Very well balanced documentary. I feel you went through effort to present the arguments of both private and public fusion project, without overhypeing, allowing your viewers to reach their own conclusion.
@@stevenrn6640 It was perhaps also reasonable-sounding in 1893 to say "In 1925, commercial air travel will still be 20 years off." (It began on a small scale in 1914.)
The problem is we the public do not have the background information to make up our own mind on this and the experts can talk circles around us, thus any conclusion I make from this will be either accidentally correct or it will be mistaken.
We're introducing a new Quicktake series: *Power Moves* - an in-depth look into the cutting-edge tech that could revolutionize how we power our modern lives. What do you think about fusion technology? Let us know in the comments!
Try hydrogen, and instead of electrolization, ionizating atomized H2O with high voltage and PWM, just like what happens in a thunderstorm in the clouds (that explosion is not caused by hot air...).
If startups didn't say they can do fusion on short deadlines (like couple years), then they wouldn't get the investors' money. As such, it would be naive to take their promises for granted due to obvious conflict of interests.
Yeah, I think there should be some scientists on the team that decides whether to give out the funds, just so they can understand if what they are promising makes sense
@@LeonardoRiglietti these are private investors. what they do with their money is not something you can control or dictate. not every single person is a scientist. public funds are 100% being channeled into the most realistic and practical approaches, even if they might not be the best, because the ultimate goal is always a return.
@@jonathanodude6660 I think it is more the opposite, private investors want the most practical and promising approaches since they are looking for something to patent and to make money out of, whereas public reasearch is often just for the sake of science.
@@LeonardoRiglietti no, private favours the rapid returns and big ideas while public often favours slow methodical research to explore all avenues that only has big breakthroughs every once in a while. you think insulin was discovered on private research?
This video changed my perception of the private fusion industry. Even if it doesn’t get to net positive fusion first, or fulfill its promises on time; the diversity of zany strategies and ideas being cooked up could end up contributing in the future. No one car company can take credit for even half the major innovations in the past 100 years.
I like the diference beteween Public and private, public its all about pushing the limits, making fusion longer, bigger, private is all about cutting cost, if you can´t make it long then make it repetition, instead of using steam use pistons or proyectiles. Is very different mentalities and they are necessary for things to advance
@@Motorata661 yes I agree ☝️ plus private may bring in new minds that otherwise would not be working on Fusion. While Public will likely move in the most straightforward (not over promising) and publicly transparent fashion.
My thought exactly. They may not be the first to net+, but ideas such as the pulsing "engine" style fusion reactor, or the smaller fusion reactor could play a significant role if they end up being feasible.
...but consider that each of the companies that do not succeed first are likely to go bankrupt once one of the others do succeed and everyone jumps on that ship. Because of this, and because of how beneficial collaboration is in general, I think it would probably be better if all these companies weren't racing to make billions against each other, but all "fusing" (pun intended) into one organization made of separate teams working on different technologies
Like space colonies and finding alien life, fusion reactors are something I've heard for decades... since I was a kid. But it is still something that feels within reach in my lifetime. It is still exciting.
When I talked to a physicist working on fusion-related topics a few years ago, the inspiring answer to “when” was “maybe in 30 years”. That’s 20 years less than 50 years ago which sounds like a joke, but it’s actually a change of timescale. It is getting closer.
It may take another century or two of testing and fine tuning for it to work. Meanwhile, fossil fuels are here to stay as they're highly reliable. Don't forget the current level of human technology and development wouldn't have been possible without fossil fuels.
@@paulheydarian1281 Fossil Fuels are reliable only in causing massive destruction worldwide. I don’t understand how you can still peddle fossil fuel while today half the European countries are devastated by raging wildfires and even the UK - that damp country of fog and eternal rain - gets fire problem.
@@ArneBab yeah I remember in 90s was gonna be 30 years or whatever. If they achieve this, be well worth the wait. Your power bill might even go down a lil. That last bit was a joke.
There's a huge difference between finally getting to net gain, and being profitable and more viable than other energy sources. Fusion will cost a LOT for many years before we can scale it and master it.
Its well worth the try I would be happy if germany would go big on this and spend 20 billion a year on this instead of spending 40 billian annually on lazy muslim migrants
Just props for how well this video was made, loved how you showcased all the different fusion startups from across the globe and their different methods of reaching net output. Thanks guys
@@niko-laus it’s not “ignored”, it’s just not available everywhere. The nations who are lucky enough to have vulcanic activity should definitely use it, but we need a solution for all the others.
@@niko-laus I looked into millimetre wave drilling and it has a few hurdles to go. Temperature and pressure, plus maintaining the waveguide are significant technical challenges, but I'm all for it.
@@jeremywilson2878 well that’s why we have state funded fusion as well, ITER, so it’s not guided by corporate profits. Albeit with the drawbacks of bureaucracy
3:53 "producing more energy than any fusion experiment in history" - we should add that it produced less energy than was put in. The energy out/in ratio is improving, but has not exceeded one, i.e. no fusion reactor has produced net energy output. This is covered later in the video, but I didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea.
Agree with you. Even if the plasma heat generation gain exceeds 1 --ie Q_plasma >1 , the TOTAL energy needs to be considered. Cooling the magnets, running the facility etc. Also the industry never ever discuss the conversion efficiency of converting the plasma heat to electricity which is much less than 50%. All said and done , even if Q-plasma is 5 or 10 time more efficient , it might not be enough to even break even.
@Zichen He : Conventional way not very efficient. Fusion is also a long way off; I predict that quantum to electric energy conversion will happen within 2 years.
I'm now a recently retired Ph.D. Aerospace Engineer with America's largest defense contractor, but i can still remember sitting in my 5th grade science class reading a science primer magazine in 1966 that talked about fission and fusion reactors and it said while fission reactors were already commercially workable it would about 30 years until fusion reactors came online.
Did they teach you how to just make things that work instead of making mass garbage in order to meter everything like a pack of spastics? I was born the next generation they didn't teach us how to make things that work either. So much for education hey. Better off blowing up all the skools & the ppl that run them the world works be a better place.
@@JazenValencia Well Helion is aiming for net electricity in 2024. That is 2 years, not 20... Most of the others are aiming for commercialization in the early 2030ies. That is 10 years. Might accelerate with more money, if they concepts proof viable.
The last fusion lab I worked in was Helion Energy. Before that I worked at the Redmond Plasma Physics Lab, part of the University of Washington. It was nice to see some of my handiwork in a video.
@@rayhans7887 I think if Helion’s approach works, then about 10 years. I am confident that Helion’s approach is the right way to go. I don’t think Tokamaks will ever work. I’ve been told that by guys that spent their careers working on Tokamaks.
Thank you for your contribution to the future. I do wonder if fusion really is clean though. I'd imagine instead of meltdown worries, we'd have gamma & x-ray worries.
You can make one yourself. no need for gargantuan billion dollar government science projects. Look into aneutronic fusion. Get a 3d printer, a vacuum pump and some household electronics.
I wonder what the best opportunities to invest now are, there are opinions but a little later I find out these opinions don't matter as a totally different turn of events play out with the stocks they discussed therein.
great report. I am rooting for fusion since I was a little kid. And I hope to see it being out there in my lifetime. This is the kind of change humanity desperately needs if we want to advance any further. The energy problem needs to be solved. Just think about how the abundance in processing power and storage has transformed the world. Having an abundance of energy would be many tenfolds of that magnitude.
On Dec. 5, 2022, a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history
A fusion reactor uses deuterium and tritium for fuel. Deuterium can be extracted from water but tritium is radioactive and must be synthesized and it must be made in the actual reactor. Since the reactor consumes the same number of deuterium as tritium atoms it is far from evident that enough tritium to keep the reactor running can be produced. That is only one of the many hurdles that the the fusion startups will have to overcome. One of the companies that are presented in the video is General Fusion. I have followed their winding path from their start in 2002 and I have come to the conclusion that the method they propose to compress the liquid lithium cannot possibly work. They claim that it does, but to the best of my knowledge they have not presented any proof to support the claim. Please enlighten me if I am wrong.
Thank you for your critique. It is true that little research has gone into the production of the radioactive tritium to generate enough to fuel the reactor and produce a cost-effective generation of electrical power at the same time. The following critique of the ITER mentions this rarely presented problem. ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy (The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists)
The inventor of the Television , Philo T. Farnsworth, went on to develop a room sized fusion reactor that used specially designed vacuum tubes for the project. I T & T controlled the Farnsworth patents and refused to allow Farnsworth to proceed any further with the project.
Whenever readers come across an article regarding a fusion energy 'breakthrough' in the goal to achieve fusion energy ask yourself was their any evidence that any, or a significant amount of fusion reactions were detected. In the vast majority of cases the claimed 'breakthrough' experiments involve no DT fusion fuel and so no fusion reactions were detected. Most are simply experiments that compress normal hydrogen isotope nuclei (protons) so there is no way any significant amount of fusion reactions will occur. The announcements are often intended to attract investor, or government funds for further research. The write-ups are often misleading fluff to attract interest.
There used to be an old saying that goes: "Fusion power is only 30 years away and always will be." Plasma temperatures run at 100 MILLION degrees, NOT 100,000.
@sandponics many people like to keep others thinking about the past that way they don't advance, is just a way to keep you distracted and make you a puppet.
They said that 10 years ago, the latest breakthrough is just another prove of concept. They put 100x the energy recovered into this, and they could only do it once a day. For it to work we will need some crazy breakthroughs in laser technology so it (lasers) can generate 100x the energy and do it more directly then we need to be able to do it over and over again to make it commercially viable. Sadly.
It's also the least pragmatic, because they're claiming "net zero" in 2 years. Nearly every real scientist sees their 2-yr claim as hucksterism. They do it to target non-scientific (naive) investors, such as Peter Thiel. Many of these CEOs "talk a big game," but to scientists they sound like children playing with big words they don't understand. The business world is full of the "who can you fool" model. Helion Energy's wish to directly transfer vast amounts of electrons (i.e. immense currents - which create heat) from super-hot plasma's into room-temperature electrical wires requires other "alchemy" that they skipped in the video - because it's too difficult to do. They need to have the fusion reactor-vessel (at 100+ million degrees C) be very close/adjacent to superconducting wires (at near-absolute-zero) to "pull away" the very high-current electricity. How do you have one space at 10^8 degrees, and next to it space at 10^-2 degrees (10 orders of magnitude difference in temperature = 10 billion degrees Celsius separated by 3 feet). Such a large temperature gradient will destroy (at a minimum, will quickly erode) the wires & equipment itself. They conveniently "ignored" this real problem (and other serious problems). Much of silicon valley "talks big" but doesn't delivery. You never hear about the 1000s of companies that vanish.
I personally doubt the idea. In my opinion, Helion's "electromagnetic harvesting" would work like inductive coupling, and it's a really inefficient power transmission
however it must be said that the Rankine-Hirn cycle is something that has existed for more than a century and is reliable and known, adding other innovations to a project that already has tight deadlines in the field of fusion (a field still in the experimental phase) would mean increasing further the risk of failure of the entire project
Fusion would be great . But in the meantime , why aren’t we going with walk away safe environmentally friendly long proven Thorium molten salt reactors that doesn’t need to be by a body of water and can built almost any where ? China is pushing hard to have these plants and is almost past the pilot plant stage and since thorium is very abundant it makes for long lasting cheap clean energy.
you calling clean to radioactive waste? Interesting You don't need to wait for some decades until that chinese lab shows some results, for then to be adopted by your country, and then a plant to be built near your region. Wake up, solar is already here.
You fell for the propaganda from the Livermore team. They reported increased plasma efficiency (Qplasma) but the total efficiency (Qtotal) is still abysmal. The input energy to laser beams used in the experiment was 300 MJ, only 2 MJ made it to the fusion fuel target and fusion reaction created 3MJ output (heat energy). They only quoted the Qplasma = 3 / 2 ratio achieved in the experiment. Qtotal = 3 x 40% / 300 = 0.01 (even this is generous because 3MJ output heat needs to be converted to the electrical energy and I generously assigned the 40% efficiency here assuming that it is possible to extract the heat energy from this device and then use it to create steam and power steam turbine.
@@SaiRyan1 Honest reporting is needed. Since national labs are using billions of USD for research, they should report their progress without hype. Current administration in Washington should not manipulate facts to play politics. ITER project promised Qplasma = 10; this is six times as much as Qplasma for laser fusion project.
@@usneome there is nothing dishonest about what they have done, they got more energy out of the reaction then put into the reaction which has not been done before. You don't understand what the problem was nor understand what has happened. The problem they were solving wasnt efficiency, it was can it even be done. Can the reaction create more energy then it took to create the reaction. How much energy it took to start the reaction is irrelevant
Great video, but there are a bunch of key startups with promising technology that should have been included for example MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems with over 2 billion in funding, TAE Technologies , Zap Energy ...
Progress is definitely being made. Very exciting times. Am particularly impressed by the "direct to electricity" technology. My bet is a private company will generate Net Energy first. I sure hope they find multiple pathways to generating Net Energy.
The problem is that we are not yet desperate enough to have to rely on those startups. Even if they progress beyond what is considered net plus, they will be bought up or stifled until they are gone, just to hold up fossil fuels. We are the lazy composers of our own downfall.
@@deadralynx1288 yes we are, but the people in charge of building it realise it's not feasible at relatively small scales (compared to the mass of the sun). But they're stuck because they based their entire careers on it. If they release something with a Net Gain that's really small, it'll be commercially viable, sure, but it'll be a ticking ecological time bomb, producing billions of tonnes of radioactive isotopes from valuable, life-giving water.
Something that wasn't talked about: The fuel. Short version: the technical challenge with fusion is not only the getting the plasma hot enough part efficiently enough Long versione: The lowest temperature fusion reaction we can do is deuterium (D) + tritium (T) to helium and a neutron. All other reactions require factors more of temperature/particle energy. Deuterium you can get from water (although it only makes up ~0.02% of the hydrogen in natural water). Tritium is radioactive and has a short half-life, so every bit of tritium on earth was generated by humans, either through atom bombs or nuclear reactors or accelerators. You can use the neutron that comes out of the D-T fusion to do another nuclear reaction with lithium that produces one tritium atom and a helium atom. But the technologies surrounding the entire process of recovering that tritium are not completely solved either.
The whole thing is a non starter. Even if the reaction itself produced overall net energy which so far isn't even close, the fuel would be far too expensive and energy intensive to supply. 60 years of research and we've got nowhere.
Lower the goalposts and shoot for synthesis of helium. There is a dwindling supply of that, and maybe you’ll run into some bigger fusion breakthroughs later.
General Fusion and Helion Energy both have complimentary ideas and technologies. If they're gonna inductively recapture energy by careful design of their apparatus, that could be applied to General Fusion's reactor chamber, granted Helion's approach is more linear, whilst General Fusion's is more radial, but I digress.
Scientists say it'll take decades, but business owners currently accepting investment capital say "It's right around the corner!" Exactly the level of journalism I expect from Bloomberg. Woof.
Yeah, it's Bloomberg. They're not in this for the science. All they want to do is take advantage of riling up investors and getting people to throw their money around. Still, the sentiment seems positive overall. I just wonder which one the producers placed all their casino chips on. One always has to look at financial media with a healthy dose of skepticism. Not the science part, just the message and the purpose behind it.
Never seen a single time that they quoted total power in electricity and total power they would get out in electricity. Hope they do it but I don’t see it for 50-60 years. The net gain they will quote will be in energy in and energy made not that the energy out when turned to electricity will be 40% of the energy made as heat even for ITER
Yeah. There is a danger with misleading expectations: Other mitigation strategies maybe neglected on the grounds this is the answer worth waiting for; loss of credibilty may even affect core funding.
Yeah when the dude said one of those "projectiles" in his fusion reactor creates enough power to last one household 2 years, and that they can fire one every 30 seconds... I felt like that was insanely low. And those are projections that he HOPES for. Not to mention they're still barely in the testing phases, so he hasn't even built one yet. No shade and we should explore all possibilities, but we really need to be putting more focus on things that we already know work - nuclear.
Yup that's the real question. One of the first thoughts that came to mind. Not only is the energy output questionable, the entire issue of conversion efficiency makes it a tough case for practical use. We need a better energy conversion technology.
@@jajajinks1569 yes nuclear especially MSR. The power out maybe enough for 2 years but he did not mention he power in it took or that when he tried to convert the power to electricity he would only have 30-40% of that power. In uk he would need to fire one of those pellets every second to get the power for everyone and convert them at 100%. Plus store the power at off peak and deliver at peak can they even make 1 of these pellets per second probably took them ages to make the pellet
@@jajajinks1569 Dude you don't understand. Nuclear Power is destroying our planet. Cossing global warming & with that comes massive weather changes, massive earthquakes, killer heat waves, our earths outer blue sphere that protects mankind from burning to death from the sun is deteriorating because of fossil fuel use.
I often think of Thomas Edison's quote on subjects like this "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Hopefully there will be a similar scientist/s who makes the key breathrough in this complex fusion puzzle soon.
It was not the private sector that got this discovery! It wasn’t Oxford either! Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California nabbed the power of the sun!
@@elmarmoelzer2229 You are raining on their parade. Plasma efficiency (Qplasma) factor bigger than 1.0 is a small step forward. However, we are still far away from achieving overall efficiency (Qtotal) bigger than 1.0
More power to the veteran fusion physicists at Max Planck and JET, but there's a significant feature they're missing wrt startup mentality: they require significant investment of optimism otherwise they can become their own worst naysayer. SpaceX had many naysayers for example, including established leaders in the rocket industry including Neil Armstrong of all people. The naysayer group is oversubscribed. It's the lowest hanging fruit for any intellectual to grab. In light of SpaceX's success, we remember their insurmountable determination and not the naysayers.
Management - I need you to give birth in 1 months instead of 9, here's 8 engineers. Very typical of the private industry, funny enough there's was an experiment regarding productivity and rewards, it scale up when the task is mostly labor intensive but when incentives increase to complex task you don't see the same.
A lot of private/silicon valley bravado is a joke. If you consider the total amount of money used in private industry/silicon valley - versus what we get out (a few companies successful, but 1000s that failed)... it's not so efficient. Millions of investors lose big money on so many so-called "startups".
nice 😀I have mine built by a friend (a scientinst that study this for over 15 years) and since I use it I feel marvellous. Plus I got rid of a fibroid and now I start to reset my consciosness🥰he doesn't sell them commercially so his interests are purely scientific. When it's about multiwave oscillators he knows the subject in and out. In the last 90 years since Lakhovski invented his machine technology advanced and now the machine can be build with higher precision and way more efficient than back in the 1900s. There are few other things that my friend added to the machine that for me work WOW.
In 2006 MIT President Hochfield visited my alumni club in Dallas. After a great presentation she asked for questions. I said "In 1971 I worked on a problem set for a fusion reactor containment vessel. It's been 35 years, so where are they?" She replied that the head of the Nuclear Engineering Department had told her "Thirty five years, but this time we mean it". It's been 16 more years Where are they? Some of this seems promising, but I want to see something before I hit 100.
As far as I know it is still a problem not completelly solved. Many may not realise, but fusion can be this first peculiar form of power production, where the fuel is not the real significant consumable, but the structural, and sacrificial materials of the reactor device itself.
What if tech originally developed for fusion were transferable to another energy project adequate to solve the GHG problem? Gyrotrons are the key tech for a geothermal energy startup called Quaise Energy. They use the gyrotron to vaporize basement rock, cutting borehole costs by an order of magnitude whilst vitrifying the sides of the hole and stabilizing it against the impending pressure. Their system also builds on oil industry expertise in pipes, geology, pumps, etc. As to fusion itself: it looks still a distant prospect, but at least we're throwing more darts at the board with slightly better aim.
I don't believe the Tokamak type reactor has much promise. With neutrons constantly bombarding its innards, making it internally radioactive, and causing structural decay, I have a problem with this. Clean thermal fusion in a Tokamak simply isn't so. The Quaise Energy concept is much cleaner, as mentioned by kreek22, but could destabilize plate tectonics if improperly used. The bullet approach to aneutronic fusion looks more promising. Keeping the flow in one direction is much easier than trying to contain a neutron bomb completely. Basically, an aneutronic fusion rocket strapped to an MHD generator.
Meanwhile stuff like molten salt fission breeders get nothing. Worked in the 60s, far cheaper, safer than current commercial (solid-fuel/water-cooled) designs, and have most if not all of the benefits claimed for fusion. Hybrid fission/fusion designs might even help get fusion here faster. I'm not anti-fusion, just pro common sense.
I'd bet any amount of money that we do achieve fusion. It's easy to see only the challenges and seemingly impossible hurdles, but let's not forget that humans have a long history of turning concepts and mathematical theories into functional realities. Accessing the energy in the atomic nucleus was thought impossible, flight was thought impossible. In 1903 we first flew, in 1967, we put a human on the moon 280,000 miles away. Let's not underestimate ourselves; there's enough negativity in the world already.
It's primarily because, if those who have the money had allowed the public to educate itself sufficiently, the public would understand the importance of the investment, take responsibility for it, and make the investment themselves. But the wealthy have spent decades educating us that public expenses are bad because of taxes, so now they're paying the whole tab. They will have complete ownership and control of it. On a related note, I heard that the privately-owned and controlled Texas power grid operators is upgrading some of the state's infrastructure, since they own it. It seems that more people than anticipated want refrigerated air conditioners in the summer, but the current system can't handle it. I guess it was one of those "Last Mile" kind of things. The appropriate service fee will appear on their receipts at the Walmart checkout.
Yeah, and fusion reactors will be so complex it will be very difficult for anyone else to compete. Giving them more the ability to charge whatever they want and even withhold electricity for political reasons.
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These companies better make sure that they keep security at the highest levels. Sabotage from within by bad actors funded secretly by big oil, seems to be a major concern given how quickly the oil/gas industries would fold once sustainable fusion is developed.
The oil and gas industry is already folding because of the rise of renewable energies (luckily). Fusion is too late for the party. The question is whether fusion energy will ultimately be cheaper than wind power, in which case the wind power industry might be rather short lived.
@@MatjesHunts Wind power will never go away unless the wind goes away. Most people would LOVE to just buy a wind turbine and run their house off it and a battery, and maybe some solar panels. The cost is still too high as an individual, but if you aggregate the cost across those whom would be willing like a town of 10,000-50,000 a few wind turbines make a TON of sense in the right areas.
@@MatjesHunts they still have a strong point with global industry. Still, they will be riding this for as long as possible. Many are already dipping their toes into electrical sources and water sources.
@@MatjesHunts Do you have any idea how much fossil fuel goes into mKing a wind turbine project? Steel, cement, composites for blades., machinery building roads and offshore foundations?
Ever since I heard of ITER its been a dream of mine to help with the project. Thank you for talking about this wonderful project and bringing it to the attention of so many more people.
The Silicon Valley approach may or may not yield directly useful results, but one thing it will do _for sure,_ is rapidly expand our understanding of the way fusion works. In that sense, it is guaranteed to bring us closer to commercial fusion energy production faster than the government-backed projects alone could. My hope is simply that the monetary incentive to eschew safety and environmental concerns that are ever-present in the commercial sector aren't so big that they are heeded. Let us try not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors.
It's like a marathon where it doesn't matter who wins as long as someone finishes the race. The more runners there are, the more likely someone will finish and the sooner it will happen.
@@6Sparx9 The fact that copyright theft is associated with China is only because all the other countries don't have the care or need to do it themselves (at least not publicly). China builds one, a western project will "suddenly" appear - with similar technology of course.
Physics breakthroughs always have impact in chemistry research, which then impacts biology and medicine research. We’ve been waiting for this and it’s finally here!
I can't help but think about how computers used to be so large, expensive, and hardly optimal and compare it to this. Just imagining that a future beyond my time there could possibly be these types of reactors in much smaller capacities like how we have hand held computers as our mobile devices gives me hope to the potential of humanity.
What about wave power from the oceans? I’d heard at some point in the past that it’s just a matter of harnessing it to provide energy. Seems that would be a kind of cheap power that wouldn’t also create a hazardous waste product that would create other problems like causing cancers etc. just wondering... I’m not a scientist or anything other than a curious but uneducated person who is just a member of the general public (in so far as science is concerned), who is curious but has no idea about any of this.
This is false analogy. Progress of computation and energy generation are very different things. There are many technical fields where miniaturization was limited or never happened.
@@bonnieklapel1825 fusion won't generate hazardous waste. Also, harvesting de necessary energy from the oceans would take an intensive use of very special and reinforced materials. It may make sanse for some niche applications but is unfeasible for global production ( also, delivering energy to inland locations would account for i me sé loses as well as you would need a lot of redundancy since waves are not exactly predictable.
D+T Fusion power can create large amounts of low-level waste due to neutron capture. Especially sucks when that waste is expensive electromagnets... I hope this issue can be solved somehow
You guys at Oxford, I think you are on the verge of cracking this, what you need is financial backing and lots of it, to sustain a controlled fusion reaction for just 5 seconds is a huge achievement, a little bit of tweaking the control software and you might well be there, clearly controlling them is a very critical matter, once that is solved you may well be looking at another world first, KEEP GOING!!!
When I was working on controlled fusion in the 90s, I came to the conclusion that it was the philosophers stone of our time. I have seen nothing since to make me change my mind, but I desperately hope that someone will prove me wrong.
@@ahklys1321 At that time the main approach was magnetic confinement. The problem in general with magnetic confinement is that there is monstrous feedback between the plasma and the containing fields. Furthermore, the higher energy and higher density your plasma gets, the higher the feedback gets. It just doesn't seem to make sense. For ICF the problem is different. Because it is an impulse system, for any type of you have the problem that you need to clear out any reaction products from the previous shot before you can do the next shot. This seems somewhat more feasible, but that much.
There have been a dozen or so major developments in the last 10 years concerning a) high temperature super conductors, b) MIMO control techology and high-speed chips for controlling such systems, c) actuators ( I imagine ), d) simulation technology, e) fundamental science / physics, f) new simulators that have come out of Princeton et al, new algorithms, g) deep learning and 'AI' techniques applied to predicting plasma instabilities better... And probably far more stuff that I'm not aware of because I'm just a spectator (although I have a ph.d. in systems engineering and mathematical optimization...). But my point is that a great many things have changed in the last 10 years. And the fact that the billionaires are coming in cause they smell blood in the water, so to speak, reinforces that idea in my mind. This is a different ball game. I don't think you're up with the times, lately.
19:02 Really dumb to say that NASA is "unmotivated" to pursue the tech SpaceX has. There's a difference between being extremely underfunded and unmotivated. If the US government put a fraction of the money they put into the military into NASA they would have innovated even more.
A better investment for this capital would be to research construction of safer and cheaper fission reactors and spent fuel reprocessing. Fusion is a money pit that may never be commercially viable.
Plenty of money is going into next generation small liquid sodium molten thorium pebble modular blahblah fission startups: NuScale, Terrapower, that Rolls Royce thing, ... They're closer to viability than fusion, which means they're facing the reality that wind and solar are and will be much cheaper than the first few units they build.
@@skierpage Fission reactors and solar/wind are not comparable, therefore neither is cheaper than the other. Now, solar/wind plus storage can be compared to fission reactors. And that comparison doesn't pan out so well for solar/wind.
I like Tokamak Energy in that they quickly jumped to build magnetic coils from now-available high-temperature-superconductor wires. A lot in fusion scales very favourably (and strongly) with increasing magnetic field, so cheap, strong magnets are key to business.
We have 65 trillion tons of uranium and 195 tons of thorium in the earth's crust. We shouldn't be waiting for nuclear fusion to have total energy abundance.
Fission is very expensive compared to most renewables, with the costs of renewables projected to continue falling. We should always have a diversified power grid but I don’t think fission is a worthy investment at the moment
This is so awesome! I’ve been following fusion progress for longer then I can remember. It seems like we’re so close to this amazing breakthrough. I really wish i was in some way apart of this amazing science. Nevertheless I’m still very proud of the individuals that are.
@@pablo-cw1wg And? The important part is that we're making a lot of progress. Predictions about when it will actually be commercially available are less significant.
Just as we cannot perfectly replicate the same conditions as on earth during space flights, we are also not yet able to replicate the sun on earth. But I believe it will be possible in a few thousand years.
In 1992 I heard a lecture on fusion technology. The lecturer had been researching fusion technology for twenty years and prophesied that it would be producing all the electricity the world would need within twenty years. It is now 2022, 40 years on and they are still quoting availability in twenty years time.
Monorail. As long as capitalism is the driving force behind such projects, they are all doomed to fail. "They" will not allow any new energy source to supplant the old one until the old one has been completely tapped out. Until then, all we will get is teasers and more esoteric calls for a brighter future. P.S. Nuclear (thorium) works, but they don't want to be financially responsible for the mess they've already created with their boiling water reactors.
@@bhatkat But if you actually look at what these alternatives are, it is very easy to see how utterly absurd these are. Lets assume for a moment that we can achieve fusion with initial confinement with both the liquid Metall idea and the laser heating idea, in the sense that the fusion energy divided by input energy is >1. Than what? You still need way more energy to power the lasers than what their output is to slightly warm up the chamber. How is that useful? A usual fission Reaktor evaporates enormes amounts of water, high temperatures and high energy output for a rather small machine. That is what makes it cost effective.
I hope we come up with a valid approach to sustained fusion. Imagine a world with cheap energy and no more fossil fuels. The approach that I liked is the direct energy transfer rather than going to steam as most other methods mentioned here.
Greenwald limit on density of fusion fuel at a given temperature was found to be twice as high as previously thought. The first reactor to exploit the new fuel density limits will make the fastest progress to net energy.
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In the 1970s, I was a grad student at the Univ of Texas Austin. We had a Tokamak design buried deep underground. We were trying to understand what the Russians already understood - just about nothing compared to now. Decades later, I see Tokamaks still trying to get on the plus side. About a year ago, I read an article that Lockheed Martin will have a working fusion generator in five years. I instantly thought their marketing department was headed by a pathological liar. In spite of all these new approaches, I just can't see a fusion generating machine for decades. I think all this positive thinking is designed to get as much investor money now, not later.
You're not wrong. All these companies are also drinking our supply of tritium to death so that those who are close to figuring out fusion may not have as long as they require. By 2050, it's estimated there will only be 5 kg of tritium left.
@@Deco_2k people will still have to pay but with an energy source of that scale the massive overpopulation could possibly not lead to the collaps of human society
@@Deco_2k We have to pay the price regardless of where that energy comes from. Talk to people who lived in the 1970s. They paid the price - to OPEC. We're not arguing paying the price. We're arguing where the energy comes from. Each source has its advantages and disadvantages. Ask Greta Thunberg about this.
@@gmork1090 I didn't realize there was a shortage of tritium. Who did this study? I'd like to know, because if true, it's very profound, as fusion is the holy rail we're all looking for if it's feasible. Thx.
If money is to be made from something, private industry will figure it out before governments. And whoever figures out net positive fusion first (and puts the Middle East out of business) is going to be extremely, extremely rich.
It only took 20 years go to from the nuclear bomb to nuclear power stations, so I would say it's safe to say that you will likely see it in your lifetime
I hope western private companies can collaborate on this essential game changing technology so when all the kinks are worked out, that the adoption happens faster..
The company with the most capital to buy up all of the best patents will likely be the one that ultimately succeeds. Unfortunately, it will require that a lot of those startups die on the vine, so that they're willing to sell them or share them. The energy recovery patent from Helion seems like something that might be applicable for a lot of designs. Could it be used for a Tokamak? I don't know. Somebody smarter than me could probably say whether it's impossible or not, but I don't know if it's something that anybody will be able to apply to their own designs unless they can use the patent. These are the kinds of roadblocks that arise when private companies take over the research space. The gold rush for fusion is bringing an amazing amount of progress to the field, but the lack of collaboration means it takes longer for all the individual branches of progress to coalesce.
@@austeyen5628 eventually, but we won’t know when that eventually is, we’ll be right but we won’t know it until 30 years later it’s done and then we track back, but until it is done, it’s still ‘30 years away’, even if it’s 1 day away
They have been saying "20 years away, 30 years away" for over 100 years of trying they are still hardly any closer to getting fusion to work than ever and they are still saying "only 30 years away". All they have done is to change the efficiency definitions. They tell you about the high levels of efficiency but they fail to include the humongous power necessary to obtain that core efficiency, so when they tell you that they are at 70% efficiency it is really somewhere around .03% efficiency. Those lasers are huge power sumps and they are not considering that power when they brag about efficiency. To put it into perspective, in the sun at the levels where fusion occurs, only 240 Watts are released per cubic meter of sun. Fusion is never going to work, it is a pipe dream for people that are poor at math. But it keeps a lot of otherwise unemployable physicists employed.
After a year, Look up this device Called the “Calicoes” this is the device that will make Fusion possible. Today is 7-22-2022. I promise you within a year or a year we will have Fusion. My name is Andre. Remember this comment my friend. You will live to see Fusion, I promise. Don't forget this comment. Because I will come back to it after Fusion is achieved within a year or a year. I promise 👍🏾👍🏾
This video has 2.4M views in 4 months? wow! There is hope for humanity. I guess in the future scientists may start earning more than athletes and movie stars.
When I saw the concept of fusion power many many many many moon ago , my heart knew it will become reality one day and my heart still beats in that same game , we are humans we are magnificent
If they conquer fusion do you honestly think they will use it for the benefit of humanity? If Tesla was still alive I'm sure he would have something to say.
@@spencervance8484 just because is clean? what's the whole deal? does it have a bigger output of energy than other methods? does it produce infinite energy? I'm sorry I'm a nobody I don't know what'sthe deal with this reactor
Beautiful documentary. A note to the Silicon Valley CEO guy that logic of government being outranked in progress by private is actually wrong for your given example. NASA DCX actually beat SpaceX
@@darinhitchings7104 This is something I posted when saying "NASA DCX actually beat SpaceX" I am referring to the relanding of a booster. Nasa accomplished this feat before SpaceX as well as other competitors. We can all appreciate SpaceX but no need to fanboy so hard that we are blinded by a competitor's success.
In this era of scams, I find it hard to take this seriously. Does one take the massive amounts of money being dumped into this process as indicative of viability, or gullibility? My limited understanding of fusion leads me to think the latter.
Startup culture is littered with scams. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the startup fusion companies are all hype. But ITER is the real deal. Worldwide collaboration of scientists and engineers.
How do you feel about any challenging research project? (Reusable rockets, EVs and fast charging batteries, carbon sequestration, advanced fighter jets, space flights for millionaires, starship, …) Sure there have been stinkers (Volta, Enron, some NASA projects get canceled, did Christopher Columbus break even?). If you only fund what exists, you’re only funding production rather than exploration.
If someone expresses a concern about a particular thing, do you think it wise to place them in the margins with Luddites? Turning something from a one off into mass production is exploitation, not exploration.
@@patinsley Yes, I see something someone is calling plasma. Apparently, there is plasma in the sun as well, along with a whole lot of gravity. So, I'm wondering, has someone figured out how to create that amount of gravity in a confined volume? Like I said, I'm not up on the scientific research, so I don't know what's needed. So my model of existence is very simple, and questions oddities that don't fall within it. My tendency is to be skeptical. It's people who either know more about it than I do, or people who have enough excess wealth to risk the loss on the trust in the claims. I fall outside of both of those categories. Scam worlds occupy the entire spectrum. The poor, the wealthy. And anything in between. Sometimes it's just an earnest mistake. I expect some online crowd funding promises are sincere as well.
Huge input of giga yielded 1.3, a 30% of gain huger giga Newton scaled force, but we still need to find a method to harness the energy emitted from fusion because that amount of input/output energy are dangerous. It just reminds me about the volatile HHO but which, in comparison, is much easier and safer to handle if our scientists try harder.
Watched Particle Fever movie 10 years ago a couple times when it came out. This video is a blessing bringing updates to such wonderful developments. Thank you for sharing this.
Would magnetic movement of pulse around the coils by lowering power in multiple coils spaced out evenly or even circular movement of the coils physically help make it work?
From what I have heard and read, thorium reactors seem more viable than fusion in the near future... Supposedly, we have already built small-scale thorium reactors that ran for decades in laboratories and we have plenty of convenient thorium supply to cheap energy for 10,000+ years.
1 trillion dollars, the price of every war for oil, could pay for 5kW of solar panels for 200 million homes...employ at least a million people to install and/or make them, covering all homes and small businesses in Canada, USA and at least Mexico. This would cut energy usage from fossil fuels by half and negate the need for things like F u k u s h i m a... which is the real reason for the 1.5 degree rise in temps esp across the Pacific every year since 2 0 1 1... if solar on roofs isnt acceptable visually there are solar thermal plants and solar farms that can be placed in the desert, generate hho with solar power and send that to power stations and homes to use in natural gas type generators which run quiet and exhaust water vapor...its number one of 10 of my solutions which are simple with a mass movement. The government spent 6 trillion for c-v... and 2 trillion for QE.. its easy for them to create a trillion
Yep Thorium could do the job for us now and for hundreds of years to come at a minimum. Its also abundant on other bodies in the solar system like the Moon and Mars. We should have implemented Thorium reactors decades ago. We have the technology.
Startup like to compare themselves with SpaceX and give forecasts for their own products based on that comparison. But we should keep in mind that NASA send the first human to moon in 1969. SpaceX took that rocket technology that was already working and improved it during the last 2 decades. But SpaceX is still no capable of sending astronauts to the moon more than 50 years after Apollo 11. Fusion, however, is not a working technology that can be improved in a cost-efficent way by the famous/infamous Silicon Valley approach. At the moment fusion only works in simulations and on paper.
Very well balanced documentary. I feel you went through effort to present the arguments of both private and public fusion project, without overhypeing, allowing your viewers to reach their own conclusion.
This was a massively over-hyped "documentary". In 2050, fusion will still be 20 years off.
@@stevenrn6640 Congrats, you're the successor of the people who made fun of the prospect of aviation ever happening in the 19th century.
@@stevenrn6640 It was perhaps also reasonable-sounding in 1893 to say "In 1925, commercial air travel will still be 20 years off." (It began on a small scale in 1914.)
90⁰⁰i0l
The problem is we the public do not have the background information to make up our own mind on this and the experts can talk circles around us, thus any conclusion I make from this will be either accidentally correct or it will be mistaken.
We're introducing a new Quicktake series: *Power Moves* - an in-depth look into the cutting-edge tech that could revolutionize how we power our modern lives. What do you think about fusion technology? Let us know in the comments!
Try hydrogen, and instead of electrolization, ionizating atomized H2O with high voltage and PWM, just like what happens in a thunderstorm in the clouds (that explosion is not caused by hot air...).
Love this series and your mini-documentaries. Keep it up!
Yes make the new series available on U-tube and podcasts
These series have huge international viewership potential, release the full series on youtube
This Video was amazingly well done. 😎🥂
If startups didn't say they can do fusion on short deadlines (like couple years), then they wouldn't get the investors' money. As such, it would be naive to take their promises for granted due to obvious conflict of interests.
True, but start ups/ private business can move faster than governments. See spacex as an example
Yeah, I think there should be some scientists on the team that decides whether to give out the funds, just so they can understand if what they are promising makes sense
@@LeonardoRiglietti these are private investors. what they do with their money is not something you can control or dictate. not every single person is a scientist. public funds are 100% being channeled into the most realistic and practical approaches, even if they might not be the best, because the ultimate goal is always a return.
@@jonathanodude6660 I think it is more the opposite, private investors want the most practical and promising approaches since they are looking for something to patent and to make money out of, whereas public reasearch is often just for the sake of science.
@@LeonardoRiglietti no, private favours the rapid returns and big ideas while public often favours slow methodical research to explore all avenues that only has big breakthroughs every once in a while. you think insulin was discovered on private research?
This is one of the best examples I've seen of a traditional media company transitioning to new media
yeah this is great!!
I can't even fathom how a device of this type was built given the intricacy it would entail. An absolute marvel of engineering.
I marvel at that lady,
In answer to your question ( general quantum mechanics ) .
My blessings
It can be built but it won't work
More a device is complex, more is prone to failure. This law is just inescapable.
@@sammyd7857
Ah yes. The old "man wasn't meant to fly" trope all over again. Of course it will work, it works already. It's called stars.
This video changed my perception of the private fusion industry. Even if it doesn’t get to net positive fusion first, or fulfill its promises on time; the diversity of zany strategies and ideas being cooked up could end up contributing in the future. No one car company can take credit for even half the major innovations in the past 100 years.
I like the diference beteween Public and private, public its all about pushing the limits, making fusion longer, bigger, private is all about cutting cost, if you can´t make it long then make it repetition, instead of using steam use pistons or proyectiles.
Is very different mentalities and they are necessary for things to advance
@@Motorata661 yes I agree ☝️ plus private may bring in new minds that otherwise would not be working on Fusion. While Public will likely move in the most straightforward (not over promising) and publicly transparent fashion.
@@Forge17 mercedes
My thought exactly. They may not be the first to net+, but ideas such as the pulsing "engine" style fusion reactor, or the smaller fusion reactor could play a significant role if they end up being feasible.
...but consider that each of the companies that do not succeed first are likely to go bankrupt once one of the others do succeed and everyone jumps on that ship. Because of this, and because of how beneficial collaboration is in general, I think it would probably be better if all these companies weren't racing to make billions against each other, but all "fusing" (pun intended) into one organization made of separate teams working on different technologies
Like space colonies and finding alien life, fusion reactors are something I've heard for decades... since I was a kid. But it is still something that feels within reach in my lifetime. It is still exciting.
When I talked to a physicist working on fusion-related topics a few years ago, the inspiring answer to “when” was “maybe in 30 years”. That’s 20 years less than 50 years ago which sounds like a joke, but it’s actually a change of timescale. It is getting closer.
it's almost here! hang on tight
It may take another century or two of testing and fine tuning for it to work. Meanwhile, fossil fuels are here to stay as they're highly reliable. Don't forget the current level of human technology and development wouldn't have been possible without fossil fuels.
@@paulheydarian1281 Fossil Fuels are reliable only in causing massive destruction worldwide. I don’t understand how you can still peddle fossil fuel while today half the European countries are devastated by raging wildfires and even the UK - that damp country of fog and eternal rain - gets fire problem.
@@ArneBab yeah I remember in 90s was gonna be 30 years or whatever.
If they achieve this, be well worth the wait.
Your power bill might even go down a lil.
That last bit was a joke.
There's a huge difference between finally getting to net gain, and being profitable and more viable than other energy sources. Fusion will cost a LOT for many years before we can scale it and master it.
what costs more is failing to spend it on this!
If ever.
Its well worth the try
I would be happy if germany would go big on this and spend 20 billion a year on this instead of spending 40 billian annually on lazy muslim migrants
I think you’re right and I think fusion will be massive once it get’s to scale. Having net gain is definitely the first step to profitability.
Just props for how well this video was made, loved how you showcased all the different fusion startups from across the globe and their different methods of reaching net output. Thanks guys
and again geothermal is ignored even mm wave drilling is now available
@@niko-laus it’s not “ignored”, it’s just not available everywhere. The nations who are lucky enough to have vulcanic activity should definitely use it, but we need a solution for all the others.
@@niko-laus I looked into millimetre wave drilling and it has a few hurdles to go. Temperature and pressure, plus maintaining the waveguide are significant technical challenges, but I'm all for it.
uds s di das s gitu td s werden yg
@@niko-laus und ich 6zwsyyyd die esse ya eey h ga ddsd
It is amazing to live in a time where we can observe the progress in fusion. No matter how long it takes any progress is welcome.
I hope they data share this would be great to solve the energy crisis. Greed shouldn’t play a role we have one planet after all.
Working on such an important mission is what motivates our entire team. We’re living in a historic moment of human history.
@@jeremywilson2878 now that you said it, greed will most likely take a role…
@@jeremywilson2878 well that’s why we have state funded fusion as well, ITER, so it’s not guided by corporate profits. Albeit with the drawbacks of bureaucracy
What about it ? Lol fusion happens all the time
3:53 "producing more energy than any fusion experiment in history" - we should add that it produced less energy than was put in. The energy out/in ratio is improving, but has not exceeded one, i.e. no fusion reactor has produced net energy output. This is covered later in the video, but I didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea.
Agree with you. Even if the plasma heat generation gain exceeds 1 --ie Q_plasma >1 , the TOTAL energy needs to be considered. Cooling the magnets, running the facility etc.
Also the industry never ever discuss the conversion efficiency of converting the plasma heat to electricity which is much less than 50%. All said and done , even if Q-plasma is 5 or 10 time more efficient , it might not be enough to even break even.
Yeah this is often conveniently not mentioned when talking about fusion experiment records. We are still so very far away from commercial breakeven.
@Zichen He : I don't see it..how do you plan to convert the energy to electricity?
@Zichen He : Conventional way not very efficient. Fusion is also a long way off; I predict that quantum to electric energy conversion will happen within 2 years.
@Zichen He : quantum to electric is what Nichola Tesla did originally, not the photoelectric effect, which is worse than the solar as you stated.
I'm now a recently retired Ph.D. Aerospace Engineer with America's largest defense contractor, but i can still remember sitting in my 5th grade science class reading a science primer magazine in 1966 that talked about fission and fusion reactors and it said while fission reactors were already commercially workable it would about 30 years until fusion reactors came online.
It's only 20 years away, again.
Did they teach you how to just make things that work instead of making mass garbage in order to meter everything like a pack of spastics? I was born the next generation they didn't teach us how to make things that work either. So much for education hey. Better off blowing up all the skools & the ppl that run them the world works be a better place.
@@JazenValencia Well Helion is aiming for net electricity in 2024. That is 2 years, not 20... Most of the others are aiming for commercialization in the early 2030ies. That is 10 years. Might accelerate with more money, if they concepts proof viable.
It’s now here 56 years later
What do you know about gang stalking?
The last fusion lab I worked in was Helion Energy. Before that I worked at the Redmond Plasma Physics Lab, part of the University of Washington. It was nice to see some of my handiwork in a video.
What is your opinion about fusion viability & commercialization? How long would that could take
@@rayhans7887 I think if Helion’s approach works, then about 10 years. I am confident that Helion’s approach is the right way to go. I don’t think Tokamaks will ever work. I’ve been told that by guys that spent their careers working on Tokamaks.
Thank you for your contribution to the future. I do wonder if fusion really is clean though. I'd imagine instead of meltdown worries, we'd have gamma & x-ray worries.
Nice
so cool!
I admire the persistence of all the people and money involved in this venture. And I really appreciate them!
You admire the persistence of money?
Yikes
I hope I can help on a fusion project someday. This is a technology that could change the world as we know it in a profound and positive way.
You can make one yourself. no need for gargantuan billion dollar government science projects. Look into aneutronic fusion. Get a 3d printer, a vacuum pump and some household electronics.
@@导演文森吴 All our energy problems could have been solved by nuclear fission and is still our best working option at the moment.
@@elosant2061 agreed its much easier to split hydrogen atoms per say then to combine them.
What kind of college majors would one need to pursue in order to work on fusion reactors?
@@test_account939 physics/nuclear physic then specialization
I wonder what the best opportunities to invest now are, there are opinions but a little later I find out these opinions don't matter as a totally different turn of events play out with the stocks they discussed therein.
@Joseph Robert Romero the names rings a bell. she has a webb presence
Don't do stocks. Simple
great report. I am rooting for fusion since I was a little kid. And I hope to see it being out there in my lifetime. This is the kind of change humanity desperately needs if we want to advance any further. The energy problem needs to be solved. Just think about how the abundance in processing power and storage has transformed the world. Having an abundance of energy would be many tenfolds of that magnitude.
It's only 10 years out. 😆
We have Sun - the biggest thermonuclear reactor. Floating photo-voltaic batteries on oceans are the solution. We need around 1 mln km2 for our needs.
@@peceed I hope you are correct.
I’ve been rooting for it too. I learned when I was 10. I’m 60. They said it would take 50 years. I’m still waiting for flying cars.
@@tinyrick6264 capitalism slowed it all down
On Dec. 5, 2022, a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history
A fusion reactor uses deuterium and tritium for fuel. Deuterium can be extracted from water but tritium is radioactive and must be synthesized and it must be made in the actual reactor. Since the reactor consumes the same number of deuterium as tritium atoms it is far from evident that enough tritium to keep the reactor running can be produced. That is only one of the many hurdles that the the fusion startups will have to overcome.
One of the companies that are presented in the video is General Fusion. I have followed their winding path from their start in 2002 and I have come to the conclusion that the method they propose to compress the liquid lithium cannot possibly work. They claim that it does, but to the best of my knowledge they have not presented any proof to support the claim. Please enlighten me if I am wrong.
I was curious what companies were ranking in the billions aforementioned.
Thank you for your critique. It is true that little research has gone into the production of the radioactive tritium to generate enough to fuel the reactor and produce a cost-effective generation of electrical power at the same time. The following critique of the ITER mentions this rarely presented problem.
ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy (The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists)
The inventor of the Television , Philo T. Farnsworth, went on to develop a room sized fusion reactor that used specially designed vacuum tubes for the project. I T & T controlled the Farnsworth patents and refused to allow Farnsworth to proceed any further with the project.
Whenever readers come across an article regarding a fusion energy 'breakthrough' in the goal to achieve fusion energy ask yourself was their any evidence that any, or a significant amount of fusion reactions were detected. In the vast majority of cases the claimed 'breakthrough' experiments involve no DT fusion fuel and so no fusion reactions were detected. Most are simply experiments that compress normal hydrogen isotope nuclei (protons) so there is no way any significant amount of fusion reactions will occur. The announcements are often intended to attract investor, or government funds for further research. The write-ups are often misleading fluff to attract interest.
@@core3673 you truly believe he invented a room sized fusion reactor from vacuum tubes… our species is doomed
There used to be an old saying that goes: "Fusion power is only 30 years away and always will be."
Plasma temperatures run at 100 MILLION degrees, NOT 100,000.
Love it, this kind of documentary are those who help inspire the next generation to step into the unknown, the future.
@sandponics many people like to keep others thinking about the past that way they don't advance, is just a way to keep you distracted and make you a puppet.
Jobs will pay your bills business will make you rich but investment makes and keep you wealthy the future is inevitable
@Hart Thim you're right it's obvious a lot of people remain poor due to ignorance
Crypto currency will outsmart the banking system in the nearest future serving as a global fiat. Already making over 85% of my investment
I have been watching TH-cam videos and tried trading on my own but lost all
Small steps everyday!
@christiana joe keep your money in the bank or pay down debt
Inspiring stuff. Godspeed to these hard-working people
indeed.
Yes ! It must be so exciting and frustrating at the same time to work on it and be so close yet so far away from a industrial product !
Karma !
@@lordwallie24 Why karma?
yes, they are the best stuff
Today is Historic moment, it happened. It's finally a tangible source of power. 10 or 20 years from now we may have commercial fusion power.
and it will lead to a drastical reduction in power related conflicts
That's the joke... it's always "20 years away." Has been for decades.
They said that 10 years ago, the latest breakthrough is just another prove of concept. They put 100x the energy recovered into this, and they could only do it once a day. For it to work we will need some crazy breakthroughs in laser technology so it (lasers) can generate 100x the energy and do it more directly then we need to be able to do it over and over again to make it commercially viable. Sadly.
@Tacolucious Source? Or just speculation?
@@talkingmudcrab718 yea its just another fake news to get investors
I loved it's idea of excluding Turbines and steams as to cut down cost and prevent undermining efficiency
Simply to the point period.
It's also the least pragmatic, because they're claiming "net zero" in 2 years. Nearly every real scientist sees their 2-yr claim as hucksterism. They do it to target non-scientific (naive) investors, such as Peter Thiel. Many of these CEOs "talk a big game," but to scientists they sound like children playing with big words they don't understand. The business world is full of the "who can you fool" model.
Helion Energy's wish to directly transfer vast amounts of electrons (i.e. immense currents - which create heat) from super-hot plasma's into room-temperature electrical wires requires other "alchemy" that they skipped in the video - because it's too difficult to do. They need to have the fusion reactor-vessel (at 100+ million degrees C) be very close/adjacent to superconducting wires (at near-absolute-zero) to "pull away" the very high-current electricity. How do you have one space at 10^8 degrees, and next to it space at 10^-2 degrees (10 orders of magnitude difference in temperature = 10 billion degrees Celsius separated by 3 feet). Such a large temperature gradient will destroy (at a minimum, will quickly erode) the wires & equipment itself. They conveniently "ignored" this real problem (and other serious problems). Much of silicon valley "talks big" but doesn't delivery. You never hear about the 1000s of companies that vanish.
Yeah I’d never heard of that method before and if they can get it to work, it makes a lot of sense
I personally doubt the idea. In my opinion, Helion's "electromagnetic harvesting" would work like inductive coupling, and it's a really inefficient power transmission
however it must be said that the Rankine-Hirn cycle is something that has existed for more than a century and is reliable and known, adding other innovations to a project that already has tight deadlines in the field of fusion (a field still in the experimental phase) would mean increasing further the risk of failure of the entire project
yeah, harness the EMP inductively. Only needs to be 30% efficient to beat the best heat to steam turbine efficiencies.
Fusion would be great . But in the meantime , why aren’t we going with walk away safe environmentally friendly long proven Thorium molten salt reactors that doesn’t need to be by a body of water and can built almost any where ?
China is pushing hard to have these plants and is almost past the pilot plant stage and since thorium is very abundant it makes for long lasting cheap clean energy.
you calling clean to radioactive waste? Interesting
You don't need to wait for some decades until that chinese lab shows some results, for then to be adopted by your country, and then a plant to be built near your region.
Wake up, solar is already here.
Thorium fission can be used to power nuclear fusion as well like in a hydrogen bomb so you get more energy yield per thorium.
@@aoeu256 And we may be able to separate Thorium from seawater, then breed it into Uranium in a reactor. Upcycling is the new recycling
0:10 the joke is: "nuclear fusion is 30 years away and always will be".
(to spare you the google search)
Well now it looks like ITER won't be the first fusion reactor to reach net gain. In California, they achieved net gain just months after this video.
You fell for the propaganda from the Livermore team. They reported increased plasma efficiency (Qplasma) but the total efficiency (Qtotal) is still abysmal. The input energy to laser beams used in the experiment was 300 MJ, only 2 MJ made it to the fusion fuel target and fusion reaction created 3MJ output (heat energy).
They only quoted the Qplasma = 3 / 2 ratio achieved in the experiment.
Qtotal = 3 x 40% / 300 = 0.01 (even this is generous because 3MJ output heat needs to be converted to the electrical energy and I generously assigned the 40% efficiency here assuming that it is possible to extract the heat energy from this device and then use it to create steam and power steam turbine.
@@usneome to be fair Q total for iter wont be over 1 either but much better than lasers
@@usneome I've seen this exact same reply in other videos. What benefit do these people have from downplaying a very important breakthrough?
@@SaiRyan1 Honest reporting is needed. Since national labs are using billions of USD for research, they should report their progress without hype. Current administration in Washington should not manipulate facts to play politics.
ITER project promised Qplasma = 10; this is six times as much as Qplasma for laser fusion project.
@@usneome there is nothing dishonest about what they have done, they got more energy out of the reaction then put into the reaction which has not been done before. You don't understand what the problem was nor understand what has happened. The problem they were solving wasnt efficiency, it was can it even be done. Can the reaction create more energy then it took to create the reaction. How much energy it took to start the reaction is irrelevant
This is the best chance we have approaching a problem from all directions
Is this a joke about those pressures pistons that surround the reactor? I like it
Great video, but there are a bunch of key startups with promising technology that should have been included for example MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems with over 2 billion in funding, TAE Technologies , Zap Energy ...
Progress is definitely being made. Very exciting times. Am particularly impressed by the "direct to electricity" technology. My bet is a private company will generate Net Energy first. I sure hope they find multiple pathways to generating Net Energy.
Money runs the world, new world ownership will be for those daring enough to invest in a power source of this kind.
📞hi, it’s Jeff Bezos..”
@@denzali Who cares Elon Musk is on line 2 make Bezos endure the music.
The problem is that we are not yet desperate enough to have to rely on those startups. Even if they progress beyond what is considered net plus, they will be bought up or stifled until they are gone, just to hold up fossil fuels. We are the lazy composers of our own downfall.
@@deadralynx1288 yes we are, but the people in charge of building it realise it's not feasible at relatively small scales (compared to the mass of the sun). But they're stuck because they based their entire careers on it. If they release something with a Net Gain that's really small, it'll be commercially viable, sure, but it'll be a ticking ecological time bomb, producing billions of tonnes of radioactive isotopes from valuable, life-giving water.
@@denzali money is just a completely virtual number we assign to actual resources. It can't bend the laws of physics.
Those two ending statements have me so so sold on working on it too. Pre-industrial atmosphere? A utopia for our kids? jesus christs lets go.
Something that wasn't talked about: The fuel.
Short version: the technical challenge with fusion is not only the getting the plasma hot enough part efficiently enough
Long versione:
The lowest temperature fusion reaction we can do is deuterium (D) + tritium (T) to helium and a neutron. All other reactions require factors more of temperature/particle energy.
Deuterium you can get from water (although it only makes up ~0.02% of the hydrogen in natural water). Tritium is radioactive and has a short half-life, so every bit of tritium on earth was generated by humans, either through atom bombs or nuclear reactors or accelerators.
You can use the neutron that comes out of the D-T fusion to do another nuclear reaction with lithium that produces one tritium atom and a helium atom. But the technologies surrounding the entire process of recovering that tritium are not completely solved either.
The whole thing is a non starter. Even if the reaction itself produced overall net energy which so far isn't even close, the fuel would be far too expensive and energy intensive to supply. 60 years of research and we've got nowhere.
what is the reason, they cannot fuse regular hydrogen?
@@zazethe6553 The reactions for regular hydrogen only happen at much higher temperatures/pressures
@@zazethe6553 regular hydrogen does not have neutrons, it is 1 proton and 1 electron. Deuterium also has one neutron, while Tritium has two
Lower the goalposts and shoot for synthesis of helium.
There is a dwindling supply of that, and maybe you’ll run into some bigger fusion breakthroughs later.
General Fusion and Helion Energy both have complimentary ideas and technologies. If they're gonna inductively recapture energy by careful design of their apparatus, that could be applied to General Fusion's reactor chamber, granted Helion's approach is more linear, whilst General Fusion's is more radial, but I digress.
clever comment, nice
Scientists, real life superheroes. Ya'll are the best of us.
true
...And the worst.
@@Martin-117 you say that as if most scientists are bad
@@aetheriox463 he's a trump supporter so it's no surprise he said that
@@lukebalderose334 how do you know?
Scientists say it'll take decades, but business owners currently accepting investment capital say "It's right around the corner!"
Exactly the level of journalism I expect from Bloomberg. Woof.
Yeah, it's Bloomberg. They're not in this for the science. All they want to do is take advantage of riling up investors and getting people to throw their money around. Still, the sentiment seems positive overall. I just wonder which one the producers placed all their casino chips on. One always has to look at financial media with a healthy dose of skepticism. Not the science part, just the message and the purpose behind it.
Never seen a single time that they quoted total power in electricity and total power they would get out in electricity. Hope they do it but I don’t see it for 50-60 years. The net gain they will quote will be in energy in and energy made not that the energy out when turned to electricity will be 40% of the energy made as heat even for ITER
Yeah. There is a danger with misleading expectations: Other mitigation strategies maybe neglected on the grounds this is the answer worth waiting for; loss of credibilty may even affect core funding.
Yeah when the dude said one of those "projectiles" in his fusion reactor creates enough power to last one household 2 years, and that they can fire one every 30 seconds... I felt like that was insanely low. And those are projections that he HOPES for. Not to mention they're still barely in the testing phases, so he hasn't even built one yet.
No shade and we should explore all possibilities, but we really need to be putting more focus on things that we already know work - nuclear.
Yup that's the real question. One of the first thoughts that came to mind. Not only is the energy output questionable, the entire issue of conversion efficiency makes it a tough case for practical use. We need a better energy conversion technology.
@@jajajinks1569 yes nuclear especially MSR. The power out maybe enough for 2 years but he did not mention he power in it took or that when he tried to convert the power to electricity he would only have 30-40% of that power. In uk he would need to fire one of those pellets every second to get the power for everyone and convert them at 100%. Plus store the power at off peak and deliver at peak can they even make 1 of these pellets per second probably took them ages to make the pellet
@@jajajinks1569 Dude you don't understand. Nuclear Power is destroying our planet. Cossing global warming & with that comes massive weather changes, massive earthquakes, killer heat waves, our earths outer blue sphere that protects mankind from burning to death from the sun is deteriorating because of fossil fuel use.
I often think of Thomas Edison's quote on subjects like this "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Hopefully there will be a similar scientist/s who makes the key breathrough in this complex fusion puzzle soon.
It was not the private sector that got this discovery! It wasn’t Oxford either! Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California nabbed the power of the sun!
Well, NIF is still quite a ways off from a practical power plant in every aspect. The lasers only have a 0.3% efficiency and that was not factored in.
@@elmarmoelzer2229 You are raining on their parade.
Plasma efficiency (Qplasma) factor bigger than 1.0 is a small step forward. However, we are still far away from achieving overall efficiency (Qtotal) bigger than 1.0
0:15 "nuclear fusion is always fifty years away".
Took me 7 words to deliver the joke. That guy's gift of overcomplicating things is next level.
More power to the veteran fusion physicists at Max Planck and JET, but there's a significant feature they're missing wrt startup mentality: they require significant investment of optimism otherwise they can become their own worst naysayer. SpaceX had many naysayers for example, including established leaders in the rocket industry including Neil Armstrong of all people. The naysayer group is oversubscribed. It's the lowest hanging fruit for any intellectual to grab. In light of SpaceX's success, we remember their insurmountable determination and not the naysayers.
Management - I need you to give birth in 1 months instead of 9, here's 8 engineers.
Very typical of the private industry, funny enough there's was an experiment regarding productivity and rewards, it scale up when the task is mostly labor intensive but when incentives increase to complex task you don't see the same.
A lot of private/silicon valley bravado is a joke. If you consider the total amount of money used in private industry/silicon valley - versus what we get out (a few companies successful, but 1000s that failed)... it's not so efficient. Millions of investors lose big money on so many so-called "startups".
The mythical man month: 728 guys trying to get it done by lunch.
nice 😀I have mine built by a friend (a scientinst that study this for over 15 years) and since I use it I feel marvellous. Plus I got rid of a fibroid and now I start to reset my consciosness🥰he doesn't sell them commercially so his interests are purely scientific. When it's about multiwave oscillators he knows the subject in and out. In the last 90 years since Lakhovski invented his machine technology advanced and now the machine can be build with higher precision and way more efficient than back in the 1900s. There are few other things that my friend added to the machine that for me work WOW.
In 2006 MIT President Hochfield visited my alumni club in Dallas. After a great presentation she asked for questions. I said "In 1971 I worked on a problem set for a fusion reactor containment vessel. It's been 35 years, so where are they?" She replied that the head of the Nuclear Engineering Department had told her "Thirty five years, but this time we mean it".
It's been 16 more years Where are they? Some of this seems promising, but I want to see something before I hit 100.
As far as I know it is still a problem not completelly solved. Many may not realise, but fusion can be this first peculiar form of power production, where the fuel is not the real significant consumable, but the structural, and sacrificial materials of the reactor device itself.
What if tech originally developed for fusion were transferable to another energy project adequate to solve the GHG problem? Gyrotrons are the key tech for a geothermal energy startup called Quaise Energy. They use the gyrotron to vaporize basement rock, cutting borehole costs by an order of magnitude whilst vitrifying the sides of the hole and stabilizing it against the impending pressure. Their system also builds on oil industry expertise in pipes, geology, pumps, etc.
As to fusion itself: it looks still a distant prospect, but at least we're throwing more darts at the board with slightly better aim.
I don't believe the Tokamak type reactor has much promise. With neutrons constantly bombarding its innards, making it internally radioactive, and causing structural decay, I have a problem with this. Clean thermal fusion in a Tokamak simply isn't so. The Quaise Energy concept is much cleaner, as mentioned by kreek22, but could destabilize plate tectonics if improperly used. The bullet approach to aneutronic fusion looks more promising. Keeping the flow in one direction is much easier than trying to contain a neutron bomb completely. Basically, an aneutronic fusion rocket strapped to an MHD generator.
Meanwhile stuff like molten salt fission breeders get nothing. Worked in the 60s, far cheaper, safer than current commercial (solid-fuel/water-cooled) designs, and have most if not all of the benefits claimed for fusion. Hybrid fission/fusion designs might even help get fusion here faster. I'm not anti-fusion, just pro common sense.
It’s because we waste money on submarines not hospitals and fusion
The quality of these short documentaries is stellar.
I'd bet any amount of money that we do achieve fusion. It's easy to see only the challenges and seemingly impossible hurdles, but let's not forget that humans have a long history of turning concepts and mathematical theories into functional realities. Accessing the energy in the atomic nucleus was thought impossible, flight was thought impossible. In 1903 we first flew, in 1967, we put a human on the moon 280,000 miles away. Let's not underestimate ourselves; there's enough negativity in the world already.
I can't wait to revisit this 20 years from now, just to remember what that level of optimism felt like! 👍🏽
It's primarily because, if those who have the money had allowed the public to educate itself sufficiently, the public would understand the importance of the investment, take responsibility for it, and make the investment themselves. But the wealthy have spent decades educating us that public expenses are bad because of taxes, so now they're paying the whole tab. They will have complete ownership and control of it.
On a related note, I heard that the privately-owned and controlled Texas power grid operators is upgrading some of the state's infrastructure, since they own it. It seems that more people than anticipated want refrigerated air conditioners in the summer, but the current system can't handle it. I guess it was one of those "Last Mile" kind of things. The appropriate service fee will appear on their receipts at the Walmart checkout.
Yeah, and fusion reactors will be so complex it will be very difficult for anyone else to compete. Giving them more the ability to charge whatever they want and even withhold electricity for political reasons.
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These companies better make sure that they keep security at the highest levels. Sabotage from within by bad actors funded secretly by big oil, seems to be a major concern given how quickly the oil/gas industries would fold once sustainable fusion is developed.
The oil and gas industry is already folding because of the rise of renewable energies (luckily). Fusion is too late for the party. The question is whether fusion energy will ultimately be cheaper than wind power, in which case the wind power industry might be rather short lived.
@@MatjesHunts Wind power will never go away unless the wind goes away. Most people would LOVE to just buy a wind turbine and run their house off it and a battery, and maybe some solar panels. The cost is still too high as an individual, but if you aggregate the cost across those whom would be willing like a town of 10,000-50,000 a few wind turbines make a TON of sense in the right areas.
@@ShimejiiGaming in some parts it's even illegal to set up your own mini turbine to collect energy. It's nuts.
@@MatjesHunts they still have a strong point with global industry. Still, they will be riding this for as long as possible. Many are already dipping their toes into electrical sources and water sources.
@@MatjesHunts Do you have any idea how much fossil fuel goes into mKing a wind turbine project? Steel, cement, composites for blades., machinery building roads and offshore foundations?
Ever since I heard of ITER its been a dream of mine to help with the project. Thank you for talking about this wonderful project and bringing it to the attention of so many more people.
The Silicon Valley approach may or may not yield directly useful results, but one thing it will do _for sure,_ is rapidly expand our understanding of the way fusion works. In that sense, it is guaranteed to bring us closer to commercial fusion energy production faster than the government-backed projects alone could. My hope is simply that the monetary incentive to eschew safety and environmental concerns that are ever-present in the commercial sector aren't so big that they are heeded. Let us try not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors.
It isn't the first but it will definitely be useful in driving the price down and increasing Market viability
It's like a marathon where it doesn't matter who wins as long as someone finishes the race. The more runners there are, the more likely someone will finish and the sooner it will happen.
ok let's say China cracks it first
@@6Sparx9 The fact that copyright theft is associated with China is only because all the other countries don't have the care or need to do it themselves (at least not publicly). China builds one, a western project will "suddenly" appear - with similar technology of course.
Best documentary about fusion I've ever seen, great job.
Physics breakthroughs always have impact in chemistry research, which then impacts biology and medicine research.
We’ve been waiting for this and it’s finally here!
So are thorium fission reactors...
I can't help but think about how computers used to be so large, expensive, and hardly optimal and compare it to this. Just imagining that a future beyond my time there could possibly be these types of reactors in much smaller capacities like how we have hand held computers as our mobile devices gives me hope to the potential of humanity.
What about wave power from the oceans? I’d heard at some point in the past that it’s just a matter of harnessing it to provide energy. Seems that would be a kind of cheap power that wouldn’t also create a hazardous waste product that would create other problems like causing cancers etc. just wondering... I’m not a scientist or anything other than a curious but uneducated person who is just a member of the general public (in so far as science is concerned), who is curious but has no idea about any of this.
This is false analogy. Progress of computation and energy generation are very different things. There are many technical fields where miniaturization was limited or never happened.
@@bonnieklapel1825 fusion won't generate hazardous waste.
Also, harvesting de necessary energy from the oceans would take an intensive use of very special and reinforced materials. It may make sanse for some niche applications but is unfeasible for global production ( also, delivering energy to inland locations would account for i me sé loses as well as you would need a lot of redundancy since waves are not exactly predictable.
D+T Fusion power can create large amounts of low-level waste due to neutron capture. Especially sucks when that waste is expensive electromagnets... I hope this issue can be solved somehow
4 months ago, they thought it would take 20 years. Anything’s possible.
Department of Energy pulled off net positive before the private sector. that's crazy. very cool video though, hope everyone keeps at it
I guess it depends on how you define "net positive".
You guys at Oxford, I think you are on the verge of cracking this, what you need is financial backing and lots of it, to sustain a controlled fusion reaction for just 5 seconds is a huge achievement, a little bit of tweaking the control software and you might well be there, clearly controlling them is a very critical matter, once that is solved you may well be looking at another world first, KEEP GOING!!!
"The time scale of 20 years is really realistic." LOL, sounds like my software engineers giving a time line which I automatically triple.
When I was working on controlled fusion in the 90s, I came to the conclusion that it was the philosophers stone of our time. I have seen nothing since to make me change my mind, but I desperately hope that someone will prove me wrong.
Can I ask, what, as simply as you can describe, made it seem a fools errand?
@@ahklys1321 At that time the main approach was magnetic confinement. The problem in general with magnetic confinement is that there is monstrous feedback between the plasma and the containing fields. Furthermore, the higher energy and higher density your plasma gets, the higher the feedback gets. It just doesn't seem to make sense. For ICF the problem is different. Because it is an impulse system, for any type of you have the problem that you need to clear out any reaction products from the previous shot before you can do the next shot. This seems somewhat more feasible, but that much.
@@thekinginyellow1744 oh, that makes a bit of sense, I guess.
Thanks 👍
Like putting a propeller on a bike, the harder you pedal the more energy the propeller consumes.
There have been a dozen or so major developments in the last 10 years concerning a) high temperature super conductors, b) MIMO control techology and high-speed chips for controlling such systems, c) actuators ( I imagine ), d) simulation technology, e) fundamental science / physics, f) new simulators that have come out of Princeton et al, new algorithms, g) deep learning and 'AI' techniques applied to predicting plasma instabilities better... And probably far more stuff that I'm not aware of because I'm just a spectator (although I have a ph.d. in systems engineering and mathematical optimization...). But my point is that a great many things have changed in the last 10 years. And the fact that the billionaires are coming in cause they smell blood in the water, so to speak, reinforces that idea in my mind. This is a different ball game. I don't think you're up with the times, lately.
The running joke is “Fusion is the Energy of the Future…and always will be…”
21:32 YES! THANK you for the plug for Climeworks!
19:02 Really dumb to say that NASA is "unmotivated" to pursue the tech SpaceX has. There's a difference between being extremely underfunded and unmotivated. If the US government put a fraction of the money they put into the military into NASA they would have innovated even more.
highly underrated comment.
@@alexanderlau770 thank you sir
A better investment for this capital would be to research construction of safer and cheaper fission reactors and spent fuel reprocessing. Fusion is a money pit that may never be commercially viable.
we don't really have any other bets apart from nuclear
Plenty of money is going into next generation small liquid sodium molten thorium pebble modular blahblah fission startups: NuScale, Terrapower, that Rolls Royce thing, ... They're closer to viability than fusion, which means they're facing the reality that wind and solar are and will be much cheaper than the first few units they build.
Just want to throw this out. Fusion makes 4x what fission makes and can create elements up to lead. You basically have a star
@@skierpage Fission reactors and solar/wind are not comparable, therefore neither is cheaper than the other. Now, solar/wind plus storage can be compared to fission reactors. And that comparison doesn't pan out so well for solar/wind.
@@spencervance8484 Up to lead via fusion? You sure about that?
As for 4x the energy, we're talking about just H fusion.
I like Tokamak Energy in that they quickly jumped to build magnetic coils from now-available high-temperature-superconductor wires. A lot in fusion scales very favourably (and strongly) with increasing magnetic field, so cheap, strong magnets are key to business.
yes exactly, that's what I'm on about... it's all in the materials science
They don't use superconductors, it's literally just copper, that's all that's been needed and that's all they think they will need
@@tusharbhudia9421 Liquid nitrogen-cooled copper in ST40. But I wouldn't be categoric when discussing future needs. Hard to believe they really are...
I'm hopeful for fusion, and also hope that the public can be swayed to use nuclear fission in the meantime while we wait
We have 65 trillion tons of uranium and 195 tons of thorium in the earth's crust. We shouldn't be waiting for nuclear fusion to have total energy abundance.
Germany: Imma pretend that I didn't hear that.
Fission is very expensive compared to most renewables, with the costs of renewables projected to continue falling. We should always have a diversified power grid but I don’t think fission is a worthy investment at the moment
@@Nikkska The cost of renewables+backup is astronomical and is why it isn't being adopted to power whole grids.
@@Nikkska fission is expensive yes, but its literally the safest energy production we have, besides maybe solar. once the reactor is built that is
This is so awesome! I’ve been following fusion progress for longer then I can remember. It seems like we’re so close to this amazing breakthrough. I really wish i was in some way apart of this amazing science. Nevertheless I’m still very proud of the individuals that are.
@Whgu ybnm you can help by pitching in money.
Research has been going longer than 50 years with no viable reactor to this date
@@pablo-cw1wg And? The important part is that we're making a lot of progress. Predictions about when it will actually be commercially available are less significant.
Just as we cannot perfectly replicate the same conditions as on earth during space flights, we are also not yet able to replicate the sun on earth. But I believe it will be possible in a few thousand years.
In 1992 I heard a lecture on fusion technology. The lecturer had been researching fusion technology for twenty years and prophesied that it would be producing all the electricity the world would need within twenty years. It is now 2022, 40 years on and they are still quoting availability in twenty years time.
Yeah, one does wonder, sure getting skeptical about Tokamaks, think we need a radical breakthrough to have anything economically viable.
Monorail.
As long as capitalism is the driving force behind such projects, they are all doomed to fail.
"They" will not allow any new energy source to supplant the old one until the old one has been completely tapped out.
Until then, all we will get is teasers and more esoteric calls for a brighter future.
P.S.
Nuclear (thorium) works, but they don't want to be financially responsible for the mess they've already created with their boiling water reactors.
@@bhatkat But if you actually look at what these alternatives are, it is very easy to see how utterly absurd these are.
Lets assume for a moment that we can achieve fusion with initial confinement with both the liquid Metall idea and the laser heating idea, in the sense that the fusion energy divided by input energy is >1.
Than what? You still need way more energy to power the lasers than what their output is to slightly warm up the chamber.
How is that useful?
A usual fission Reaktor evaporates enormes amounts of water, high temperatures and high energy output for a rather small machine.
That is what makes it cost effective.
I hope we come up with a valid approach to sustained fusion.
Imagine a world with cheap energy and no more fossil fuels.
The approach that I liked is the direct energy transfer rather than going to steam as most other methods mentioned here.
You could make a windmill move to drive the generators, but as long as it doesnt output more than it is useless to think abt transport efficiency.
Greenwald limit on density of fusion fuel at a given temperature was found to be twice as high as previously thought. The first reactor to exploit the new fuel density limits will make the fastest progress to net energy.
Fusion reactions in tokamaks could thus produce much more energy than previously thought
@@offline7620 if you think that the density limit is what limits power density but it's not so, wall loading does
.... but does not address a negative energy balance doe to energy losses due to radiation and neutrons. When will MCF get real?
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In the 1970s, I was a grad student at the Univ of Texas Austin. We had a Tokamak design buried deep underground. We were trying to understand what the Russians already understood - just about nothing compared to now. Decades later, I see Tokamaks still trying to get on the plus side. About a year ago, I read an article that Lockheed Martin will have a working fusion generator in five years. I instantly thought their marketing department was headed by a pathological liar. In spite of all these new approaches, I just can't see a fusion generating machine for decades. I think all this positive thinking is designed to get as much investor money now, not later.
You're not wrong. All these companies are also drinking our supply of tritium to death so that those who are close to figuring out fusion may not have as long as they require. By 2050, it's estimated there will only be 5 kg of tritium left.
And what then if they achieve fusion, ppl will still have to pay for energy.
@@Deco_2k people will still have to pay but with an energy source of that scale the massive overpopulation could possibly not lead to the collaps of human society
@@Deco_2k We have to pay the price regardless of where that energy comes from. Talk to people who lived in the 1970s. They paid the price - to OPEC. We're not arguing paying the price. We're arguing where the energy comes from. Each source has its advantages and disadvantages. Ask Greta Thunberg about this.
@@gmork1090 I didn't realize there was a shortage of tritium. Who did this study? I'd like to know, because if true, it's very profound, as fusion is the holy rail we're all looking for if it's feasible. Thx.
If money is to be made from something, private industry will figure it out before governments. And whoever figures out net positive fusion first (and puts the Middle East out of business) is going to be extremely, extremely rich.
I'm 29 years old. Really hoping we get to widescale commercial fusion within my lifetime
im 49 :( can i see it too?
@@LTDANMAN44 I am 15🔥. I am best
@@simabhaider7985 lucky
We will sooner than you think. These will be the decades of breakthroughs
It only took 20 years go to from the nuclear bomb to nuclear power stations, so I would say it's safe to say that you will likely see it in your lifetime
I hope western private companies can collaborate on this essential game changing technology so when all the kinks are worked out, that the adoption happens faster..
Nah this is capitalism,
compete > collaborate.
@@therealb888 By the time fusion is commercially viable there will be a ton of expired patents
The company with the most capital to buy up all of the best patents will likely be the one that ultimately succeeds. Unfortunately, it will require that a lot of those startups die on the vine, so that they're willing to sell them or share them. The energy recovery patent from Helion seems like something that might be applicable for a lot of designs. Could it be used for a Tokamak? I don't know. Somebody smarter than me could probably say whether it's impossible or not, but I don't know if it's something that anybody will be able to apply to their own designs unless they can use the patent. These are the kinds of roadblocks that arise when private companies take over the research space. The gold rush for fusion is bringing an amazing amount of progress to the field, but the lack of collaboration means it takes longer for all the individual branches of progress to coalesce.
Iter is a collaboration company
Americans made it a reality today
Fusion is a technology 30 years away, and has been for 50 years
its 30 years away until its not!
@@austeyen5628 you’re right, the breakthrough could happen tomorrow but today it’s still 30 years away
@@thsxi nt with that attitudue!
@@thsxi yeah i meant even with many wrong guesses, 30 years will be an accurate guess EVENTUALLY
@@austeyen5628 eventually, but we won’t know when that eventually is, we’ll be right but we won’t know it until 30 years later it’s done and then we track back, but until it is done, it’s still ‘30 years away’, even if it’s 1 day away
0:54 is it a coincidence that he looks like Dr. Otto Octavius? "The power of the sun... in the palm of my hand"
Long term vision: "mining asteroids"
Germany currently: using coal and going back to burning wood.
That's the end result of rabid environmentalism.
@@Captain-Sum.Ting-Wong thats basically due to people being so patriotic that they refuse to put a wind turbine anywhere close to where people live
They have been saying "20 years away, 30 years away" for over 100 years of trying they are still hardly any closer to getting fusion to work than ever and they are still saying "only 30 years away".
All they have done is to change the efficiency definitions. They tell you about the high levels of efficiency but they fail to include the humongous power necessary to obtain that core efficiency, so when they tell you that they are at 70% efficiency it is really somewhere around .03% efficiency. Those lasers are huge power sumps and they are not considering that power when they brag about efficiency.
To put it into perspective, in the sun at the levels where fusion occurs, only 240 Watts are released per cubic meter of sun.
Fusion is never going to work, it is a pipe dream for people that are poor at math. But it keeps a lot of otherwise unemployable physicists employed.
Thank you for the only intelligent, realistic comment in this whole thread of mindlessly optimistic responses
I tend to agree. The earth might run out of oil trying to get fusion to work.
After a year, Look up this device Called the “Calicoes” this is the device that will make Fusion possible. Today is 7-22-2022. I promise you within a year or a year we will have Fusion. My name is Andre. Remember this comment my friend. You will live to see Fusion, I promise. Don't forget this comment. Because I will come back to it after Fusion is achieved within a year or a year. I promise 👍🏾👍🏾
This video has 2.4M views in 4 months? wow! There is hope for humanity. I guess in the future scientists may start earning more than athletes and movie stars.
Did you not just hear that one of them actually did get energy positive? In california?
When I saw the concept of fusion power many many many many moon ago , my heart knew it will become reality one day and my heart still beats in that same game , we are humans we are magnificent
If they conquer fusion do you honestly think they will use it for the benefit of humanity? If Tesla was still alive I'm sure he would have something to say.
What else would you use it for?
@@rizizum Profit and control.
@@blacklightredlight2945 So, you mean selling the energy to get profit from it?
Would be the biggest advancement for humanity since the printing press.
Internet. Semi conductors.
Or even since the internet!
Id argue biggest advancement since farming
@@spencervance8484 just because is clean? what's the whole deal? does it have a bigger output of energy than other methods? does it produce infinite energy? I'm sorry I'm a nobody I don't know what'sthe deal with this reactor
Nah, tacos. They make so many people happy.
How about a few months
Excellent. The best documentary on current fusion technology I've seen so far.
Some of these startups are really creative, and will probably have other technological applications too
Take an example from the Chinese,Plentiful thorium nuclear energy,Already in effect..
Itallstarted with 95% literacy rate forthe population. In hi a.
China ahead by leaps and bounds.
Water resources saved by thorium technology..big factor to consider
Typical American capitalist technology,dependent on individual funds. NO FEDERAL COORDINATION,
Beautiful documentary.
A note to the Silicon Valley CEO guy that logic of government being outranked in progress by private is actually wrong for your given example. NASA DCX actually beat SpaceX
Care to expand on that? How so? I'm not aware of Nasa beating SpaceX in any way shape or form. I'm curious to know what rubric you're using...
@@darinhitchings7104 This is something I posted when saying "NASA DCX actually beat SpaceX" I am referring to the relanding of a booster. Nasa accomplished this feat before SpaceX as well as other competitors. We can all appreciate SpaceX but no need to fanboy so hard that we are blinded by a competitor's success.
This is the best option for us on Earth🌎
Just like sun gives us all this energy,by fusion ,we can do it too and this will be the 100%clean energy
Or we just take the sund energy vis solar today … i know, cracy talk
@@tiro0oO5 Solar doesn't work dude, it's not sustainable for the long run🤷🤷🤷
@@calicoesblue4703 sure
Net-zero is ambitious, but it's exciting to see this coming online! My mom will be so excited!
In this era of scams, I find it hard to take this seriously. Does one take the massive amounts of money being dumped into this process as indicative of viability, or gullibility? My limited understanding of fusion leads me to think the latter.
Startup culture is littered with scams. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the startup fusion companies are all hype. But ITER is the real deal. Worldwide collaboration of scientists and engineers.
How do you feel about any challenging research project? (Reusable rockets, EVs and fast charging batteries, carbon sequestration, advanced fighter jets, space flights for millionaires, starship, …) Sure there have been stinkers (Volta, Enron, some NASA projects get canceled, did Christopher Columbus break even?). If you only fund what exists, you’re only funding production rather than exploration.
If someone expresses a concern about a particular thing, do you think it wise to place them in the margins with Luddites? Turning something from a one off into mass production is exploitation, not exploration.
Hey it's better than it being a online crowd funding pipedream. I see plasma at least
@@patinsley Yes, I see something someone is calling plasma. Apparently, there is plasma in the sun as well, along with a whole lot of gravity. So, I'm wondering, has someone figured out how to create that amount of gravity in a confined volume? Like I said, I'm not up on the scientific research, so I don't know what's needed. So my model of existence is very simple, and questions oddities that don't fall within it. My tendency is to be skeptical. It's people who either know more about it than I do, or people who have enough excess wealth to risk the loss on the trust in the claims. I fall outside of both of those categories. Scam worlds occupy the entire spectrum. The poor, the wealthy. And anything in between. Sometimes it's just an earnest mistake. I expect some online crowd funding promises are sincere as well.
I sincerely hope that when this breakthrough is achieved it’s shared with humanity and not used as a means for profit.
Why would that be the case?
Huge input of giga yielded 1.3, a 30% of gain huger giga Newton scaled force, but we still need to find a method to harness the energy emitted from fusion because that amount of input/output energy are dangerous. It just reminds me about the volatile HHO but which, in comparison, is much easier and safer to handle if our scientists try harder.
Watched Particle Fever movie 10 years ago a couple times when it came out. This video is a blessing bringing updates to such wonderful developments. Thank you for sharing this.
Would magnetic movement of pulse around the coils by lowering power in multiple coils spaced out evenly or even circular movement of the coils physically help make it work?
From what I have heard and read, thorium reactors seem more viable than fusion in the near future... Supposedly, we have already built small-scale thorium reactors that ran for decades in laboratories and we have plenty of convenient thorium supply to cheap energy for 10,000+ years.
1 trillion dollars, the price of every war for oil, could pay for 5kW of solar panels for 200 million homes...employ at least a million people to install and/or make them, covering all homes and small businesses in Canada, USA and at least Mexico. This would cut energy usage from fossil fuels by half and negate the need for things like F u k u s h i m a... which is the real reason for the 1.5 degree rise in temps esp across the Pacific every year since 2 0 1 1... if solar on roofs isnt acceptable visually there are solar thermal plants and solar farms that can be placed in the desert, generate hho with solar power and send that to power stations and homes to use in natural gas type generators which run quiet and exhaust water vapor...its number one of 10 of my solutions which are simple with a mass movement. The government spent 6 trillion for c-v... and 2 trillion for QE.. its easy for them to create a trillion
Yep Thorium could do the job for us now and for hundreds of years to come at a minimum. Its also abundant on other bodies in the solar system like the Moon and Mars.
We should have implemented Thorium reactors decades ago. We have the technology.
Excellent documentary!
I've been warning against this since conception.
It's an all you can eat nothing burger.
Startup like to compare themselves with SpaceX and give forecasts for their own products based on that comparison. But we should keep in mind that NASA send the first human to moon in 1969. SpaceX took that rocket technology that was already working and improved it during the last 2 decades. But SpaceX is still no capable of sending astronauts to the moon more than 50 years after Apollo 11. Fusion, however, is not a working technology that can be improved in a cost-efficent way by the famous/infamous Silicon Valley approach. At the moment fusion only works in simulations and on paper.