Fusion Power Explained! | Dr. Dennis Whyte | EP 424

hello everyone I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June Tammy and I an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the US you can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book out November 2024 we who wrestle with God I'm looking forward to this I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon bye-bye it is like the the Holy Grail of Fus of energy the things and this why it's because it it it it actually uses very few raw materials to build the thing if you build it effectively and the fundamental fuel source is essentially inexhaustible on on Earth and freely available to everyone it's like that that's why you pursue [Music] it hello everyone I had the privilege today to speak with Dr Dennis white who like me is a Dennis of a small town in western Canada small Prairie town I'll be that as it may he's also one of the world's foremost authorities on nuclear fion and has been at the spearhead of uh both technical Technical and Commercial projects to make fusion technology a reality and fusion offers the opportunity essentially if it can be mastered of unlimited energy and potentially at a low cost so it's the ultimate in transformative Technologies we talked about the fact too that the fusion Revolution which has been promised let's say for decades which isn't that long a time frame All Things Considered is now being facilitated by tremendous advances in materials technology and and computational technology and that La just last year there was one variant of fusion technology that produced for the first time more energy than it consumed which is a milestone on the pathway towards True commercial viability and so we talk a lot about exactly what Fusion Energy is how it differs from standard nuclear energy where we are in the process to transitioning let's say to the kind of future that would be um endless clean energy at an extraordinarily low price right and that really brings with it the possibility of lifting all the remaining poor people in the world out of poverty if we could if we could just get that right so it's fairly technical discussion it'll be very appealing to you engineering and science types but for everybody who's interested in the issue of energy more broadly and the science fiction reality that the world is about to become then follow along with us so thank you very much Dr White for agreeing to talk to me today we might as well Jump Right In I think the thing we could do for our viewers and listeners that would be most useful to begin with is to tell them is for you to tell them what Fusion Energy is and how that differs from standard nuclear energy like just like a rationale for the pursuit of Fusion Energy and a place and placing of it in the proper context with regard to our pursuit of Advanced Energy and reliable energy supplies right so Fusion is the process of fusing together the most abundant and the lightest element hydrogen uh into heavier elements um so it actually changes the element and this is the process that powers the universe because it Powers uh All Stars including our own sun and you can think of a star our own Sun a big conversion Factory it's like a standard burner in this sense that it takes the huge masses of hydrogen that the sun is made out of uh and in the center of it where the conditions are meet the requirement for Fusion it converts the hydrogen into helium uh and by that process uh releases staggering amounts of energy per reaction um so um you know usually when I comment in public about Fusion it's like so Fusion makes life possible in the universe because it's the it's the radiant heat that comes from stars that makes life possible in a place like the planet Earth um so it is the you think of it it's the quintessential or fundamental energy source of the universe that's that's the the starting point so it distinguishes why is it such an effective energy source it's because it changes the element right so what happens is that if you take the mass of the starting particles of this before you fuse them together they they have larger mass than the particles that result from this and you go but how can that be because we all learned in school that you know Mass cannot be destroyed or created but this is what Einstein realized was that in fact mass and energy are the same thing and then when you convert them in these processes you end up with energy uh and it's it's it's hard to imagine how much of a different process this is than either fision or standard chemical reactions which is basically What We Run the World on today in terms of in terms of comparing it to chemical energy the average energy released per reaction or per mass of particle is about 10 million times larger that's it's amazing right so this this is this is why stars on our own Sun can last for 10 billion years I mean there's an enormous amount of hydrogen in in the Sun but if it was running on a chemical process like burning hydrogen like you would think of in a fuel cell or something like that it would only last for a few thousand years it lasts for 10 billion years that's the difference between them um and with respect to fision it's actually there's a relation there in the sense that fion changes the elements as well too but it's literally the opposite process fion as the name implies splits of parts or fions the most UN stable heaviest elements that exist like uranium uh and again by this equivalent of energy and mass it releases energy but it's a completely different physical process and then we can discuss a little bit more about what that means but that at the starting point you can say you know the universe already voted F Fusion is the energy source of the universe just the question is how do you actually harness it on Earth um and the consequences of harnessing it are very different than either chemical or fossil fuel energy or standard nuclear energy now you said that it's in the deeper reaches of the Sun that the fusion reactions take place and the Sun is extraordinarily large and um the conditions there are very much unlike the conditions on Earth so what are the conditions under which Fusion becomes possible let's say on the Cosmic Landscape and then how is it that those might be duplicated how is it even possible to duplicate those on Earth and also how is it possible to duplicate them on Earth without things going dreadfully wrong right yeah so right so the conditions in the set so I'll take our it it varies from star to star actually there's slightly there there's nuances to the differences and different types of stars but I'll take our own Sun as the example it's the easiest one so um the as you imagine like in the center of the earth like we learned this in in in in elementary school like there's like there's different layers to the Earth right you have an outer cold cross and as you get towards the center because of the pressure exerted by gravity and the the the core and the manth these are all higher temperature and they're much denser because they're under so much pressure the same thing happens in the sun which is actually larger much larger than the earth and what you can think of is as you go from the surface of the sun which has got um is contact with outer space that has minimum pressure and it's actually the coldest part of the Sun so around 5,000 de and as you start going towards the center of sun the temperature keeps increasing the pressure keeps increasing and eventually when you reach the center of the sun it's it's approx approximately 20 million degrees Celsius uh in this in the center of the sun it's under those conditions that basically the fusion reaction can start to occur in significant quantities and that's what's required ired uh for a Star to essentially ignite is that there's sufficient conditions of particularly temperature and pressure that allow enough Fusion reactions to occur that it starts to keep itself hot to allow other Fusion reactions to occur so um this is interesting is that there are there are entities even our own syst solar system you know which didn't quite make it to Stars so there's actually an Arthur SE which one was it I think 2010 right Arthur C Clark brilliant scientist and writer postulated that that at the end of that story you might remember that Jupiter is turned by the aliens into another Sun into in our in our in our solar system it's that's not quite totally possible but it is interesting Jupiter basically has a very similar composition to the sun it just didn't get quite big enough and hot enough in the center to start triggering enough Fusion reactions to make it a star um so it what so what this means is that you know fusion occurs naturally only really in one place in the universe and that is in the center of of of of stars because that's the place where you can get the conditions of a particularly temperature that allow it to remain hot enough uh to be able to sustain the fusion reactions um and quickly like why why is that needed it's because this process of pulling the hydrogen pushing them together to fuse means that you have to overcome extraordinary large forces which don't want them to get close to each other which is a basic force of nature it's the electromagnetic force because the electrical repulsion between those two particles this doesn't want them to come together so you have to have high average energy essentially overcome that barrier and get them to fuse you can think of like we use analogies like you have to have your match or your your kindling hot enough to get the big fire started well in this case you you sort of have to get enough average temperature or energy to start up the reaction and to get it and to get it going so that those are those are the requirements um so this comments then as to why we could imagine that you could make this happen on Earth is um the requirement here is actually not so much around the energy because for almost a hundred years we've actually induced Fusion reactions on Earth with Accel with particle accelerators this is one of the first things that was discovered actually when particle accelerators were developed in the 1930s um the question is about how you maintain the temperature of this medium of the of the hydrogen fuel that allows it to stay hot enough for it to keep fusing um and the Sun and our and stars work by the fact that how how is it allowed that the center of the Sun so much hotter 20 million degrees than you know how do how can it not es this heat Escape well it does escape with finite probability or time scales but a very long time scales like you know orders of a million years or something like this and the reason this is happening is because it's the sun's own gravity which is containing this hot core which disallows it to escape and dissipate and therefore cool down and then stop the fusion reactions from occurring so this is why star it turns out gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces by a lot like many many orders of magnitude and so for this reason in order for Fusion to be viable on Earth you can't do it the same by the same exact same process that a star works because it takes something the size of a star so with with a few exotic sort of examples like neutron stars this is why stars are actually enormously large because gravity is a very weak Force so this all ironically in some sense it comes comes back to what I just commented to the thing that makes Fusion hard is this electrostatic repulsion that is occurring because the two like charge particles they both have positive charge don't want to get close together to fuse we actually use its cousin which is the magnetic force is one of the ways to do this we replace that gravitational force with is which is something which has much higher Effectiveness than gravity and primarily what we use is the electromagnetic force and so that's what we in fact primarily use on on Earth although it's not exclusively that it's mostly that's the thing that we that we use uh you know to sort of recreate these temp these temperatures particularly that occur uh in the interior of the Sun so so I think your last question was why why why isn't that crazy like it seems dangerous for something to have something at such high temperatures on Earth it's actually the opposite of that and it comes from a little bit of a subtlety of understanding the the thermal balance in a fusion system is that while while the materials this fuel gets extraordinarily hot there's extremely little of the fuel like very very little of the fuel so one of the leading concepts for for example that's focus of my own research in magnetic confinement the um uh the energy content of the fuel even though as a 100 million degrees is less than boiling water uh because there's so few particles in it so you actually have you basically need in order to have something that has high energy content and therefore could be considered dangerous it has to have high temperature and large numbers of particles of it so Fusion has very high temperature but very very few particles so when you put those numbers together it turns out it's not dangerous at all and the other the other thing that makes it safe is because what makes Fusion hard on Earth is in fact isolating it from anything that is terrestrial anything that's earthlike anything that has temperatures anything close to what we're used to is that what tends to happen is the this fuel will just leak its heat so fast into that Medium it cools down and immediately stops making Fusion so in fact Fusion has inherent safety built into the physics of it it's actually not really a engineering safety concern it's a it's it's you you just you can't actually in many ways you can't actually use it intentionally to do bad things with it because of those physical properties of the fuel okay so let me see if I've got this straight so far so a star Aggregates together primarily hydrogen because of gravity and if there's enough aggregated together the gravitational density especially in lower levels of the stars star becomes such that Fusion reactions can begin to take place now is that primarily because initially of is it that the atoms are are crushed together despite their electromagnetic opposition they're crushed together by the pressure that's a secondary consequence of the gravity so they're just brought into proximity and so so and and what happens does like one fusion reaction take place and then start a chain reaction under the appropriate conditions yeah so no actually it which is the other part of thanks for asking that that's a very insightful question actually it doesn't work through a chain reaction it works rather through a thermal process which is different let me let me just quickly explain this because this is a fundamental difference to fision um so in fion what happens you you imagine so here's your great big uranium nucleus right and the fion gets gets triggered by an extremely simple process in many ways it's it's a neutron which is one of the components of the nucleus which is made of neutrons and protons neutrons have no electric charge protons have electric charge they hold them themselves together in the nucleus through the strong nuclear force uh a neutron which can participate in that Force basically uh gets in proximity to the to the uranium nucleus and it splits apart and releases energy it also releases neutrons when it does that and so when those neutrons leave that from the as a cause of that reaction if you design the Assembly of the uranium in that case or other other materials which can undergo fision um what you do is you design it such that that neutral it's that particle that actually starts the next reaction so in a in a power plant like in in a fision pardon me nuclear power plant you design this very carefully and control it very carefully that on average when one fusion reaction occurs one particle that is released from that triggers the next fion reaction and you control that um if you intentionally don't control that then the process runs away because that one say triggers two more Fusion reactions and then four 8 16 and it up and goes and and in fact that creates an explosion um Fusion does not work that way be because the products that are made by Fusion are very very hard to fuse they actually don't trigger the next fusion reaction so in fact that almost comes by definition because what what's happening is primarily it's converting it the fuel into helium and helium is an extremely stable nucleus it actually doesn't want to fuse anymore that's actually why Fusion is such a good process and such an energy efficient process so it's not that particle that wants to fuse anymore it's the heat which is released from the from the fusion reaction that gets the fuel a little bit hotter if you get it a little bit hotter then that will want to make more Fusion reactions and as it gets and as it releases heat it'll actually get the fuel hotter and it will go up why is it more likely for we talked about the relationship between gravitational pressure and the preconditions for Fusion why is that more likely at higher levels of temperature right so that does come from the fundamentals of the process so if you take a single reaction of fusion and you consider the average energy of the particles that in general although there's a limit to it as you increase the average energy the velocity essentially the particles to fuse that gives them a higher likelihood of overcoming the because they're in motion and and then basically allows them to do that and and that's actually and that's a good uh one to to speak about because as I commented before accelerators in fact I have an an accelerator run by graduate students at MIT that can trigger Fusion reactions all day long because you take an accelerator you give a single particles back basically a high average energy and you impinge them onto a Target that's of appropriate composition you'll trigger these these kinds of fusion reactions um all day long um that cannot make net energy it turns out it's because what's happening is basically most of the energy that you're supplying to this particle just gets lost in useless heat essentially in the system what's what's happening inside of stars and that's why I said temperature not energy is that it's a contained thermal system what I mean by thermal this means it's it's it's the equivalent you know that we're used to of thinking about um you know like we think of water of having a temperature or air of having a temperature this medium which is called a plasma actually has a temperature it is a system in which the particles have a distributions of energies based on thermodynamics and so that's why I call it a temperature so this is key it's a thermodynamic process in that sense is that you have something in side of it is that individual particle reaction releases kinetic energy because that's forced to give that energy back as heat into the medium the temperature increases the average energy of the particles in the medium increases increases the probability and this builds up your your way to actually to being able to do that I see so you crush them together and then and that increases the probability of fusion to some degree and then you heat them up and that increases the probability even further so I'm curious about the the temperature and the movement of the of the hydrogen atoms so this is a stupid question likely but I the answer doesn't spring to mind as you increase the average temperature of the plasma what actually is happening to the atoms like are they vibrating back and forth faster and if they're vibrating back and forth faster why don't they just go off in a single Direction why is the mo motion like that just I can't understand that exactly because you'd think that with a given momentum they would go in a specific direction are they bumping into other atoms is that the issue yeah so right so now I have to pull up a whole other level about what what the medium of the fuel is and it's because so the temperatures involved always in Fusion exceed tens of millions of degrees so it turns out that any matter when you increase it up to around 5 or 10,000 de C it turns into a different phase of matter so you cannot you can no longer think of it as atoms in a lattice as you do in solids or atoms float floating you know basically a fluid like water or even even the atoms in this air bumping into each other it turns into a completely different phase of matter this is called a plasma uh and plasmas have unique properties because what they're doing is disintegrating the atom and atoms are made up of the simplest one is hydrogen is there there's a uh there's a positive charge nucleus in the case of simple hydrogen is just a single proton and things like dyum which is the heavy form of of hydrogen there's a proton and a neutron that are held together and then there's a single electron a negatively charged electron around it so all all the matter that we always deal with on Earth solid liquid gas are all in the phase of they all stable atoms that hold them themselves that are holding themselves together through the uh through the atomic forces which are in there not nuclear forces which is atomic forces which which are in there once you get up above 5 or 10,000 degrees those temperatures are so high they start breaking those bonds and basically what happens is that there's enough energy that on average the electrons are all pulled away from their partner that they had here so the distinguishing feature of a plasma is that in fact they're not little atoms like wiggling around like this they're actually freely going around particles that all have electric charge and particularly When You Reach temperatures required for Fusion everything has a charge in it as well too the reason this is so by by the way plasma is a discipline in and of itself my you know I actually work at a place called the plasma science INF Fusion Center plasma is the central medium that you use to make fusion happen so like what is an example of that well it's the sun the sun is not actually a ball we think of the Sun as a ball oh it's a ball of maybe gas or liquid or something no it's plasma because everything is above 5,000 degrees in the Sun so this gets a little bit harder to say so what does this mean about what well that it's a plasma like why is it special why is it difficult to think about this does go into your question but how on Earth do you actually Tain this right well what happens in from this it goes back to this whole pushing against each other through um through the through the electromagnetic forces in particularly the fact that they've got charges now remember I told you before when they when when the hydrogen protons come together they don't want to come together too close because they get repulsed from each other that's actually a force that acts not when the particles physically touch one another but it's always present because they're interacting through their charges so particles out here like they can be zipping by each other like this but actually impact each other because they get to interact with each other through the through a basic force of nature which is again the the electrostatic force and it turns out well sort of intuitively almost IM and this is why it's by the way plasmas are not intuitive because the the physics that dictates them is is action at a distance and therefore they have a really pretty wild set of collective behaviors that is been a you know has been a source of study in it's an entire uh discipline of physics plasma physics that has been studied for over 100 years to sort of understand this medium but in the end one of the ways we do describe it is you can almost think of like a like a gas but rather the particles have charg and so they're bouncing off each other without actually physically touching into each other which gives them complex s of behavior so in the end in order to this like in the sun that's happening in the sun is that this means that they're sort of randomized motion actually for any individual particle as an ensemble they actually have they have predictive ways through statistics ass statistical mechanical descriptions that allow us like we do in gases and sols and others that we can sort of describe this in terms of a thermodynamic point of view even though it's in this crazy plasma State we're experiencing a lot of global instability as we plunge into primary season how are you protecting your family in the midst of all this chaos the fact is there is one asset that has withstood famine Wars and political and economic upheaval dating back to Biblical times and that's gold it's not too late to diversify an old Ira or 401K into gold and Birch gold group can help you with that Birch gold can help you create a wellth thought out and balanced investment strategy they'll help you convert an existing Ira or 401K into an IRA in Gold without paying a penny out of pocket diversify into gold today just text Jordan to [Music] 9898917350 like a um bunch of singular North poles of magnets trying to get along together in a crowded room is that approximately right because you can imagine pushing North Poles together they don't like to come together they they twist around each other and you can imagine that being compressed together as a consequence of gravitational force now would it be then that there's a probability distribution that those interacting um those interesting particles are going to actually Collide hard enough to fuse so they're interacting and now and then the interaction is such that they fuse and there's some set probability of that that increases as temperature and pressure increases that's that's exactly what it is so it's and in the end what happens is you you can take this statistical approach to the to this large distribution of of particles that are behaving in you can't predict the part an individual particle probability an enormous Ensemble of them you can start treating them St statistically and that's in fact exactly what we do we use laboratory measurements of things like we basically take single particles and find out their probability of interacting at a given energy we measure those extremely accurately uh and then what we do is we assume that the system is in this deep thermal State essentially what's happened is it's maximized its entropy effect effectively because they bounced off each other so many times and then you can statistically describe a probability that actually the the particles will fuse and this this depends this probability depends only on the temperature um we call this a rate coefficient to be more technical but that's okay it's basically just the probability and Ensemble of these particles that in fact the fusion can occur because of these um because of these interactions um right and the denser that the denser that Medium the higher the probability that those are going to occur and then and then we tend to separate those there's basically one function and this is key actually infusion which we might get a little bit more into is that so one of the dependent we we consider the independent parameter or the controlling parameter primarily temperature because it is a Al it is an absolute requirement um so if you take the most uh simple fusion reaction there's there's minimum temperatures that you can get net energy out of it it tends to be about uh for the terrestrial sources so it's about 45 million degrees Celsius that depends only on the temperature so we tend to break it out there's one there's one part of the reactivity depends on the temperature and then we separate then there's another one that depends on the density of the fuel and this has actually intuitive right it's like oh it's like I've got to if so as I increase the density of the fuel and I have fixed probability for an average Ensemble of them I can calculate how much how many Fusion reactions I'll make in that medium in a unit a unit of time and and a fixed volume so this is really important because this informs us about how much on for a terrestrial energy source how much fusion power because every time a fusion reaction occurs it releases energy so we can actually calculate from this directly the amount of power that we make and a fixed volume of this fuel once we reach those conditions and it depends on the density of the fuel and the temperature of the fuel yeah okay okay so now we've explained how this occurs in the sun we've explained why it isn't a runaway process we've described the relationship between pressure and temperature but then we're stuck with the next mystery which is well you don't have the sun on Earth you don't have that gravitational pressure that volume of hydrogen how do you duplicate the conditions that are necessary to produce Fusion how do you how do you produce temperatures approximating you said 45 million degrees an unimaginable temperature it's no wonder that things cool down when they're when a fusion reaction would cool down if it touches anything Earthly because that would be like plunging it into the most frigid deep freeze imaginable so how do you duplicate these conditions however temporarily on Earth you you you do something like make these electromagnetic containers but and I know that you use laser beams to increase the density but maybe you can walk us through the construction of the electromagnetic container what Technical Innovations that's dependent on and then how you attain those temperatures and pressures right so as it right so this intro so I've introduced the two of the three requirements for Fusion so one is the temperature the other one is the density of of the fuel the third one is a before I start before I talk about the technology I'll just describe what it means um conceptually so we call this confinement what do I mean by confinement is that because these systems must be thermal thermalized that namely the fuel must have a temperature technically what that means is what I've actually allowed to happen is that the fuel medium is having en way more many way more interactions with themselves that don't fuse it's just like thinking about the particles in this room colliding off each other all those things what they do is they exchange energy and momentum and that's that's actually what allows the system to thermalize and once in a blue moon a fusion reaction will basically happen so that's what that's what's going on so what that means is that you must have a system that provides en particle and energy containment what I mean by this is that it's okay because it's isol this fuel is isolated in some way away from everything else so that you're you basically allow those part those reaction those nonfusing reactions to occur and you don't really care because you you've provide containment so what does this mean conceptually it's like of whatever you think of your fuel assembly on this is that um there's some physical mechan mechanism which is disallowing it to basically touch anything that's at room temperature or even close to it so it's it's isolating it in some way okay so that's the concept so we call this the energy confinement time and and the way that you can think of just sort of close your eyes imagine you got some Ensemble and you put some unit of energy into this and you kind of wait and you say oh it took this long to cool that characteristic time is called the energy confinement time this was conceived of by a scientist in 19 1950s uh Lawson who came up with who realized this important added this important concept into play so it turns out that when you look at a fusion system is that once you reach a certain temperature it's actually and it takes a little bit of math but it's like whatever it's it's pretty much the first thing you teach like entering grad students at MIT about how to establish Fusion Energy System is that um it it requires a minimum amount of containment for a given amount of how many Fusion reactions you're making um and that's set by the density because you in this in this you've assumed some kind of temperature in it um and it turns out when you work through the math of it it's the product of the density of the fuel and this energy confined in time that actually make realize what you want which is to get net energy out of the system and particularly the ultimate goal which is you basically put in almost no external energy and the whole thing is just keeping itself hot by its own Fusion reactions so it's very important this and the reason and sorry that's a little bit complicated but it's so important to understand infusion because this is this is unlike a lot of usually when you think of physical systems it's rare to come across a product of two important parameters controlling each other namely you multiply them by each other right and it turns out the physics doesn't care about the absolute number about those as long as the multiple of them actually meet this minimum level on Earth and that was density and confinement time it's density and confinement time so it's how many particles there are per unit volume and then you multiply it by this characteristic Time by how long you hold it together basically how long the it holds its energy technically right is okay okay okay all very good and so this is what confuses uh a lot of the public about Fusion because you you'll see this picture there's this great big magnet wow they did Fusion or you see this other thing which is an electrode they made Fusion or you see this laser and they made Fusion what the heck do these things have to do with each other what's happening is that they're using the same physical principle that I just uh talked about but they're vastly changing the density and confinement time but basically about how you get to the multiple of those two and so you can imagine what this is is that if I allow the density to be very very high then I don't need a very long energy confinement time and vice versa if I make the energy I made the density very low I must get a high energy confinement time and that's actually the the approaches uh that are there um so just a quick comment because it's so this this is why it is uh a little confus if you look the right right now the two you know methods of getting there that certainly have obtained the most um uh publicity but also probably you know the furthest along in terms of the scientific accomplishments is in uh mag Fusion which is my the focus of my work which is in that case we use very very low density fuel the the density of the particles in this is 100,000 times less than air it's very very UND um and this requires an energy confinement time of around 1 second which doesn't seem very long but recall what you're doing is like the particles that you're containing at 100 million degrees have such high average velocities then when they fuse like they would like I'm here in Rhode Island right now they would go from Rhode Island to Los Angeles in about three seconds that's how fast they're going so containing these kinds of things for a second is a pretty impressive heat indeed right and that's that approach and this is the one and how do we do this we use we use magnet the magnetic force to basically Force those and I can get back to more details and that but just this comparison of that then I go to the Other Extreme of this it's our colleagues that have performed this with lasers and in the lasers uh the lasers are actually not heating the fuel they're compressing the fuel they're achieving densities which are about 10 billion times higher than what we were using in a magnetic fusion and correspondingly their energy confinement time is a fraction of a billionth of a second and there are people and and companies and other groups which are approaching things which exist in those in between areas as well too things like pinches and so forth so this is one of the reasons for or H it's it's an interesting one it's both I would argue a an advantage but also has been one of the challenges of fusion there's so many because it turns out when you vary those those physical parameters by so much it actually vastly changes the technology that you're thinking about how you would actually get there so this is an interesting thing as a thinking about how you develop it as an energy source because you got a lot of choices but there's so many choices it's led to this it's an interesting race in some sense right about about how you would get there right so you can vary you can vary the density using various Technologies and you can vary the time to confinement using various Technologies now how exactly in your magnetic Fusion designs how how exactly do you confine like I I'm trying to conceptualize this you're you're using very very power powerful magnetic fields I read that you've produced magnetic fields that are many multiples of the force of the Earth's the entire Earth's magnetic field now now I'm wondering why doesn't that take a staggering amount of energy just to manage that but also what exactly how do you conceptualize the confinement space like is it an enclosed magnetic field and then inside that there's this relatively low density hydrogen and is it when does it become hydrogen plasma and then if you're only confining it for a second well you don't want a power plant that only works for a second so I don't see how to jump from that to something approximating a sustainable power source yeah yeah so I'll I'll parse that out so so first of all the so so this will focus on magnetic confinement so the the physical principle that's being used to contain the the particle is another fundamental Force called the lorence force uh which is that if you have a Charged particle that is in movement uh and and and there's a magnetic field present it will exert a force on that charged particle um yeah well it's it's actually so this takes I'm GNA use my hands to try to get this so so magnetic fields most people are you know know this from using a compass I know there's a so there's two things that are important about a magnetic field it's amplitude it's magnitude right uh and it's and it has a direction because the way that we com it it's a vector right so as a direction okay so I'm just going to tell you I've got a magnetic field which is going like this right it's in this direction it's pointed in this direction there's a certain altitude to it so what this means is when I put charge particles in the presence of this magnetic field it exerts a force on it which is an interesting Force by the way it's a force that always acts in a direction that is orthogonal to the direction of the charged particle when you work out the math of this what this forces the particle any particle to do and like this is that it will execute a circular orbit like this around the magnetic field so no matter how fast it's going it basically hold it's it's like it ties it to the magnetic field like that and this is for both negative and charge particles so remember my my the collection of or recollection of the definition of a plasma so when it gets hot enough that most of the particles become uh charged and that's certainly true infusion plasmas so every every single individual particle is actually feeling a containment Force which is coming from that magnetic field okay so what does that mean so what that means is and there's oh by the way and there's a another special one is that not only is it orthogonal to the direction of the uh of the charged particle it's also must be orthogonal to the direction of the magnetic field itself so what this means is that you can think of these as like barber poles of motion of the particles that they're going along like this they do not get affected in the direction that is along the magnetic field so there is no containment along the magnetic field so in general what we do this is we come up with a set of topologies of magnetic fields primarily what we do is we make them close back on themselves so there is no end to the magnetic field right um and and the way you do this is okay so that that so in the end you can think you had it right conceptually basically you can think of the these vectors or line we conceptualize them as lines of magnetic field and of magnetic force and this basically when it's put together in a particular configuration it becomes extremely effective at holding this very hot fuel because of that force is exerting because that circular motion doesn't allow them to escape unless some other thing happens like they Collide into another particle or something which set is the strength of the magnetic field necessary proportionate to the average speed of the particles in question so the higher the temperature the higher the magnetic field required the more powerful the magnetic field required so technically the force that's exerted is proportional to the charge of the particle but that's that that doesn't matter that's fixed because it's always the same the velocity of the particle the velocity of the particles increases the temperature increases as changes it goes up as the square of the Velocity uh and it increases as the strength of the magnetic field as well okay so in the and what that Resort what that ends up being in a PR for Fusion's sake what this means is that in magnetic confinement is has very critical consequences is that when you solve the when you solve the particles um Motion in the end what that means is that if you if you now consider I'm I'm the magnetic field pointing like this what we care about is the size of this orbit the thing that the size of this orbit because it's basically a circular orbit and if you keep everything else fixed and increase the strength of the magnetic field the size of that orbit decreases it shrinks because the force is better so basically holds it closer to the magnetic field is what you want and this is really important because um it turns up from that other argument that Al although there different arguments about this is that that other the first argument about the requirement of the temperature it turns out that there's a optimized temperature to access Fusion it's about 100 million degrees for the leading uh kind of fusion that we consider on Earth which is not the same as it isn't that's why it's a different temperature than the sun because it's actually a different fuel combination that we use it's the heavier forms of hydrogen um but anyway that's at about 100 million degrees so basically anytime if you're you know a fusion power plant designer you more or less always pick that temperature because it's the easiest one to achieve and that that means that the temperature is approximately fixed and therefore the velocity is approximately fixed and therefore generally in general what you're controlling is the strength of the magnetic field to make that orbit smaller and smaller and consequently consequently make the engineering system that you have to build smaller right which does that also increase the density of the fuel ah it does but for more subtle reasons um and it depends about what kind of it depends on the details of the shape of the magnetic bottle that you make but in general yes uh but it's it's not so straightforward of a path to tell you about how it does it but in general the density of the fuel is allowed to increase which is important because that actually means you can access then net energy gain uh if at high if you're at higher density this allows you to do it at lower energy confinement time which is U which is a sort of a double win in the system you want to think of it that way okay so now okay so a couple of questions there go ahead no no yeah well and you had an important one about the one second business so this is really so right so the 1 second is not the duration of the existence of the fuel it's the characteristic time at which it holds energy so namely this this so if you think of it this way it's almost like I think of because it's the middle of winter right now I'm thinking of heating our house and so forth you can think of when I put a unit of energy into this house there'll be some characteristic time like a few hours that'll basically leak out right to the outside environment um that's but the house is still here all the time that's more what we're doing so this 1 second is that leakage time it's it's not how long the house lasts yeah starting a business can be tough especially knowing how to run your online storefront thanks to Shopify it's easier than ever Shopify is the global Commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage Shopify is there to help you grow our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items ship products and track conversions Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout up to 36% better compared to other leading Commerce platforms no matter how big you want to grow Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify ./ jbp go to shopify.com jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're at that's shopify.com [Music] jbp okay okay now you have to segregate the system from the ice cold temperatures of terrestrial reality let's say how in the world then do you how do you actually harness the heat that's thereby generated how do you turn that into to while transmissible energy or mechanical force right and there's a riety of ways to do it but I'll so I'll walk through the system of how you do this I'll use magnetic confinement and it varies a little bit if you change if you use other containment schemes but it's whatever it's good so in the end basically whatever you're doing to provide this Force so like the the magnetic fields that we make use an electromagnet this electromagnet is not in physical contact with this fuel at all because the Electro magnet makes a magnetic field at a distance in fact the leading way that we do this is we configure these magnetic fields and in fact the magnetic field can't even escape the magnets it's just sort of encased inside of these so usually you think of these as large circles or D shapes you put these in a particular configuration and on the inside what you have is this you know beautiful kind of magnetic cage which is on the inside of it so the electromagnets have no idea there's like a star inside of them and the star all all they're feeling is is the magnetic field that's coming from the electromagnets that's the key it's physical isolation of the systems completely from one another right because that that's also confusing to everyone it's like so it's not a physical container in that sense that's hold holding the fuel um right it's like the gra it's analogous in some ways to the gravitational gravitational field that keeps the Earth in orbit around the sun exactly it's an action at a distance that's the right way to think of it right so it's doing it through that process right so um then this goes to um well what is Fusion Energy like where where is the energy that's the important and how do you get access to it well right so the the original energy source as I said is that the two particles Collide and they actually make new particles um and by the nature of the fact that this is coming from the strong nuclear force which is the thing that holds all nuclei together uh the pro what what that means is that the energy is actually in the kinetic energy or the velocity of the particles that result from this so the fusion particles yeah so uh we take heavy forms of hydrogen like dyum and and fuse them together and then what will come out it's actually the same uh um subatomic particles the the the neutrons and protons it's the same number that come out afterwards they're just rearranged right so for example dyum dyum can come together and then what you would have is something called uh uh you can have uh helium 3 which is one which is two protons in one Neutron and then one spare Neutron or you can rearrange it into another way that is actually a um uh it's a it's a proton um and a I'm losing track of it's a right it's a proton and a uh and a and a Triton which is a proton and two neutrons so basically it's just rearrange rearrange them and those have lower Mass and they release energy but because it interacts through that mechanism it turns though the energy is only it's released in the kinetic energy of those particles that come flying off and what happens is that it's when when you write out the equations of the conservation equations it's the lightest particles that the energy gets partitioned in a way that has to do with the with the masses of the of the things that result from this and what happens and they can escape can they escape from the magnetic chain it it it depends actually so some of them have electric charge and some of them don't have electric charge in particular if it's a neutron which is one of the fundamental particles it has no electric charge and therefore it is it can escape the medium immediately escapes the magnet because because that has no electric charge it feels no interaction with the other plasma particles let alone the magnetic field which it has no interaction with so it escapes so I'll use this one because it's it the the the um most prevalent approach right now is dyum tritium fusion and what happens there is that those are the two heavy forms of hydrogen and what is released is a helium just a a normal helium nucleus and a neutron so the helium has two protons two neutrons so it has a net charge in it this cannot escape the magnetic bottle because it's feeling that Force from the magnetic fields more more not say more important but just as just as important it is also feeling the electrostatic reactions like that you said the magnets pushing against one the poles pushing against each other well it has electric charge just like all the other particles in it so it has way more energy than all the other than the average energy of the particles that it's in and now therefore it starts undergoing Collision so it's sort of like releasing like a cannonball I think the like a a cannonball into one of those you know those K those Kitty things where they have the the big balls that they go play in it's like putting a cannonball into that it's like it basically forces the cannibal to give its energy into all those other ones that's what's happening because that's the heavy particle that has a mass of four units because it's got four got two protons two neutrons um and there's a total mass of five particles it has the inverse of those so it gets one out of five sorry for the math but it means so that means it 20% of the fusion energy is released so that's very important because like where does that energy go this is the heat remember Way Way Back At the beginning of this that in the and fusion sustains Itself by the fact that the particle energy which is released by these in single events actually just ends up as being heat that is distributed amongst all the rest of the fuel and this helium will not fuse again because it doesn't want to fuse because it's extremely stable so it's basically the ash product of of fusion by the way just a quick comment why Fusion is that the the process the ash product of the of the thing that releases energy is helium which is a harmless neutral gas right wonderful unlike fion where the thing that's made by the reaction itself is this this soup or mix of just of of of hundreds of radioisotopes because you're splitting apart this really stable uranium so that's one of the other fundamental differ between F part of the C the cleanliness of the process and the Simplicity in some sense of the process okay so you have this increasingly hot plasma and you you explained the mechanisms there how is that converted into usable electricity yeah so so in some way you've got to get back you've got to get this back into heat that's essentially how you're going to do it um so and and the two I I like to say it's Fusion is basically two forms of recycling heat so it's taking this major kinetic energy in these local particles and converting it into heat so the first mechanism I just described which is that heats the fuel itself this is the key mechanism about how you make fusion a net energy source on Earth that's actually it was that process that was solutioned to this thing with the product of the density it's actually that process because what it's telling you is that you're making enough Fusion reactions that you're basically able to keep the system hot because it's it's it's keeping itself hot and that in this in this form of fusion that's 20% of the energy very important um the 80% of the energy in that reaction is in a neutron it has it cannot be contained or it doesn't interact with this so it interacts very weakly with matter because it doesn't have an electric charge so there what you have to do is put something in front of it um and what we tend to think of is either something a liquid or solid uh that forces this neutral which is like a cannibal again another cannibol going into this and you force it to undergo uh interactions with the atoms that are in that solid or liquid phase this T by the way this this thing we call a blanket because you basically wrap the fusion thing around it and the idea is that we force these neutrons even though they they escape the um the the the plasma and magnetic fields they're forced to interact with this blanket uh and after you know it it it varies on the design but after about 30 or 40 collisions kind of on in general they basically give up all their energy and where is this energy it's actually it's it's it's in the it's in the motion of the atoms that were in that blanket U and so that's like heating up water with it say I don't I don't know what you use in the blanket but uhhuh yeah so this is actually why Fusion isn't it's another reason why Fusion is such an attractive energy sour this all sounds very exotic but actually as a if you just close your eyes and think I give you a fusion power plant what are you actually getting you're getting a heat Source because this this blanket that heats up uh you know you just get out this heat and then you do what whatever you use to use heat for make electricity run industrial power plants uh make synthetic fuels um it's it's really just it's it's adaptable to almost anything that you can imagine that we use from any other fundamental energy source yeah right okay so let's turn away from the engineering elements and the practicalities of the process to the practicalities of producing a usable energy source so I've got two questions there really I know there's been tremendous look we have reliable fision energy already although some of the plants seem very complex they're built has one-offs there's tremendous bureaucratic red tape there's a bit of a problem with nuclear waste people are afraid of it um it's got a bad name but I saw a company the other day for example I think I'm going to interview the CEO that's produced this very cool little nuclear reactor that just sits on the back of a truck and that can be pulled to a you know like a northern Community to some and these there's all these thorium salt reactors and so forth that have come on the market recently and looks like we're starting to mass-produce them and so like it seems to me and I'm certainly ignorant about this but it seems to me that if we had the political will we could be turning to fision energy at a much higher scale than we have been and so we have fision as a potential alternative and the fusion problem is very interesting to solve technically but why not devote our attention more particularly collectively to the fision issue why pursue fusion and then if we're going to pursue Fusion where are we with Fusion because I'm old enough now that you know Fusion has been 10 years in the future for 50 years so how are you what do you feel about all those issues yeah so get back to so I mean to make it clear I am personally uh totally in favor of of deploying Vision at at a larger scale you know to meet our energy security demands um it's actually you know the reality is that fion is one of the is one of the if not the safest forms of energy that we use right now it's it's a great fit into the things that Renewables are not Renewables are a lot of great things but they're not reliable because of their intermittency and their low power density vision is is like that as well too and as you commented too it's like we we've got a lot of experience with this and uh we know that we can you know we can make it work um so I guess my my comment to would be would be sort of a meta comment at first which is which is the Staggering challenge of if we if we really are serious about decarbonization which in my opinion as a society we are not yet serious about it just based on the math of where we are but if at some point you know let's put it this way we know mathematically sometime human civilization will run out of fossil fuels we can argue about what it is but it will because it's a finite resource um and we need to think about what is the sustainable and Deployable almost Universal high energy density uh dispatchable energy source um and and I our choices are so few that that's that it's basically it's not my argument about fion versus fion it's just like tell I I want a set of alternatives on the table to let me do this because this is the way almost all you know I would argue all Technologies work we don't have monolithic solutions to these complex problems they just don't really exist and so my comment to this is that in many ways I think the free market will decide this as well too because there are just intrinsically different properties of fusion about its inherent safety uh about the long-term consequences of the um of the waste products that come out of fusion the ab ability to license them is very different than Fusion so while it has um you know a commonality in some of the physics to you know to Fusion it's really such a different energy source and there are so few other options in the long term it's like let's do this in some sense now while while we have the resources and the wherewithal to actually you know get after this problem right so you're not seeing them you're not seeing them in competition in some sense at all and your point not well because because you know fusions you know the time scale is such that fion can be deployed now right yeah and we've got that um but there are there are serious cons look any technology has consequences that like if you somebody comes and says I've got a technology and it's got zero societal and environmental you know uh consequences then go by a bridge or something it's like it doesn't exist okay it do it just doesn't and we know about these like we know about the consequences of fossil fuels which have been you know honestly have been the the reason that we get to live the way that we do now by burning fossil fuels but we also know there are direct Health consequences we can track these through um you know through air quality is a direct link actually to people you know dying prematurely of been like we know these things right there's always a consequence to so that's the metav view I would say is that yeah you better get after you better get after these and so what does it mean about a scalable energy source and this is an interesting one and about deploying it at a global level well an interesting one that comes and it's not a criticism of fision but it's just the reality of it is that because of the physical process that fision works on is actually at the heart of actually how you make a nuclear weapon is that always has been to fision is that you must have proliferation um you know control in fact next week I'm going to be at a workshop that's discussing proliferation uh aspects of this so you have to take this into into account and you don't have that problem with Fusion well it's a different problem in Fusion it's actually such a new technology we're we're sort of figuring it out in general you don't because you don't in the end you don't require uranium or plutonium on a fusion device so it's like it's very different that okay so that's that that one and also and I and I think the you know for although people would argue that there's there are solutions to that like the long-term waste storage one is an interesting one is that because in Fusion this is linked to the physical process really of the fusion itself in Fusion the physical process doesn't actually make a any radioactive weight it makes helium but the engineering that you put around this like what you make this blanket out of and what you do these other things these are engineering and design choices that you have about improving uh the the public acceptance and the viability the license ability of the fusion one it's an engineering choice that that you have even though there's some pretty severe you know challenges around making that engineering work so that's that's that's where I would comment to that you know and in the end the fact and I should get back to this this one is that it is like the you know they call we have to watch out how you use analogies but the Holy Grail of Fus of energy the things and this why it's because it it it it actually uses very few raw materials to build the thing if you build it effectively and the fundamental fuel source is essentially inexhaustible on on Earth and freely available to everyone it's like that that's why you pursue it right um but it's important to understand like what what is it you're pursuing which I think was your second question no matter where you're listening no matter what job you have the clothes you wear to work say a lot about you it's time to take your style to to the next level with mizen and Main dress shirts you don't have to sacrifice comfort for style their performance fabric dress shirts feel just as good as they look mizen and Maine invented the performance fabric dress shirt 10 years ago and they've practically perfected it it's lightweight breathable moisture wicking wrinkle resistant and the most comfortable shirt on the market you can wear their clothes to work throw them in a suitcase or keep them by your at home desk for when you need to look sharp for an interview whatever you do and wherever you wear it no that you'll look and feel amazing so whether you're attending an important meeting or a networking event or simply want to impress your colleagues misen and Main has everything you need so what are you waiting for spruce up your style with mizen and Main go to mizen and.com and use code Jordan to get 25% off any purchase of $130 or more that's M izen and.com promo code Jordan for 25% off [Music] today right well let well i' I'd like to I'd like to take the skeptical approach to that now because as I said this is this has been for so now look I mean we haven't really been trying to develop Fusion Technologies for very long if you think on any like reasonable time scale of technological advancement I mean we're so accustomed to having complex technological problems solved within the spans of single lifetimes that we think anything that takes like 200 years is hopeless and so I'm I'm certainly not making the case that Fusion is an uncrackable problem but but having said that it has been continually announced for many decades that you know Fusion is a decade into the future viable fusion and that would be Fusion as you pointed out that produces more energy than it takes to produce and so now you've been involved in a until recently headed uh um very um thorough project developing this magnetic technology that we described you step down from that position in November if I have my facts straight um so tell us about that project tell us where you think we are on the fusion Horizon and and what you think the next steps and something approximating a timeline might be and maybe you could also tell us why we might not why we might be optimistic about that timeline yeah right right again The Meta comment is it's interesting on AI right uh like the term artificial intelligence was invented in the 1970s which is which is you know fittingly about the same time that Fusion technology really started taking off as well too right or maybe in the 60s like Marvin Minsky and anyway like these ideas are around because they survive because they're compelling ideas would is my argument and then all of a sudden things happen that all of a sudden makes this thing which people conceive of uh oh yeah I I get the dream of this right and all of a sudden things happen that all of a sudden make it you know a reality like you see something right around them so I'll I'll pull back that's the meta comment like why Fusion right so so some of it is the pull right um that I would argue that as a society if we really are serious about decarbonizing um the set of choices we have in front of us about replacing 82% of our fundamental energy which is comes from still from fossil fuels and basically hasn't changed in decades um you need just massive amounts of carbon free energy like massive amounts so that pull that is coming from that has increased uh significantly um compareed to like the 90s or something like 1990s um very important um I I think the it's actually not and it's even more nuanced than that it's not just access to that kind of energy it's like the realization that Renewables alone because of their intrinsic limitations like try to run a gwatt you know chemical processing plant on Renewables it's like when it's cold oh yeah well I mean the science just you know the science is against it's not nothing against renewable you just have to be cognizant of the of the the limitations of any kind of energy source it's like the limitation infusion by the way like you can't make uh you can't make a up fusion power plant that heats this home because everything's got to be at bigger scale they has to make way more power than would be appropriate for heating a so everything's got limitations surround on those um so so the so I think this was part of it and then of course what happens like in a lot of so Fusion this distinguishes it the science I described has been known for a a long time and the criteria to make fusion been known for a long time so what happens is the reality of actually making Fusion practical as usual um it it it comes from synergies of techn logical and scientific advances that tend to make you feel that it's ready for prime time and I'll and I'll comment on this is that really in the last 10 years there been there's been a really I think a set of those one of them has been computational power it's a really complex problem you know one of the the origins of the of the company that we launched out of MIT and some of the ideas that we've been pursuing came out of my classroom to why I say this it's like the computational power that's available to my students in a single master class at MIT surpasses the people the computational power available to people one generational goal that we're actually trying to design the biggest Fusion experiment in the world like that's G to make a difference right and because it's a complex problem um I think the uh the other part is because um you know fusions Advan seem to take a Hiatus because we were trying to figure out the way past that next threshold particularly of the scientific threshold was getting net energy energy which meant that what that means is when you hit that you're actually the the fusion reactions are the dominant heat Source in it um and there are multiple approaches to that and we were it was a big step and we needed to get our scientific feet underneath us and that was honestly like a two decade process I was heavily involved personally in that as well too it's a major major major scientific uh you know task to basically get get after these things and that particularly evoked self in in forms of advanced magnetic confinement devices one called eer which is in the south of France and now our own experiment uh you know that that's been launched out of MIT uh and and commonw fusion systems and also uh with the laser Fusion which had a big breakthrough approximately a year ago as well too and guess what like one of them did break through right the laser experiment got to the point where they got the fuel to the place where the fusion reactions were the dominant heat Source an amazing scientific accomplish M this was a thing that sort of broke through the news cycle if you remember in December of 22 yeah very very important and of course everybody looked at it it's like everybody you know calmed down about an energy source next week but a major scientific accomplishment and this is this is you know this is the the fruit of Decades of of of work right that the general public won't see so that's the second one like we really know a lot more than we did 20 years ago through that and through computation and the computation by the way affects the science the science and the engineering they sort of the synergistic buildup right right and then the FI final one was advances in technologies that come from places that weren't necessarily infusion and that's one of the ones that we discovered was that namely there was a commercialization of a new kind of Technology a new kind of superconductor material that was going to apparently allow us to greatly improve the efficiency of the magnetic bottle that we were making in that in that approach and interestingly like the path of that one came from a fundamental science Discovery in the late 1980s when the Nobel Prize in physics everybody went crazy because this is so-called superconductor which could say superc conducting at extraordinarily for that kind of technology high temperatures usually superconductors are near absolute zero this is at a stunning like 70 degrees above absolute zero remain superconductor but that took you know over 20 years to commercialize and it turns out our team was ready sort of with the right set of ideas to take that new material now in a commercial form in terms of a tape and turns it turned it into an ex uh into a D um uh into a highly performing electromagnet that produces this cage and that's in fact uh was a major pursuit of of of of my group at MIT and now the commercialization aspect of this with common Fusion systems which a couple years ago essentially demonstrated this Quantum jump and and the capability of the magnet to Be an Effective container for the for the fuel and just to put that that one in context is that that was approximately a factor of 20 to 40 Improvement um in the efficiency of this so this meant that the cost of achieving of being able to build a device that would see fusion um this uh this net energy gain for the first time it shrunk it by a factor for approximately 30 to 40 so that's an enormous one which goes so but by the way then and now there are other Fusion Concepts which can also use that breakthrough along with the computing power to design it in fact early this morning I was having conversation with my MIT colleagues about how we might apply this to a different configuration all this being said is that it's it's a lot of details I know to go through look at technology breakthroughs they always happen this way that namely there's things which are sitting there which are ideas but are hard to imagine self-consistently together as a commercial product or something that we can all use and then what happens is a couple of things pop together and all of a sudden what seemed impossible becomes I'm not going to say inev I never say inevitable because that's too much huus but um I I think it becomes much more likely actually around on this and of course the important thing for this is that is there is there a customer on the other side for thinking about commercialization and the argument here is that in the energy world we become hungrier and hungrier for these kinds of products not less hungry for those and that I think I think I think that's why I think that's why the the landscape has changed for Fusion okay okay okay so you're pointing to well clear advances on the laser side advances in material technology stunning advances in computational ability which I presume enables you to model the things that you would otherwise have to build and test much more precisely much more rapidly and so you can see an acceleration of movement towards the end goal how far away do you think I don't I maybe this is an unfair question and if it is well deal with it however you want but how far away do you feel that the teams that you've been leading or the team that you've been leading is away on the magnetic containment side from producing um reaction that produces more energy than it consumes I mean you you talked about commercializing this and I know there are plans in the work for that so I presume you feel that you're on the threshold of this or or close to it how do you know that and how do you track your progress and predict yeah so one of them is that there's a place about an hour drive away from here in Suburban Boston that has built the buildings in which it will be in that has built the factory that is building the magnets which basically took the magnet development that we did jointly with the company at MIT between MIT and the company and they're building the magnets in fact I'm on this podcast I'm missing my weekly meeting about the magnet fabrication okay that that because that's how real it is the money is there the team is there it's putting it together and um and the uh you know right now the projection is it's a few years away like a couple of years away I can't speak in detail about schedules but that's okay so that kind of puts us into context and what is what what do we mean by it right it is something that makes Fusion at a commercially relevant scale namely that it's in orders of hundreds of millions of watts of fusion power uh and it makes and it has a net energy gain in the plasma which is a fundamental requirement obviously to make a net Energy System around on that so you you know in substance I would ask you you know you as you know somebody who obviously you know is a you're scientifically literate but not an expert in Fusion if you see something like that you know do you think Fusion has taken a big step towards commercialization right right well what you see is that people are willing to bet resources they actually have at hand on that realization and so you'd assume if they're sensible people and I suspect they are that they've done their due diligence and believe that this is a possibility in some time frame that makes the investment worthwhile and that they're more interested in that than they would be investing in F fision for example which is a more proven technology so that you know that's how it looks from the outside I have two issues that came up in our discussion that I didn't get quite cleared up that I'd like to return to and then we can move the discussion forward more generally again when when the plasma forms and the electrons are stripped off the the hydrogen plasma what happens to the electrons the electrons are contained as well too so a fundamental feature of the plasma is essentially an equal set of negative and and positive charge particles that's actually one of the definitions of a plasma really so they're in the soup they're in the soup yeah which is interesting because they can they do not fuse together they're fundamental particles that that do not change and in fact they're interesting one because it's a good if M I'll just divert this because it's an interesting technical challenge if you think of this way is that the the electrons have way less mass than the other part they're 2,000 times less mass of than the hydro than the other parts so this is a weird fluid it's one of the reasons why Fusion sorry why plasma physics is complex because you have a fluid where the two partic have a difference of mass of an inertia of factor of 2,000 from each other right so they behave they can behave quite differently so for example the size of that orbit that I mentioned it's inherently a 100 times smaller for the electrons than it is for the other particles which means this is why it's a difficult physics problem because you're dealing across very different spatial scales because of that okay um but it's interesting in a fusion in an Earthly Fusion system these are so these are really important why why is this because you you've got this equal ensemble of of the of the of the hydrogen species the the nuclei and the electrons they're all together like this they're actually exchanging energy to each other through collisions as well too but when the fusion reaction occurs this particle that is ejected is so energetic that it's actually going it's it's actually going even though it has a mass which is way more than electrons it's actually going at a velocity which is actually about the same as the electrons because it's got so much pop to it um and through re reasons I won't I won't derive this means that actually that that very fast particle gives technically gives most of its energy into the electrons not into the not into the rest of the fuel so the electrons get hot and then the electrons actually exchange energy through collisions with the fuel and then it's the fuel that makes the fusion but the rate of Fusion fuel actually is a thing that sets the rate at which those energetic particles go out and hit the electrons wow so you see the the physical coupling with in this is complex because there's essentially three independent species uh sort of navigating this with each other through through through collisions and Power Balance this is just one of the kinds of complexities that we deal with in Fusion systems yeah so okay so I had thank you for answering that I had a question too on the conceptualization side of this with regards to the justification for for fusion um technology now you you Justified it and I'm not putting words in your mouth I hope not to but one of the angles of justification that you adopted was know an emphasis on decarbonization but it seems to me that the proponents of fusion power have a better environmental sustainability argument than decarbonization so for example we know that there's almost nothing more tightly t to economic progression and success the amelioration of absolute poverty then decreased energy cost I mean that's a it's almost a onetoone relationship because energy is work and work is productivity and productivity Is wealth and so that's not much of a complex causal scheme it also turns out that if you get the average GDP of absolutely of the absolutely poverty stricken up to about $5,000 per year they start taking a long-term view of environmental sustainability at the local level because instead of having to Scrabble for their lunch in the dirt and burn dung they can start thinking about what sort of greenery might be around for their children right and so it seems to me that instead of following the green pathway so to speak and and pointing to the utility of Fusion Energy as a substitute for fossil fuels which in in principle might become more expensive as they become more scarce and which also could be used perhaps more wisely for the production of chemicals rather than exactly because it's a root stock right yes AB absolutely and absolutely and and for fertilizer as well let's say um that baiting the drum for driving the cost of energy down to the lowest possible level you know conceivable seems to me to be a a more appropriate and potentially deeper long-term say Public Relation strategy like what could we do with the world if we had an inexhaustible source of inexpensive energy I mean it makes Enterprises like um desel deselenization for example widely possible and and well that would be a wonderful thing given that in principle we're going to be facing water shortages in the future as well so I'm wondering what's what's your view with regards to the viability of fusion as a genuinely inexpensive and universally available Source apart from the fact of its cleanliness and safety which is obviously relevant yeah right so that that is that is actually the challenge I would argue in front of us as technologists who propose fusion fusion Energy Systems right is that I feel you know my belief is that we've gotten past the point where we we're pretty because we've demonstrated so many of the different parts of the system like the signs of it while it sounds like science fiction has actually been done by the way for example 100 million degrees which sounds like science fiction we we ran an experiment on the campus of MIT where when we ran the experiment 30 times a day for a few seconds at a time we'd make the fuel 100 million degrees like this I remember we had a VI VIP visitor who said who saw one of these and they said why isn't everybody applauding because we do it we do it we did it we did it 30 times a day the scientific viability is there and what was missing were two components I would argue so one one was does the you know were you past the point where you felt like when the system became more self-determined and heating itself that it was going to be uh it was everything was going to behave you know properly and it's not all the way obviously there but the laser Fusion result has been a major impetus to us saying that darn it that looks pretty good and the project that U called spark which is the one which is outside of Boston um basically that shows it for magnetic fusion and also so shows the fusion power at a commercial type of scale it's like I think your question about the essentially the physical reality of fusion like Fades away and what becomes the question now is what price point can you deliver the energ right um and as you heard from so you know because all the Exotic parts of this containment and all it's like of course that's still important but now it comes to the effectiveness of the integrated engineering system that you're building the so-called blanket like how effectively do you extract the heat what temp like it sounds like simple things but it's not like what temperature do you extract the heat at this is enormously important in terms of the thermodynamic efficiency what you might use the power for um you know how reliable are those systems because they're in pretty intense environment right so how reliable are the components inside of them how long will it last these are the things and and that's why you know although some of my colleagues still disagree with this I feel the fusion technology the fusion development world has changed in the last few years is that we're starting to ask the question of how what will the cost be not whether or not can we do it right and that's and I think that's a good deal but it's still hard by the way I mean because right right right it varies across the all these different approaches about how you might and the cool thing is that there's like 30 some things you know huge varieties of scientific you know maturity and so forth that are trying to answer that question because in the end what answers that question about the um you know is the marketplace right right is that's what's going to do it um in fact we're going there's you know we're doing a study of this at MIT right now which is we we're calculating with understanding and some projections of of energy markets like where will that be so that namely all new energy sources to penetrate at some more expensive you know some point because people are saying well it's okay because it's a new energy source will kind of give you a break but if you want to deploy it at Mass scale you got to get it competitive to the other ones and then you sort of look at the relative advantages and disadvantages so that's exactly where we should go and you know I think the simple answer is if you get if you get Fusion in the right Ballpark and enter it and start reducing the price of it it's incredibly disruptive to the energy right right right of course because because it's so expandable you know that's one of the and in the end it does the physics or the science of the energy source does matter right and in the end you cannot physically increase the solar radiant heat flux on the surface of the Earth it's a it's fix right and you can't snap your fingers and make the wind intensity higher and or things like that and all these different things is that this is why we pursued Fusion is that you look at the the I the ideal ifusion is you you can't run out of the resources apparently as far as we know about deploying this right and so that end goal is that it's like if it becomes inexpensive and you can deploy it at fast time scales it becomes a dominant energy source this is why people want to invest in it because it's not just it's not just altruism it's it's like this is a business proposition but we've got this serious challenge of that it's still a pretty we've only turned that corner in the last few years and what this means is that we're facing the challenge of how do you take these different concepts and actually deliver on the full integrated energy product we've got a long ways to go on that well we have you know on the optimistic side we have we have quite a world waiting for us if we're sensible and fortunate I mean you can imagine that imagine here so I know a group of people who are avidly pursuing Atomic level deposition in 3D printing which opens up the possibility that we'll literally be able to print anything we can model and then add scale and then very inexpensively and so just God only knows what that's going to produce and these aren't Pie in the Sky Technologies these sorts of printers already exist and they're working very hard on making them economically viable and distributable and dirt cheap as well eventually and so that's remarkable and then we have these AI systems s that are now conversation level that I can Envision being put into technologies that will'll be able to teach every child on Earth every single subject there is at their level of comprehension and also exceedingly inexpensively and then with this if this can I just give an anecdote to that actually sure sure because we're both we're both professors or been professors and it's uh I recall my colleagues when chat GPT came they were rapidly using you know they were checking to see well how would students like cheat basically using and got all and they're putting qualifying exam questions and so forth and like my comment to them was you might be not realizing whose job this might imp Peril no kidding right what does this mean but but by the way it's like it as it I as usual with these big disruptive ones which I think Fusion would be as well too people probably look at it a little a little bit incorrectly is that if I by the way one of the I'm sorry for the sideline but you know one of the greatest challenges we have right now in Fusion is people and it's because this transition from a science only program to thinking about integrated engineering Energy Products happen so fast basic in fact I just wrote a paper it just in fact I'm giving a seminar uh National webinar on Friday about it it's like our academic system is just like because it's frozen in that place that it was you know fif like academic systems are right they tend to have really long lag times and Lead times it's like oh my gosh it's like we are not ready for this at all right and so in fact we don't even have the right distributions of kinds of expertise and faculty and so forth It's like oh what what if in fact I you know and there's set of what if I can because I one of my I would argue my specialties is is integrated Fusion Design analysis and that's one of one of my classes I get to teach you know order 15 to 20 students every one or two years at MIT what if I can teach thousands of students of that through AI like right right absolutely and so the synergies in this are amazing the other part was which is in fact we just signed an agreement with the international atomic energy agency that we are now we are active and very very actively pursuing um AI use to basically be the entity that runs the power plant oh yes oh yes of course of course right and is are the AI systems helping you now already with design it was almost ready for and I I almost I almost thought about using it in my design course that's coming up actually in a few weeks it wasn't quite ready for prime time for that but here's of course what the the amazing thing about being at a university by the way the students had already started to do this and so what what what did they do is I told you we ran this experiment it a integrated Fusion experiment had electr magnets in it it made this magnetic cage had the 100 million degree fuel had this amazing set of measurement tools and so forth um but it also had people running it which is so all that data is of course recorded and used but it also had people experts who were examining the data and in inferring things about the performance of the fuel and so forth uh but that was sitting there as essentially as a static not really useful um set of of of dialogues that had happened in that they training they're training an AI uh language uh uh format basically on sort of 20 plus years of human expertise built into AI thing it's it's like right oh my gosh like like so this is what I also find so cool about being a technologist by the way you never it's always these synergies of things that like that apply to each other like these new super conductors and a new kind of magnet then a new kind of AI then a new kind of thing and then you you just keep bootstrapping yourself up all the way to the technological ladder I think it's yeah well you know you're you're you're at a point now where if there was enough of your published and spoken material is that you can have a dialogue with yourself about problems you haven't solved so I'll give you an example we built an AI system recently based on the first part of a book that I'm writing and the book is an analysis of deep themes in biblical stories so you could imagine that your bright students are going to put together all the relevant literature that pertains to your engineering problems and at least you'll have a partner that'll be something like an instantiation of you that you could or you and your colleagues that you could discuss these problems with yeah even better that it's an accumulative one of those right and right um and and you know I've been at Fusion now for 30 some years uh a faculty member it's like I can tell you almost all of my insightful breakthroughs came with a version of that which is we already had this it's called it's called training students at a university right right ex why do why do we have universities one of the reasons is we accumulate people in the same place and we take senior people who convey certain aspects of basic knowledge and so forth which are required to make sense of the problem but it's like I'm like almost every Innovation that has ever come has been sitting there talking with the student of explaining about why such and such a thing is a problem and they go and they they ask some you know quote unquote stupid questions not stupid at all it's actually iple question because in some sense they're they're training their own neural network right around these and and then all of a sudden you sort of see it from a different angle or you take it from a different approach it's been almost all the totality of my Innovations in the last you know 25 years have been almost all through student interactions so it's another version of that I think is is what I'm what i' saying yeah um so right those are the kinds of uh and and by the way that is another one where you talked about um in fact I left that off I should I should have reminded myself of that one which is additive manufacturing is another one of those aspects that is coming to Bear infusion because in the end we build these complex physical objects the ability to design it from the ground up um is just and to produce variants rapidly oh my gosh yeah um like a simple example is you know in the end you while you got this containment system there has to be this really effective essentially heat exchanger on the outside of this to remove this kinetic and get it into a usable heat form um you know the way I would describe this to date is we we build because because we could build it this way you know you build square blocks of things and you put a round hole in it and you pass you know some fluid through it to get it to cool nature never cools anything that way take a look at a leaf right but additive manufacturing allows us to make the equivalence of of leaves or like the capillary systems in our own in our own bodies it's like what that means we don't even know right even at the atomic scale then to do it at the atomic scale which means you can start mimicking biological functions as well too as well yeah amazing yeah it's almost like a science fiction world that we live in people sort of comment that it's like are again sort of medical that are pessimistic about where we're going I it's if you'd have shown me when I was uh you know when I was a young boy in rural scat on if you would have showing me this technology I would have thought I was living in a movie right right right absolutely and it's a new movie every day at the moment well that was great man I I really appreciate well first of all stepping us through the complex technical elements of understanding the fusion technology which I think we managed very well and then moving effectively from that into the Practical realization and the problems at hand and also interleaving with that you know a sense of I would say it's like 1950s to 1970s can do engineering optimism something I really loved about engineers in general about MIT in particular certainly saw that at Stanford too and with the Silicon valy types is that there isn't a problem that we can't crack and it's lovely to see that Spirit still alive at MIT um for everyone watching and listening I'm going to continue this conversation as I always do on the daily wire plus side it turns out that Dr White and I have some autobiographical features in common because he grew up like I did in western Canada and so I'm going to harass him about that and see how he emerged from that Canadian Prairie environment into a position of foremost influence at MIT we're going to talk too about how his interest in Fusion technology in engineering and in physics developed and so um as some of you watching and listening know I'm very interested in how people find their purpose find their meaning meaning and the interweaved relationship between the demands of their conscience right the problems they're trying to solve that lay themselves in front of them as objects for them to take responsibility for and then the spontaneous interest that manifests itself to people around topics that you know aren't it's very it's very it's a very curious thing how interest Finds Its home in as a Catu and Prairie boy you got obsessed with Fusion technology it's like well why well that's what we're going to delve into on The Daily we plus side so you guys who are watching and listening can join us there if you're inclined to in the meantime thank you very much Dr White for walking us through all that and for agreeing to be a guest of my show um congratulations on the success that you've had we'll be watching to see how this unfolds over the next few years including the success of this commercial Enterprise because it's an exciting possibility that that's that that's making itself manifest and so um and to everybody watching and listening in the dailywire plus crew thank you very much for your time and attention good getting to know you a bit and uh thanks again thanks for the opportunity appreciated [Music] it

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 162,744

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: Ftnt7KoRTIk

Length: 101min 17sec (6077 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024