years away from fusion.
I believe you. I'll invest in your company.
@@Chubbycat747 Oh Yea ... I only need 6 billion and a case of duct tape ... invest in my company :)
😂 😂 😂
The real Fusion was the Friends we made along the way.
You can't, so we will never be 3 yrs away! Maybe Elon can give you? But he's trying to get the wealthiest among us to escape planet earth for the damage they've done to the rest of us!
Thanks!
10 years ago (October 2014) Lockheed Martin announced they were only five years away. Now we're only six years away, so at least we're holding our own (almost).
What do you think is powering all these UAPs? Lol
At this rate of progress we’ll be only ten years away before the decade is out. What a time to be alive!
Yeah, but that Lockheed Martin reactor was always an obvious scam. Nobody half way serios ever believed in it. It's like Helion Fusion right now.
There are actually promising apporaches like Commonwealth Fusion (2 years delay isn't all that bad) and the one Sabine talked about in this video.
Yeah, but that Lockheed Martin reactor was always an obvious scam. Nobody half way serios ever believed in it. It's like Helion Fusion right now.
Yeah, but that Lockheed Martin reactor was always an obvious sc*m. Nobody who knows anything about fusion ever believed in it. It's like Helion Fusion right now.
There are actually promising apporaches like Commonwealth Fusion (2 years delay isn't all that bad) and the one Sabine talked about in this video.
Six years is a very good number. It is short enough to attract investors, but also long enough for the CEO to make a lot of money. In 6 years, it will extend for a few more years and attract additional investment. By the time this company dissolves, the CEO can retire comfortably with multi-million dollar retirement fund.
2035 😂 any of them know about the tritium problem ? Heck did they ask where are they getting lithium 6 from ??? Did you know there is company in usa that bio refines free food garbage into gas to power 100,000 homes, now that an investment that will pay out in 6 years.
@@soundtrancecloud5101 Biofuels are incredibly dirty pollutionwise and basically undo all the CO2 capture that plants are good for, not a direction we should be going as a species at all.
@@soundtrancecloud5101 We already have nuclear, and currently, it's the safest energy source (not the cheapest, but that's because it's not subsidized). We don't need any other tech to power human civilization for thousands of years, let alone tech that involves burning hydrocarbons. It's a PR problem, not an engineering or science one.
@@soundtrancecloud5101 - sure, ignoring the fact they spend in the process energy / money enough to buy energy, at today prices, to power 150 000 houses... 🤣🤣🤣
Exactly! Like any research that takes a little too long to reach its objective, it becomes an industry on which many jobs depend on it and... human nature does the rest.
A promise of 5 years in the private sector is like 20 years in the public sector. When a university scientist says something is 20 years away, he means there is no real timeline but will eventually get it so give us a grant. The same thing when somebody in the private sector says 5 years. It means we have no timeline or real plan but give us money because we think it will work eventually.
Raising funding for fusion energy is one of those grifts that con artist can run without the specter of going to prison when the backers discover they were bilked out of their money for nothing in return
For the Win.
@@TheSulross , maybe you should stick to working at McDonald's and leave the science for others. Don't forget to ask if they want fries with that.
@@mickmccrohon Something against McDonald's workers?
@@TheSulross Unfortunately that is what some of those startup are doing. They aren't in it for the science, but for the quick bucks, before closing shop a few years later... They use the initial funds raised to get a nice big hangar, a niece team of talented people (mind you), output carefully space out experiments to show they are doing something, put outlandish claims and timelines on their polished website, produce nice uplifting videos and try to keep the illusion as long as possible to get as much money as possible, before having to close shop when it becomes to obvious...
They basically see Nazi Musk doing the same thing on a much larger scale with plenty of idiotic tech bro investors dumping money in his vaporware claims (carefully mixed with the actual material output of Tesla and SpaceX to maintain some credibility, along billions of taxpayer money) and just ask themselves: "why not me?"...
I'm sure the team is motivated and genuinely think they may have a shot at making their project succeed but I'm cynically also sure that the heads of the company have more nefarious motivations. Wouldn't be the first time. So yeah, the "fusion in 6 years" is just bull crap for naive people. Do note that the same kind of scams are popping up more and more on the _supersonic commercial jet_ side as well...
When I was a kid in the late 60s, we had these things called encyclopedias, I had a preference for the Science Volume, one of my favorite articles was the one on Fusion, I remember thinking that Fusion being "20 years away" was forever.
Still true
Yes but now engineering companies are stepping in. Some famous ones.
Think why are they doing it....
@ Hope over experience.
And you were right...
In 1980 my high school physics teacher told us to keep an eye on KMS Fusion because they were just a few years away from achieving a sustained reaction.
At this rate im gonna KMS before we achieve fusion 💀
they also told me that if i wanted to make more money i should go to college. liars all.
Yep, that and roon temp superconductivity. And Ceramics were going to be the next Plastic etc etc etc. Lest we forget the whole Fuzzy Logic > Neural Nets > Machine Learning > Deep Learning > AI Venture Capital seeking rebranding as well.
This is not a repeat from 1992, 1994, 1995, 1997, ... 2019, 2020, ...
Turns out the ancient profecy of the end of the world requires that a fusion reactor breach to bring about the apocalypse. Our rereading says that the end of the world should happen sometime in the next 30 years.
I remember sometime during the 1970s reading a Popular Science magazine article about fusion power. It confidently predicted that a working reactor was 15 years away.
Merry Christmas and happy New Year,Sabine & family./.🎄👍💕
The best thing abut Nuclear Fusion is that it's been 6 years away from commercial production for decades. No other field of science has been quite so imminently successful as Nuclear Fusion.
String theory papermill
Recently I heard a physicist explain why it's impossible to produce efficient energy using fusion, because fusion always require significantly more energy than it creates. Unfortunately, I'm _NOT_ a physicist, and I have severe ADD, so I cannot remember precisely how he presented his explanation.
@HighlanderNorth1 Not to mention the efficiency of actually being able to capture the released energy and convert it to a usable form. Creating a net positive system in regards to total energy released is just half the battle.
General AI. I dont think its truly possible. They will just end up with incomprehensible algorithms, but algorithms non the less.
It may already exist in military black budget research.
I am 28 years old, and I’ve heard at least 6 or 7 similar statements so far. I'll probably keep hearing them until my 50s without seeing any concrete results.
Yeah I'm 36 and heard this BS my whole life. Fusion isn't sustainable in a controlled environment. Temps hotter than the sun right next to super cooled magnets and not enough tritium to supply one reactor let alone dozens.
I'm almost in my 50's and I saw the same claims in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines in the 80's.
Frohe Weihnachten, Sabine! 🎄
Yay. Sabine, I've commented to you on this a couple of times from down here in NZ and you've finally responded.
Although a year ago the company did say it would succeed in 3yrs and now it's 6yrs. Luv U Sabine.
Six years from now everyone will have forgotten there was a promise in the first place.
Promise of what, now...?
I feel like this is the norm. The news cycle and outrage politics play the same game.
Not the investors
@@syntaxusdogmata3333 I see what you did here. 🙂
Frohe Weihnachten und riesen Dank für deine high-qualitty Videos
"We are less than 10 years from commercial fusion!"
Every fusion research project since 1960.
Weird. 2 years and 6 years don't seem to be the same as 10...
And they have cured cancer every 5 years over he last 60
Nuclear fusion is like the lottery. You're unlikely to win it, but if you do, the difference will be unfathomable. I don't think many people realize how much of a difference a hydrogen/nitrogen economy would make compared to a carbon economy.
Love your 20-second yoga position analogy. Merry Christmas, Sabine.
I imagine one way to deal with the turbulence in the plasma could be to transfer it to another container very quickly by activating some other magnets which "suck" it away from where it normally resides. This of course would significantly increase the complexity of the reactor's structure.
I'm in New Zealand and my first thoughts on Openstar was that they were just after government money. However, they are making progress and considering the difference it would make for human civilisation, I hope they succeed. I'd be very glad to be proven wrong about them.
🤣🤣🤣 -- yeah because kiwis are jen-yuhsizz, bro
@@ZedX-hj8mx Heard of Ernest Rutherford? Lots more top-notch Kiwi scientists - not bad for a small population on a set of small, shaky islands.
Captain, the Containment Coils of the Dilithium Crystals is Failing. "How much time do we have Scottie?" 6Years Captain. "OK lets push on."
For as long as I lived, everytime somebody was just ten years away from a working fusion reactor generating more energy than one must put in. I'm older than ten. Much older.
Schöne Weihnachten!
Fusion has been 20 years away for the last 50 years. A moving target. Long time ago, when reports were printed on paper, a fusion physicist (who?) said: the only way to get electric power out of fusion is to burn the fusion reports in a steam boiler 😀
Well, six years is better than twenty, I suppose. But, it's been twenty years away for the past 60 years.
I remember reading about Levitating Dipole Experiment ¬20 years ago. They seemed to be very optimistic about this design back then. Then they went silent. I wonder what went wrong...
Decades ago (in the mid 1970's) a CalTech colleague of mine working at Lawrence Livermore Lab (then LLL) was touting hydrogen from fusion energy, the latter being too cheap to meter. I questioned this, and Terry G told me it was a directive from the lab director. Fusion is claimed to be "clean" but Terry discussed the "first wall problem" where neutrons were madly irradiating everything in its sight, not without consequence. We are nearly 80 years from the start of the FEP (fusion employment program). In my view, all these new startups are all babes-in-the-woods. Nonetheless, I'm please that there are new players are in the game. p.s. LLL was using a flowing lithium wall to absorb the neutrons, at least conceptually.
Have you seen the work LLL is doing lately?
@presence5426 I follow mostly in the popular press. I'm skeptical of the potential practicality of their work. It needs review. Claims of net positive energy ring hollow
@@whydidnttheyaskevans2431 Ok. They've achieved net positive power generation. My thing is, every barrier to workable fusion is an engineering problem. Humanity has solved many engineering challenges. It's kind of the only thing that had driven progress.
Frohe Weihnachten für Dich und Deine Liebsten, Sabine und für alle Zuschauer zu Hause an den Geräten 🎄🎄🎄
I installed solar a few months ago. I'm expecting a major fusion breakthrough any day now.
I've been using fusion power for 40 years now. I preheat hot water.
*Alondro throws a cup of water on the Sun to put it out!* Nyah ha ha ha! >:D
Grazie.
New Zealanders following in the footsteps of Ernest Rutherford.
Dear Dr. Hossenfelder
Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year. Thank you for your excellent videos and humour.
As a New Zealander I would be stoked if we were first to crack nuclear fusion, but I'm not holding my breath. Instead I will be installing solar next year, more for energy _security_ than cost. Cyclone Gabrielle was a wake up call, and then just last week the entire region lost power due to a lightning strike on the 220KV lines. In the next 6 years renewables will get even cheaper, and cheaper battery storage will make solar even more attractive. We already have a fusion reactor beaming huge amounts of energy to us every day - just have to make use of it!
Technically solar is fusion power. It's just the reactor is 150 million kilometers away from your energy capture system, so it's not super efficient.
Its pretty cool that you don't have night in NZ, and that you found solar panels that can work during monsoon and/or blizzard 👍
What I like about OpenStar's approach is that the plasma configuration seems naturally stable. Levitating a magnet is something that is not that tough to do. The question is about how they can cool the floating magnet properly (which they are working on). I think that may be a much easier problem than stabilizing plasma using feedback control.
Merry Christmas Sabine from Openstar. Don't eat too much stollen.
Thank you Sabine for producing these delightful programs which entertain while also educating. I've seen a very few lecturers in college level courses who manage to entertain while also imparting knowledge, but never anyone who does it as well as Sabine. I hope you are finding time and resources to also continue your efforts in music as well.
120 years and a week ago, wilbur wright flew for 12 seconds … 20 seconds by comparison is pretty good.
Merry Christmas, Sabine and thank you for your work.
Yes, it's exciting.
Is it practical - no
Will it be cost effective - no
Will it substantially address our power needs in the medium term (before 2050) - no
Does it absorb a ridiculous amount of innovation/R&D funding, denying more practical, realistic, and valuable innovation from accessing that capital - yes
You’re incorrectly assuming that people investing in fusion would invest into something else instead. Additionally, research being difficult is a very bad argument for not committing to it - with that logic we wouldn’t get done anything at all.
Fusion is arguably the most valuable tech research we are doing.
@CanIHasThisName I never said anything about the level of difficulty in relation to investment, just the return in value.
Private R&D investment is dominated by tax credit investment, i.e. the volume of capital available is because people are looking to offset liability and get a high return. In other words if they don't invest in one tech they look to invest in another, because that's how they get their tax benefit. The state investment on the other hand is dominated by civil servants' decisions, politicians looking for sexy messaging, and scientists looking for funding, the complex interplay between them is why it gets so much funding - that may or may not get relocated to other techs.
In the long term, if it's possible to solve the problems of fusion (it needs an efficiency increase of more than 100x at the moment), then it may be of value for energy in space but it's highly likely not to have any commercial value on Earth because of the cost.
It gets the volume of investment that it does because the whole industry isn't being honest about its viability and time to commercialisation.
I would love to have seen your opinion of the first time man took flight.
@mickmccrohon what, do you mean monk Eilmer of Wiltshire Abbey? It would have been the same - there's a lot we have to learn before we crack that problem.
It's estimated that (in real terms) $400bn has been spent in fusion research, over a 70 year period, yet there's still a need to increase efficiency by 2 orders of magnitude (100x) just to MATCH the power in, let alone get useable power out. Let's say to really make it efficient you need another order of magnitude that's 1000x more efficiency that's needed, and even if we have that today there would be a need to build the power plants, and that takes decades!!
Fusion isn't anywhere near that stage of commercialisation it needs to be at to command the level of investment that it's getting. Don't get me wrong, there would still be government funding, but not the amount it is getting or mega projects like ITER where they're basically trying to brute force the problem to get it to only lose half the power put in (input estimates are 300-500MWe, output is 175-200MWe)
@@mickmccrohon The Wright Brothers weren't trying to reinvent the Sun.
Any safe form of nuclear energy is worth trying to achieve. We may yet have to first try proven Thorium LFTR reactors and only then move to fusion if needed. Fusion is achievable visa self-organizing plasma's as focused specific energy is what is needed, not so much high temperatures. Nontheless. We need nuclear for the backbone of future energy supply. Without it there will be no long term prosperity, growth and perhaps even peace. So the more attention on nuclear energy the better...thnx Sabine
My chemistry professor in college came in one day and said that some tokomak somewhere had just nearly hit the break-even point and we could expect fusion power very soon. That was in '93. First of many times Ive been told fusion power was right around the corner.
What was wrong with that guy? Everyone in 1993 knew that fusion was 30 years away.
First of many times of people not understanding what was actually going on. It's a bit sad that it came from a chemistry professor, but I guess at least it wasn't a physics professor.
Even if someday in the sweet bye and bye someone achieves 'net energy output' we would still be years away from a device you can attach an electrical outlet to.
I've never heard anybody ask these companies, pointedly, how they plan to get the energy out to, say, a turbine. So what if you can generate energy by fusion in a torus of plasma surrounded by superconducting magnets at very low temperatures--how are you going to get that energy out and boil water (or other fluid) to spin a turbine, to turn a generator? I've never seen even a concept of a plan. Somewhere there has to be a heat exchange system, and a fluid flowing from hot to cold and back to hot again. That's thermodynamics. There's not even hand-waving. (OK, maybe magnetic fields? Maybe radiant heat transfer? But wait, we can get lots of radiant heat from all that light coming from the big fusion reactor in the sky. Storage is difficult, but way easier than controlled fusion.) I'm old. All these companies sound like Popular Mechanics from the 1960's.
Thank you. Dead on. Regardless of the scheme, everything I have seen for 50+years has left me with, "Okay, maybe. But how will you get the surplus energy OUT of it? What access is physically or thermally possible? Can the device itself take the heat of a sustained event?"
LOL Yep. There goes the free energy, when you have to repair and maintain turbines, replace turbines, replace piping, fix door hinges and supply coffee, while using only parts all rated for nuclear power plants.
I asked chatgpt, "Would a nuclear fusion plant's design for energy transfer from the hot core be similar to that of current fission reactors?" and it replied more or less, "Yep, heat is transferred from the hot core to primary coolant and then energy is transferred to a secondary steam plant."
To verify my understanding I asked chatgpt, "If the nuclear reactor and primary loop of a nuclear submarine were replaced with a fusion reactor and plant, could the secondary components in the submarine's propulsion plant remain unchanged?" and it replied generally yes with the exception that because of the high temperature fusion reactors operate that the primary coolant would not be water and that necessitates replacing the steam generators, the components that perform the heat transfer between primary and secondary sides of the system.
@@DoctorManglerThere are two big problems. You are alluding to the second one, making money. If it costs too much, it won't matter. The first problem is getting more energy out of it, than you put into it, and I'm not talking heat. I have a heat pump that can do that. I mean electricity.
Yeah every so called 'plan' for fusion power seems to be some variant of 1.spend a mountain of (other peoples) money (or five) to build a mindbogglingly complex, incredibly finicky machine, 2. produce marginally more energy than you put into the reaction, 3. ????, 4. build utopia from limitless fusion energy!!
I'm pretty sure we can't just go for fusion immediately. We need to advance material science to a degree where we can model the properties of any alloy and any compond in a practical timeframe. So we can create more easily manufactured superconductors, more heat or activation resistant materials for the inner sheilding, or make the manufacturing process for the current designs easier.
So basically first quantum computers, then high temp superconductors, and only then fusion
We live in hope for a better energy source in the future.
It is good to hear different time period from 30 years
This time next year Rodney, we'll be fusion-eers.
Cult Stuff.
Wonder how many people in this audience will get that reference!!
Happy Christmas, Sabina. Regarding fusion, like fission, the product is heat. You then need a heat engine to produce power. The heat has to come out of the reaction vessel. Probably means plumbing in a heat receptor and piping it out. UK power stations are mostly gas cooled, but the problem is getting enough energy out without it being too hot for the reactor components. To make a useful small power station, say 100MW,
(let's not be too ambitions), you probably need around 350 MW of heat piped out in fluid or gas, and a steam turbine (or Stirling engine?) to make mechanical energy to drive a generator. You know how hard this is in a fission power station, with the temperature quite low, so efficiently of conversion is also quite low. Do these New Zealand engineers have any plan for doing that?
From what I've seen, none of these projects have a firm plan for the operational power station.
Obvious things like maintenance of the irradiated components, the turbine cycle, etc are all "implementation details" that are assumed to be easy once they actually go far enough past break-even to work as a power plant.
Seeing how quickly solar and batteries are dropping in price, I think PV will be our "fusion" power for some time yet.
And there's the dark secret no one wants to bring up with fusion: even assuming these reactions EVERY produce a significant amount of excess energy, HOW THE HECK DO YOU USE IT?
As of yet NO ONE has put forth a design to actually recover and convert the energy from one of these fusion reactors into a useful form!
In the computer industry, this is called vaporware. Great for acquiring investors, not so much for delivering on promises. Also, Happy Holidays to Sabine and all here and everywhere.
@@buddypage11 In law it was called a confidence trick.
The interesting difficulty with this design is that the levitating torus can't be actively cooled (it doesn't touch anything and is completely surrounded by hot plasma), which means that this design must necessarily run in intervals of burning and re-cooling the levitating torus - if I understand this correctly.
All we need to do is to find a superconductor that works at the temperature of the sun's surface.
@@kimlground206 lol
You are correct! (I work at openstar)
@@pietgeursen7023 Wow, thanks for chiming in! How much energy is radiated to the reactor chamber walls in such an interval compared to the energy needed to put in the levitating torus for cooling and the current in the current test? What are the remaining challenges?
@@jth4242
First off: the current magnet does not and will not do fusion. The goal of this first machine is to build something similar to the ldx experiment (mentioned in the video) but with high temperature superconductor. If the heart of your question is about energy in vs out then energy out of the plasma is 0 because there's no fusion.
I'm not 100% sure how much energy we use to cool. But to give you some ball park intuition: we have 2 grunty off the shelf cryocoolers that run for ~2 days to cool from room temp. Re-cooling from a plasma shot cycle took ~2h. But that warming of the magnet is not from plasma, it's internal heat leak between the warm parts (the electronics + batteries at room temp) and the cryogenic parts of the magnet.
The power to charge the magnet is surprisingly low. ~100W for ~2days. Very ball park numbers.
Disclaimer: I'm just some guy who works there replying to yt comments while on holiday. This isn't official comms from the company lol.
Orville Wright's first flight on 17 December 1903 was twelve seconds. Twenty seconds sounds promising enough.
Wilbur and Orville were extending already proven technology, and did not need superconductors or temperatures approaching those on the surface of the sun to do it.
Show me one of these gadgets that will charge my phone or heat my house for twenty seconds and I'll jump right on the bandwagon.
Right. But how long did it take to fly 1h (I guess 1915-18 something, World War 1, 12 years)? How long did it take to cross the atlantic (1933, 30 years later). Do you see similar steps in fusion? I don't!
Merry Christmas Sabine! Thanks for all the brilliant videos🎉
it's really crazy how nobody is talking about the book the hidden path to manifesting financial power
Merry Christmas Sabine :)
Frohe Weihnachten :)
Thats about the same as LLM becoming an AGI
Spot on!
Merry Christmas Sabine to you and your whole family from Sydney Australia:)
That's a progress: for past decades it was always 20-somewhat years away from fusion, now it's only 6.
If they can really deliver in 6 :)
The investors are getting angsty
Happy Xmas Sabine 😊
these startups that are just draining infinite money need to be held accountable for making false promises when none of them have any significant results in 6 years. that's the people's money they are wasting.
"draining infinite money". No they are not. Entire global investment is a tiny fraction of the Pentagon budget - or Elon Musk's pile. And it's the beancounters not the engineers that have set this up. US bureacracy does not even separate capital investment from recurrent; very quaint.
5:09 - "The last time I tried holding something together for 20 seconds ... it didn't end well." You probably did better than I would have!
Fusion in New Zealand ? Finally putting those flightless damn Kiwis to work ! If you throw kiwis in the particles accelerator... we'll not much happens but maybe six years from now they will fuse together.
Kiwis might not fly but looks as though pigs might 😂
Have you heard of Ernest Rutherford?
Do you know what he achieved and where he came from?
A company recently celebrated its 20th. anniversary producing Superconducting devices exclusively... do you know where that company has operated for the last 20 years or it's name?
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. Merry Christmas and a prosperous new year! Go fusion go!
You can get all the energy you want from an existing nuclear reactor. It is called the sun!
Said the man, just after the Winter Solstice...
Please repeat that at midnight during winter.
In a sense, this is true, earth operated on this mode for millions of years. All biological life does this! But we are now a high tech society which need vast amounts of "artificial" energy, coal, gas, electricity every day.
Happy holidays too you too, Sabine. Love from Italy
Hey, fusion has always been fifty years away.
Now it's only ten!
You aged
Ur old
@@Savemefromtheoctipie You almost produced a thought there buddy
@@Theos-ne7nv☹️
Thank you, Dr. Hossenfelder, Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas !
From 30years to 6years,one step forward.
Sabine, where to donate for a new shirt?
Just press the "thanks" button or become channel member.
@benyomovod6904
This has been discussed. She has about a dozen identical shirts and she wears them for continuity.
Sehr interessanter Vortrag. (Danke für das Stichwort)
Man braucht einen zweiten künstlich kippbaren Pol damit man überhaupt erst ein 3 D - Phasen Transformatormagnetfeld
im Tokamack erzeugen kann. Dazu legt man z.B. elliptisch verschachtelte Spulen her aus einzeln verschachtelten Flachbandspulen (x -Phase) mit Schichtflachbandspulen aus Neodymnickelblech und einer Schicht isoliertes Kupferblech. Um diese legt man noch eine Facettenphase =(z-Phase) und ordnet das ganze im Kreis wie viele Facetten an. Darüber legt man eine kreisförmige spiralige Flachbandspule (y-Phase) auch aus Neodym und Kupferblech . Oben und unten legt man diese in den Boden und in den anderen Ring - Generator in die Decke gegenüberliegend. Hierdurch bekommt man bei impulsartiger gegenüberliegender Gradientenansteuerung einen zusätzlichen polaren Kippmagneten, den man im Kreis als Wanderfeld herumbewegen kann, wie einen echten 3 D - Phasentransformator. (Den es ja eigentlich noch gar nicht im Tokamak oder bei Iter voll umsetzbar und realisiert gibt.)
Durch circuläre Phasenabgriffe kann man dann die dritte Phase erstmalig realisieren, indem man den bisher nur 2 - 1/2 phasigen Tokamak voll im Kreis herum dann ansteuern kann mit kippbaren Polmagneten. Auch kann man die ineinander verschachtelten Elliptischen Spulen durch verschiedene Phasenanschnittsteuerungen linear abgleichen und dann recht gut ansteuern. Das Verschachtelungsmodell von 3:12 zeigt nur zwei gegenüberliegende teilverschachtelte elliptische Spulen mit fehlenden Phasenabgriffen und einem massiven Endmagneten auf der falschen Seite, eher außen rudimentär zur trapezförmigen Formanpassung. (wenn in die Mitte, die Tokamak - Zentral - Spule noch rein soll). Die 120 cirkulären einzelnen x - verschachtelten (10 x ineinander flachen verschachtelten) Ellipsenbandspulen, die außen umgebenden genauso etwas geformten z - Gegen - Phasenimpulsfacettenspulen, und die spiralig darüber gelegte y Phase, auch mit Phasenabgriffen für runde Polmagnetfelder außen (die beliebig dann nach innen oder außen steuerbar sind ), die in der zusätzlichen Höhenachse als Kippgradienten parallel oder gekreuzt je nach Beschaltung sich gegenüberliegend befinden, erzeugen das echte variable zusätzliche scharf umrandete Kippmagnet - 3 D - Phasenfeld. (das wäre nämlich mein perfektes Grund - Modell). Außen kommen die Vollspulenabgriffe. Innen kommen noch die 1/4 Phasen - Spulenabgriffe dran, damit nichts durcheinanderwirbelt. Aber trotzdem die abgestimmten Pol - Kipp - Phasen, präzise, wie bei einer einstellbaren Zentrifuge im Kreis antreibt. Über horizontale Reluktanzgeneratoren entstehen polare Kippachsenfelder.
Fusion predictions are always paced so that by the time the prediction fails the researchers have all retired. The 6 year prediction doesn't mean we'll have fusion in 6 years, it means that the researchers think that AI will put them all on the scrap heap in 6 years!
Since this is the private sector, I think the timeline is more that in 6 years the company will have folded and a few will have run off with some of the VC money but that's enough time for the news cycle to move on and for people to have forgotten about it.
I have a hunch that only investing in companies that do NOT make these claims pays better than the counter strategy.
I have a hypothesis that one thing that brings technologically clueless companies to invest in such experimental enterprises is it provides the investors with a greenwashing opportunity. It appears that many of the private investors depend upon nuclear fusion energy fans who operate consulting businesses. There are very few sources, of truly independent, critical assessments.
Fusion is a pipe dream, trying to reproduce the interior process of stars will always be beyond our reach.
Good job that that is not what is happening then. An electro-magnetic field is not a gravitational field.
Einstein thought that we will never be able to use energy of the atom. He was one of the smartest scientists of the time, but was wrong nonetheless. Who are we to say that fusion is not achievable on Earth, especially when it has been demonstrated? It's an engineering problem, and the question is not "is it possible", it's "when".
Theres' a saying "Fusion power is 5 to 10 years away and always will be."
This has proven to be true for the last 60+ years and show no signs of ever changing.
well, we've been "20 years away" for like 60 years... so, now it's just "6 years away", so we might do it by 2200
That's something I never would have thought of, but I think this just sort of moves the problem under a different rug fundamental to Tokamaks. I genuinely don't think the fusion nut will be cracked until more Stellarators are built and tested
Merry Christmas to all!
and in return😊
@@Thomas-gk42
Thank you!
I'm old enough to remember the Zeta project in the late 1950s. Unlimited fusion energy was just round the corner then and still is. If I was in charge of research funding , it would be going towards Thorium
I'll believe it when I'm heating my house with it.
For your stance of defending tho in your weird illuminating way the cookiest theories as well instead of just saying "dats wrong" i award you the gift of well wishes on this xmas season.
Happy Holidays!
I would like to hear about eletrogravitics, and the 0 point field, please. You do great work!!! 🌎🌞
You might want to make a video about fusion breeding. Tritium--deuterium fusion gives 17.6 Mev, but if you use the neutron to breed either U233 from thorium or P39 from U238, you can get 200 Mev from fission. It might be possible to get more than one fissile nucleus from each fusion, which gives more than 10 times more energy. That means that the existing fusion devices can produce net energy.
I've been hearing this for half a century, with estimates between 5 and 20 years. I'll hope for the best, keep tabs on the research, but expect nothing.
Merry Christmas to everyone who makes this channel so great!
I'm so glad that I switched in graduate school 30+ years ago from plasma physics (working on tokamaks) to particle physics to pure math. I've would've spent my entire career seeing no progress in my field.
Thank You Sabine for all the information and entertainment You have shared with us this year.
Merry Christmas and Best Wishes to You and Your Family for the Holiday Season !
Why do firms keep promising things they don't know they can match? And, more importantly, why does anyone keep believing them?
$$$$$. And dreams of $$$$$$
You are absolutely right about energy access. And that is why the powers that be banned/restricted fission. And it stays that way despite the new tech that makes it safe, cheap, reliable. They POB can't have that. Its all about control. If its starts to look like fusion is a thing that is going to work on a commercial scale the resistance will be whipped up over something.
Clean energy and Merry Christmas 🎄
Very much hoping it'll work this time around with all these start up and the breadth of the funding! I remember all too well when I graduated from university early 1990s and in my last Physics class we looked at feasibility - though back then we only tackled the confinement approach with the magnetic fields and were hoping twenty years or better. That was 30+ years ago.
Merry Holidays. I had a good chuckle with that title.
Marry Christmas Sabine!! have a great time with your family.
A physicist with good communication skills and a great sense of humour 😊🇩🇪🇬🇧
at University in 1981 I had a corse "Alternative Energies" - so at the time we talked about two Nuclear fision projects, one in Germany, the other in Paris. They managed to run for a fraction of e second - Like the Thorium salt reactor it was just sadly neglected - 'Studing Electrical engineering - I was fascinatet - everybody neglects that the closed off area around Tschernobyl seems to be around half the size of Germany. Smart solutions would be great
We've been 6 years away from making energy from fusion for over a century now.
I am mostly interested in the following, China has plans to develop a new approach to nuclear fusion using electric fields. In September 2022, the Chinese government approved the construction of a nuclear fusion reactor that utilizes a 'Z-pinch' machine. This technique generates a powerful electric field to compress and heat deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen, enabling nuclear fusion to occur. That could be really interesting.