The need for fusion - with the UK Atomic Energy Authority
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ม.ค. 2024
- Explore and delve into fusion energy's complex scientific underpinnings.
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Watch the Q&A (exclusively for our TH-cam channel members) here: • Q&A: The need for fusi...
This lecture was filmed on 21 October 2023, in collaboration with the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Join us for a captivating academic discourse on the need for fusion energy, where audiences are invited to explore and delve into fusion energy's complex scientific underpinnings.
Mark Maslin, a preeminent researcher from UCL, talks about the interplay between fusion energy's development and its positioning in the broader energy market. Dennis Whyte, a respected scholar from MIT, delves into the formidable complexities of plasma physics, a crucial aspect of the fusion process. And Jenny Cane from UKAEA, an expert in fusion engineering, demonstrates the importance of integrated design and materials research in fusion energy development.
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Jenny Cane is the Technical Lead for the STEP In-Vessel Components, responsible for the design and performance of the systems that lay closest to the plasma - the Blanket, First Wall, Divertor, Shielding, Limiters and Vacuum-Vessel. After graduating from a DPhil in the Aerodynamics and Heat Transfer of Ramjet Engines at Oxford University Jenny decided to move into renewable energy engineering and spent 7 years at the Wind Turbine manufacturer - Vestas, working as a control; project; and aerodynamics engineer both in the UK and the USA. Jenny began working as an thermo-hydraulics engineer at UKAEA in 2013 working on the JET safety case. She then moved into a lead engineer role for JET as it prepared for the record breaking deuterium-tritium campaigns; before moving to the STEP programme in 2019. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, has two children and enjoys, running, cycling, tap dancing and gardening in her spare time.
Mark Maslin FRGS, FRSA is a Professor of Earth System Science at UCL and the Natural History Museum of Denmark. He is also Strategy Advisor to Lansons, Net Zero Now, a CSR Board member of Sopra Steria and a member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. He is a leading scientist with particular interest in understanding climate change and the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. He has published over 190 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, and The Lancet. He has received research, consultancy and training funding worth over £75m from government, charities, NGOs and the private sector. He was the only climatologist on the original 2009 The Lancet report on climate change and global health and is a co-author on the annual Lancet Countdown reports that started in 2015. Mark has written 10 books and 100 popular articles (e.g., New Scientist, Independent, Guardian, Telegraph, New York Times and The Conversation on which he currently has over 5.5 million reads). He regularly appears on radio and television, including BBC One David Attenborough’s ‘Climate Change: the facts’. His books include ‘Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction - 4th edition’ (2021), ‘The Cradle of Humanity’ (2019), ‘The Human Planet’ with Simon Lewis (2018) and his latest book is ‘How to Save Our Planet: the Facts’ (2021). Mark was recently named the Number 1 Global Sustainability thought leader and influencer of 2023.
Tim Bestwick is Chief Development Officer and Deputy CEO at the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Tim joined UKAEA in 2018 after leading commercialisation and innovation from big science programmes and campus development at Harwell and Daresbury. Following a career in corporate research in electronic devices and optoelectronics - including IBM and Sharp - Tim has been involved in establishing and growing multiple technology start-up companies. He was Chair of the Eureka Network, the major international business to business innovation network and is Chair of the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. Tim was awarded an OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours List in 2023 for services to the commercialisation of science, technology, and innovation.
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This to me will be the ultimate human achievement in science. I truly believe fusion energy is possible if we all work together and put our minds into it❤
Yes, but let me be the party pooper here. Every technology has dual use. While it will take quite a while to get it economicly feasible, maybe faster due to AGI and maybe also a lot better batteries. What do you think comes afterwards? One of the things needed for fusion depending on system are also lasers with power outputs we haven't yet seen the end of. Lasers already change warfare(f.e. for intercepting granates) then even more so. What would be better for a body, to be hit by a bullet or by a laser?
@@kinngrimm
In a world with AGI, ignore the fusion. That world will be very different, and how it's different depends on the AGI.
@@kinngrimm any laser (even hypothetical ones) with the power output to just .. iunno lets say melt small holes in tanks, including the person in it will actually need to be hooked up to a power source which can support it. It seems highly unlikely that any sort of mobile unit is capable of megawatts of output. Thus, the use seems rather limited to defence.
Anything below megawatts of power is something already existing, so nothing would change. At the point where people are running around with portable nuclear reactors, I would stop worrying about the lasers.
On the question of what's better for a body, to be hit by a bullet of by a laser I have to say that I have been indeed struck by laser pointers before and have been perfectly fine!
Anyhow, my point is that to me the dual-use of fusion is mostly limited to the dual-use of electricity itself.
@@Alice_Fumo good points, i will keep them in mind
@@Alice_Fumo dual use here might come in forms of military robots with very durable batteries then, though there it is less important how that energy is produced. Seeing how solar is taking off, even if we get a working protoype fusion reactor within 10 years, it still will take a while longer till they could compete, They would be maybe then better for space ships :) where the sun might not always be close ^^
One issue i heared about fussion, it is more about to get the materials to even build one. Certain materials and the amount mined currently we could worldwide maybe get one fusion reactor build per year. I forgot to what concept that was refering, but i think it was the ITER version.
Skip to @19:52 to get to the fusion bit.
Thanks alot of waffling at the start
First bit is pure climate alarmism that is now thoroughly discredited.
@@alangknowles source pls
39:05 the transitory was invented December 1947. Not the 50's.
@@alangknowles wrong
All 3 speakers were brilliant. One of the best lectures I've watched.
There’re some serious haters here in the comments 😂
It’s a slow march towards progress, Folks. The presenters are doing their part of the effort (yes, even marketing guy convincing backers to invest).
Вряд ли они испытывают ненависть, они просто боятся, впрочем, как и любой здраво мыслящий но не имеющий полной информации к чему это приведёт, человек.
Fusion is the ultimate solution of our energy crisis. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful and amazing informations and updates about Fusion.
There is a working fusion reactor just 500 light seconds away. Works fine since billion of years.
Fusion technology is a wonderful science subject but I find it misleading to present it as a solution for our energy needs. A fusion reactor is still a fancy water kettle, which means you need an ordinary rankine cycle plant plus an expensive nuclear kettle. I strongly doubt that this will be economically more attractive than a cluster of PV systems + Wind farms + short term storage + long term storage.
Sure, this technology is progressing along admirably, but this is still clearly 10-15 years away from commercial scale. We'll almost certainly need it in the future, but for now we have to work with what we have. Fission nuclear power is highly effective and waste products can be safely contained, and if we use thorium, waste products amounts are even smaller and fuel is cheap and easily available..
Thorium nuclear power is very close to use - it requires only minor alterations to existing nuclear fission plant designs. So focusing on using fission now is far more important than fusion because it can prevent us going over those important tipping points at 2 degrees C.. As well as improving the technology to re-use used nuclear fuel.
My man, 15 years is very optimistic. In an optimistic timeline in 15 years the building of a demo reactor begins. That will take 10 years to go online. And only if that works actual commercial scaling can begin.
*progressing along admirably* - 90 years of research and still we only have experimental reactors that achieve fusion for some fractions of second. I think I have a different kind of definition of progressing admirably. Fission and nuclear power plants just took 22 years of research and development. See my other comment.
I mean I think the best solution is just Loads of solar and wind.
Those are the technologies that are improving the most rapidly.
Great lecture ❤
Fusion has a bright future and always will.
1:07 "to produce energy" - each time I hear this expression, I get a shiver down my back. Energy cannot be produced nor consumed, as there is a conservation law for energy. You only can convert it from one form into another.
Thank you for the interesting lecture
Could have reinforced the start of the talk with the rate the climate is changing. Which dispels the arguments that say this has happened before. Yes it has, but not at the same speed, when compared to geological time scales.
Love for the new textures design 8:35
I would love to live to see commercial nuclear power generation 🤞
Wait until you find out…
😂 depending on which country you’re in, you can probably tour one tomorrow.
Yup. Why are these people talking fusion when we haven't tried the perfectly practical fission power yet?
@@TheDavidlloydjonesi mean, we should always talk about things that will improve people’s lives. people are talking about fission, it just has a ridiculously undeserved bad rap. the world is big and money gets spent on a ton of things; we can do both : ).
You won't, these are wishful thinkings and claim of scientific superiority. How do you capture/convert the mass of the released Neutrons to energy?
Anyone know if they have figured out a long lasting environment for these 'reactors'. If I remember correctly, and that is not a given. They have to rebuild the reactors after they run the tests. As the extrme heats damages the walls.
Excellent.
Sorry..the preamble almost lost me. Start at 20 min
Renewables will never be more than a small fraction of our requirements. Let is increase fission with waste recycling, and more to fusion when we are able.
You show one path to produce Tritium. Hopefully in a sufficient quantity.
Does Deuterium still require outside sourcing?
Maybe the blanket design can take care of this as well?
At around 51mins, the speaker has a ‘it’s complicated ‘ slide, with the various options for the blanket. How will these options with high tritium levels and high neutron doses be tested before STEP is built?
Could research and iterate them all in 5 yrs, but that would be an manhattan project v2
29:33 What happens if the recycling rate for the neutron is not 100 %, but flys out of the reactor or is absorbed by something else and not a breeder element to produce tritium?
Wonderful! - one note for the younger among us - the transistor was invented in the 'late 40's - integrated circuits (multiple transistors on a single chip) were created in the late 50's
Yes indeed. Yet we must keep in mind that it took quite a few decades after the late 50's to get to integrated circuits that were sufficiently dense, speedy, low in power, and cheap to enable smart phones, for instance. And this progress proceeded along a rather straightforward path that was laid out by Gordon Moore, using one dominant material, silicon.
People, including dedicated amateurs in home labs, have been producing fusion since the 50's, yet only just over a year ago, using a monstrous machine, we finally made a non-bomb fusion reaction that released a little more energy than was absorbed by the fuel. The process still required a total input of over 100 times the fusion energy that was produced. The fusion energy that was produced was a bit less than the chemical energy released by burning a tenth of a liter of petrol.
Tokamaks, or other machines using plasma, should be able to produce more energy than they consume sometime in the coming decade or decades, but there is no clear path from that point to commercially viable fusion power. Various guesses for the timeline range from a decade or less to a century and beyond to never. We can pursue fusion power, but we can't count on it to get us to net zero carbon emissions.
5:11 - "Guy Calendar shows temperatures are getting hotter!" would be an excellent clickbait title.
NIF's net power generation from fusion is only "net" if you ignore all the immense power required to generate the lasers, which is why MJ (MegaJoules) are mentioned instead of MW. It also ignores all the power required to run the rest of the NIF facility.
So the laser beams had an energy of 2 MJ and generated 3 MJ worth of fusion energy from the frozen D-T sample inside the hohlraum. That's a 50% "net" energy but only over the final laser pulses. 3 MJ though are _multiple_ orders of magnitude less energy than what was spent to generate those lasers.
The lasers were not conjured out of thin air, yet NIF's general press releases almost seem to suggest they did. NIF's "breakthrough" is a neat science experiment but it falls _way_ short of what's required for an actual nuclear power plant. Plants need to generate more energy than what they spend in total, otherwise they make no sense.
Will UK's STEP reactor manage to generate actual net energy or will it be a case of "net" energy over the plasma's energy alone, disregarding what's required for coolants, superconducting magnets, control systems etc?
That's because it's an experimental facility that was not designed to do that. There are much more energy-efficient ways to produce the lasers and equipment as long as you can generate the required net production of energy over laser energy.
Are you old enough to remembre dial-up internet?
STEP is the dial-up internet phase of fusion power generation. It's better than the telegraph, it's not as good as ADSL, and it's nowhere near FTTP. We should keep striving for full fibre fusion plants.
@@13minutestomidnight The point is that currently the only experiment that claimed to reach ignition is NIF, and not only could they only do that because they ignored the energy loss for the operation of the whole system, but as far as I know they didn't try to extract energy from the experiment and turn it into electricity which will be an additional efficiency loss.
STEP will use a totally different method which can't even claim that much at the moment. Therefore to say that it WILL produce energy for the grid seems to be a bit premature to me.
@@l3zl13Check Wendelstein, they have ignition and burning plasma regularly. What NIF was celebrating is that THEIR approach to ignition finally worked. The grand picture they were paining aids in securing future funding, not more, not less. You could call it misleading, and if we are strict it is, but the Politicians who decide the budget wouldn’t understand the difference anyway. Plus they like to decorate themselves with news such as these. Scientific research, especially in the U.S., has become a complete circus.
Эксперименты проводятся для того, что бы понять процесс, однако, на новые эксперименты нужны деньги и откуда их брать. Вроде замкнутый порочный круг.
This technology is really cool but we need to understand the important fact. Commercial fusion power is at least 40 years away.
This depends entirely on how much money we throw at it. Look at the space race, for example, they went from barely able to get to space to on the moon in like twenty years, at least in part because they had scads of money to work with
There's a company working on driving current with the plasma's magnetic fields directly instead of taking the extra step of converting to heat then having to have the infrastructure to boil water and run turbines, definitely would be way cooler and efficient to fund that path
Для пути предложенного Вами, фундаментальной базы ещё нет. Кто же создавать её будет, когда все сидят на финансовых потоках уже имеющихся технологий?
You're talking abour Helion
A lot of the migration that seems to be about politics, id argue are still the start of climate migration. A lot of the political conflicts causing the migration are the people who want to exploit with abandon versus those who want to exploit sustainably. Right now, those who want to exploit with abandon are winning elections, as they are scaring people that climate change policies will ruin their economies.
Seems like a competitive sourcing of Lithium, vis battery technology, is a consideration.
Why don't we "Manhattan project" this fusion 😄
@@Linky52691yeah instead of spending that money on a solution like fusion it is best if all the elites fly around the world in their jets telling us all the sky is falling. It certainly has helped for the last 20 years…
Because this is considerably more difficult than the A bomb unfortunately. All main governments have pumped fair sums of money into fusion eg the US is about $1B or so most years but no Manhattan do or die project so far so it could help (maybe) but the issue is a “lot” more multifaceted than the A bomb.
@@skylineuk1485 how did we put people on the moon in the 1960’s? It seems like many other governments have tried to do it but even today they crash. Einstein theorized that nukes were possible and then they were made a reality by sheer determination and lots of money. If our government was willing to set up secret cities to make the nukes, what would be the limitations of their efforts to make fusion? Military recruiters used to say you could join and work with technology 40 years ahead of the civilian sector. Geewhiz what could be 40 years ahead of us technologically? I’m saying it now. Our government and several others have had AI for over 10 years and the same with Quantum Computing. You marry those two together and ask the machine for answers to life’s little problems. I believe there could be a breakaway civilization that is far ahead of us in technology. While we the peasants are allowed a slow trickle down of said technology. The government denying the existence of UFOs since the 1940’s and then all of a sudden confirming they exist suggests to me that we really did recover alien technology decades ago.
We have. Lookup JET or ITAR
Bring on the abundant energy.
I wish that the date of the video recording/creating was put in the description. This video is probably quite a few years old.
This video was recorded on 23 October 2023, so only a few months ago at this point in time.
Oops, my comment got posted on the 2nd video on my playlist, the next video started playing when I tapped the blue arrow.
How do you capture/convert the mass of the released Neutrons to energy?
he explained that you use lithium.
As the neutrons interact with the blanket material, they slow down, transferring their energy to the blanket, thereby heating the blanket. Easy.
What happens to the neutrons after hitting the blanket? How do neutrons convert to electrons and how many electrons for each neutron? When did we invent the blankets and what are they made of? @@johnh6245
@@ShonMardaniQuite what happens to neutrons when they come to rest is beyond my pay scale, but for sure they don’t convert to electrons.
Nobody knows, there is no electrical power generation except from solar or turbine which does not exist in any nuclear plant. @@johnh6245
20 years away still. Requires a five fold increase in the current speed of numerical processing. That is even with the current very fast processors on the market today.
That is insanely incorrect, and I'd ask why you think that's true, but you are posting this from a ghost account which has never produced a single piece of content, and your username is auto-generated. People should be curious why "trolls" are trying to downplay fusion - what do you have to lose if fusion becomes widespread? Get a life, dude
Shop the royal institution store… The item they are calling," our galaxy mug", has a picture of our solar system on it.
What useful information
the amount of climate deniers comments feels astroturfed...... this is basic grade school science at this point get with the fucking program. thanks for the good stuff RI.
FYI, eV --> Kelvin is a factor of e/k_B ~ 12,000 K/eV
For an equal deuterium / tritium mix (I forget the ratios of the fuels)?
For the others:
k_B is the Boltzmann constant
eV is electron volts (a measure of energy like "Joules")
e is the electron charge (edited)
K is Kelvin, but it could just as well have been degrees Celsius.
The Boltzmann constant changes depending on what the gas / plasma is made of.
@ e was the charge on an electron (1.609x-19 C), and an eV is exactly that: e*V = 1.6e-19 C-V = 1.6-19 J. Then you set that to k_B T...but every experimental physicist know that room temp his 1/40 eV, which is 300K...so the factor of 12000.
and the reason ppl use eV is because when the temperature is greater than the ionization energy (a few to tens of eV): boom, you gotta plasma.
or, if T > 2m_e you're making electron-positron pairs (see: pair instability supernovae, e.g.)...it's just a better unit.
@@DrDeuteron "e/k_B ~ 12,000 K/eV"
The first e is the electron charge? Why?
There are no electrons in the plasma as far as I'm aware. I'm pretty sure that they are stripped from the hydrogen before it is injected into the fusion chamber, since the particles need to be charged to be contained by the magnetic fields.
@ that’s just a unit conversion for measuring temperature in electron volts.
Regarding a plasma, it really, really, needs to have electrons to be neutral. A gram of protons at hydrogen density has enough electrostatic energy to unbind the sun, let alone the earth.
@@DrDeuteron Thanks. Based on what you say, the plasma has to be at an equilibrium, but still with a net positive charge in the plasma - otherwise you couldn't affect it with the magnetic field. Inside the 840 m3 of ITER, there will only be half a gram of plasma - still too much for it all to be stripped.
I guess you could calculate the average charge of each hydrogen atom from the magnetic field strength of 11.8 Tesla, and the temperature of 150M Kelvin.
41:59 Did she say "net energy production"? There is no net energy production nor gross energy production - there is no energy production at all. At least if we believe that the energy conservation law actually has some physical foundations.
Good evening sirji
Have you thought of filling the chamber where fusion is produced with methane gas to boost the chamber temperature? The capacity to magnify heat surely would give you the yellow ring doughnut you are looking for?✌️❤️🇬🇧
wow lots of energy, might be coming from the fusion! :)
31:18 Neither fission nor fusion is flexible generation. This has nothing to do with the technical feature, but is an outcome of being a power station with a high CAPEX and low OPEX. You do not want to operate such a plant below full capacity factor, therefore these plants are baseload plants, running preferably at 100 % except during maintenance and refuel cycles. It the economy which determines which type of plants to baseload and which are load following. High CAPEX plants will be eaten up by competitors if they dare to take over the role of a peaker plant or a medium load roal for load following (e.g. daily cycle)
Ever since fusion was mooted as a future energy source in the 1950s (too cheap to meter), it has been thirty years away. If it is still thirty years away, then it will arrive too late to save the planet. We only need to harness 2% of the sun's energy that lands on the earth's surface to meet all our energy needs.
While fusion is interesting as a potential energy source, I think it might remain just that - an interesting potential energy source. In the meantime, we should go all out and invest heavily in current technology renewable energy. There are so many sources available.
Yes
There are 8 billion humans in the world. ~ 1 billion in the western world. We can be working on a few things at once. It's not a big deal.
Due the amount of tritium available on earth and technology for the litium blanket on it's early stages it seams comercial fusion still far away.
Better stick on torium molten salts reactores to tackle the world's immediate energy needs.
The first presenter. I don't think I've seen a more patronising presentation ever
I don't agree. I think he did a great job of keeping things simple and lightly, before a more heavy presentation
People like that diminish the reputation of the Royal Institution.
Well you have a pretty low bar for "patronising" and probably need to get out more considering this is intened for the General public and kids.
these are wishful thinkings and claim of scientific superiority. How do you capture/convert the mass of the released Neutrons to energy?
My thoughts after the first talk... While I agree that we do need fusion in the long run, neither it nor fission will have _any_ impact in us trying to reach net zero by 2050. At worst, they will hinder that goal by making people think they actually are a solution.
There isn't a single fusion reactor ever having demonstrated even remotely that running 24/7 while producing net energy in the realm of thousands of MWh is possible. Positive results in the news usually don't tell you that it took them weeks of preparation, the thing ran for a microsecond and produced slightly more power than what you put into it... if you only consider what you put to make it hot but totally disregard all the operating power costs of a power plant and all the losses from converting heat back into electricity. We're off by at least 2--3 orders of magnitude from something that we could call a "product".. like an actual fusion power plant. And even if we had the tech now.. how long does it take to build a plant? 15 years? 20? So those will be done in 2050. And how does it scale? How many can you build world-wide in parallel?
Similar story with fission. Most existing plants won't last till 2050. They are more expensive to build now, then they were in the 60es (due to ever increasing standards those take like 7 years to build now and there's not enough U-235 on the planet anyway. Alternatives that work with U238 exist, but there isn't a single "production ready" design out there afaik.
Anyway, so like he said.. we need to act now and 5 times faster than we are.. but we have no viable fission or fusion solution at hand. If we manage to somehow reach the 2050 net zero goal, they might help make it easier to meet energy demands and keep those CO2 levels down but until then we need something that actually works. And it won't be nice.
You cannot consume your way out of this problem. There won't be a sudden magical technology solution to it. Capturing CO2 (has to be done for existing CO2) is no solution because there is no free lunch. It takes a lot of energy.
And to have any chance at all it'll need world wide cooperation. Helping countries leap frog into more efficient and greener technologies... at a time when autocrats and dictators are on the rise and the rest of the world is too afraid to quickly put an end to those distractions.
Eunice was not the discoverer of the greenhouse effect but did the first physical demonstration of it. Weirdly political history lesson to start with.
It’s not weird to be political.
Fusion energy might be more politically expedient to persue but it always seemed to me that fission technology is already here and can solve the energy crisis. If we'd just continued to build nuclear power stations since the 1970s there would be no energy crisis.
I think it would have been better to put the money into thorium reactors
Fusion was 10 years away in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s...
In that time we've taken total Q from 0.1 to 0.11.
Currently our best Fusion reactors produce one ninth of the power required to run them, they run for milliseconds and are not self sustaining, exactly as they were 50 years ago.
Uhhhh we've reached q of 1.54, and sustained reaction in a separate experiment over 6 minutes. The progress we have made in fusion reactions the past few decades are measured in multiple orders of magnitude.
Some people love to wallow in misinformation.
So we are told
these are wishful thinkings and claim of scientific superiority. How do you capture/convert the mass of the released Neutrons to energy?
W7x ran for many minutes
That CO2 is one magic gas! "Heats up faster, gets hotter and releases the heat slower'' lol
What happens to the neutrons after hitting the blanket? How do neutrons convert to electrons and how many electrons for each neutron? When did we invent the blankets and what are they made of?
41:44 _"it needs to be a price in the end, that the world can afford"_ - not 100 % correct. Ever heard of the saying: 'when you are chased by a lion, you do not need to be faster than the lion, you only need to be faster than the slowest animal in the herd'? The same is true in the electricity market. You need not be cheaper that the payment capacity of your assumed customer, but you need even be cheaper than the most relevant competitor.
This means if fusion power is as "cheap" as fission power - and new nuclear power plants (fission) are quite expensive according to the MIT study "The Future of Nuclear Power" or the series of studies on Levelized Cost Of Energy by Lazard, then fission power will be dominated by cheaper alternatives of electricity production.
So in reality we are still doing the same conversions with conversion losses as in the 1900's just with different fuels? Heat E -> Mechanical E -> Electrical E ? Isn't there a more direct path? Fussion Products -> Electrical
@@Linky52691 Yeah I get that, but from a laymans perspective it still seams primative , the sun produces a 49/44 % Thermal/Light energy ratio , seems we should be able to get a much higher % of light energy out of our fusion devices and recylce the heat back into the fusion, taking the light and forcing it into a lower quantum state somehow, I believe if I remember my feynman diagrams, that would a force photon to electrons ? maybe thats only achieveable as you say by Photovoltaics
I think Helion says they're going to do that, but it looks sketchy.
fusion is the direct path. Power output per unit of fuel mass is the advantage here.
@@DrDeuteron I hear you on the sketchy part - push back on the containing B-field? I don't see how manipulating input magnetic energy used to contain the plasma is creating energy? The energy should be tapped off of the fusion products somehow.
🤞
BUT no matter what actual present year it is, Fusion is ALWAYS 10 years in the future !!
It's the Benton Harbor Corner: It's everywhere, it's everywhere!
Think just around the.
At some point, it really will be 10 years away.... eventually.
It's like asking a contractor when he'll be done...it's always "2 weeks."
@@JohnDunne001 or twenty or "actually, we can do fusion but it is always going to be net zero".
That's why I think we should divert all fusion funding to developing a time machine. 😉
skip the first 20 minutes to get to the fusion talk
They'd still charge us an arm and a leg.
Exponential growth means tiny and then suddenly huge. So we should expect to suddenly switch from not much renewables to loads of them.
This is where the "renewables only cover the growth in demand" argument looks silly.
When renewables go from 1% to 2% of global energy, and global energy use goes up by 1%, leaving fossil fuel use the same, that is renewables only covering growth in demand.
But if that exponential keeps up, soon renewables will be producing 10x as much energy as current fossil fuels. And saying "but we will start demanding 11x as much energy, and so still need fossil fuels" sounds silly.
I gave up. I wanted to hear about fusion, not global warming.
Me too...9 mins in and it's going off.
Excellent! 'This is not science fiction' :-)
In Norway by the way, we expect the coldest winter since 1945. Expected temp in Oslo airport this coming weekend. - 25.6 F (-32 C.)
Correct, that's cold weather being forced away from where it's supposed to be, and the overall effect will be a temperature _rise._
meanwhile its 55F and rain in Detroit this christmas with no hint of any lakeice nearby. White christmas becomjng rarer and rarer in michigan
@@fvefve12 ? Gardermoen airport, saturday 6th: -32 Celcius prediction.
@@fvefve12 Ja, heerlijk schaatsen op de meren. Ik heb hier net geschaatst, maar niet op een meer helaas.. Er ligt nu 1 meter sneeuw, moeilijk om dat te verwijderen, ook al is het ijs 40cm dik en kun je er met een tractor op rijden.
@@ottodetroitever heard of El Niño?
he lost his bet 2023 was cooler than 2022
I hope humanity lasts long enough for us all to harness fusion, build better rockets for interstellar space, and spread out and let everyone do their own thing xD
Yeh & we'll cure the c words soon, I really hope so
20:52 is a bit misleading, since the sun runs on the pathetically weak 4(p + e) -> He + 2(e + v_e), while D + T -> He + n is wholly different, and strong.
I can't see the pie, for the sky.
I can't see the sky, for the pie.
Good bye!
It's going to take another three decades to develop a commercial viable fusion reactor. You also require to talk about how much tritium costs. It's costs $30,000 per gram. This is why large power companies wants Thermal nuclear fusion power plants, they can make money out of it. Low Energy Nuclear Reaction(LENR) AKA Cold Fusion, doesn't require this costly fuel nor does it require a large complex system which also dirves the cost.
Cold Fusion has been replicated. Not always because we do not know the underlying principle and the reason why we do not know the underlying principle is because large power companies do not want it to be funded because they will lose a large amount of funding resulting to nuclear physicists will not touch it fearing for their research funding to dry out.
By the way the US department had allocated 10 million dollars this year for fundamental research because a private company in Japan has announced that they are developing a commercial reactor which will be placed on the market by 2030.
It would be nice to have fusion, but lets face it, it won't be viable in the foreseeable future, maybe in 100 years. Actually, I don't even know if fusion is desirable economically. If we compare it with nuclear power and fission. In 1932 the neutron was discovered. Fermi created new elements just 2 years later in 1934. Then in 1939 the fission chain reaction was realized. In 1942 the Manhattan Project was started. Just 3 years later in 1945 the first atomic bomb was created. The first generation nuclear power plants were build in 1954. This is a timeline of just 22 years from the first discovery to a complete and functional power plant. Around the same time in the 1930s fusion was also discovered and theoretically mapped out. Up to today we have experimental fusion reactors but they do fusion for a fraction of a second and not one of them achieved viability. That is after about 90 years of research into fusion. Now for the economical side. About all nuclear power plants were build in the 1970s-80s. A new nuclear power plant takes about 10 years to be build, currently there are just 8 new nuclear power plants being build, and some of those are basically abandonment like the UK's Hinkley Point C which wasted 32.7 billion Pounds. There is a reason, nuclear power plants are costly, take long to build and are high risk. The same would apply to fusion power plants. But we have already a viable alternative: wind and solar. It's cheap, modular, low risk. And it kind of uses fusion, too. Fusion from the sun.
Found the anti-nuclear lobbyist who believes wind and solar will fix humanities problems.
Base-load base-load base-load. So solar or wind is cheap but storage is the issue. All storage options at grid scale are really expensive. We have a lot of lithium batteries going into the grid at the moment but not a suitable scale to store base load. Fine for frequency matching and transients. But no good for dealing with an overcast week with no wind.
@@byrnemeister2008 are we here on Fox News? I really thought that on a science channel people a bit more sophisticated. Can you provide me with any sources that "*All storage options at grid scale are really expensive.*"? Lithium is not the only choice here at large scale. Lithium ion are good at small scale like your iPhone or EV cars. At large scale gravity storage, gas pressure store are really cheap. Also Sodium batteries are good at large scale and are cheap. Gravity storage is basically free, all you need is a good elevation change, water and a turbine.
*But no good for dealing with an overcast week with no wind.*
You know how big countries are? Please name me a day/night in Germany with no wind anywhere. Or offshore with no wind. Or the whole of Europe suddenly having no wind? Or the whole of USA having no wind?
The real problem is the grid. It's not designed to distributed energy sources. It's designed around large power plants. In Germany the number one problem is to distribute electricity from the north to south Germany. There were many instances when the north produced so much energy that it price became negative, thus many coal/gas power plants were turned off. This caused the south of Germany to have brown outs. The grid is just not designed to redistribute energy over the whole of Germany.
Base-load becomes also meaningless if we talk about whole of Europe. There is no way that the whole of Europe would stop having wind. Again it becomes a problem of the grid. We already have the EU energy market where EU countries can buy/sell energy from all EU countries. But it's not efficient enough. It's basically we need a new grid, and we need as many wind parks as needed for base-load. It's not a big problem. I once calculated that the whole of UK electricity can be produced by space of like 100x100 km of solar which would be like 1% of UK land. Or something like that. You can do the math yourself. I don't have the notes anymore.
@@byrnemeister2008Ever town should have a sand battery and district heating, cheap and safe
Fusion generates Helium and a spare neutron, isn't this a bit disingenuous as that neutron is radiation?
Interesting presentation. I am not sure spending so long on the climate crisis was necessary. folk are aware.
Not aware enough!
I think it's pretty clear now that renewables will just win. (+ batteries or maybe some compressed air storage and stuff like that)
We still can't get energy out of fusion at all. We have had fission for a while.
Putting a bunch of glass panels in a desert is fairly simple. Building a fusion reactor isn't. Fusion will lose because it's too complicated and expensive. Fission is already complicated and expensive. Fusion will be more so.
Skipped over the fact that increase in CO2 FOLLOWS rising temperatures. This is not the standard of information I expect from the Royal Institution
Can you explain what you mean, with timestamps, please? Where is the misinformation exactly?
A few disappointingly "less than honest" statements made by the second presenter regarding NIF. The "net energy gain" claim excludes the energy used to charge the enormous capacitor arrays, etc. before firing the laser - in real terms, it was an enormous energy loss. Inertial confinement with lasers is not going to generate any electricity; NIF is for testing thermonuclear weapons effects, and " ... implications for energy production" just gets tacked onto their press releases. Otherwise, it's not a bad lecture.
Do you also need to take into account the energy that made the bricks of the building of the NIF? And the food that all of the researches ate since they were born, and their parents, etc? And the energy of the gas that their cars consumed in transporting them to the facility? The way they are accounting for the energy is the most straightword way to understand what is physically going into the experiment. The NIF is 1000x more efficient than is was in 2010, These "gotcha" comments are silly.
I wasn’t going to share my thoughts about the facts that we should have had the cure for global warming, ‘I’s just climate change…’, caused by the growth of the human population some 50 years ago.
‘If we had fusion power 50 years ago, think of what the world would be like today?’
That was supposed to be a good thing?
‘Except for the economy?’
Skip it, Watch the UK Atomic Energy Authority explain when we humans knew we were at fault for heating up the world. Not for having too many children or the burning of fossil fuels that we needed to survive, trust me if… Well, keeping it simple, we would have never reached the Moon, oh, and a lot of other things…
‘I do not understand???’
With fewer humans, there are fewer minds to dream, invent, and strive for more. Oh, and being able to communicate with each other is a big deal, also!
Never mind that by 2040 we will have replaced the world’s biggest fossil fuel-burning power plants, and guess what, ‘That is enough…’.??
With Clean-Coal and Carbon Capture technologies, we will still be mining Coal and drilling for Oil.
‘Yeah, the AI Robots will be doing that.’
Oh, I thought we wanted to save jobs???
Far too many un-skippable Ads. It spoilt continuous viewing for me. A good Talk otherwise. Shame really.
:>)
My bet is we will see a fusion reactor before 2030 from a commercial company
The extra energy of fusion has the potential to dramatically increase productivity and raise living standards, just of the advances made in switching from coal, to oil to nuclear fission and that fusion has a much higher energy density.
For me that's a much better argument for why we should do this than fear of climate change.
How much do you bet?!
How much of the issues mentioned in the last 5 minutes can be simulated vs how much needs to be trialled in real life? That will have a huge impact on how long it takes to produce a reactor that works.
That is a safe bet (or no bet at all, depending on how you look at it) since commercial companies, and even dedicated amateurs, have been building fusion reactors and producing fusion for many decades. Fusion is tantalizing for this reason and for the other reasons given in the video. Yet no one knows how to produce commercially viable fusion power (cost competitive with alternative sources).
You seem to think those two reasons are mutually exclusive, which they aren’t. Dealing with climate change- which is already happening; it’s not something we have an irrational “fear” of- is at the absolute heart of sustainable development.
Interesting talk.
Buy where's the Fusion power plants?
Whether we ever see a Fusion Power Plant in our lifetime is very doubtful.
So I guess it is Climate Change and we will have to adapt very very quickly.
EV s is interesting because it is plain to see that what is driving EVs is for sure not climate change but profit and money as usual is the case in all things of human endeavour.
Where is the fuel (Electricity) going to come from?...Guess..Burning Fossil Fuels mostly.
The fuel for ICE vehicles....Petrol and diesel is easily seen and that tank is easily filled as opposed to the EV tank (The Battery) which takes ages.
The demand for the electric fuel is growing exponentially.....
Imagine what would happen if in winter, here in the UK, the gas supplies failed (say Russia decides to sabotage our oil and gas pipelines)....Guess what, the demand for electricity wouild go so high that the National Grid would collapse and there would be no gas nor electricity....
How to prevent this nightmare scenario.?
There is only one option and that is to construct at least TEN new Nuclear Power Stations in under ten years......There is no alternative for the UK.
To safeguard our Energy needs for the next generations we need more traditional Nuclear Power Station and we cannot wait for "Fusion" power stations because we do not know if they are even practical....That power in/ power out equation and then there is the Carnot Cycle.....
As regards Climate Change.....We know our climate or atmosphere or the air we breath has taken NATURE billions of years to evolve and what has changed it most is PLANT LIFE which has dominated our planet until WE HUMANS came along...BUT especially since the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.....
Plants love WATER + SUN + CO2....There be an answer.....Increase plant live ahd they will take care of our atmosphere....BUT it would take thousands of years.....
So in conclusion we will have to adapt to the inevitable CLIMATE CHANGE and it will be extremely difficult and disruptive.
But also we must construct more POWER STATIONS to meet the obvious increase demand for ELECTRICITY.
If you go to GOOGLE EARTH and visit somewhere like Tel Avive and walk around the streets, one thing will strikew you and that is the number of AIR CONDITIONING UNITS stuck oe every appartment and building...It's quite amazing to see how the Israelies have adapted to excess HEAT....Now consider if that was all over the Planet......Where's the power going to come from.??
Same here in the UK...Nearly every home has a heating system....Where is the energy coming from??...It;s mostly OIL and GAS.
The thing we are living through a period where ENERGY DEMAND is rising exponentially.... and we must adapt to this new World quickly....
I cannot see the demand for Fossil Fuels going down...Only up and up exponentially, even with EVs etc....
Only Nuclear Power can provide the growing demand for Energy and that is along with the burning of FOSSIL FUELS.
IT's CLIMATE CHANGE and we had better get used to it.....ADAPT.!!
I would like to ask anyone with a common sense answer to respond. Is there any possible way to capture solar power in space and wiresly transmit it to capture and distribution centers? It seems that this could/would lead to just not a cleaner world but would eradicate multiple problems that exist. As uneducated as I am, I do know that solar panels and wind farms are horrible for micro environments. Thx
Yes, it is possible. But is it practical? I am not aware.
Covering the Earth with solar panels is pollution as far as I care.
Yes, it is possible. To the people asking why you would want to do this, solar panels in geosynchronous orbit could be exposed to sunlight 24/7. This would alleviate the issues with intermittent power due to the day/night cycle and weather.
To transmit the power to earth, a large microwave array would need to be constructed. Essentially, a directed beam antenna would broadcast microwaves in the direction of the power station. A large array of microwave receivers on the ground would capture the power and send it to the grid.
Efficiency would likely be around 50% if done well, so half of the solar power generated would be lost. It should be noted however, the solar panels will make more power in space than they would on the ground.
Naturally, there are many practical issues in constructing such a system.
It is done in the desert already. There are large solar radiation collectors (an array of mirrors) directing the solar energy into a focal point in a tower. It is a failed experiment. The mirrors need to be cleaned all the time - they need water and maintenance workers. Secondly, the mirrors are frying birds in mid-flight. the energy produced that way is too expensive.
*I do know that solar panels and wind farms are horrible for micro environments* - you do know that? Based on what? My knowledge is that solar and wind parks are really good for the plants and animals. Solar/wind parks create meadows and grass lands, which are very diverse ecosystems. Also in cities there is sooooooo much space for solar. Like soooooooooooooo much. All the roofs, parking lots, streets.
Fission is the power of planets, fusion is the power of stars. It does not work on earth.
I think they should continue research, but it's not honest to believe it is achieveable to override entropy at that scale. We've known for quite some time that it's not possible get net positive energy by fusing atoms together. The only way we know of so far is bending space as much as a sun does, and in the end it just releases the energy that's actually already there and not even all of it. The sun as a fusion reactor is like rolling an enormous ball up a hill and let it roll down, that's what we need to do for fusion reactors to give energy too because energy is always conserved and the universe (so far) always goes towards higher entropy.
Did he just say Europe was part of Britain?
Excellent discussion! 👍😎 I'm 46 and it's about time we _DID_ something about it. Nothing but talk and bad political decisions since the 80s. 🙄
Meanwhile solar tech is quietly improving.
What a stupidly expensive complicated centralized, construction shareholders wet dream way of making a steam engine . It detracts from real action today with the endless promise of free energy tomorrow.
One big flaw will be operating costs of fusion reactors.Think of cooling away 5 to 15% of the gross heat by liquid He to keep the core of the reactor operating. The cryo system will eat up ~ 50% of electrical power output with astronomical operating costs. He losses in the cryo system by Onnes effect will add to the costs. Electrical fusion energy will not be "cheap" and may never reach economical break even.
They mentioned that they need to design fusion power plants to be economical and cost-effective. You remember how they mentioned the cooling fluid being used to power electricity (turbines)? The whole point of using fluid coolant to generate electricity is that the coolant is cooled by that process in aerosol form, to be re-used again. They also said how part of the energy they are producing is going into powering the plant - y'know, like all those electromagnets, cooling pumps etc?
So….this is clearly not something the presenters ignored….
11:37 The red scenario family is nonsense. Zeke Hausfather & Glen P. Peters: Emissions - the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading, Nature, 2020-01-30, p. 618: "Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome - more-realistic baselines make for better policy." .. "Emission pathways to get to RCP8.5 generally require an unprecedented fivefold increase in coal use by the end of the century, an amount larger than some estimates of recoverable coal reserves." .. "Overstating the likelihood of extreme climate impacts can make mitigation seem harder than it actually is. This could lead to defeatism, because the problem is perceived as being out of control and unsolvable. Pressingly, it might result in poor planning, whereas a more realistic range of baseline scenarios will strengthen the assessment of climate risk."
IPCC states that there is a quasi linear relationship of (estimated) 0,45 °C temperature increase per 1000 Gt of CO2. With 3400 Gt of CO2 emissions by known fossil fuel reserves, this means the most realistic baseline scenario is the one which is marked COP26 2.4 °C - 2.8 °C.
Fusion reactors will still produce waste heat.
Why not look over the last 1000 or 10000 years. Yes you can.
So sad the 1st segment..full force into the 3rd segment pls. All science has been worked out so skip the 2nd segment...hurry!
Thought the ice caps were meant to be gone by 2013..... Wrong
Someone please explain: How do they know that the plasma produced here on earth is 1 million degrees and not, say like, 9,999,000 degrees?
They measure it.
@@Amethyst_Friend , humor me please: How did they measure it?
Solar is fusion.
Очень интересно, но.
Was interested in the science of fusion, not a lecture on climate change.........
The presentations felt a little “desperate” to me…..
1) 1852 to present is almost nothing on a geologic scale.i.e., not relevant. 2) if the United States had not canceled their thorium reactor research in the 1950s, we would, today, have abundant, clean energy, too cheap to meter. Fusion, in its best case scenario, will not be online for at least 20 more years.
Its that kinda perky enthusiasm and faith that will get us all killed 😂
Scientists will always tell you „This is now…“, they need the funding - which is understandable. In reality the hurdles to get to a commercial level are still quite substantial. But the research makes sense and progress is being made. It’s just a puzzle of many parts all of which have to work together. And we are not there just yet. I also don’t think that the Tokamak will be the solution, I think the stellarator design will work first. Wendelstein 7-X maintained a burning plasma for over 8 minutes in 2023, that’s almost magnitudes longer than anywhere else. I‘m 51 and I HOPE I will live to see the first commercial fusion power plant, in the 2060 or thereabouts. Quite certainly not sooner than that - unless the World comes together in a joint project that makes the Manhattan Project look like an amateur hour.
Всё бы ничего с достижениями, однако, опасность в передаче торговцам научных знаний, знания погубят незнаниям, да и людей заодно уничтожат.
@@user-ju4bj6nv6z I don’t speak Russian.
30:04 you irradiate with 864e10 neutrons, and get 15 Hz * 12 years = 6e9 tritons, which means you recycle 1 out of 1,500 neutrons....it's a start, I guess.
Do they go in the blue bin or the yellow bin?
Fusion constant: 30 years.
That stays constant. Always 30 years in future. That will never chance.
If you are creating nuclear fusion by subjecting pellets of a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium to massive laser bombardment, then what if we could make this fusion process more efficient, by putting microscopic spheres of pure Iron in the cores of these pellets? When atomic bombs explode, that’s done by using high explosives to compress a spherical layer of fusible Uranium or Plutonium around a steel ball, an ‘Ignition ball’ to make the bomb’s fission or fusion happen. Also, astronomers determined that when the core of a star, a sun, starts to manufacture the element of Iron, it INSTANTLY goes NOVA! So, perhaps adding Iron Nano-Orbs to these fusion fuel pellets, they would do the same thing.
Iron is the lowest energy state.
Stars burn their remaining fuel faster as they start to run out of fuel. (For reasons of gravitational collapse which wouldn't apply to fusion pellets)
No, that won’t work