4 Fusion Breakthroughs From The Last Year | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org about a year ago I did a video on nuclear fusion and how close we actually are to having nuclear fusion as an energy source because there's actually a bit of a race going on right now there's a lot happening turned out to be a pretty popular video in fact it's the fourth most watched video in the channel but that might just be because I introduced the world to a couple of really awesome fans what I pay the guy for that graphic yeah I'm gonna use it twice so if you haven't watched that video from last year that might be a good place to start I'll put a link right here but one of the things that I've talked about in that video was how you know nuclear fusion has been about 50 years away for about 50 years now and there's been multiple waves of different technologies that have come and gone but this time it is kind of different this time there are new ideas being tested some of them created by supercomputers and AI and it's not just public agencies anymore there's also private companies are getting involved and they're backed by some serious money and if there's one thing that's true about the human race it's that money makes things happen and there is a lot of money to be made for somebody who corners this market so with all that in mind there has been some notable breakthroughs in the world of nuclear fusion and we're gonna talk about a few of them right now before we jump into the list here just in case there's some mini noobs out there that aren't familiar with why this is such a big deal I'm gonna pone you with some knowledge this will be fun I haven't pwned a noob in a while mostly because nobody's used that term in like 10 years our world runs on electricity without it we pretty much get sent back to the Victorian age which was a nightmare yeah we don't want to go back to that in almost every way that we make energy involves turning a turbine that then powers a generator that makes electricity almost every different type of electricity is just a different way of turning a turbine hydroelectric uses dams and rivers to direct water over a turbine that turns the generator wind uses big huge blades to capture wind power that turns a turbine coal natural gas and nuclear are all really steam generators they basically heat water to the boiling point and then the pressure of cosmic steam turns a turbine makes electricity solar really is the only electricity generation that doesn't use some kind of turbine power to get it done they just basically collects photons and turns them into electrons it's more passive and less active of course all of these power sources have their issues not everybody lives next to a dam or a river for hydroelectric it's not windy everywhere in the world the Sun isn't always shining and the coal and the oil and the natural gas those create greenhouse gases and nuclear creates toxic sludge that could kill people for 10,000 years and another thing about coal oil natural gas and nuclear is that we have to extract stuff out of the ground to make that work so that actually takes more energy to get that fuel and you know it's a limited resource we are eventually going to run out of that but nuclear fusion has got none of those flaws the fuel is cheap and abundant you can do it anywhere anytime there's very little waste product associated with it it's almost the perfect energy source except for one major flaw it's that we can't do it turns out pretty high up on the list of mandatories foreign energy sources you know that it work now to be fair we can do it we can fuse hydrogen into helium and create energy out of that but the problem is that we put more energy in than we get out which is obviously not the idea fusion energy of course involves smashing hydrogen atoms together and fusing them into helium atoms which produces massive amounts of energy it basically is what the Sun does and this is usually done by confining a superheated plasma of hydrogen ions inside of a magnetic field in a doughnut shaped torus called a stellarator or a tokamak although there are some newer designs being explored that use a sphere shape or a cylindrical shape to sort of smash the hydrogen atoms together from all directions and create energy that way so anyway that gives a basic rundown again if you want to go over all the details up with the link to the old video down the description that kind of spells it all out for you but long story short what we're trying to do is improve on these designs that we already have out there so that we can get it to where we're putting less energy in than we're getting out net positive energy basically and that leads me to the first breakthrough China's artificial Sun reaches 100 million degrees I talked in the last video about China's East reactor which stands for experimental advanced superconducting tokamak it's been operating since about 2006 and it's one of the largest tokamak reactors in the world well in November of last year they broke records by sustaining a plasma for over 10 seconds at a hundred million degrees now 100 million degrees sounds hot because it is that's six times hotter than the inside of the Sun and it's capable of producing 10 megawatts of energy so this was not only one of the hottest temperatures ever achieved in a reactor it was also one of the longest times that plasma has been sustained which is kind of the biggest problem in nuclear fusion that's sustaining that superhot plasma now in this case they were able to sustain this plasma using a few different techniques including lower hybrid wave heating which means oscillating ions and electrons in the plasma electrons cyclotron wave heating which means using a static magnetic field and a high frequency electromagnetic field ion cyclotron resonance heating which means accelerating ions inside a cyclotron and neutral beam ion heating or injecting a beam of accelerated neutral particles into the plasma I mean you know those are pretty obvious things scientists at East are gonna continue working on this they're combining different methods or adding and subtracting here and there the goal being to get the plasma to go longer and longer until it becomes self-sustaining Princeton stabilizes plasma with RF waves now the trouble with plasma and the reason it's so hard to stabilize is because plasma is basically a superheated fluid which means fluid dynamics come into play in fluid dynamics are chaos and you know that makes it beautiful to look at all the little swirling Eddie's the chaos you never know where anything is gonna go that's what you know fluid dynamics is all these tiny little particulate pieces of matter being worked on by forces that are you know working on all the little neighboring particulates around it it causes chaos and randomness and it's it's nice to look at but if you're trying to create a stable plasma it's kind of your worst enemy so the scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory or the P ppl working along with the Department of Energy have found a way to possibly keep this chaos and check using radio frequency waves and a paper published in Physical Review Letters in January this year what they found was that these swirling particles can create what they call magnetic bubbles or magnetic Islands in the plasma and it's these little bubbles that can trigger a disruptive events that can make the plasma unstable so their idea was to use radio frequency waves to create what they call RF current condensation it's basically a concentration of radio waves right in the middle of that bubble to keep it from getting any bigger smaller bubbles means less disturbance to the plasma less disturbance means more of that sweet sweet plasma stability the study was led by physicist Allan Ryman and NAT fish both of whom look exactly like the scientist at the beginning of every disaster movie that nobody takes seriously but let's hope their work is taken seriously when project like either come online in the next 10 years tae announces their Copernicus reactor one of the most exciting aspects of the new fusion race if not the most exciting aspect of it is the fact that private companies are getting involved in this now and one of those private companies is called tae used to stand for tri alpha energy they've been working on fusion energy for about 20 years now but have recently raised over five hundred million dollars from such players as Google and Microsoft based off the success of their norman reactor this is a type of reactor known as a colliding beam fusion reactor or CBF are in a field reverse configuration and in 2017 they were able to create plasma with it at 20 million degrees this is a design that they're still tweaking and they plan to make breakeven energy with it in the next few years but in January they announced their next generation reactor called the Copernicus reactor this simply put is a scaled-up fusion reactor that they think will be online and energy positive by 2023 obviously an energy positive reactor is something that can be commercialized and sold all around the world which would put them at the head of the market now firsta market doesn't mean it's gonna be the one that comes out on top remember the zune but all disruptions start small it's like a dam holding back a lake full of water before it breaks there's always a leak physicists flip the d oh yeah they flip the D just last week a paper was published in the Physical Review Letters that shows an experiment that was done in San Diego that sounds really simple but apparently worked so basically if you do a cross section of a tokamak reactor you get something of a D shape with the flat part of the D on the inside of the torus well these scientists got ahold of an old tokamak reactor called the D III D or May or maybe it's D 3 D I don't know there's a lot of D's in here and they basically reverse that yeah they reconfigure the reactor so the flat part of the deal was on the outs instead of on the inside they thought this might actually help create a more stable plasma turns out they weren't wrong so the way they break it down is there's a couple of different types of plasma there's h mode plasma and L mode plasma h mode is tighter more constricted and hotter but it's also more unstable whereas L mode is not as constricted and it's not as hot in fact it's not nearly hot enough to actually produce fusion but they use it so that they can study different types of plasma so the researchers created an L mode plasma in that reverse D shape and what they found was it it actually got hot enough well past the point where it would normally turn into an h mode plasma but it still stayed in that el mode plasma and it even had pressures that were high enough to create fusion in a typical reactor now this diid reactor didn't have enough power to actually create any kind of fusion out of it but they've been doing this long enough that they know how this these kinds of energy scale up to bigger reactors and they're able to say with pretty good confidence that if done in a bigger reactor this could actually produce a much more stable plasma now this sounds incredibly simple and you might wonder why they never did this before but that shape that D shape in the tokamak reactor had been done that way for many years for lots of different reasons that might not work in this new configuration not to mention in order to reconfigure a large tow kinetic reactor for that you basically have to like completely tear it apart and start over from scratch so it would cost millions of dollars to do this it's still interesting stuff that they found out but we don't know for sure if this will ever come to fruition now whether any of these individual breakthroughs ever come to fruition or not is not really the point the point is this is just a few of dozens of advancements and breakthroughs that have happened just in the last year and that's what it's going to take to get to this ultimate energy source you know we love this idea of the renegade scientist that goes off and has a Eureka moment and comes up with some breakthrough idea but really it's usually done in tiny tiny increments over and over and over again whittling down at the problem until you get it right yes Fusion has been a long time coming and yeah it's still probably gonna be another ten years or so before a fusion reactor is powering any homes much longer before they're everywhere but there is reason to be hopeful I cover a lot of scary doom and gloom stuff on this channel but I'm happy to say that this is one of those topics that has a steady stream of positive good news coming out of it so I'm really optimistic about those and there's a good life lesson here you know chipping away at big problems to create smaller problems you can solve a little bit at a time as a great way to go through life and if you want to be better at solving problems one good place to start is the daily problems feature I'm brilliant don't work you've heard me talk about brilliant before you know there the online learning platform that teaches you course scientific concepts by walking through a series of problems so that you can learn to think like a scientist but they've also got daily problems to help you build a daily learning habit every day you can take five minutes or so to solve a daily problem and if you want to go further into that specific topic you can go into one of their courses and learn more or not maybe you can just learn a random fun thing that either way it's a fun way to engage your mind viewers this channel can get free access to brilliants weekly brain teasers and puzzles by going to brilliant org slash inches with Joe and the first 200 people to sign up for the full subscription the premium subscription that gets access to all their courses can get 20% off for life I love it you'll love it brilliant org sliced answers with Joe links down the description big 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this is your first time here check out this video Google thinks you'll like that or any of my other videos and if you do like them maybe hit subscribe because I come back every Monday and every Thursday with fun science and futurism topics alright thanks again for watching you guys go out have an eye-opening week and I'll see you on Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 837,157

Rating: 4.8559194 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, fusion energy, fusion power, sustainable energy, clean energy, EAST reactor, Princeton University, TAE, TAE Copernicus, Reverse D, Tokamak, Stellarator, artificial sun, fusion breakthrough

Id: lRa798QVEFQ

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/gimme-rewards]

Where is anything about wendelstein 7x goddamn it

[u/OckhamsTazer]

Fusion power generation is the hardest thing we've ever tried to do, I hope it happens in my lifetime.