I swear, Simon could make a hour long video about how to do your taxes and I'd enjoy it. The scripts, his presentation and the video editing are all just top notch!
@The Official Michael Jackson Educational Channel No wait he has a point. It would probably help a lot of people that don't know how to do their taxes.
Kevin is very much correct about current nuclear fission energy. It's not the 1970s anymore. Most powerplants that exist right now were built in the 70s and 80s. Current technology is vastly superior. As is our understanding of the possibility of disaster if we don't make many redundent error prevention measures. Build more nuclear power plants! Let's go!!
I agree, I hate how ignorant anti-nuclear people are… they’re just scared of it because they don’t understand it and only understand Chernobyl or Fukushima, both of which only occurred because of idiotic designs. Three Mile Island should hardly be considered a “major” nuclear incident because it didn’t release nearly enough radiation to harm anyone… but the dummies will always call for green energy without understanding what green energy even is.
@Gerald H Recycle it, like french people do. In any case, 80k tons actually fit in two swimming pools. It looks a lot but it actually occupies very little space. And furthermore, most of the waste is actually low radioactivity waste. Most of it goes away within a few years. The dangerous radioactivity comes from only 7% of the waste, which is usually the spent fuel, and within that, 97% of it can be recycled. At the end of the recycling process you end up with a waste product that is dangerous only for 200 years and can be stored almost anywhere.
@Gerald H If you were trained by the military, then you know that the overwhelming majority of that ‘nuclear waste’ is low level stuff like office furniture and soil that emits tiny amounts of radiation barely above the background level. We could pile it up on the surface into a 20,000 foot mountain peak (which would take several centuries to amass) and as long as people didn’t go hiking on it to directly expose themselves it would pose virtually no risk to people who stayed a 1/4 mile away from it. As for the really nasty, heavily contaminated, super radioactive stuff…..the volume there is much much much less (less than 10%) and could realistically be stored rather trivially in a building 1/10th the size of my local American Furniture Warehouse for the 50 or so years it would take to develop economically viable commercial space lift capabilities to hurl it all into the sun. Personally, my money is on using electromagnetic catapults to do the job.
I am absolutely certain that, even if we had literally unlimited power, utility companies here in the USA would still find a way to both cause rolling blackouts and demand higher prices per watt.
Because the US grid was not designed with redundancies in mind. Because the grid is more than the energy flowing through it. In Europe blackouts are very rare because of how the grid is designed. But to reach that point the colaboration between states is mandatory.
@@wyvvernstone I disagree. If someone can't make money off something, they will instead make it illegal to do it for free, and then claim 'it will create jobs and help the economy'. Case in point: No right to repair.
As a physicist i would tell you that we are 30 years away from fusion just like i was told in the university in 1979, this a tradition in fusion, the "30 years thing" !!!
Simon! You've made a video about why Nuclear Waste isn't as dangerous as people think. I know it's in the eyes and out the mouth sometimes but I would've definitely thought you'd remember that one hahaha
Give him a break, he reads so many scripts that he forgot that one of his channels, Brain Blaze, used to be called Business Blaze. The sad thing is that he sometimes still says Business Blaze and he forgot about it while doing a Brain Blaze video
Yeah, one thing I never got was: uranium mines are not bottomless, they do get worked dry. Leaving a big hole in the ground. 🤔 Why don't they just put the nuclear waste there? 🤨
To be fair, the TV you can hang on your wall like a painting was always thirty years away... until suddenly you had one. All it took was some extremely different technology.
it might just be me noticing this, but i think some of the visual effects are overloading youtube's compression algorithms resulting in slight potatoing of simon. i had to check that i wasnt set to 480p around 5:18 . love the vfx but it might be worth trying to find a more compression friendly middle ground
Great show! Fusion really will change everything when we finally get it, from generating gigaWatts of reliable electricity with hydrogen to farming in 40 story farms that make one acre of land into 40 usable acres with grow lights 24/7.
There's also the fusor. This doesn't come close to break-even and never will, but that doesn't matter as it's not being used as an energy source. The main use is as a neutron source, which can be used for all sorts of interesting things. Muon-catalysed fusion - replace the electrons around a nucleus with muons, which have a much higher mass than electrons and therefore orbit much closer to the nucleus, allowing nuclei to get much closer than they would normally do - also works, but seems very unlikely to hit break-even due to the energy required to make muons and their short lifetime.
The bigger issue is that the muons tend to get dragged out _far before_ they even decay. Apparently they tend to manage about 1.5 reactions, instead of the 3 or 4 that their half-life would indicate.
1:58 At Canada's Nuclear Generator Stations, the waste is stored on site,indoors, in pools of water, for ten years or so .. then they move it to concrete canisters outside in fenced off storage areas, basically forever.
Permanent storage involves sealing it deep underground in a geologically stable area. One idea I've heard of is to put it in a subduction zone where one continental plate gets sucked underneath another, which would carry it deep under the earth's crust for redonkulous numbers of years, so if any of it ever resurfaces it will no longer be radioactive.
“Long Term” storage…..is really only however long it takes us to develop cost effective space launch capabilities and we can dispose of it in the sun. Arguing that the only possible ‘safe’ disposal is an elaborate underground tomb that would make the pharaohs jealous, in a theoretical location geologically stable for the half-life of uranium………is nothing more than rhetoric funded by the oil industry to handicap their competition.
Thank you for giving us the straightest possoble answers about where we are technologically. I just wish one of these videos wouldn't end up being about, "yeah no we'll probably never get there".
Lol nice Doctor Who reference. Speaking of which, I would like to see you do a video about the longest running sci-fi series in history; and the odd coincidence of the original air date of the original pilot. Truly, a great story of television of history. Keep up the great work brother.
Seems like Simon needs to research more on how we're disposing of nuclear waste nowadays. Hint we don't store it in warehouses and burying it would be worse. We dispose of it by containing it in giant concrete structures that can withstand a train collision.
This. Technically, we do actually bury nuclear waste...in boreholes miles below the ground, in bedrock, beyond any seismic activity or ground water, and far beyond the reach of humans. It is stored in the form of glass, contained in multiple layers of shielding, and sealed by concrete. The transport containers have been tested by - quite literally - throwing a runaway train at them. This isn't even mentioning that properly built modern reactors are so robust with so many safeguards and backups they just...can't meltdown, barring very precise and very extensive sabotage. Kyle Hill is by far one of the best sources for explanations on nuclear power.
The best part would be the creation of helium as a byproduct. We are running out of helium on earth and we need it to fill up balloons that float for birthday parties.
People wants to have fusion in there as soon as possible, but we have to remember that it took 2 centuries to make something out of electricity. Do you remember before the wright flyer every attempt to make an airplane? We are in that phase right now. The same thing happens with graphene and other "futuristic" materials. We need to be patient and invest on it.
I’m shocked that there was no mention of the new superconducting magnets, that operate at a much warmer temperature than previously required. Nor mention of MIT’s proposed test reactor using those magnets
Just a bit of a quibble - IIRC Fusion power can produce significant amounts of radiation. Both em and particle based. Neutron radiation is the one most damaging to the reactor, and likely to turn parts of the reactor mildly radioactive over time. (Aneutronic fusion is possible with different fusion methods but those have their own problems) Nothing on the scale of a fission reactor at all of course, but enough to be cautious when decommissioning one of these things after decades of service. Obviously the active radiation during fusion vanishes when the reaction stops, but it is important to remember when you're working with energy at this scale you get high-energy particles as a matter of course and a lot of the higher-energy em radiation too when you are running at self-sustaining levels. Making sure that the reactors are well shielded during operation is every bit as important as it is in a fission reactor even if you can fairly dance in the room in your birthday suit after its been shut down properly.
This radiation would induce radioactivity in nearby steel structures (or U-238 if you have some lying around - great way to make some Pu-239). Nothing "mild" about this.
@@markrobinowitz8473 Using a fusion reactor for breeding fissile material is quite a bit more than difficult if the models in my head are correct. The neutrons need to be slowed significantly (which IIRC is a function of the rod material and coolant in a fission reactor, something not really able to be near enough to the neutron source in a fusion reactor) and also having exotic metals in range of the neutron source would probably play merry havoc with the magnetic flux needed to compress the plasma to sustain the fusion reaction. :) There will be some induced radioactivity in the shielding material but it won't be on the scale as a fission reactor. The big problem is fast-neutron damage to the electromagnets which will physically degrade them over time. Of course, I haven't been looking up the math for fast neutron decay as of late, but there will be reflectors in the tokamok or stellerator along the fusion path, these will be thin. The next thing in line is the linear and axial compression magnetics and cooling systems, after that you have instrumentation and additional shielding. The neutron rate will both be less overall and likely more randomly interacting throughout the volume of the reactor and its shielding - which is where I got my "mild" radioactivity from and that over 50 years of operation.
I and a friend have come to the tragic conclusion that Simon is great at presenting, but terrible at thinking. Mad respect to all the writers for all the channels for shining through though.
@@-Neo_Genesis- yes, I do, I follow every single one of his channel, but when he said that "we have a big problem with nuclear waste" that was his words, not the authors. You can tell when he's reading of the teleprompter and when he goes off on his tangents. And that was one of his tangents. And regardless of if it was his words or the authors, misinformation is still misinformation.
As the author on this channel, I can confirm we do have a big problem with nuclear waste. It's the same one Kyle mentioned in his video: the problem is that people think there's a problem, and it's REALLY hard to change that perception. That is a fantastic video though. Maybe someday I can meet Kyle so he can make me feel dumb about science and I can make him feel dumb about Magic.
@@ThatWriterKevin Kyles video barely touches on how to manage spent fuel. I think his solution was like everyone elses and its to bury it. Why bury it when "If we take that a step further, U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards." 5 Fast Facts about Spent Nuclear Fuel (energy gov) "Nuclear energy has its advocates-it spews little by way of emissions and is produced relatively cheaply. But no country can claim to have a comprehensive solution for dealing with its toxic waste. Environmental group Greenpeace estimates that there’s a global stockpile of about 250,000 tons of toxic spent fuel spread across 14 countries, based on data from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Of that, 22,000 cubic meters-roughly equivalent to a three-meter tall building covering an area the size of a soccer pitch-is hazardous, according to the IAEA." Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest (Bloomberg) (that 250k tons is probably collected over 50 yrs) Are there really no abandoned olympic stadiums nuclear waste could be stored. "The Ukrainian authorities decided to use the deserted exclusion zone around the Chernobyl power plant to build a place where Ukraine could store its nuclear waste for the next 100 years." AP News "More than 90% of its potential energy still remains in the fuel, even after five years of operation in a reactor. The United States does not currently recycle spent nuclear fuel but foreign countries, such as France, do." 5 Fast Facts about Spent Nuclear Fuel (energy gov) "Although some countries, most notably the USA, treat used nuclear fuel as waste, most of the material in used fuel can be recycled. Approximately 97% - the vast majority (~94%) being uranium - of it could be used as fuel in certain types of reactor. Recycling has, to date, mostly been focused on the extraction of plutonium and uranium, as these elements can be reused in conventional reactors." World Nuclear "Of used fuel, 96% can be recycled, and long-lived high-level radioactive waste only represents 0.2% of the radioactive waste produced in France. All human activity produces waste We use the term waste when someting has no possible further uses. This contrasts with recoverable material, which can be recycled and reused. There are some 1,200 producers of radioactive waste in France, from the nuclear power industry, from other industries, research, defense, medecine and so on." For 59% of the French public (Orano group) "Cesium-137 is produced by nuclear fission for use in medical devices and gauges. It is also one of the byproducts of nuclear fission processes in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons testing. In larger amounts, Cs-137 is used in: Medical radiation therapy devices for treating cancer. Industrial gauges that detect the flow of liquid through pipes. Other industrial devices that measure the thickness of materials such as paper or sheets of metal." EPA "These smidgens of material would normally have been disposed as nuclear waste by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its partner in disposal, the nuclear waste management company Isotek. Instead, TerraPower requested the samples so that Latkowski and his colleagues can unpack the Russian dolls and extract a valuable medical isotope: actinium-225, which results from radioactive decay of uranium and has shown promise in treating a range of cancers. TerraPower hopes that mining the waste will yield between 200,000 and 600,000 doses of 225Ac a year, 100 times the number of doses currently available globally." Mining Medical Isotopes from Nuclear Waste "In 2019, Bruce Power partnered with Isogen, a joint venture between Framatome and Kinectrics, to undertake a first-of-its-kind solution to produce urgently needed medical isotopes leveraging Bruce Power nuclear infrastructure as the backbone. The innovative project will utilize a made-in-Ontario Isotope Production System (IPS) installed in Bruce Power’s nuclear reactors through the course of the Life Extension Program currently underway at Bruce Power. The IPS is a first-of-its-kind solution to produce short-lived medical isotopes in a commercial reactor. This system will be a game changer in the global medical isotope supply chain, providing unprecedented capacity, redundancy, and scale for medical isotope production." Bruce Power "In nuclear reprocessing plants about 96% of spent nuclear fuel is recycled back into uranium-based and mixed-oxide (MOX) fuels. The residual 4% is minor actinides and fission products the latter of which are a mixture of stable and quickly decaying (most likely already having decayed in the spent fuel pool) elements, medium lived fission products such as Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 and finally seven long-lived fission products with half lives in the hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The minor actinides meanwhile are heavy elements other than uranium and plutonium which are created by neutron capture. Their half lives range from years to millions of years and as alpha emitters they are particularly radiotoxic. While there are proposed - and to a much lesser extent current - uses of all those elements, commercial scale reprocessing using the PUREX-process disposes of them as waste together with the fission products. The waste is subsequently converted into a glass-like ceramic for storage in a deep geological repository." Radioactive waste (Wikipedia) "The actinides are valuable primarily because they are radioactive. These elements can be used as energy sources for applications as varied as cardiac pacemakers, to the generation of electrical energy for instruments on the moon." LbreTexts Chemistry "Researchers from PNNL and Argonne National Laboratory have developed and tested a new chemical process that successfully captures certain radioactive byproducts from used nuclear fuel in one step instead of two. These hazardous byproducts-actinides such as americium, curium, and neptunium-could be sent to advanced reactors to be destroyed while also being used to produce more electrical power."Pacific Northwest National Laboratory On the other hand "Without changes to the current structure of solar panel retirements, the world could witness some 78 million tons of solar trash disposed in landfills and other waste facilities by 2050, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). The UN reports that only 17.4% of global e-waste in 2019 was collected and recycled, even though 71% of the world’s population, in 78 countries, is covered by some type of legislation or policy on recycling." Solar trash: Without intervention, a shocking (and costly) amount will be produced (pv magazine) "To be sure, this is not the story one gets from official industry and government sources. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)’s official projections assert that “large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s” and could total 78 million tonnes by the year 2050. That’s a staggering amount, undoubtedly. But with so many years to prepare, it describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat. The threat is hidden by the fact that IRENA’s predictions are premised upon customers keeping their panels in place for the entirety of their 30-year life cycle. They do not account for the possibility of widespread early replacement. Our research does. Using real U.S. data, we modeled the incentives affecting consumers’ decisions whether to replace under various scenarios. We surmised that three variables were particularly salient in determining replacement decisions: installation price, compensation rate (i.e., the going rate for solar energy sold to the grid), and module efficiency. If the cost of trading up is low enough, and the efficiency and compensation rate are high enough, we posit that rational consumers will make the switch, regardless of whether their existing panels have lived out a full 30 years." Harvard Business Review "By 2020, Japan's Environment Ministry forecasts the country's solar-panel waste will exceed 10,000 tons. After that, the pile really starts growing: reaching 100,000 tons in 2031 and topping 300,000 tons in 2033, the 20th anniversary of the feed-in tariff. Between 2034 and 2040 the amount of waste produced is expected to hover around 700,000-800,000 tons annually. The projected peak of 810,000 tons is equivalent to 40.5 million panels. To dispose of that amount in a year would mean getting rid of 110,000 panels per day. Industry leader Toshiba Environmental Solutions can currently handle 44 tons of solar panel waste a month. It would take 19 years for the company to process even the 10,000 tons of waste expected in 2020." Nikkei Asia If you havent watched Kyles lava video its good but the video about waste storage wasnt that great.
@@ThatWriterKevin And longer half life doesn't mean anything. "Whereas its cousins take mere minutes or hours to decay, only half of the carbon-14 component of a given substance is gone after 5730 years, having become nitrogen-14. This long half-life has made the isotope invaluable to archaeologists as a tool to determine the age of organic matter, whether plant or animal." science org "Many isotopes and radioactive elements occur naturally in the environment, where they get into plants and water. So, every time a person eats food or drinks water, they may be imbibing tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes. The biggest sources of radiation in our bodies are trace amounts of carbon 14 and potassium 40, said Mike Short, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. Though these isotopes make up most of our body's radiation, we take in only about 0.39 milligrams of potassium 40 and 1.8 nanograms of carbon 14 a day. The amount of radioactivity caused by isotopes inside the human body is comparable to 1% of the radiation dose people would get on a flight from Boston to Tokyo, Short said. "Most of these radioisotopes make their way into our bodies through the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe," Short told Live Science. Some foods have higher concentrations of radioactive isotopes - like bananas, which contain a small amount of potassium 40, and Brazil nuts, which contain radium. Of course, the amounts of these foods an average person consumes does not significantly increase radiation-related health risks, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency." Live Science "Gamma ray spectroscopy is used to detect the minute amount of radioactive potassium-40 present in the human body. Using a NaI(Tl) scintillation detector in conjunction with a multichannel pulse-height analyzer (PHA), 1.46 MeV gammas originating from the human body are detected. The source of these gammas is K-40 which has a half-life of 1.26 billion years, and is the main source of radioactivity inside the body. The second most active radionuclide in the body, carbon-14 (5,730 yr half-life), can not be detected with this apparatus because it is a beta emitter." Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations The worst that can happen if you get exposed to nuclear waste is you get cancer that has a 70%+ survival rate depending on type and country you live in (for example the crude mortality rate of prostate cancer in Barbados is 98.5 while in the US its only 19.8. From "Prostate Cancer Incidence and Mortality: Global Status and Temporal Trends in 89 Countries From 2000 to 2019" available at Frontiers in Public Health). If cancer is a concern then "Airline pilots and cabin crew have about twice the risk of melanoma and other skin cancers than the general population, with pilots more likely to die from melanoma." Clearvue Health (you shouldnt be flying because of cancer risks) "More than 684,000 obesity-associated cancers occur in the United States each year" CDC The chances of being exposed to radiation from nuclear energy is very small. "Among the 600 workers onsite, increased incidences of leukemia and cataracts were recorded for those exposed to higher doses of radiation; otherwise, there has been no increase in the incidence of solid cancers or leukemia among the rest of the exposed workers. There is no evidence of increases in other non-cancerous diseases from ionizing radiation. Among the residents of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, as of 2015 there had been almost 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident. Approximately 5,000 of these thyroid cancers are likely attributable to children drinking fresh milk containing radioactive iodine from cows who had eaten contaminated grass in the first few weeks following the accident. The remaining 15,000 cases are due to a variety of factors, such as increased spontaneous incidence rate with aging of the population, awareness of thyroid cancer risk after the accident, and improved diagnostic methods to detect thyroid cancer." Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission Imagine. The more you test for a something the more youll find. Wasnt there a recent worldwide event that proved that. "Thyroid nodules are very common, in liquid (cysts) or solid form, and are generally benign, with only 10 to 15% of nodules revealing a thyroid malignancy." Lessons learned from Chernobyl and Fukushima on thyroid cancer screening and recommendations in case of a future nuclear accident
Funny that Simon mentioned They Might Be Giants as I've been on a TMBG music kick in the past few days on Spotify, especially Particle Man and Istanbul/Constantinople.
Not a physicist, but if I recall correctly, actually, 1) fusion does release radiation. It just isn’t significant enough to cause concern. 2) The star’s core doesn’t have the temperature to cause fusion on Earth. The pressure decreases the minimum temperature required to have fusion.
I think the fusion only releases neutrons, and when those continuously hit the walls, the walls become a bit radioactive in time. So the radiation is indirectly caused by the fusion, and not directly released by the fusion. At least that is how i understood it but i am not a physicist either.
A point I think deserves mention is many of the fusion in X years claims was with an asterix stating a funding rate that never materialized. Probably no amount of funding could have made the claim true in the '50's, but by the 80's, something ITER-like and working by 2000 was probably possible. By now fusion plants would be popping up all over the world. But the funding needed to be massive and handled so payment to contractors was made for on time delivery--something sort of like NASA's COTS--no farting around to drive up the toilet seat price to $100M. (Yes, fusion plants need toilets)
The problem with free energy is the "free" part. The folks with enough money to really invest to improve these designs are not going to invest out of the goodness of there hearts, only when they find a way to milk a return out of it.
its as free as solar energy. and you pay for that too. they can produce green energy you pay for it. so your argument is not a valid one. the company who makes the plans for a working fusion reactor holds the worlds energy production for all future in its hands so will be the richest most powerfull company
It’s not free…..it’s just cheaper to produce than current sources. The energy company can still charge the same …maybe a little less…..and come out on top. They profit, the world benefits from reduced dependence on carbon energy and the consumer gets slightly cheaper energy to fuel our never ending need for more and more electronic stuff.
Fusion reactor and concept facts: Helion blasts two plasmas at each other at 1 million mph colliding at a combined speed 7x faster than lightning. They compress the superheated ball with a magnetic force that could lift over 100 Statues of Liberty and convert the energy of the charged fusion particles directly into electricity in their electromagnets at up to 80% efficiency General Fusion is building a demonstration reactor that will slam a liquid wall with 200 pistons with a combined weight of two Eiffel Towers, crashing the liquid into a spherical ball of plasma fired from the largest plasma gun in the world The hydrogen atoms in a tokamak blaze around the donut 90,000 times per second and when they smash and fuse the helium particle created has an energy equivalent to 40 billion degrees celcius while the neutron blasts off in a random direction with over 100 billion degrees of heat going over 10% the speed of light. The ITER tokamak's central magnet will push a current into the plasma equal to the amperage of 500 lightning bolts The NIF laser fires so fast that the percentage of a second that it lights up the target for is equivalent to if you started on a journey to Alpha Centauri and had gone 1% of the way to the moon. The laser's power level is for that moment 25 times greater than the entire planet's steady state power usage and the fusion explosion released in the record shot had a power equivalent to 40 billion home run hits for the even shorter instant that it occurred. (Since a home run hit delivers its energy to the ball for much longer the total energy of the explosion was equal to about 8000 home run balls)
Simon, you are right, nuclear energy is the best option we have at the moment provided it is done well. Even when it isn't it is arguable that the resulting problems are not as bad as the planetary consequences of carbon energy.
Simon how in the world did I never know about this god damn channel. I thought I was subscribed to all of them, I am crying... Anyways, this will be my favourite channel already.
This weekend I visited the Paul Schärer Institute in Switzerland and they have the largest testing facility for superconductors. They use it to test amongst others superconducting magnets for Tokamak reactors.
Oh, my STARS! (No, no pun intended, nor made.) Moving right along, All Hail #TMBG and #KevinJennings for being an effing certified #LEGEND for writing (well, everything he’s written for your channels, but, more specifically,) the intro I just watched.
Am I the only one who finds the animation entertaining but distracting from the content without any breaks? (I very well might be, just asking without any disrespect intended.)
I feel like this video came out a month or so before the first successful fusion reaction that created more energy than is took to create it. Happened in California in December of 2022.
04:08 "assuming we have the foresight not to build our fusion reactors out of wood" that is a bold assumption. After all, we did build fission reactors in one of the most active earthquake zones directly at the coast where tsunamis did happen and everyone knew they would again.
I've followed this topic for a while; unfortunately, I fear a lot of issues with commercially viable fusion don't get highlighted enough. E.g., #1. Saying fusion runs on a hydrogen isotope from seawater (aka, "Deuterium") is like saying internal combustion engines "run" on the oxygen in the air... true enough, from a chemistry standpoint, but leaves out something important. The fossil fuel, for ICE power, and... the tritium (H-3) for currently proposed fusion designs. There are presently only a few kg of Tritium ON EARTH. Sure, they *think* they'll "breed" it, eventually, but there may be decades more work just on this point (e.g., take a look at production issues for Beryllium-6, which is needed for H-3 breeding) #2. About fusion "ignition". The current energy gain (Q-factor) of ~0.7 sounds like it's "real close". This is misleading, because most engineers agree that we'll need a Qplasma in the 5x-10x (maybe more) range for anything that's viable from a technical standpoint (and it still may not be economical from a commercial standpoint). - - - - - If even half of what's suggested about climate change is true... counting on Fusion energy is going to turn out to be a disastrous distraction. We need a new generation of Fission plants-- and soon. [I agree about the nuclear waste concerns, but we at least have workable technologies for storing nuclear wastes...]
I was about to mention these issues, glad someone got here first. Simon is usually pretty good at keeping expectations appropriately low for the science of science fiction, but the efficiency issue is kind an elephant in the room and wasn’t mentioned. Kevin seems to be a bit over optimistic.
the recent advancements and tests have brought alot of hope in this project as my understanding goes the biggest issue is the specific materials required for there fusion 1 from memory comes from a nuclear power plant in Canada and has a expiry date . they were looking at making some sort of savaging blanket to solve the issue but i am yet to hear about it being tested " and i am eagerly waiting for the results " . at the end of the day its SCIENCE and exciting so push forth great explorers push the boundaries .
I work with reactors and have a small problem with the facts here for one we do have a proper way of long term storing spent fuel for fission reactors and also people won’t stop referencing the 2 times reactors had problems even though 100s of regular power plants have exploded and also the emissions from coal and oil plants have led to cancer and killed 100s of 1000s times more people than radiation from reactors had, fusion reactors also do produce radiation and also activate the elements in its structure meaning there will be radioactive items to dispose of just not quite as bad as spent fuel. Fission should be promoted more and the way you presented it is why it’s not used and electricity is super expensive. Besides that great video!
Sooo… the reactors that were covered are all research reactors- we have no existing way to convert the fusion into electricity. Also when they say breakeven they are only talking about the energy to make the plasma, not the magnetics, building, or power conversion. Unfortunately, because people only know these two reactors and we let scientists lie about their progress fusion is still far away. If we focused on inertial confinement, magnetized target, or lattice confinement fusions we could have it this decade.
I'm always mystified when the words "free" and "unlimited" make their way into energy discussions. By the time this is cracked, trillions of $ will have been spent on research and the complexities not yet overcome, point to a staggering "early adopter" cost of finally setting up a working fusion power plant. And as for "unlimited" that just means that the raw materials to be consumed/converted are in plentiful supply. Actual running of power generators is both expensive and time consuming. The operational efficiency of every energy extraction/conversion method we operate right now has increased massively over many generations of deployment. This new tech will be no different.
Why didn't you cover the reactor that was built somewhere in California (I believe), which uses rams to push the plasma into a tiny space and force fusion that way?
Finland has the best long-term solution for nuclear waste. It is called Onkalo, or cavity/cave in English. Onkalo is located at Olkiluoto nuclear power plant, it is carefully designed 520 meters deep cave system mined in stable bedrock. Onkalo will be operational in 2025. Finnish bedrock will stay stable for billions of years, far longer than what radioactive material needs to decay. The copper-graphite cast iron containers are filled with radioactive waste and sealed with bentonite-clay that absorbs any water that might somehow leak in. Eventually the whole cave will be filled up with concrete. Maintaining of Onkalo is secured with low-risk fund worth billions of euros. Nuclear waste actually doesn't take up much space and Onkalo will be enough to facilitate all existing nuclear waste in the world. If the space would run out, they will simply expand the cave. I think that our government should sell this service to other countries aswell. When our public will realize that storing nuclear waste of other countries is actually safer to us than having piles of nuclear waste in rusting containers in countries like Russia, just waiting for something bad to happen, our government could make a lot of money. It's a win-win scenario to us all.
Sabine Hossenfelder goes over a couple of ways in which cold fusion is known to occur, it's just that the amount of energy generated is miniscule and the methods aren't in any way scalable.
the bit I still don't understand is, once a sustained fusion reaction is achieved ... a) how do you put more Hydrogen/Deuterium/Tritium fuel IN and (b) how do you extract the excess energy to generate electricity?
Not that it would fit in this series, but Simon should do a deeper dive on Nuclear Fission reactors, particularly the 3rd and 4th generation models and realize it’s much safer than most people know. Coal power plants emit more radiation than nuclear.
I seem to recall TMBG updating the line to "The sun is a miasma of superheated plasma" because someone complained that the original line was not correct (A gas still has the electrons orbiting the nucleus, a plasma does not).
Another big problem has been the behaviour of some fusion scientists, who have glossed over the difference between Qtotal and Qplasma. Q is the efficiency. Now the have achieved 75% of Qplasma, but the reactor has many more passive energy drains, like computer, pumps, the cryostats (the superconducting magnets are enormous, and must operate close to absolute zero). There is the problem or generating all the tritium: H3 is very very rare, and must be generated by the reactor itself, otherwise the entire operation make no economic sense. ITER will contain a sample blanket, which should prove the feasibility of using the neutron flow to convert deuterium into tritium. True the fusion reaction is hard, and the true scientists deserve all the praise...
We are twenty years from a workable fusion reactor…..we are always twenty years from a workable fusion reactor, and in another twenty years, we will be twenty years from it.
6:41 Technically a lightsaber wouldn’t be a laser sword, as a laser’s beam goes on infinitely. A lightsaber would be closer to a plasma sword in a self contained energy field. Considering they do have some sort of way to contain antimatter, it’s not scientifically impossible to create a localized self containment for a plasma or cold fusion reaction.
4:43 Actually, pressure isn’t the most significant factor. It’s actually the sheer amount of hydrogen atoms in the core. Ordinarily, the Sun’s core wouldn’t be hot enough to fuse hydrogen, but because of quantum shenanigans, there’s a small chance hydrogen might just fuse anyway. Since there’s an absurd amount of hydrogen in the core, the fusion happens on a large scale.
Fusion does produce some radioactive waste: The most common reactions produce neutrons, which in turn attach themselves to atoms, making them radio active
