I plan on uploading content about science, technology, history and comedy. Then again, as Dwight D. Eisenhower said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything"
Thank you for producing this video. The vast majority of fusion experimenters and fan tend to have no interest in searching for such critical assessments of something that they've fallen in love with. Since this video was posted the ITER project has experienced further problems with major components that were being assembled to form the plasma confinement chamber. As a result it is unlikely this machine will achieve a 1H test plasma before the year 2030. Even before that it was hugely over its original budget and at least a decade behind its original schedule. Those, who work in such fields, in the more than a dozen experimental nuclear fusion energy research machines around the world, like the vast majority of the 8.0+ billion humans, tend to 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 5.5 years ago.
Holy cow this is a lot of info but very very very useful. Have been searching for a video like this for months!! Thank you. I'm going to have to watch it at least 6 more times to get a better understanding
Thanks, that's high praise from someone with the UCI logo in their profile pic. I visited a few times when I did work with their plasma physics department.
Pretty much everyone who knows how big money and big business works, kine wthat fusion power was decades away and that all the recent hype was to get access to the funds to keep these scientists paid for the next 50 years. It's all about jobs.
Great plots, as being not a physic idiot, I love plots showing relations of key parameters. As a advice anybody who does understand not the plots should not discuss.
Fantastic presentation. The issue is to divert money away from building already proven Fission designs, France has had automated waste processing since the 70s. If its not Fusion it will be Hyrdrogen or wind or more solar. The economic power of coal oil and gas has defeted the fission industry for 50 years.
My biggest gripe about the fusion narrative, is whenever they describe break throughs of energy production, or crossing over the break even threshold, they are talking about the relative energy formulated on an equation. And as you described, there are energy losses from the conversion of thermal capture, to mechanical, then to electrical energy plus that electrical energy needs to cycle back to maintain the reaction, when we are already at a net loss. It's all smoke and mirrors right now.
It looks like this technology could be used to activate Th232 into U233 and we could have two fantasy dreams support each other and finally realize the dream of . U 233 reactors . Of course the thorin would have to be somewhere in the way of the lithium that they plan to use to breed their own tritium which then they will decay to helium 3 or some such other thing . Simples!
My mindset and work ethic caused me to resign, send out adverts for my replacement, interview a candidate, spend weeks briefing them about the job? Yeah, I guess.
Listening to scientists about the timeline of future tech development is like listening to an economist about upcoming stock values. You would assume they knew what they where talking about but yet they are never right. Accurately predicting tech requires an understanding of the tech and all problems on the road towards it. If we had that we would already have the tech.
Im hopeful, China and Korea have made huge advances just in the past 20 years with their EAST and KSTAR collectively (friendly reminder that it is China and Korea that have the most recent world records in terms of sustaining plasmas, not Britain or America).
The reason we won't have fusion power by 2040 is because it is always 20 years away perpetually. That means this year we will get it by 2044 and in 2025 by 2045. Its just how things work.
Surely the materials around the reactor are going to be damaged by high energy neutron bombardment. What's the research on materials that can withstand decades of being bashed by high energy neutrons?
I’ve got to somewhat disagree on the chaos theory point. It’s not impossible to fully understand a complex system, just often impossibly impractical. You could absolutely build and successfully fly a starship without crashing any beforehand, you just have to do a stupid amount of math and simulation and unit tests, which no company is willing to pay engineers to do. Sometimes the reason we iterate is because we have no way to do otherwise, but far more often it’s because it’s simply the fastest way to reach our goal. An AI that is capable of reasoning about more things faster than humans are would be able to reach solutions without iteration in a practical amount of time.
I have trouble explaining these issues with fusion with friends and family, you know the one's that believe in light speed galaxy cruising... well same goes for many reality topics , well they say, " they said going to the moon would be impossible ! "
For me, the amazing thing is that fusion power seems completely reachable for humanity. What's terrible is some people use buzz words like fusion to justify why they don't need to worry about our lifestyle or the current state of energy production
Dear 😄I actually don't know your names, you explained the problems with fusion, you discussed a vallue about the amound of energy is garnered in for each unit expended of that same energy source. 'N-value' I believe you called it. - coal should have an 'N-vallue' of 4, oil of 6 (so every unit of oil expended can lead to returns of 6 times as much as exploited from nature. Could you make us a complete table of energy sources ranging from manpower to wood to solar and wind to coal gass/oil and then conventional nuclear and most important: thorium nuclear? I believe the Dutch name for the N-value unit is the ESRO, could you check if this is true? The reason why I ask is that a climate activist once explained to me that he believes that 'economic wealth equals ecological catastrophe' But then there's this guy who states that solar power actuall requires coal power to be used up, in order to heat an arc-furnace where coal would then be blended with quartz in order to generate finitely useful solar panels. Meanwhile, the Greens are claiming that solar power panels give energy forever (that last part at least, I know isn't true). We really need to be able to know more about this 'N-value' in order for us to prosper further, so I am asking you to start making us an informative movie about my suggestion here above.
this is welfare for nerds. fusion and hydrogen are the best technologies theoretically but since their discovery, humans have found less optimal but far more cheaper methods to produce and store energy: solar and lithium batteries. the issue is that fusion and hydrogen fans can’t lets go of their theoretical dreams even though engineering has told them they are fools for the last 50-75 years. this is welfare for nerds. why create a start to harness its energy when God has already created a star for you that you can harness with a solar pack anywhere? why convert electricity to hydrogen to carry it around only to convert it back to electricity when we have cheap and abundant lithium batteries that can carry electricity?
