Nuclear fusion, explained for beginners
Aug 10, 2023
Nuclear fusion, explained for beginners
What’s really going on with nuclear fusion?? @simonegiertz and I try to explain…https://www.bit.ly/oura-cleo https://www.youtube.com/cleoabram?sub … https://www.amazon.com/Star-Builders- … https://www.amazon.com/Future-Fusion- … https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Awakeni … https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Fus … https://www.washingtonpost.com/techno … https://www.dropbox.com/request/Edocs … https://www.tiktok.com/@cleoabram https://www.instagram.com/cleoabram https://twitter.com/cleoabram https://www.vox.com/authors/cleo-abram https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10108242/ https://www.youtube.com/cleoabram?sub …
Content
0 -> "I'm rolling over here..."
2.999 -> "She calls me and is like..."
5 -> "Nuclear fusion..."
6.849 -> "Can we build a fusion reactor in your workshop?"
10.809 -> I have a story for you.
12.35 -> So over the past few months, I've been trying
to build a nuclear fusion reactor.
16.93 -> This is a real thing that you can do,
I promise.
20.403 -> It all started because I kept seeing these
headlines about nuclear fusion, and I was curious.
25.219 -> Like, what really is it?
27.06 -> Why don't we use it?
28.39 -> So I called up the CEO of a nuclear fusion
company called Helion.
31.89 -> He showed me how right now
researchers can do nuclear fusion,
36.121 -> as in, they can smash atoms together
and make larger atoms.
39.94 -> "So as this camera was capturing this image,
fusion was happening
43.487 -> in the white spot in the middle?"
45 -> "That's correct.
45.816 -> And so you're seeing now the fusion process
happening directly."
49.856 -> But he explained that the big problem, the
reason you're not using fusion right now and
53.42 -> everyone seems to still be working on it,
is that we can't get more electricity out
58.059 -> of that reaction than we put in
to make it happen.
61.66 -> Cool. Got it. Hard, interesting problem.
64.423 -> But at the end of this interview about how
difficult fusion was, I still had one big question...
69.732 -> "Every couple of years or so, I hear about
some 12 year old kid that did fusion
74.1 -> in their mom's garage...
75.728 -> What am I actually hearing about
when I hear that?"
78.348 -> "It's very, very easy, actually, to build a
small fusion system that builds a high energy
82.47 -> beam that collides and does fusion."
85 -> So obviously, my reaction was, "how easy??"
88.241 -> because I'm not very good at building stuff,
but I have a friend who is.
96.99 -> So you had that interview with that CEO and
then she calls me and is like,
102.2 -> "Hey, how is your workshop?
104.27 -> Can we build the fusion reactor in your workshop?
107.179 -> That's Simone Giertz. Inventor, builder, YouTuber,
friend that will allow me to ship nuclear
112.02 -> fusion materials to her workshop.
114.159 -> And you sent me all of these boxes, some of
it having, like, "explosives"
118.327 -> all taped over it.
119.59 -> And I'm like, this is fine.,
121.117 -> Don't worry.
122.117 -> We weren't going to build a nuclear fusion
reactor on our own.
124.011 -> The team at Helion had sourced all of these
materials and tested things and packaged them
128.509 -> all up into boxes and shipped them to Simone.
131.43 -> And then...
133.463 -> "There were seven boxes and we know
five have been delivered.
137.3 -> So you're saying two were probably stolen?
139.881 -> Two boxes got stolen from
outside of Simone's house.
144.535 -> [Help me laugh]
146.613 -> I went to basically every UPS store in L.A.
and yeah, they were definitely stolen,
151.859 -> which means there is a thief running around L.A.
with parts of a nuclear fusion reactor.
157.67 -> Don't worry, they can't do anything with it.
159.681 -> It's like misshapen bits of metal, but still.
163.08 -> So now we have an incomplete fusion reactor
in my workshop.
168.229 -> We're still working on it.
169.229 -> We're going to make this build happen.
171.2 -> But in order to understand what Simon and
I are actually trying to build and to understand
175.44 -> when you might be able to use fusion, we need
to start at the beginning.
193.001 -> [Woof woof woof!]
194.553 -> You hear that? That's Scraps.
196.059 -> [Woof!]
196.639 -> I just woke up in L.A. and I'm staying with
my friend Simone and if you watch Simon's videos
201.07 -> you might recognize where I'm staying.
203.122 -> "I've named her Campla..."
205 -> I've genuinely never been more
excited for a day.
207.25 -> This job is great.
208.671 -> Simone is the absolute cutest.
Look at this!
211.265 -> Go over to Simone's workshop...
213.659 -> Hello hello!
214.659 -> Hi!!
215.396 -> I'm rolling over here...
220.6 -> What do you already know about nuclear fusion?
222.75 -> Oh my god... [help snort]
224.391 -> UH...
225.47 -> Mostly I always confuse which one
is fusion and which one's fission.
232.461 -> Hold on...
235.22 -> Here's how to organize every nuclear thing
you've ever heard of.
239.159 -> Imagine that this is fission row,
and this is fusion row.
242.54 -> Mm hmm.
243.54 -> And this is controlled.
245.16 -> And this is uncontrolled.
246.2 -> Fission is cracking a big atom
like uranium into smaller atoms.
250.422 -> A little mass gets lost, energy is released.
253.025 -> Fission uncontrolled, that's an atomic bomb.
256.11 -> Fission controlled, that's all nuclear power that's
actually usable, generating electricity right now.
262.12 -> Fusion is smashing tiny atoms like hydrogen
or helium together to make a larger atom.
267.287 -> Little mass gets lost, even more energy is released.
270.21 -> Fusion uncontrolled can be used to make another
kind of bomb, the hydrogen bomb.
274.06 -> These have been tested by several countries,
but never actually used in war.
277.752 -> And this box, controlled fusion, that's what
we're talking about here.
282.778 -> Like, why?
283.778 -> Where is it?
284.778 -> Where is it at?
285.778 -> Because I feel like it's been on the verge
of being a thing for a long time.
290 -> Yes.
291.453 -> Pause, rewind.
294.503 -> That ring on my hand is a Gen 3 Oura Ring.
299.281 -> I got it a couple of weeks ago and it monitors
my heart rate during the day when I wear it.
303.22 -> But the thing I like best about it is that
it monitors my sleep at night, and after a
306.92 -> while it started giving me recommendations
to get better sleep based on the nights that
310.61 -> it can tell that I'm sleeping well.
312.202 -> It's really incredible how much technology
I'm holding in my hand here.
315.396 -> And it all fits onto this tiny little ring.
317.61 -> It would also tell me things like if my temperature
were unusually high so I could tell if I was
321.71 -> getting sick before, I might
normally be able to tell.
324.46 -> Anyway, if you want to try it with me, you
can click the link in my description.
327.812 -> I really like it. I think you might like it too.
331.654 -> "Nuclear fusion...
332.654 -> could this provide energy which is cheap,
clean and inexhaustible?
337.473 -> People have been trying to do fusion and get
electricity for a really long time, but now
341.78 -> the threat of climate change and the need
to find more clean energy sources is making
345.419 -> this much more urgent.
346.85 -> It's hard to compare energy sources while
they're still being developed, but we're talking
350.16 -> about millions of times more energy from fusion
for the same amount of mass than from fossil fuels.
355.575 -> Fission has a similar energy density, a little
bit less, but fusion comes with fewer safety
360.72 -> risks, namely nuclear proliferation-
363.568 -> proliferation, proliferation, proliferation,
nuclear proliferation, namely nuclear proliferation.
369.878 -> [Help me snort]
372.167 -> Given that there are types of fusion bombs,
like hydrogen bombs, why would I not be worried
378.894 -> about nuclear p-proliferation with fusion?
381.104 -> What many people don't know
is a fusion bomb is still a fission bomb.
384.55 -> It still has uranium and plutonium in it, but it
uses fusion to perhaps add some more energy.
391.263 -> And so that's one of the primary concerns.
Fusion by itself isn't a proliferation concern.
396.555 -> So potentially huge amounts of energy, less
risk. In order to get closer to this dream,
401.06 -> though, we need it to move beyond smashing
individual atoms together to get them to combine.
405.35 -> We needed to do fusion at scale.
Less smashing and more smooshing...
412.302 -> Figuring out the best way to do this has been
the work of thousands of people over decades.
418.417 -> One of the images that I have in my head is
when you learn about early efforts to build
423.479 -> an airplane, you find that everyone agreed
on what the airplane should do.
428.479 -> We wanted something to help humans fly.
431.259 -> But there are so many wonderful different
images of the ways that planes were going to look.
436.768 -> I love the analogy of the initial work
into building airplanes.
440.697 -> So in fusion, there's a variety of concepts
of ways to do this.
445.53 -> All of them rely on something that I have
to explain first, hold on...
449.719 -> I love this.
451.562 -> You already know that you add energy to a
solid and that solid becomes a liquid.
455.284 -> That liquid becomes a gas and that gas becomes
plasma, which many people may not be familiar with.
460.575 -> Ice to water or to steam to other stuff that
you don't see in a normal kitchen.
467.931 -> Yes.
468.931 -> And plasma is all of the individual atoms
themselves have broken into bits, like there's
475.27 -> so much energy in that system that all of
the neutrons and the electrons and protons
480.389 -> are just like flying around in there.
482.639 -> This is a really good party.
484.229 -> Everybody's like, I'm going to leave my
protons and electrons.
487.9 -> Single party.
488.61 -> Yeah, no, it's like swingers night.
490.699 -> You can go and hang out with anyone.
491.979 -> Exactly.
492.979 -> But the question is, how do you keep plasma
confined and pressurize it enough for a long
498.25 -> enough time to actually make fusion happen?
500.35 -> If that is atoms or like electrons kind of
falling apart, like we wouldn't have any material
505.37 -> that can contain that.
508.197 -> Do we?
508.855 -> Well, there's one place that fusion is already
happening a lot.
511.542 -> The sun.
513.042 -> There are three big methods that we know can
confine plasma enough
516.566 -> to make fusion happen at scale.
518.655 -> The one that powers the universe and most,
if not all, of the energy in the universe
523.86 -> right now comes from fusion,
is gravitational confinement.
527.87 -> It's so large that the gravity pulls it in,
pulls that plasma in and compresses and heats
534.22 -> that fuel to the point where it actually
starts to fuse.
537.459 -> On earth, we don't have the ability to build
very large systems that have gravitational confinement.
543.535 -> So what we do is now a variety of using electronics
and magnetic fields and other techniques to
548.91 -> try to pull that plasma in.
551.068 -> I've heard about like magnetic fields and
using that to keep it in place since it can't
556.47 -> really be in contact with other things.
559.123 -> That's the first method that we can actually
do: magnetic confinement.
562.86 -> This involves a machine that you might have
seen pictures of.
564.98 -> It's called a tokamak.
566.48 -> You heat that fusion plasma that circles around,
568.72 -> that's well confined, until it finally gets
hot enough that it starts to fuse.
574.19 -> However, there's another version.
575.65 -> I genuinely cannot guess.
577.36 -> What would it be?
578.36 -> What could hold it in place?
579.36 -> Yeah I mean, do you have a guess?
581.492 -> If you guess this, it would just be...
583.413 -> Oh, no, now I really want to guess it.
586.185 -> Uhhhhh
587.237 -> No. I can't guess it.
588.895 -> Inertia.
592.459 -> Another big approach is called inertial confinement.
594.6 -> In inertial confinement, rather than trying
to copy what's happening in the sun,
599.834 -> where you're holding steady a fusion fuel
until it heats and begins to fuse, now you
605.679 -> compress it very quickly, as fast
as you can, on the order of a billionth of a second.
610.59 -> Shooting lasers at your plasma so that it
gets pushed together very quickly.
617.117 -> And then they- things fuse.
619.028 -> And then they can't hold it there
for very long and so it -
621.526 -> So it's more instead of just having a continuous
plasma soup, we're having all these little
625.92 -> plasma blinks.
628.49 -> It's like gravity....
631.016 -> magneticism...
633.053 -> and lasers.
635 -> And this is - I'm the plasma.
637.5 -> There are other variations on this, so
638.75 -> the company that I interviewed, the CEO
of, is doing a mixture of magnetic confinement
642.51 -> and inertial confinement:
magnetoinertial confinement.
645.972 -> So you get the confinement, you get to hold
on to the fusion fuel, just like the sun does,
650.342 -> just like magnetic confinement.
651.56 -> But you get the compression, just like inertial
confinement does.
655.637 -> This is what it looks like.
657.547 -> This is their fusion reactor.
660.21 -> This probably is over the course of many hours.
663.26 -> This is the pink light that gets
emitted when you do fusion.
667.68 -> It looks beautiful.
669.048 -> I don't know. That's...
671.495 -> That's wild.
672.969 -> That's the plasma.
674.837 -> What you're seeing in this progression of
images is this plasma being ejected from one
679.26 -> side of the machine, compressing down, increasing
in pressure and temperature.
683.62 -> It's getting brighter and then it starts to
expand and gets a little darker.
687.694 -> This is a manmade star.
690.448 -> You're doing fusion and
you're doing it here on Earth.
692.518 -> That's awesome.
693.518 -> I love my job.
695.334 -> This is a really cool- it's a really cool job.
698.307 -> It just feels like fusion is that thing that
I'm hoping that, like, our grandchildren are
703.959 -> going to be like, wait, you didn't just have
electricity at the ready?
708.071 -> You had to burn fossil fuels?
711.15 -> Ew. Like, you can just fuse atoms
and then we're fine.
715.576 -> But like, what's the catch?
717.66 -> Because, like, it sounds too good to be true.
722.389 -> Okay, there are a couple of catches.
724.37 -> The first is that the materials
that you need to do fusion
726.903 -> aren't just your normal hydrogen and helium.
729.3 -> They don't have the same nuclear proliferation
concerns as fission materials do.
732.82 -> But some of them are rare and hard to find.
734.892 -> The two kinds of hydrogen that are most commonly
used in fusion are deuterium and tritium.
740 -> Tritium is rare.
741.399 -> If you can't get enough tritium, you can do
it with helium three, which is a kind of helium.
746.813 -> Yeah.
747.576 -> Also rare.
748.456 -> There's a controversy in the community
that does fusion of like what the best materials are
752.758 -> and which ones would scale if we wanted
to do this for millions of people.
757.388 -> But the most important catch is: it doesn't
work yet in the way that we need it to.
761.786 -> Like all of the fusion methods that we as
humans can do take more electricity to make
765.89 -> happen than we get out of them, which is kind
of the point of an energy source.
771.67 -> However, and this is for people that get cynical about
how long we've been working on fusion...
775.258 -> "Sounds too good to be true, right?
776.85 -> That's because it is."
778.061 -> "Just another empty promise."
780 -> "Decades away from effective nuclear fusion."
783.026 -> Just think about electricity itself.
785.21 -> We understood that a charge could carry energy
all the way back in the late 1600s.
790.439 -> But it wasn't until the 1800s that we figured
out how to use it.
795 -> That's way longer than we've been working
on fusion and plenty of people spent the time
798.59 -> in between calling it a useless pipedream.
801.32 -> And the stakes of getting fusion right today
couldn't be higher.
804.786 -> "There is a real need to focus on climate change"
807.368 -> "and fusion could be the answer to our energy needs."
810.42 -> "Fusion has enormous potential."
812.051 -> I am really curious to see what the societal
impact would be of having energy that would
818.19 -> potentially be very cheap.
821.831 -> I mean, obviously we humans are very good
at hogging resources and gatekeeping in different
827.829 -> ways, but I'm really hoping that it could
be a beginning to like not having energy be
832.62 -> so hard to come by.
833.831 -> The way that it would change how you think
is just totally profound.
838.5 -> Like, imagine what you could do if you didn't
have to weigh the energy cost.
844.209 -> Imagine like the total amount of human suffering
that you could reduce.
847.899 -> And then beyond that, like how you could just
experiment to make people's lives better.
857.16 -> To me, that's not just a reason to
research fusion.
859.61 -> It's a reason to invest even more in making
this dream possible.
863.05 -> It's a reason to try.
865.655 -> Speaking of trying...
867.103 -> She calls me and is like, "Hey, how is your workshop?
870.215 -> Can we build a fusion reactor in your workshop?"
873.449 -> And I'm like, "Yeah, sure..."
877.209 -> And you sent me all of these boxes.
878.89 -> And so now we have an incomplete fusion
reactor in my workshop
884.214 -> but we will just have to
leave that for another day.
887.096 -> But it is going to be another day.
888.07 -> It's going to be in a couple of weeks.
888.859 -> Oh yeah.
889.359 -> Yeah yeah yeah
889.886 -> It's not going to be 30 years in the future
that we build our own tiny little fusion reactor.
894.44 -> Part two coming really soon.
901.31 -> They don't have the nuclear prorif-
902.699 -> They don't have the nuclear proliferation concerns -
904.339 -> Nuclear proliferation! Why can I not-
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piPbnKdve9M
