How close are we to clean fusion energy? I Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) 

I thought content was informative, but OMG camera placement and angles made it impossible to follow in places.

A good thing about Fusion is that when it fails, the reaction simply stops. No meltdown. No catastrophic release of radiation.

I can hear Bob Mumgaard ok so I don't need to see him, I NEED TO SEE THE CHARTS AND GRAPHS THAT HE KEEPS POINTING TO AS HE MAKES HIS POINTS!! The camera man or director needs to back to film school to learn what's important about how to film a lecture!

For the love of god, overlay the charts.

The power of the sun in the hands of humans... this will either fail miserably, or launch humanity to a whole new level... Let's hope for the best.

Big use of fossil fuels started in the 19th century, not 1945, and it was definitely a good thing compared to the alternatives available at the time giving us the industrial revolution and preventing tens of thousands of deaths in cities each year from diseases spread by flies on horse manure. Don't let current problems make you forget past problems and make you unjustly critical of our ancestors. As you said, we're not going back to using less energy as we did in the 19th century. :-)

Our use of energy from fossil fuels began in the 19th century, not 1945, and it was vastly cleaner than the alternatives available at the time (remember tens of thousands of deaths each year in New York City from diseases spread by the flies on tons of horse manure) Using fossil fuels wasn't a mistake; It addressed bigger and more immediate problems that have been forgotten thanks to the use of fossil fuels. Now let fusion and other clean energy sources address the problems caused b using fossil fuels. :-)

Very good to hear some positive news about fusion energy!

I'd love to work on Fusion, seems like the power of the future.

So this guy just explained fusion to a room full of people who already know the concept.

So Basically, Thoughty2 watched this video and then made his own on it. Cool.

Even if we work out a net positive energy fusion reactor, it still boils down to the construction cost. It will cost billions for one of these plants and will price itself out of the market just like fission. With the almost daily news of cheaper battery storage designs and the still falling price of solar, Fusion is going to have to come down huge in cost.

Bob Mumgaard explained it perfect.

In next 40 years as it was for the last 70 years.

We already have a fusion device for the world and a magnetic shield and PV devices that are close to 40% efficiency in collecting this energy. For less than a penny / watt this power can be collected and stored on cost plummeting batteries for every home and business in the world. We need this SPARC where the sun don’t shine. Deep space bases and craft for exploration.

if the plasma is held in place with crazy big magnets, how do you extract the heat energy to make power? I know a fair bit about fission reactors but never studied fusion in detail.

Who doesn't know this already? He's a very teacher of technology. we've heard prodigy kids who can explain it better.

We have never been closer...and its not really about going green, thats just the advertisement fluffery - Its about technological progress and the final test for the industrial civilisation. Also, some fusion designs may give us new propulsion technologies (FRC configuration etc etc)

okay. i had the same joke. but I DO like Eric Lerner's approach at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics.

noun 1. a fixed luminous point in the night sky which is a large, remote incandescent body like the sun. synonyms: celestial body, heavenly body, sun

Is there any hope of using something analogous to solar panels to directly convert x-rays from fusion into electricity more efficiently than using heat to generate steam for powering a turbine? The real Q is electricity out to electricity in. :-)

What do you think of Kirk Anderson and Thorium lftr molton salt reactors?

Nuclear fusion, excellent for propelling vehicles. Sooner than you think we will be driving such wonders.

The huge power production plant saddens me, Smaller would be better: Smaller would be cheaper and much more likely to be able to lift itself into orbit. :-)

This is the same investor relations hype I witnessed in the 1990s regarding clean hydrogen for use as 20 to 100 kilowatt micro-generators. I talked with numerous startups in those years touting the fact that they were all " just around the corner"and "we are very close to commercializing hydrogen gensets" with just a few more millions "we are nearly there". I work in chemistry and material science , and actually developed Micro- power steam turbine gensets for remote Island nations. There are so many hurdles to overcome. What is the kilowatt per hour cost? What is the actual energy density? Will it compete economically with nuclear, hydro- electric, diesel, LNG?? When will the first technology demonstrator be actually running? Are we talking efficient powered units that produce in megawatts? Kilowatts? What? Just build a 100 to 500 kw unit using this technology and run it for several months. Then return to us with real facts. Power point animations are just vapor ware until you can build a scalable prototype folks.

So what type of energy is put into this to get energy out? I was always under the assumption that you can't get more energy out of something than you put into it?

what if they contained the plasma by using multiple toroids to allow the plasma to expand and allow plasma to flow into the parallel toroids as needed for containing the plasma easier

How about a small fusion reactor producing 500KW that runs (once it is started) on tap water where it finds hydrogen and enough deuterium to operate. Impossible?

I know as little now about "how close we are" as I knew before watching this.

Let's see...how many holes could we punch in the ground to harness what is ALREADY THERE AND AVAILABLE TO UTILIZE!!!!????

They might be able to produce electricity more efficiently from the x-rays produced by fusion than from the heat produced by fusion. :-)

What do you think about the new Danzik engine that’s run by magnets?

How do I get in touch with you Bon?

superconductors need extremely low temperature to work and plasma produces extremely high temperature. How they expect to make them work together?

30 years

We are never any further away from fusion energy than 30 years, im sure that in 2049 we will still be 30 years away from fusion power plants. Why don't we use Thorium as a lifter reactor fuel, Molton salt reactors they had one in Oakridge Tennessee it would be a fraction of the cost that we have spent throughout the years on fusion and we could have an actual power plant that makes electricity

It should be noted that energy COSTS will not be reduced with fusion. Generating electricity is rather cheap. It is the transmission and distribution and all the infrastructure required that's the real killer.

2:35 actually the first oil well in the US was up in Pennsylvania.

Will ITER be a bigger construction project than the Large Hadron Colider?

Problem of fusion is the large amount of gamma rays and that magnets can explode if they stay long time at almost 0 kelvin. Moreover, its hard to maintain plasma for tens of yrs. A better approach is to make fission so advanced and safe (by making fast breeder reactors), that we will never need to push the tech so far. Hence, we will have fission reactors that can last for 100 yrs.

I collect fusion energy every day on my roof. You should focus fusion research on small portable devices so you can stick them where the sun don’t shine.

As close now as we were then.

Very little news here or idea of when it becomes anywhere near usable. Why more money isn't put into LFTR and the Thorium cycle is puzzling as it would yield much better results and much quicker.

Didn't we decide to use fossil fuels in the 19th century, and weren't they the cleanest and best alternative available at the time?

But the thing is If you need a great reaction you need good insulation but in order to use the energy you need to something that conducts that energy out of the confinement ...

The Large Hadron Collider is both larger and more expensive than ITER.

The way he explains it for idiots who dropped out middle school makes me sceptical. Still want to see fusion happen in my lifetime.

Anyone who has any familiarity with fusion technology knows it's 10 years away. It doesn't matter *when* you ask the question. That is the answer.

are these fusion units in a vacuum? or under vacuum? might be a stupid question but the suns in a vacuum right?

Without watching.... Let's see it was 30 years last time... Annnd still 30 years to go. How about billing begins at deadline?

ITER $50 billion total or just so far?

SO many Trillions of dollars have been spent on building nuclear missiles capable of destroying the entire planet 100 times over. Imagine if that money had been spent on research into fusion and other ideas intent on growth instead of death. ugh its all so depressing. This video gives me hope though. :)

I found it to be a good presentation meant to be a general introduction. Why all the discontent in the comment section. There will be other source materials for more in depth information.

Mr Mumgaard. please get your video tea sorted out. Very poor camera work.

*Video starts at **8:00**. Kiddy bullshit until then. **13:44** if you REALLY want to skip to the point.* The real answer though, it's 30 years away, and always will be.

Bob Mumgaard ...That was an epic, edge of my seat presentation on Fusion !!! Thank you. I'm a Wounded Warrior and prolific Inventor of underwater supercavitation engines, underwater (whitewater river) gold mining machines, and underwater robotic construction methods. You easily discussed a complex Fusion topic and I listened to every bit of it. Do me a favor please, instead of looking at a Fusion process as giant and complicated....think of it in its most basic and simplest of forms...think how to make Fusion with a Nano sized reactor based upon ultra simplified molecular theories. For example; SonoFusion , water physics, micro bubbles, and SuperCavitation are 99% confusing to everyone. AND most physicists admit they have no idea how things work most of the time. Have no idea if water has a "memory" or how "SonoLuminescence" works. Bob, always keep on kicking buns out there in the physics world, there are people like me that get it, and I encourage you to use your imagination to create and produce.

We'd have still been in the stone age without fossil fuels.

Fusion power is and always be, the energy of the future.

Whats the difference between Nuclear Fusion, Photosynthesis and The Krebs Cycle ?

Why not consult with David Adair?

Nuclear fission with molten salt reactors is a good energy source that is hard to make nuclear weapons and it's hard to meltdown and the reaction can be stopped from a plug unlike in lightwater reactors that are used today yet not as efficient as in fusion reactors but it's a energy source that can move the human race forward not destroying our environment until we can make fusion reactors viable because cost is a problem for a reaction that isn't proven to work when we have an energy and environmental crisis on the rise

How cool is that.

I dont understand the concept of fusion and in no video is this properly explained. As far as I get it you create a plasma field in a tokamak (with electricity?) and then you add some substance which burns and sustains plasma? Plz somebody explain in lamens terms :)

the new solar series blew the fusion off the chart

First comment with small jazz hands he mentions 1940 1945 and as he says that was after World War 2?

Tell me summit I don’t know.

Hold on 100 million degrees Fahrenheit? The hottest start known by man in the Universe is merely 72,000 degrees...so how do we get to where a blue hyper-giant star can't?

Mr. Fusion on a Tesla Roadster?

Like they say, fusion is the energy of the future--and it always will be

These are the guys that partnered with MIT, ARC design and a lot of brain power. I'd take him seriously.

Who are the incompetent videographers doing these lectures?

Hello future..but, actually is the past😉🙂

Take my word, invest into these companies 13:00

Ask the Chinese, they are way ahead of us!

What is wrong with our current Fusion reactor? Zero building costs, Zero maintenance costs, Zero research costs, available 24 hours a day world wide, we just need to collect the free energy supplied, what is it? The sun!

Will throwing unlimited funds at the problem get it solved faster?

Do you suppose that AI when it goes super smart, that will find a simple way forward for fusion that we never would have thought of being possible?

I'm guessing 30 years.

I think that they will find in the end that all they have managed to do is create a super conducting plasma capacitor. Where the energy they get out, is just the result of delays in discharge and low resistance. When you are wrong, trying harder won't make you right. you have to go back and see where you made a mistake.

Wastes the first half of his speech explaining fusion to children, or at least he must have assumed they were as ignorant of fusion of children. When the speaker did have something to say, he'ld present slides or graphs, but the camera folks Wernt interested, and NEVER BOTHERED TO ZOOM IN TO THE SLIDES!! Just focused on him in a close up pointing to things off screen. So essentially they reduced his slide presentation to a audio cast. Past that he really only had a couple minutes covering status of programs, and countering the cynical "we never did it before, so we'll never succeed" by saying it's like saying we'll never climb Everest, and ignoring that each new expedition gets significantly closer then the last, and they have passed all the really hard parts.

20 years.

Hydrogen fusion power has been used in America since the 60 stees

This is incredibly interesting I'm new in studying fusion energy can someone refer me a great audio book or documentary on this subject

I was told as a young boy that it would be impossible but for the last 20 years.... its on only a couple years to go. 20 years is an awful lot of couples!! hurry up!!

Honestly anyone who watches fusion videos on RU-vid already knows all of this. There was nothing new here

Why do we want lights on every spot of the planet. Are you planning on lighting up the wilderness?

... and stellerator Wendelstein 7x isn't even mentioned. Pity, as it is very likely the most promising fusion technology.

how close are we to CONFUSION?

And Germany is building windmills instead. I want to cry....

I hope this gets accomplished

As fusion is basically unlimited clean energy once you get a reaction going that gives off more energy than you put in, I really fail to understand why we aren't pumping untold billions into developing functioning reactors. Achieving viable commercial fusion is basically our key to becoming a post-scarcity society. It should be seen as a common goal for everyone on the planet.

There are now several competing projects whose backers predict will achieve net energy gain within the next five years or so. Let's just check in around 2025 and see how that's going. I'm willing to cut them that much slack. Beyond that, if there is not some solid success-well, I won't say it will never, ever happen, but it would be a much harder sell, for sure.

The future is starting now

17:58 "In ten years we should see (the next to the last) step." Was that a bad choice of words? It doesn't really answer the question.

ahhh.....hurry up on the fusion already.

I used to think ITER will solve the world's problems, but now I have to ask whether paying an order of magnitude less for the same constant power solar/wind+battery system as they hope to generate there (or maybe cheaper) is not already possible. I know successful or not ITER will continue to serve as a laboratory to improve the technology and who knows maybe make it cheaper. But... By gosh in 30 year's time solar, wind and batteries will be on another level altogether. How much for a constant 500MW supply renewable+battery solution now? Some analysts predict that if trends continue then in the future the cost of transmitting the power will be the biggest expense! ie... It will probably get almost literally dirt cheap. Other technologies as well. Even if it works out expensive fusion like ITER will have some rather stiff competition I dare say. Maybe one of these smaller flexible approaches will find the happy middle ground. A constant, clean base load is after all highly desirable. And probably more so if it's a smaller, more flexible solution. I'm just worried scalability will be held back by the cost of large fusion stations. This is simply a practical opinion. I would love for fusion to be a viable part of our technological capacity. As somebody who has always followed ITER with great interest I was actually a bit astonished to come to the realisation that we probably have something better already. Ultimately solar is fusion power. We just don't have to keep the star it is from bottled up. Also... If you are going to 'bottle up a star'... Maybe it's possible to develop PV materials that can harness that level of energy inside the reactors. I'm sure it's quite a challenge to harvest the energy from a stable plasma while containing it. Maybe there's a type of PV that can be developed that can deal with a few megawatt per square meter. Then one would be able to keep the plasma contained at all times and simply harvest the radiant energy that shines from it. From a quick search I see PV materials have been developed that can remain highly efficient at one or even several thousand times as much irradiance as sunlight on Earth. Have they looked into this for use inside fusion reactors?

I sure wouldn’t rely on anything DOE signs off on.

This is like that Shark Tank T.V. show, except with a roomful of Sharks instead of Fubu dude,Mr. wonderful and that toothy blonde lady. I hear a pitch and a commercial not anything new. They had this in the 40s a working model. *sigh* I think the people in ways were smarter back then.

www.justodians.org/SphericalMagnet/01ElecMagPic1.htm​ Too much energy is lost in a torus to sustain fusion. A sphere is better. In this design the plasma is rotated like the armature of a motor with the axis of rotation constantly changing. The counter emf inside the plasma compresses it toward the center. The link is not working here but the address is good. Just paste the address in your browser to see the design.

Well that was downright painful.