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When ITER's tokamak finally comes online (as of July 2024, that's 2034 for its first round of research, and 2039 for deuterium-tritium fusion), it will become the world's biggest fusion reactor. But don't hold your breath for a green energy revolution.
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Sure for now Fusion isn't viable but when I was a kid back in the 80s a lot of people stated that solar could never be a viable source of energy. Now in 2024 my entire home is powered by the sun.
Give it time, let it cook.
It would be so cool to have semi-minitiaturized fusion power for single buildings or at least neighbourhoods. Something the size of a water heater in the basement, except it eats helium and produces electricity.
Saying solar is viable because your house is powered by solar panels is like saying a restaurant is popular because the chef eats there.
The first attempts at fusion power were made in the early 1950s (see "Perhapsatron", ZETA etc.). So, _if_ ITER is the first sustainable fusion reactor, that'll be _85 years_ after the first attempt - and that isn't even producing commercial amounts of power. It takes around 10 years or so (with planning and infrastructure included) to build a fission reactor, fusion reactors are much, much harder. I wouldn't expect to see commercial fusion reactors operating until 2070 or later, and perhaps some other technology will have happened by then.
@@T1000Rex i also live nearby a solar power plant
@@iceboi5983 mini fission is closer.
FYI the reason why controlled fusion on earth is so hard is because we can’t recreated the pressure of a star’s core. In a star, the gravity creates such enormous pressure that hydrogen atoms are squeezed so close to each other allowing quantum tunneling to do the heavy lifting of fusion. On earth, we don’t have methods or materials to replicate and confine such pressure. So the only option is heating the fusion material to several times the temperature of a star’s core to induce fusion (our sun only has a core temperature of 27mil K while fusion on earth requires 120mil+ K). The amount of energy required to produce and maintain this ridiculous temperature is ungodly. That’s why since half a century ago we’ve been perpetually 20 years away from achieving self sustaining controlled fusion.
It's not just pressure, it's VOLUME. The "triple point" scientists are shooting for is very different from the sun because:
The fact that the sun relies on quantum tunneling means that the occurrence of said tunneling is very rare. So rare in-fact that the power density of the sun is roughly the same as a compost heap. There's just SO MUCH sun that all that power adds up.
@@AbeDillon
SO MUCH COSMIC COMPOST as a concept makes me chuckle.
@@AbeDillon Also the sun will continue to burn for billions of years as opposed to a compost heap going cold in a matter of weeks or months. The reason we go for such high temperatures is to get the fast burn you see inside of an exploding thermonuclear bomb.
@@AbeDillon Wow! that's true, I looked it up. I never would have thought that. But it's a hell of a lot hotter than a compost pile.
approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre
Theoretical models of the Sun's interior indicate a maximum power density, or energy production, of approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre at the center of the core, which, according to Karl Kruszelnicki, is about the same power density inside a compost pile.
Sun - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
I wonder if a sufficiently powerful electromagnetic field could create a self-stable fusion reaction.
Basically replace the role of gravity with electromagnetism, then feed the energy generated back into the electromagnets.
Hi, Particle accelerator tech here. Engineers design it, techs actually build it. Show the techs some love.
Mad love for you my fellow technician
Some of y'all sound like the people that doubted if electricity could be used for anything useful back in the 1800s. This stuff is complicated, the way breakthroughs work is that it takes decades of people building on other people's work.
Due to the difficulty of creating fusion energy here on Earth, I believe a room temperature superconductor will appear sooner.
Tell me you don't understand physics, engineering and economics without telling me you don't understand that stuff...
All of that sounds great until you run into reality. Because one thing has been done doesn't mean another thing will be.
Fusion has been 10 years away, since the 50s
The people in the 1880s were in no way trying to emulate the centre of a star on a tiny planet. These analogies of what was science in Earth conditions with few staff and even individuals creating the technology against the current ambitions are absurd. I expect now for many physicists this research is their meal ticket and are they really going to admit that it is a no go?
This is like an Egyptian pyramid. Imagine working your whole life on something to never see it finished.
The pyramids didn't take that long, they had to be finished within the pharoah's lifetime so the guy could be buried in it. Cathedrals could take well over a century tho!
The experimenters of the past, in this field, were as enthusiastic as today's young experimenters and fans. The nuclear fusion energy experiments began back in the 1950s and since then many dozens of experimental machines have been created. All the early experimenters are now dead or retired, most of them highly disappointed in how little progress they made. This is not part of the history that we were taught.
So you’re saying fusion will be a thing in a few thousand years…. 😂
But seriously, Sagrada Familia is probably a better example for the OPs point.
Strange, that Wendelstwin 7X didn't get a mention in this video. While a stellarator system, not a Tokamak, they sustained the plasma field for 8 minutes in 2023 and are going to prolong the plasma field starting this September.
The problem is that even if they prolong it indefinitely it won't be scalable to ever produce electricity.
The same goes for the ITER design, so I'm not even sure why are they trying if the design doesn't have a future... I guess just as a fancy experiment to get some data and papers out.
The problem with fusion is that we currently don't have any scalable design that can be used to produce electricity nowhere on the horizon, and the old saying "fusion is 20 years away" still doesn't hold true, since fusion is still nowhere in the future. We know that stellerators, inertial confinements and tokamaks are all just experiments with no viability for energy production since neither of them can scale to >500x of their current output in order to be viable. For production we dont want to produce energy, we want to produce hundreds of times more energy than we use since a lot of it will go to waste before it can be used.
@@marsovac the only sustainable thing is the framework of lies drawing in a whole ecosystem of self-generating funding.
They say: it is 20y away, without saying what is 20y away. The 20y period length also nicely letting fit in any career free of purpose ... and free of the request for presenting results
@@marsovac We actually have to understand how this stuff works before we can scale it. Understanding how it works IS THE HARD PART. That's why these experiments are "just experiments". They're not built with practical energy production in mind because that's not the hard part. They're built with tons of variability and measurement equipment and data collection that a commercial plant wouldn't need.
When we figure out how to stabilize plasma indefinitely and reproducibly and we've hammered out all the equations that govern the phenomenon, then boiling water with the excess heat isn't hard.
The estimates of fusion being any number of years away were based on funding estimates, fusion has NEVER been funded sufficiently and the estimates from back then say it could never be acheived at the funding we have given it.@@monnoo8221
That is a bit of an overstatement, we make advancements, but you cant half ass something as difficult as fusion. It is no wonder its gone very littld
@@marsovac Uhm source? Why wouldn't any of these be scalable? Also, why wouldn't we jsut mass produce smaller models?
ITER was always meant as a research project, not as a means of energy production. It is designed according to the theoretical predictions that say it should achieve ignition, after which the reaction would become self-sustaining - pretty much like Doc Ock did it (if we're already referencing it), but a doughnut. Unlike inertial confinement, like NIF, tokamaks can produce continuous power output, perhaps sometime in the future running for days, weeks, months ... on end. To just say it won't produce electricity is funny, since what it is predicted to achieve (yes, who knows when) is perhaps the most important milestone in fusion energy production in general. It is something like saying shipwrecked on an iceberg: "oh, I finally managed to start a fire, but it's no use - I left the kettle back home!"
Most people don't understand how hot fusion would create intensely radioactive reactor vessels caused by high energy neutron bombardment,which would mean fusion reactors would have to be rebuilt on a regular basis,and the radioactive reactor vessel steel adding to the radioactive waste burden.
@@mikedunn7795 it is true that its shielding would become radioactive over time, but so do fission reactors, which have a lifetime of a few decades. The fusion reaction is far less messy than the complex decay chains present in fission reactors, where all kinds of long-lived radioactive isotopes are produced. Unlike in fission reactors, due to production of only more short-lived isotopes in the vessel walls, after decomission the radioactive parts of tokamaks could be safely stored for just a couple of generations, untill their radiation falls to background values. Plus, the neutron bombardment can (an will) be used to create fusion fuel when incident onto a Berylium blanket, covering the reactor's inside walls (like in JET).
@@borlup6504lithium to breed tritium as I recall?
I do not understand that last analogy at all.
Nuclear fusion energy fans and experimenters tend to immerse themselves in echo chambers that reinforce what they prefer to believe in. They tend to have little interest in seeking out critical assessments of the amazing technologies that they have come to love. Most of today's fans are largely clueless regarding the numerous problems that were encountered since the experiments began in the 1950s.
Nuclear fusion energy will never become self-sustaining on this planet. It will always require enormous inputs of energy to maintain the plasma confinement. The term 'ignition' is deliberately misleading. Most people use the term ignition in reference to a match, in which once the ignition is started it propagates through the entire fuel mix until all the fuel is consumed. Nuclear fusion 'ignition' is not anything like that. In the announcement, on the December 5, 2022, NIF experiment, they failed to mention that only about 4% of the supplied fuel reacted before the internal forces blew the rest of he fuel away from the reaction center. There was very little propagation of the reaction which only lasted for approximately 0.000,000,000,08 seconds after a week of experimental preparation.
You, the press and the investors, were not informed that that most, if not all, the tokamak-like machines are expected to operate in a pulsed mode with lengthy recovery times when they are operating at near their full fusion energy generation levels. The parameters given are usually only for the brief on periods, not the average of both the on and the off period. They have all been misled by promotional hype that focuses upon the hoped for future results, rather than on the key details of the current operations.
Virtually all nuclear energy promoters, are in line with the vast majority of Earth's other 8.0+ billion humans, who continue to assume that we still have at least 20 years left to turn this 'Titanic' around using their favorite nuclear technology. They have become masterful in excluding the following warnings from their consciousness. I urge readers to search for the following two article titles.
IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)
UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
* This statement was made 5.6 years ago.
Everything seems impossible until it isn’t. Fusion energy is hella ambitious, but still very promising. Remember when everybody thought even dumb-as-hell AI would be a pipe dream? Remember when they thought man would never be able to fly, or survive diseases that were slightly more dangerous to us now than the common cold?
It’s far from ready to do something useful, that’s true, but I wouldn’t say give up on it just yet.
Europe at least is working on it, whilst the Americans are sitting on their ass lmao
The problem is that ITER is another big European project that is overly expensive, not innovative enough, and over-the-budget, just like LHC. Compare for example how Boeing builds their space capsule and how Musk delivers. These are completely different approaches and Musk is much more innovative (though of course he is crazy and narcisstic). But I think one should learn from people like Musk following all the good ways and avoiding the bad ways. So, if it is going to take so long to build and run ITER for real then it is quite resonable to assume that one of the start-ups will come up with a better solution (like hydrodynamic fusion etc.) or solutions like 4th gen fission reactors, thorium reactors or that what Gates builds right now take over. Would it be money better spent if all of it was spent on project like these? So that we could compete with China where many of these are being developed?
@@szlagtrafi9115 One of the main reasons why SpaceX has had such success is because they have decades of previous experience from private enterprises and national space agencies to call upon. They didn't have to go through many of those "let's see if this will work" or "I wonder what this will do" phases because someone else had already looked into that a few decades ago. It's much easier to find success when you have a map to follow -- and when it comes to fusion power, ITER is one of the many groups currently creating that map to guide whoever follows in the future. Will ITER work? Who knows -- that's why it's an experiment, to find out. And if it doesn't, then those future engineers will know what NOT to do, just like SpaceX today.
There's a big difference between things seeming impossible out of total ignorance and things seeming impossible and us knowing why; it's similar to unknown unknowns vs known unknowns. I don't think anyone worth listening to is giving up on fusion just yet though.
@@szlagtrafi9115You're comparing apples to oranges. Creating a functionally useful fusion reactor is significantly more difficult than anything else humanity's ever attempted, much less achieved. It's not a matter of who's in charge or even a matter of approach at this point, it's simply a matter of time and money. There are probably inventions and breakthroughs that need to be made that we have yet to even realize are necessary.
I think it is important to understand that by now, it is clear that fusion isn't going to solve our current energy problems or contribute to fighting climate change. But what it could do is massively change what happens in the next century. Fusion research needs to be treated the same way we treat particle accelerators (or indeed JWST and other astronomy): They are important for scientific research and furthering our understanding and probing areas that we don't understand and where we might discover unexpected things - but they are not and should not be expected to produce an immediate practical benefit, though in the long-term they may lead to discoveries and theories that do have important practical consequences.
Most nuclear fusion energy fans and experimenters tend to immerse themselves in echo chambers that reinforce what they prefer to believe in. Few have any incentive to seek out critical assessments of these technological wonders that they have come to love. They have no interest in asking if key parameters have been left out of the hyped presentations, such as the input energy needed to power the facilities, or the fact that many of the provided parameters only account for the brief time these facilities sustain a plasma, but not for the lengthy recovery time between pulses.
I don't expect Fusion power in my lifetime (i'm55) , and I've been hearing about this since my teens
Dont lose hope, look for Helion Energy, Inc
It will never be viable. It needs the pressures inside a star. They will never be able to complete a never ending loop that runs itself. It would become a perpetual motion machine and that is impossible.
It is just a way that scientists who do not want this money train to stop because it pays their nice wages.
They will always say they are making a little more progress so the doner money keeps flowing.
Before it would happen if somehow it could the world will have its sustainable future anyway. In 50 years with the innovation of other technologies the world will have its answer. That will make the whole thing obsolete.
China is testing the first main Thorium reactor at the moment and if that goes well then we will have a safe form of producing power from that.
You probably also heard about electric cars in your teens- the very first automobiles were electric and people have been trying to make electric motors and lead-acid batteries (and later, NiMH and LiPo) work for most of the last century. You never know.
@@CapnSlipp
There is so much energy surrounding us in so many forms
The point is to harness energy
Not to make an artificial star for just the fun of it
Don't you think future generation will look for different ways to extract energy other than fusion
Example
CRT - LCD - LED-OLED-MICRO OLED
CASETTE - CARTRIDGE - OPTICAL DRIVE D- 3D DATA STORAGE
We are not refining Old tech anymore, we just jumped to something totally new
Same here. I'm 68.
We've crossed the horizons of electricity, fission, and now fusion, and yet we are still using STEAM for all of them...............
I believe fusion should be funded more then it is today. I also understand why they keep saying "it's just 10/20 years away" is because the people that control the money are short sighted, don't understand how research works and have to be mislead to do the right thing. However, we also need to be honest with ourselves and admit that's what's being done. As many have stated, we've been told for decades that fusion is only a decade away and at this point it sounds like we're being lied to. I don't have a good answer for what to do with leaders that are ignorant of science, but insulting other science enthusiasts for pointing out to truth doesn't help.
Yes, the US contribution to ITER is a pittance.
And ITER wasted a full 10 years in political wrangling.
If the US put real (Apollo-level, as someone here said, but not even that) effort into it (going alone) we would have been into the DEMO construction by now.
However, the fossil fuels industries would be at odds with it.
This is nonsense; a massive amount of money has gone into fusion over the last 50 years, and these days even more is being pumped in by investors who don’t understand the difficult and probably insoluble problems.
Another problem with a tokamak reactor that gets a bit overshadowed is how to deal with waste helium. The fusion reaction produces it as a waste product and can poison the reaction. I honestly think that's actually the problem with sustained fusion and not simply just mass. A larger reactor is only going to last longer because it has more time before you have too much non fuseable helium in the system.
Tokamaks are pulsed machines. Helium leaves confinement and is pumped out as soon as the plasma recombines into gas.
The pulsed nature isn't a huge issue. What matters is duty cycle, uptime, and maintenance schedule.
My biggest problem with tokamaks is their deuterium-tritium fuel source, since most of the energy released in that reaction is carried by the neutron it fires off, and the techniques they use to extract that energy both consume expensive materials like and create radioactive byproducts.
IMO they should try to use a fuel source that releases its energy in other ways, such as deuterium-He^3 fuel.
@@Epicmonk117 I think the idea is to use the easiest to fuse fuel first to solve problems common to all possible versions of the reactor, so that those problems can be solved in relatively compact research reactors. Once we've run out of problems to solve getting the impractical research fuel to work, then things can scale up to deal only with the unique challenges posed by a practical fuel source.
@@Epicmonk117There’s less He3 around than tritium, so how does it get started?
Thank you for raising this issue. Numerous remaining difficulties are conveniently not mentioned by the hype sales people behind numerous nuclear fusion energy research projects. Most of the fans fall for the hype and have no interest in seeking out critical assessments for these technological wonders.
Additionally, it is expected that tokamak and similar Magnetic Confinement Fusion (MCF) reactors will have to operate in a pulsed mode when operating near the full fusion energy levels that they are designed for. The experimenters tend to only mention the energy parameters for the brief on periods. They tend to remain quite regarding the lengthy off recovery periods. So no mention is made of the average amount of facility energy consumption during the average of the on and the off period.
Savannah seems to be having so much fun on set lately, what a joy to learn and laugh at the same time!
"ITER" does mean journey in Latin however Latin does not have a definite article so "the way" really is "way."
"Iter" means "way" in Latin, but _because_ Latin doesn't have a definite a article it can also be translated as "the way".
@@michaelmicek True. My rendering was "literal" simply to point this out. Your rendering is "idiomatic" to point out its meaning in context might require the definite article.
I ran into this when I studied Czech at university. It also has no articles.
this is way
The pulsed plasma reactors that Helion is working on still sound like the option that is most likely to produce usable amounts of power any time soon.
For sure but that doesn't necessarily mean they won't end up like, say for comparison, concentrated solar power vs photovoltaics
@cameroneridan4558 fair enough.
We could make any number of breakthroughs exploring different ways of doing fusion. And one of the other options might have better returns when it's perfected. Pulsed plasma is just the current front runner in terms of producing something usable. And I'm not sure how well it stacks up to wind, solar, hydro, etc in terms of price tag for power
Helion's work is very interesting
The CEO of Helion Energy is a master sales pitchman. He has been shown to be a poor predictor of the progress of their various experimental endeavors. He has failed to provide details regarding the amount of fusion energy that they have already produced from their hundreds of experimental shots. Also they don't provide figures for the amount of facility input energy compared to the fusion energy they have generated. Most fusion energy fans tend to immerse themselves in echo chambers that reinforce what they prefer to believe in while showing no interest in seeking out critical assessments of the technologies that they have come to love. I urge readers to search for the following critical assessment of Helion's approach, located on TH-cam.
The problems with Helion Energy - a response to Real Engineering
A lot of people mention how there is fission and renewables, and those are cool and all but I dont see them as addressing the same issue. Fusion was never likely to be on the table in the short term, it wont help with climate change etc, its a solution for one or two hundred years down the line and for the fact that we want everyone on Earth to have the kind of access to power that most of us in these comments take for granted.
For that, we dont need fission and renewables replacing what we have, we need an order of magnitude (probably much more) power than the entire world is currently generating.
You dont really want fission around at all in the long term, its problems are wildly exaggerated but they still exist. Renewables with up and coming grid level storage solutions may do it, especially after a couple hundred years of development, but fusion could join them to be a powerful and constant base power source for that kind of future.
TLDR: working on fusion is worthwhile because [reasons].
Good point
Fission could easily be what gets us those 300-ish years needed for fusion to take off, but instead a bunch of idiots campaign against it.
If we're talking about long term development and scale, renewables can provide a stable base load if you can globalize the power grid. It's always sunny and windy somewhere on the planet.
Then again, the world being peaceful and cooperative enough to allow that kind of global infrastructure is probably a bigger pipe dream than fusion.
@@FNLNFNLNat that level of scale power losses over transport become a very significant problem for a lot of places and could very well end up using more metal and damaging the environment more than fission reactor construction would. worth considering. I personally hope we start construction on some real solar system infrastructure soon
@@angeredturtle9135 You can get some decently sized networks even with what existing technology can do.
In any case, it doesn't really matter if fission is objectively safe. What matters is that public opinion is that it's not safe.
Public support is a resource like any other, and expending huge amounts of time and public support convincing people to let new fission plants be constructed might delay support for other projects, like building up large scale grids.
One tiny little nitpick, the deuterium atoms in an ICF capsule are moving inward when it implodes, so the inertial part is basically the atoms wanting to keeping moving inward and compressing
it's crazy how they always find money to make wars, trillions etc whatever needed. , and not to actually evolve humanity. The pursuit of profit and greed is frickin cancer..
That pisses me off too. And to top it off they never actually take care of those thousands of disabled and truamatized veterans they make. They just make more veterans.
War has led to many innovations - some even beneficial.
@@camplethargic8yeah, because they can show off what they have made to other countries rather than integrate it in the current one in a positive manner. There is no doubt that the tech that the government is hiding could revolutionize society as it is, but they won’t because the only way they can release it to the world is with war
Misanthropic self-hatred and humanity-blaming is the real problem.
@@camplethargic8 wow sundowner, didn't expect to see you here!
Interesting to know: technically useful fusion must achieve MORE than the sun. Power conversion density inside the sun is comparable to that of your body or a compost heap. But we don't have the luxury of the space or time that the sun can utilize to produce its energy. Useful fusion requires power densities orders of magnitude greater than those in the sun.
We have both the space and the time. What we don't have is the patience or the lack of greed.
@@philbert006 Good luck with producing a technically viable reactor with the power density of a compost heap. Which solves the energy needs of 8 billion people. Remember that calorie production these days largely depends on fossil energy.
@@philbert006It’s not a moral issue it’s a technical issue.
well said. The requirements for practical fusion are like recreating and containing a supernova.
There's a joke in here somewhere about building bigger and bigger fusion reactors to try and make fusion work until eventually we just build another sun
Haha!
The thing is iters design or rather the tokamak design is already outdated for magnetic confinemend. There exists a stellerator, wendelstein 7x, in germany. Unlike the time limit of a current driven confinement it is able to sustain a plasma for far greater times at high energy density. in a tokamak you have to induce a countiously increasing current into the plasma itself to confine it. that only works for so long. by design a stellerator doesnt need that and only needs to maintain the magnetic confinement field through the external coils, theoretically INDEFINETLY. they have already been able to achive this for a 8min run with a 1.3GJ turnover and are preparing the next phase of 30 mins while developing better absobant interfaces for capturing the excess energy. they have used inertial caputre, basically big bricks that disperse the heat for testing. next is direct transfer to water with thin plates and maintain a stable temperature on these.
all of this with a twentieth of Iters "proposed" budget of 20 billion at just shy over a billion.
The Wendelstein 7x machine does have many superior characteristics compared to the existing tokamak designs. Fans tend to immerse themselves in echo chambers that reinforce their views on the technological approaches they already prefer. At the same time they tend to not put much effort into seeking out critical assessments. Much focus ends up going to figuring out how to deal with specific problems such as how to dissipate the massive amounts of energy contained in the plasma during a quench event. Overlooked, and often not mentioned, is that such machines will have to operate in a pulsed mode when operating at near full fusion power. The energetic parameters are provided for the brief on periods and not the lengthy off recovery periods along with the on periods, or the average operating parameters. Often the experiments involve no fusion fuel and are just aimed at increasing plasma confinement times. Still, the public announcements are crafted to make appear as if they were seeing significant levels fusion reactions. As pointed out in the above video the energy gain, or Q, often mentioned in public presentations, fail to convey that that value may be many orders of magnitude different from the energy input to the experimental facility during the day the experimental shots are occurring. The arcane nature of the quest should not be used as an excuse to withhold such key parameters.
Virtually all nuclear energy promoters, are in line with the vast majority of Earth's other 8.0+ billion humans, who continue to assume that we still have at least 20 years left to turn this 'Titanic' around using their favorite nuclear technology. They have become masterful in excluding the following warnings from their consciousness. I urge readers to search for the following two article titles.
IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)
UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
* This statement was made 5.6 years ago.
For anyone wondering you can fuse past iron but it generally doesn't release more energy than it took to fuse. Part of the energy of a nova ends up fusing up gold but not much past that. Theres plenty total energy to do far more but its a wasteful process. The highest mass elements are made in the merger of neutron stars. I wonder if black holes have cast off like neutron stars.
And just to explain things a little further, the energy released from nuclear fission is the energy that was lost when cosmic events forced fusion of isotopes beyond iron. That energy didn't dissapear, it was stored in the atoms like a battery.
@@RMX7777 that was kind of explaining something different and nobody said the energy disappeared, it's kind of obvious how that works
@@joshyoung1440 It's directly related to the comment I replied to and I'm certain >99% of the population is unaware of this. You may have some degree of background on nuclear processes, but that only means you weren't part of the audience I wrote this for.
Try commenting something useful instead of belittling people.
Wouldn't each neutron star technically be a unique super heavy element
Btw fusion generates around 4 to 6 times energy of fission gram for gram
But fission is much easier to induce and with breeder reactors you can make more nuclear fuel then you consume
That's pretty much only beacuse fissile isotopes have such high densities. If you look at the energy released per reaction, fission is over 10X higher.
It sucks that there aren't any spotlights for the Stellarator, it's always the Tokamaks and the laser tube ones.
Nuclear fusion energy fans and experimenters tend to immerse themselves in echo chambers that champion the technology that they have come to love, in order to reinforce that love affair. At the same time they tend to not seek out critical assessments of that same technology. Everyone tends to develop their favorites. You are correct that there are many problems with the tokamaks and the laser based fusion energy experimental machines. Most of the problems still haven't been made clear to the public and to the press. The same goes for the stellarator experiments. The promoters tend to leave such issues out of their presentations.
As a research project, one of the main goals of ITER is to research the methods of capturing the energy from the reactor. Because even if it can generate more fusion power than is put in, the energy comes out mainly in the form of fast-moving neurons. Turning that efficiently into electricity needs more research.
Many of the 14 MeV neutrons, that carry the majority of the fusion reaction energy, will be needed to generate radioactive tritium in the proposed breeder blanket so that will not be available to heat a heat exchanger fluid. The wall will also have to contain a thick shielding material to prevent the energetic neutrons from reaching the surrounding magnets, operating at cryogenic temperatures. Due to the ITER's huge cost overruns some of the planned tritium breeding experiments has be eliminated.
These are some of the numerous issues that tend to be excluded when promotional presentations are made to the press, the public and the numerous funding entities behind this massive project.
ITER itself is 30 years away...
Did you watch the video?
@@sjzara I was making a joke about how long it was taking and the old 'fusion is always 30 years away'.
I think tokamaks are a dead end. My three fundamental questions for fusion reactors are: 1) How do we get the energy generated out? 2) How do we get the waste products out? 3) How do we get new fuel in? ALL WHILE MAINTAINING THE FUSION REACTION.
Good questions. Another is if the advertised fuel is so plentiful how come the promoters often fail to mention that tritium is radioactive and its current market value is around $30,000 per gram? The promoters also tend to leave out the fact that the tokamak-like machines are expected to operate in a pulsed mode when operating at near their full fusion energy generation levels. The presenters provide expected parameters for the brief on periods but not averages for both the on and off periods, which includes a lengthy recovery period between pulses. Those presenters tend to utilize the extremely arcane nature of the field to justify leaving out key issues.
"This reactor does nothing."
* Proceeds to tell you what it does *
I see Sci show, and know it's a worthy watch. Why clickbait the title?
First time here, so refreshing to watch a vid with no 'chatting' and repetition in. Big fan of the fast paced delivery system. Keep up the good work.
Power from fusion is 30 years away... and always will be.
I mean nuclear fusion has made strides in recent years and also 3d printing as it gets more advanced will allow for better designs that were previously impossible
As long as the public and private billions come in it is paying wages that pay mortgages for these scientists. They will spend their whole lives getting small increments nearer to something that will never happen. You need the mass and pressure of a star.
Nice little earner.
Since 1980, I've always heard 20 years away. I have been convinced for a long time that if we were willing to take on a Manhattan Project , or Apollo level commitment, we could have achieved fusion by now.
I've heard actual believable estimates for how long it will take for us to actually get fusion power to be viable... And it's more like 80 years lmao
I am hopeful that we'll see scalable net-positive fusion power this century.
Right up until it isn’t.
Here’s to hoping fusion will no longer be fiction! Hopefully within my lifetime
Toby Maguire is the best spiderman (there are loads of great spiderman, but Toby just fits that awkward dork role perfectly!
They did fusion pretty well in Yugioh - maybe they should take a few pointers from that
Call a tokamak a "fusion doughnut" and you'll get a lot more funding from non-sciency types.
I have waiting years for you Sci Show info experts to clear some things up for me and connect some dots. I was very happy to see this video.
I wonder why they didn't mention stellarators
The persistent infinitely dimensional vector space embodies every past, future and present from every observer but who ever talks about that?
Fusion power has been 10 years away from now, every year, for the past 80 years.
15 years is a lot of opportunity for opposing political interests to get ITER cancelled. Meanwhile, 'smaller, faster, cheaper' projects are already making progress and discoveries. By the time ITER comes online, it'll be grossly inefficient and obsolete.
As is the case with most things the US gets its grubby oil-loving hands on.
@@Gabu_ Your ignorance is clear for all to see, well done.
As of the end of 2022, total funding for ITER has been provided in the following proportions:
EU: 34.29%
Japan: 21.2%
China: 10.92%
India: 10.31%
South Korea: 9.58%
Russia: 7.74%
USA: 5.96%
The science and engineering is slightly more diverse, but is largely restricted to countries that put forward some money.
5.96% represents 5.96 out of 100, in case your mathematical skills are as weak as your ability to be objective.
i think you're talking complete rubbish.
@@CerealPort500 Did the 'murican get his butt hurt? Boo hoo hoo, cry me a river over the tears of the children killed by your genocidal regime.
you're talking complete rubbish.
Tokamak style fusion reactors are going to have the same issue traditional fission reactors have today, they're all custom built with an insane amount of infrastructure around them to make them safe and efficient, which makes them incredibly expensive. We need nuclear reactor designs that can be built quickly at low cost and easily repaired/maintained. Until that happens nuclear power will remain uncompetitive compared to other power generation methods.
Not surprised at all to see the dates pushed back, again. Fusion has perpetually been "10 years away" for the last 40 years.
It has, but it has also been underfunded and has actually made real progress. Especially in recent years.
I'm sure you know better than the thousands of Scientists and Engineers working on the project with decades of experience building high end scientific equipment...
@@teaser6089 I'm sure you use this line to shut people up wherever you can
I like Savannah mixes micro rants in narration
Super cool
NIF does not do fusion power research, they do nuclear weapons research. Their job is to make tiny thermonuclear explosions, record all the data, and then use that data to verify and/or refine the massive computational models of nuclear weapons (at least the second stage of nuclear weapons).
Correct! Since the original planning stages the primary source of NIF funding has been related to thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research and design. It is located within the campus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and was preceded by a series of smaller development ICF lasers funded for the same purpose. The lab management has always been masterful in obscuring the primary purpose of these ICF laser miniature thermonuclear explosion tools when presenting to the press and the public. The LLNL received funding, for NIF, in return for ending their decades long full-scale nuclear weapons testing activities at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). They were required to end those field-test activities due to the signing of the nuclear test ban treaty.
@@vernonbrechin4207 In fact there have been some quiet grumblings from China and Russia that NIF is actually _violating_ the test ban treaty. I think that is a stretch and they are mainly just jealous about how far ahead the US is in the area of computational modelling.
@@JonMartinYXD - I would expect such rumblings from them. I believe that is also suggested by some watchdog organizations in the so-called Western world. It may be a stretch. LLNL was given permission to employ plutonium samples in their NIF tests. Very few people, in the U.S., are aware of that. Some kind of target material was in the announced 12/05/2022 shot. My guess is that the ongoing subsurface 'subcritical' shots, at the NTS, are closer to the boundaries set by the nuclear test ban treaty.
The Spider-Man franchise is just like the Rush Hour franchise. The sequels were the best.
1:50 - My brain refuses to not see this as either a giant mechanical pencil, or a normal-sized mechanical pencil held really close to the camera. Those are the only two options I'm being given.
hello
Hi
Hello
That 1st thumbnail was better than this second one
NIF isn't doing fusion research for energy generation, NIF is doing fusion for nuclear weapons testing.
That's how everything starts 😅easiest way to get grants lol 😂
@@tacticallymadd5131 no, it's not about grants at all, it's been about nuclear weapon testing since the NIF was first instituted back in the 80s after the comprehensive test ban treaty went into effect.
All I'm saying is the best way to get new technology out there is weapons testing... Either way most new technology has MIC to thank for it... Honestly know jack squat about nif... I just was minding other people's business 😅🤣
The engineering of the device is so intimidating. I can't see it being cost effective for a lonnnnnnng time.
If you ask me, they're overcomplicating it, and trying to do this on a massive size. I'd like to see them control a basic plasma first.
Does it not bug anyone else that since the invention of the steam engine, we really haven't done anything better? Everything is just an interation of the steam engine. Boil water, turn turbine make electric. Been the same process since coal power plants.
No, not at all. They are pretty efficient nowadays, and the water can be endlessly reused, just as it always has been. Generation of the heat is the issue, not the steam turbine and generator. They will be the cost effective and reliable way to continue generating electricity for probably hundreds of years to come. They will keep finding little ways to upgrade them for efficiency, and that's all right. Again, the problem is, and always will be, finding a source of heat to apply to the generation of electricity that isn't prohibitively expensive, creating some kind of massive waste issue, or being so dangerous as to not be worth it, no matter what the cost. And most of the people interested in advancing such things only care about one of the issues, cost. No matter what happens, you can't eliminate greed from the human element, so even if there were "free" energy, which isn't possible, somebody, somewhere will find a way to strangle every ounce of worth out of you and everyone else.
There are physical limitations in our universe that prevent extracting all of the energy from heat. Just as a quick example, the energy of heat is motion, so if you removed all of the heat from something it would stop moving. If it stopped moving, that means it's stuck in whatever machine you used to extract that heat. With the atoms stuck there, the new atoms that are hot and waiting to have their energy extracted can no longer make it into the machine, they are blocked by the atoms you extracted the heat from.
Heat energy needs to flow in order for work to occur. You can't take 100% of it, at least not when extracting heat energy. The most efficient means we know of currently can only pull half of the energy from heat. The only types of systems I'm aware of that can extract 100% of the energy are purely electromagnetic in nature, and that limits the materials you can extract the energy from to charged particles or photons.
I’m glad is taking a long time. That way I can finish my career learn some more and probably be part of this cool stuff. Is not fun when you’re trying to learn new things and new things are being built everyday. Feels like you’ll never have the skills for a job.
I was hopeful Helion’s efforts to build a fusion generator would be at least mentioned.
as a massive fan of both stable fusion news and Dr. Otto Octavius this vid made my morning lol
I have never heard a concise explanation as to *why* fusion reactors continue to delay.
1) We don't yet understand the physics
2) We understand the physics but don't know how to build it
3) We have 1) and 2) but it's basically one billion Legos and only one person can build it
WHY?!?!?!
Everything moves. When you manually try to push two same pole magnets together, you will find it nearly impossible.
Same with plasma, but you need more force and more control.
It's just because hot gas wants to expand and thus to fly apart. That is why one can't make a continuous fusion device on Earth. All human made fusion, whether in bombs or labs, is extremely brief.
One thing that she didn't seem to mention was that the energy produced in deuterium-tritium fusion is not heat in the usual sense but largely neutrons that immediately escape the plasma and slam into the walls, likely transmuting it.
And also gamma radiation.
So a lot of what ITER needs to do is solve the problem of safely/sustainably make use of that energy.
@@michaelmicekare you stupid? The very definition of hear IS particles' movement in space, faster more energetic particles means more heat lol. And they already do that!! That's how we take the heat energy and transform it to electric!!
The answer to your specific question would be, all three at once.
We think we have a pretty good grasp on how fusion works, but haven't been able to test if this still holds true in magentic confinement. We know hot to build plasma vessels but are having difficulties with the size required. Those machiens are incredibly complex and we are still building up manufacturing expertise and capacity for the components required.
oh i remember this fusion reactor talk in 2022 , tiktok schzio posters were saying they turned it on and our reality shifted bruhhh💀
I like watching you because I just like watching your videos
0:34 still very small compared to the Sun though 🙂
Doctor Octavius is NOT a villian
His robot arms are. At least in the movies!
The real villain is that vigilante nutjob, Spiderman! Why isn't he arrested yet!?
I demand more pictures of Spiderman!
Only 110 years ago, it was thought utterly unthinkable that regular people would causally be flying to Europe at 40,000 ft in the air at 600mph with the same novelty as getting on a bus or a plane, let alone have astronauts basically living in orbit.
It’s still only a matter of time before we figure out fusion.
Tacomac is the abomination born of a Taco Bell and McDonald’s merger.
dining at such places creates huge reserves of natural gas. Sadly my wife's storage capacity is very limited.
I'm pretty sure the Q>1 in the nif ignition they throw out not just the power to the lasers but all of several losses before the implosion. A large chunk of the laser energy lost getting converted to the x rays, some kind scattering on the plasma surface etc. They just got positive energy out relative to the energy put into the ignition points by the imploding plasma.
Fusion power has 20 years away for 50 years.
Thank you for the *
Most science communicators gloss over that whole energy in vs. energy out part.
I can't wait to have one in the trunk of my car! Or at least my house, or my apartment building, or my block, or my town, or my county, or my region, or my province/state, or my country, or my continent, or my hemisphere, ...or at least for those that like reading.
Fusion powered apple watch.
AR contact lenses powered by an earring.
@@Rebar77_real Nah I want the fusion reactor to be directly on my eyes
Or your planet.
@@iceboi5983 Medusa body hair follicles that can dance you across a surface like a million legs. Or change hair styles, if you're into that.
Anyone feeling despondent by the timescales for this; remember that once one of these solutions/experiments shows reliability and potential financial gain, there will be a an enormous market push.
...and how does that offer comfort to those who are feeling down because this tech may not come in 50 years?
With all due respect, a little inquiry is made about the subject before the video. Why do they only mention peak energy, no one mentions the total energy consumed. Then it will be a little clearer to you why ITER, which will provide 10X more energy than the input (50MW-500MW), must have its own 250MW power plant?
First, those 500 MW is thermal energy that needs to be converted into electrical energy - a loss of about 50%, they need to cool the magnets close to absolute zero within 1-2 meters, and on the other hand pump up the temperature to 150,000 C. And all this before the start of the work that they assume will work in minutes. You didn't wonder when they say we managed to get 70% 90% of the energy invested, but the peak power, not the total power they used. To write in terms of the total power, the results would be 0.07% 0.09%.....
I'm not against testing fusion energy.
I don't like lies (with which they collect money for projects).
this episode of Scishow is brought to you by the power of the sun in the palm of your hand
Meanwhile Helion company is almost ready to start producing energy next year
So they say.
Excellent, accurate and honest (about NIF and ITER) extremely well done! It will be smaller spherical Tokamaks using high temperature superconducting magnets that will have more chance of generating excess useful energy. See Tokamak Energy or SPARC.
Charles Nelson Reilly figured out cold fusion
But he never ever told a soul
@@gearandalthefirst7027 It's a line from the Weird Al song "CNR".
We need a faster accelerator, to find out how much faster to make the next accelerator.
Big Brain Idea: Build a fusion reactor on Earth
Smooth Brain Idea: Get better at using the fusion reactor we already have in space
genius brain idea: drastically reduce energy consumption.
Efficiency is definitely a plus, but us living things likes to consume energy.
Anywhere I go, nobody ever says that tritium (one of the fusion materials) is produced by desintegrating lithium, which is the worst thing to do for our energetic future.
It can also be produced desintegrating plumb but it's not what we do for some reason...
This is the strangest take I've ever heard. You're literally a science channel, but you continually refer to "modern fusion research" as "useless". You do understand that research is how we do science, right?
Gotta say, this channel went way down hill.
You didn't watch the full video, did you?
scientists: Don't tell me what to do. I didn't buy all this tentacle polish for nothing.
The problem is the massive cost of ITER when it basically has no purpose anymore to prove.
Several alternative or even superior methods of making fusion energy viable and net positive already exist and have proven themselves in terms of concept. Most of them cost considerably less, and are already well on their own way to demonstrating a scaled-up net-positive generator.
When you consider the now decade-long minimum wait for first spark and decade-and-a-half minimum wait for real testing, its even more likely that not only will new methods demonstrate themselves conceptually plus at-scale testing, but that the current methods already well into their own versions will almost certainly have produced multiple tests already. They could already be implemented and finished in our power grid before the 2039 tentative date.
There's simply no real point to ITER anymore.
The whole point is to only allow the consideration/application/proliferation of the expensive kind of fusion; the energy barons won’t accept cheap, plentiful energy production. See Morgan Freeman’s speech on the topic of a “World addicted to gasoline” & the global economic collapse that would be brought-about by an easily-implemented fusion breakthrough.
It is an experiment. The point is the process of creating it and the lessons learned along the way, not the generator actually built.
Thank you Savannah!
btw, I hope you management folk are making Niba feel welcome. Please give her a strong financial reason to continue to host videos for you.
Another SciShow video I can't watch, because it's hosted by Savannah Geary..... *Sigh*
Can't stand her voice.
If it manages to help us achieve sustainable net positive fusion then it's worth every wait and budget overruns. The only problem is if it doesn't work, or if it becomes an obsolete before it is even finished.
Fusion startups popping up like mushrooms. None of them using tokamak designs. And even other big national fusion programs are either using stellarator or a different tokamak geometry. I don't believe those fusion startups are that close to achieve fusion as they claim, but with ITER's completion date is pushed out further and further it's not unimaginable anymore that some other, much less costly design will achieve it.
more likes than views?
TH-cam is slow when it comes to counting views
Active people watching not being counted but likes are.
@@jonesmcbones390penis😏
Views are cached locally around the planet, then periodically confirmed and updated. That's why there's a delay Vs likes which are instant.
5384 views
518 likes
Science is about failure and the iterative process. ITER is about learning from the build process and making the process also commercially viable. It’s a global community that learns from incredibly scientific (plasma physics containment theory), engineering, complex logistical process.
God I love the camera 2 cuts xD
Loved this video, thank you!
I love that despite all the fancy science and tech, once it's plugged in, it's just an upgraded steam engine.
The first step to "doing a thing well", is "doing the thing".
It’s refreshing to see an honest summary of this tech
I've seen smart people crunch the numbers on what it would take to make these viable vs other energy sources and it seems like it probably won't ever be a solution, however I see the research as a good thing since we can apply the technology we develop to other things like we do with NASA and the military, eventually it trickles down into something useful for us, and worse case scenario we check this idea off the list to move on to other things.
I've seen a lady with a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences who thought hydrogen was a red solid at room temperature.
Fusion isn't impossible, it's that people have this dumb massively bureaucratic mindset.
There's about a thousand reasons why we don't have fusion power yet, and none of it has anything to do with the concept itself.
I believe I have tritium vials on my handgun sights. They glow bright green, I've also seen them inside key fob capsules.
ITER will never be turned on because of the age of the parts by the time they would be ready. I hope companies like Helion and others get more funding since this has been mismanaged so badly.
Oh god. they've been talking about ITER since I visited some universities on their open days in 2004 or 2005ish. I saw the video title and thought they'd finally started it up and it wasn't doing anything. You're telling me IT'S STILL NOT BUILT YET?!
I got impatient/ wasn't sure if you would answer my questions in the video so I just googled it: "The ITER project was initiated in 1988. Ground was broken in 2007 and construction of the ITER tokamak complex started in 2013."
and "As of July 2024, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is expected to begin operation in 2034. This is a nine-year delay from the original 2025 target date." oof. I'll be 52 years old by he time it's fusing deuterium and tritium. 👴
ITER is a project that really represents a phenomena of world cooperation and understanding the future neess of humanity. That phenomena has sadly died in last decades and this also brings projects like ITER - and ITER itsef - in huge danger of never being done, which in turn endangers our peaceful future. I really do hope humanity gets liberated from the hold of capital and our survival is put to the front of our worries. Right now it seems as though lithium and oil are worth more than our survival...
20 more years. This time for sure. Promise.
As the old joke says, "Don't worry, fusion energy is only 20 years away". Even once they get one capable of producing electricity, the costs to build and maintain such sophisticated power plants are going to remain high several decades later, while the costs of producing and storing solar or wind are probably going to keep falling down. But it is still a worthy scientific experiment, nonetheless.
I'll just say one word on Tokamaks: Beryllium.
Only 30 years more, guys! We'll surely have fusion energy in 30 years!
Enough waiting. BUILD ME A TOKAMAK WORTHY OF MORDOR!
Great analogy some PhD said: "Fusion power is like a putt-putt golf course obstacle where you have to putt the ball up a 30 foot volcano with a small ball size opening at the top. Fission power is like a flat course with a 2 foot hole and whenever you put the ball in, two more pop out." You need a team of PhD working with a fusion power plant to just barely break even. You can have team of high school graduates with a few months of specialized training to run a nuclear powered submarine plant.
We're over half a century of commercial fission power and looking to vastly improve it with molten salt and CANDU reactors. There should still be fusion power research, but fission is where the next step of large scale renewable power will come from prior to getting into orbital solar energy collection (basically Dyson swarms).
"Not in my lifetime" seems to be becoming a well-established a universal law.
People are allowed to get solar panels for their houses. But when i try to build a fission reactor at home i get called a "national threat". Sounds unfair to me
There are stories of children building them at home, haha. They're pretty wild, but it's entirely possible for a person to homebrew one.