Fusion Energy Is Coming. No, Really. | Answers With Joe

can we talk about movies for just a second it's 2018 it's three years past where Marty McFly traveled and back to the future part two and we still haven't seen all the cool stuff they predicted in that movie goods where's my hoverboard where's my aluminum sunglasses where's my double tie I want my double tie but more than anything where's my mr. fusion you know the device that dog Brown puts on the back of the DeLorean that was just a few scraps of garbage created as much energy as the lightning bolt that they had to use earlier in the film mr. fusion clearly was named after mr. coffee by the way which is also a good source of energy but in fairness back in 1985 it was not weird at all to think that fusion would be happening in the next 30 years the problem is they thought the same thing 30 years before that it's been said that fusion is the energy source of the future and always will be but the last several years have actually seen a whole new wave of fusion research and we're breaking new milestones all the time could fusion really be finally right around the corner nuclear energy is nothing new we've been using nuclear energy to turn our lights on and heat our homes and create dankmemes for decades now because splits a crowd it's far less polluting than almost any other kind of energy but the pollution it does create is a doozy nuclear waste is dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years which creates a whole new problem because how do you let somebody ten thousand years in the future know hey you know don't dig here it's kind of the opposite of the clock of the long now instead of building a monument that people will want to visit for 10,000 years we're creating a place that people will want to stay away from for 10,000 years this is the worst game of geocaching ever this is a coarse nuclear fission which harnesses energy from splitting huge atoms like uranium in a chain reaction but this isn't a natural process I mean radioactive decay occurs in nature but it's not what's a powers the Sun and the stars as nuclear fusion fusion is basically the opposite of fission while fission is taking one large atom and splitting it into two atoms vision fuses smaller atoms into bigger atoms wait a fusion is fusing is fission pissing I am fixing this Brent I am fixing this paper I am fizzing this dog dog so hard it is in the Sun this works by forcing hydrogen atoms together so tightly that they fuse in the helium which takes a lot of pressure to do because hydrogen nuclei are basically protons and protons are both positively charged and repel each other luckily the Sun is insanely huge it is ninety nine point eight percent of the mass of our solar system remember this picture of North America on Jupiter Jupiter is only a fraction of a percent the size of the Sun so if that much mass and energy it just crushes down into this insane cauldron of pressure that releases enormous amounts of energy many times by mass more energy than fishing and the end result is helium which we're kind of running out of anyway this is why the idea of fusion power is so alluring the fuel is plentiful it creates more energy than almost any other type of energy production out there it has almost no impact on the environment and it's all the time it's regular it's controllable it's not like wind and solar that's intermittent it truly is the holy grail of energy production but in order to achieve this we have to recreate conditions at the core of the Sun okay how hard can that be hard like really clinging playing hard as hard as fizzing a dog so hard yes the conditions that we're concerned about here are temperature and pressure what kind of temperature how does a million degrees Celsius sound hot sounds hot but how do you contain something that's 100 million degrees without melting the container that it's in by suspending it with superconducting electromagnets electromagnets cooled by liquid helium and just a few degrees above absolute zero as cars go sacked points out in their video this is the greatest temperature differential in the entire universe followed closely behind by microwave burrito now that's a technique called magnetic confinement another technique called inertial confinement takes a small pellet of hydrogen fuel in bombard it from all sides by super powerful lasers the history of fusion energy is a history of human beings trying to create a Sun on plan that's why it's sometimes called a star in a jar the first experiments with nuclear fusion took place in particle accelerators in the 1930 followed closely after by the world's first thermonuclear bomb because of course the first thing we're gonna do with it is blow some stuff up but at the same time we're blowing stuff up we are also coming up with the first magnetic confinement reactor designs called the tokamak and the stellarator which by the way who are the best band names I've ever heard - a tokamak was created by Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tam both scientists in the Soviet Union and it basically looks like a donut that the plasma circles inside up held in place by powerful electromagnets decelerator design proposed by Lyman Spitzer at Princeton is the same idea as a tokamak but it twists the magnetic field around the plasma in a 3d form to cause it to compress further and create more collisions and fusion opportunities Lyman Spitzer by the way is the guy who the Spitzer Space Telescope is named after meanwhile inertial confinement reactors started springing up in forms that they called the linear pinch design or the Z pinch which basically compresses plasma in a linear form instead of in a circle experiments like Zanna Inspector 3 in the UK started running tests and they were able to hold a stable plasma for 300 microseconds it's actually a big deal so at the time with fission reactors starting to come up and feed energy into the grid everything was coming up nuclear at the time and so many physicists were assuming that fusion would follow the same trajectory and we'd have homes powered by fusion energy in about 20 years yeah that didn't happen it turns out that creating plasma and getting atoms to fuse is one thing creating a stable plasma that you can actually get energy out of that's something else fusion technology would progress in fits and starts over the years but the progress always seems so small compared to the hype and the promise around fusion energy yes fusion energy can give us limitless energy with no pollution yes we have a stable plasma for five seconds the surge of experimentation in the 50s was great but it didn't lead to any tangible benefits that the general public could see and again in the 70s there was a big wave of headlines around fusion energy and again nothing flurry of new fusion reactor development sprang up yet again in the 90s this time centered around new types of hydrogen the hiset opes deuterium and tritium were being used this time around and this time in much bigger reactors that had a new international cooperation around them projects like the tokamak fusion test reactor in Princeton in the joint European torus or jet in the UK which was an international collaboration that did achieve the world's first controlled release of fusion power milestones were shattered in the 90s and some of the key parameters of nuclear fusion being temperature pressure and time of sustained plasma some of the reactors in the United States actually were able to produce several hundred million degrees Celsius reactions in the JT 60 and Japan broke records for sustained plasma time excitement for fusion energy was at a fever pitch because for the first time we were actually creating energy from fusion it just wasn't as much as the energy we were putting into it creating the conditions of the Sun's core in a lab turns out takes a lot of energy and therein lies the rub you want to be getting me energy out of reactor more than you're putting into the reactor and while we were getting really close to that break-even point we weren't quite there so once again popular interest faded there was a little bit of a Charlie Brown trying to kick the football thing going on this proven claims a cold fusion the kept popping up didn't help things out much either but now in the 2010s we're seeing a whole new wave of nuclear research bringing up and this time the projects are scaled up and bigger with even more international partners the Korean superconducting tokamak Advanced Research reactor or star broke the world record in 2016 by holding a high-performance plasma for 70 seconds that record was quickly beat by China at the experimental advanced superconducting tokamak or East by holding a plasma for over a hundred seconds in 2017 in scientists at the Alka Torcy mod reactor at MIT broke the record for pressure at 2.05 atmospheres in 2016 but one of the most talked-about projects is a window Stein 7x stellarator reactor which if that name doesn't give you a nerd chubby I don't know what will this is being built at the Max Planck Institute in Germany in collaboration with the US and it was actually designed by a supercomputer to get the electromagnetic fields just right and it's proven to be incredibly accurate only one error in a hundred thousand it's also the biggest stellarator ever built which when fully operational should be able to hold a plasma for 30 minutes the first test of the seven acts began in 2015 just to measure the magnetic field conditions with helium gas and they created their first hydrogen plasma in 2016 reaching temperatures of a hundred million degrees Celsius for a quarter of a second and then it shut down for upgrades it's expected to be fully operational 2019 with a steady-state operation soon after but the project is getting the most attention these days is the International thermonuclear experimental reactor or ITER it's currently under construction in France and ITER is designed to be sort of a bridge between the experimental world of fusion energy in the commercial world of fusion energy production kind of the last step before we have actual fusion power plants out there Hyder is a joint project supported by the 28 member countries of the European Union plus Switzerland China Russia the United States India Japan and Korea this is a project that is not messing around ITER once operational will be the first fusion reactor to smash the break-even barrier and produce 10 times the amount of energy going into it it's expected to produce 500 megawatts of power while operating on 50 megawatts on top of breaking those important milestones ITER is also supposed to test the systems that would be needed to actually run a functional nuclear power plant from fusion and it's not gonna actually be plugged into the grid itself but it just kind of sort of create the blueprint for a project called demo which will be the first nuclear fusion power plant set to go up in the 2030s this is a massive project as you can imagine with all those countries involved but it is the first project that's expected to create net energy which will pave the way for commercial nuclear fusion so yeah it feels like every other month or so we're hearing about some new breakthrough in nuclear fusion so excitement is building around it again but haven't we seen this movie before well yes but there is a difference this time and that difference is private industry just like the private companies SpaceX Blue Origin and rocket lab or heralding a new space race private industry is getting into the fusion game as well in developing their own reactors with commercial applications because let's face it the company that cracks the code and actually puts commercial fusion energy on the market is going to own the world and right now there are multiple private companies vying for world domination each of them with their own unique spin on the idea the cleverly named tokamak energy of the UK is building a small compact spherical tokamak called the st 40 which is the first step toward a fusion power station by the year 2030 SPARC is a collaboration between MIT and a start-up Kok Commonwealth fusion systems which has raised over 50 million dollars from companies like any an Italian oil company they have the goal of getting a working reactor online in 15 years try alpha energy is working on a modified pinch design that forces the two hydrogen plasmas together and then uses neutral beam injections to maintain a tight field reverse configuration to accelerate fusion reactions you know that thing in general fusion based out of Canada has a unique hybrid design that surrounds the hydrogen plasma with a liquid metal which is then compressed together by Pistons which creates fusion reactions that heat the liquid metal which is then piped out to boil water to create steam which turns turbines for electricity and it does this once a second almost like a fusion combustion engine general fusion also has the backing of Jeff Bezos - tek-tips did a walk through the facility it did a really cool break down the whole thing I'll put the video right here and all these private companies have an incentive to accelerate the adoption of nuclear fusion energy because let's face it that's when they get paid and they're all angling for around the 2030s in other words we've gone from saying that nuclear fusion is 20 years away to saying that it's 12 years away so that's an improvement so is it time to get excited again I will say that while researching this I found out that there have been a lot more progress in fusion technologies than I was aware of and I do think that private industry getting involved does indicate a bit of a tipping point because people don't invest money in something unless it's proven or close to it and that does get me a little excited I mean I get a lot of comments from people who say that government shouldn't be spending taxpayer money on scientific research that that should be left up to private industry because that government's gonna screw it all up and look I get the sentiment I I do but I think that that early research kind of has to be publicly financed because there's just no incentive for a private company to put that kind of money into it it kind of needs that public financing to get the research up to the point where private industry can take over and that's when real change occurs and the change that we're talking about here is monumental clean energy real clean energy 24 hours a day from the most abundant fuel source on the planet with no environmental impact whatsoever this is the dream and it's worth it some would argue will actually be screwed if we don't get it and while the ever-shifting timeline is frustrating there there is a side of this that I find really inspirational and that's all the people who have been working on this for all these decades knowing full well that they're never gonna actually get to enjoy it this is all stuff is gonna happen outside of their lifetimes you know planting trees under whose shade they shall never sit and if that isn't the best of humanity I don't know what it is just tell me what you think are you jaded about fusion are you excited about is it too early to tell talk about it down in the comments no I purposefully didn't get into the weeds of the nuclear fusion process like what actually happens in the core of the Sun with the atoms and all that stuff because you know you got to pick your battles but if you're a curious person then you want to know more about that a great place to start is brilliant work longtime viewers this channel have heard me talk about brilliant a lot but this is the exactly the type of subject that brilliant is great for it's this high level super granular type of stuff with a lot of detail that you really have to work out every little step of the way and that's what makes brilliant so unique they take a very complex topic and break it down so that you can understand it and then you can apply that understanding to other areas of your life but yeah brilliant has an astronomy course that covers several areas of astronomy from the size of the universe to exoplanets but one section of this course focuses specifically on the life cycles of stars from a hot cloud of gas to a supernova explains the whole thing go - brilliant dork slice answers with Joe and you can sign up to get free access to their weekly puzzles and brainteasers to help keep you smart and the first 295 people to sign up for the premium subscription that gives you access to all their courses get 20% off your subscription until the Sun dies that's a long time if you like this channel if you like learning I think you'll like brilliant - so brilliant org slice answers with Joe links down in the description thanks to brilliant for sponsoring this video and a big huge thanks to the answer files on patreon that make everything so much easy around here I can't thank you enough there's some new people that have joined one give them a shout-out just real quick we've got Rory McCabe Phillip Petra Paolo and Valentine Brandon Miller Tommy Waldo Lowe a hasan ahmed mark a Putman and john Binstead thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get access to stuff that normal people don't get to see normal people normals you can go to patreon.com/scishow good joke please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here please check out some of my other stuff and if you like those you can hit subscribe and you'll get to see my videos every Monday and Thursday and also hit the bell and you'll get notifications that way you won't miss anything because YouTube's starting to throttle back that kind of stuff all right you guys go out have an eye-opening week and I'll catch you next Monday love you guys take care okay you go girl you go girl I play with your doggy on the cameras

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,441,983

Rating: 4.8431454 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, nuclear fusion, fusion energy, fusion power plant, tokamak, stellarator, general fusion, tri-alpha energy, tokamak energy, linus tech tips nuclear fusion, kurzgesagt fusion, sustainable energy, nuclear fusion reactor, ITER, Joint European Torus, alternative energy, future technology, Wendelstein 7-x, lyman spitzer

Id: KZm_mpbKX5c

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/BaconOverdose]

It's really annoying he keeps interrupting his video with these gags that aren't funny at all.

Fusion energy is really interesting as-is, no reason to try to keep me watching with lame jokes.

Rest of the video was fine though.