The truth about nuclear fusion power - new breakthroughs

nuclear fusion is the holy grail for the ultimate clean energy power source virtually limitless clean power that's fueled by seawater and is much safer than fission nuclear reactors that we have today so what's not to like by the fact that they don't exist yet it costs billions of dollars for the research and we always seem to be perpetually 30 years away from having a working reactor it's a common joke that were always thirty years away and one that I saw a lot in the comments on my solid-state battery video there have been some exciting breakthroughs over the past few years so are we really stuck thirty years away from fusion reactors forever I met Carol welcome to undecided I'm gonna keep this higher level because nuclear physics is clearly a very complex topic that's how to scope for this video in my channel and my brain I'll include some links in the description for some details and explanations if you're interested but here's how it works at a high level fission is what happens when a neutron slams into a larger atom which splits it into two smaller atoms additional neutrons are also released in this process and can start a chain reaction by slamming into more atoms to continue the process when an atom is split a massive amount of energy is released which generates heat in the nuclear reactors that we have today around the world the heat is captured to turn water into steam which then turns a turbine and produces electricity Fusion is the opposite of fission and it's what's happening in our Sun and all stars in the universe fusion is when two atoms slam together to form a heavier atom fusion reactors can use deuterium and tritium when heated to 150 million degrees and slammed into each other they produce helium and a neutron fission reactions don't occur normally in nature but as I mentioned before fusion does and it occurs in stars one big benefit of fusion / fission is that it doesn't produce highly radioactive fission products it's also safer because of how the nuclear chain reaction behaves in fission the chain reaction of splitting atoms can get out of control which will either cause an explosion or a reactor meltdown and release massive amounts of radioactive particles for years and decades into the future while nuclear reactors are very safe and practice there have been several notable examples of what can happen if something goes wrong all you have to do is look at Three Mile Island in 1979 Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima in 2011 fusion reactions however are very different it takes a massive amount of heat to create plasma in the center of a fusion reactor plasma is superheated matter that gets so hot it rips electrons away from the atoms forming an ionized gas the freed nuclei which are positively charged and usually repel from each other start bouncing around at great speeds and confused together which releases energy in the process if a fusion reaction becomes unstable or unbalanced it naturally slows down dropping the temperature until it stops the worst case scenario is damage to the fusion reactor and the immediate surroundings but very little else but the safety benefits aren't the only reasons we're working to build fusion reactors instead of using something like uranium and plutonium as a fuel source fusion reactors can use deuterium and tritium both deuterium and tritium can be extracted from seawater and lithium and so there's enough fusion fuel on earth to power the planet for millions of years so what's the catch well it's a big one we haven't been able to produce a fusion reaction in an energy efficient and sustained way yet it takes more energy to generate the heat and pressure needed to create the fusion reaction than the energy we get out of it this is referred to as the fusion energy gain factor it's the ratio of energy to maintain the reaction versus what it's actually producing which is often expressed by the symbol Q so a Q of 1 would be breakeven a queue of 2 would double the energy that you put in and a Q that's less than 1 would be the loss of energy in 2017 the record for Q was set by the jet tokamak reactor in the UK which was a Q of 0.67 but there's a lot of nuance to that because these reactions and experiments are running on cheaper hybrid forms of fuel which aren't as efficient as deuterium and tritium so researchers also have calculations that they use to estimate real-world performance with things like extrapolated breakeven engineering breakeven and commercial break even again that's all lettuce scope for this video but I'll include links in the description if you're interested that's not the end of the cache we've been researching and experimenting with fusion since the 1930s that's right almost 90 years but the first fusion devices didn't show up until the 1950s when people joke that fusion energy is always 30 years away this is why the predictions for when fusion energy gain factor would be at a workable level has been wrong again and again a lot of times these predictions are coming from researchers trying to get funding stead of some overselling going on in order to generate interest it's important to look at this holistically saying that we'll never achieve fusion energy because we're always thirty years away is ignoring the actual progress that's been made the over selling of the time frame has damaged fusion Energy's perception in the 1970s and 80s we had several tokamak style reactors build which use a torus shape it's kind of like a big donut Homer Simpson would love it the tube is ringed by giant magnets that create a magnetic fields can find the hot plasma used for the fusion reaction three of the more notable tokamaks are the joint European torus or jet the tokamak fusion test reactor or TFT are in the US and the JT 16 G pan it was also in the 1980s when an international project was launched to build one of the largest tokamak reactors in the world in ER this 35 year collaboration between China the EU India Japan Korea Russia and the u.s. is building on a facility in southern France that should be capable of achieving a cue greater than 10 if it works out like they're hoping it should be able to generate about 500 megawatts of fusion power from 50 megawatts of input heating power itter itself is not meant to be a working reactor but a test facility to prove out the technologies in the design for the fusion power plants of future as exciting as that may sound it suffered from major cost overruns and delays but as of right now it's scheduled for its first plasma in December of 2025 and then ramping up to full operation by 2035 when you look at the progress that's been made over the past 50 years in fusion research there's been an increase in plasma performance by a factor of thousand and we're about a factor of ten away from having the core of a fusion power plant if you put aside the crazy predictions of when specific people or researchers think will get working reactors and you focus on the progress that's actually been made that's when you see that it's a generational process new advancements of material science high-speed supercomputers and modeling a simulation with the aid of machine learning are unlocking new approaches quickly in some cases relaunching old approaches that had to be abandoned because certain technologies didn't exist yet interest testing magnetic confinement fusion or mcf at a massive scale it's a tokamak that's using electromagnetic fields to confine the plasma into the reactor scaling up the size the reactor should scale up the reaction and the energy as part of the reason the project is so expensive and taking so long but on the flip side of this is to go smaller in 2015 MIT proposed a new design for a compact tokamak fusion reactor it creates a much stronger magnetic field using rare earth barium copper oxide superconducting tapes that's a mouthful this stronger magnetic field makes it possible to create and maintain the plasma in a smaller size for a sense of scale an arc reactor could achieve net energy gain in the system two percent the size of it er the smaller size means the whole system is less expensive and faster to build an MIT has spun off a company called Commonwealth fusion systems that's employing this in something they're calling a spark reactor then there are projects using an inertial confinement fusion or ICF which uses powerful pulse lasers or ion beams to compress a fuel pellet to an extremely high density the shockwave from the process heats the plasma a British company called first light fusion is taking its inspiration for this type of design from a pistol shrimp yes a shrimp not to get too far off track but a pistol shrimp snaps its quad together so fast that it rips the water apart creating a low-pressure zone bubbles collect in this area and rapidly expand the outside pressure of the surrounding water pushes back and collapses the bubbles this vapor inside the low-pressure zone is compressed to the point that plasma actually forms and reaches temperatures over 4700 degrees Celsius first light fusion is replicating this process in the reactor but using a metal disk shaped projectile and a cube filled with a fuel source in a central cavity the projectiles impact creates shock waves which produce bubbles in the fuel and as they collapse the fuel inside is compressed enough to fuse they're hoping to have a net energy gain demonstration by 2024 and when the most recent fusion developments is around lasers in 1985 Donna Strickland and Jerrod Marui demonstrated chirped pulse amplification of lasers at the University of Rochester shoutout to my hometown the discovery gets petawatt level performance out of an ultra short laser which was a game-changer for laser science up until that point lasers had only been pushed to the megawatt and gigawatt levels to put that in perspective a kilowatt is 1,000 watts the mega watt is 1,000 kilowatts a gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts a terawatt is 1,000 gigawatts and a petawatt is 1,000 terawatts this discovery ones Strickland and Marui a Nobel Prize for Physics in 2018 this breakthrough in laser technology made an older fusion concept known as hydrogen boron 11 fusion or HB 11 possible emeritus professor Heinrich hora of university South Wales in Sydney Australia has spoken of this concept since the 1960s HB 11 energy is a company spun out from the University that has patents in the US Japan and China instead of needed heated to terraeum tritium fuel to the temperature of the Sun lasers are used to speed hydrogen atoms into colliding with boron to begin reaction it wasn't until cpa lasers some 20 years later that this older idea became feasible where a tokamak reactor would be used to heat water to generate steam and turn a turbine hhb Elevens process would be generating electricity directly from the energy created from the hydrogen boron fusion the end result would be a very small efficient and safe device these aren't the only breakthroughs or reactor designs being tested but some of the more interesting examples that I found of what's happened in fusion research in the past few years does that mean we'll have fusion reactors within 30 years who knows I mean your guess is as good as mine but if you look at how far we've come from first experiments - now there's been an incredible amount of progress around a very complicated problem and if even if many of these companies hit their timelines and prove their designs the next three to five years which some of them are claiming that doesn't mean we'll have commercially viable reactors working right away just as I talked about my solid state battery video there's a gap between the lab and a commercialized product don't expect your home to be fusion power - any time in the next ten to twenty years but we're gonna get very close to proving out the concept of the technology that's needed to make it work and that's something to be really excited about and look forward to just take those time estimates with a massive grain of salt if you liked this video be sure to check out my video on solid state batteries that's another one where we keep getting promised the next big batteries almost here but we keep waiting now jump into the comments and let me know what you think and I'd also like to welcome Craig sweet gnam as one of my new patreon producers and as always thanks so much for watching I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Undecided with Matt Ferrell

Views: 745,944

Rating: 4.9132977 out of 5

Keywords: fusion power, nuclear fusion, nuclear fusion explained, nuclear fusion reactor, nuclear fusion vs fission, hb11 nuclear fusion, fusion, nuclear, power, fusion energy, fusion energy explained, nuclear physics, first light fusion, hb11 fusion, clean energy, clean energy technology, discovery, education, iter, physics, plasma, renewable energy, renewable energy 101, science, science news, science videos, stellarator, sustainability, technology, tokamak, tritium, undecided with matt ferrell

Id: Wc8SJqAPVaM

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ZamaZamachicken]

30 years 😉