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As funny as the old 30 years away thing is, I honestly think we're maybe 10 years away from properly sustained Fusion and then the goal after that would be to keep making it smaller I would guess.
Robotics combined with AI is the future (in the future) of this kind of work, and many others, so anything covering robotics will be very educational on many levels.
If Fusion reactors are gaining momentum - Including small scale reactor prototypes. Are large scale solar farms still a viable long term business strategy? For example, would investment in large scale solar installations pay off before Fusion becomes mainstream?
@@urbanspaceman7183 Can't make solid hydrogen without liquid Helium. Solid hydrogen is the solid state of the element hydrogen, achieved by decreasing the temperature below hydrogen's melting point of 14.01 K (−259.14 °C; −434.45 °F).
@Jo Po , gonna happen. A young teen built a fusion device at home several years ago. Imagine what corporations coupled with centers of learning could accomplish if they put their efforts toward it.
suprised at this kind of stupid comment on a science channel. walking into the JET doesn't "create" any energy. JET has made 59 megajoules which is way more than whatever you're talking about, you can make the same facile comments about early solar panels
I visited JET when I was studying physics, well, more than 30 years ago, let's just say. It was enormously impressive, but it does show how slow progress is with fusion.
Yes, quite. The ‘record breaking run in JET’ hyped up by everyone was roughly 1% efficient with Q(engineering) = 0.01; a reactor will need to have Qeng = 30 or so, a factor of 300 higher. Possible or not? Take your pick.
@@PatrickSamphire Future is whatever technology that can be deployed the fastest to replace the burning of hydrocarbons and that can be done at similar scale. Right now that is only nuclear fission and if they would have put all those funding dollars in it that they have for fusion we would already be there.
We might, but it probably won't be tokamak based. The JET experimental tokamak consumes 800MW of power to maintain the plasma! That's the output of a large nuclear reactor. According to them, if it works, it will generate between 1 and 2 GW of power. That is a terrible EROI. It's under 3 even assuming 2gw. If you assume 1, the low end of their estimate, it's 20%. You put in 800mw and you get 1gw out. Who knows just how much power the rest of the plant will consume.
0:47 So, this is the one thing that's NOT undecided. The answer is epic! Downright Epic!! That's what it's like to stand inside a tokamak reactor. ;-) I love your videos on state-of-the-art alternative energy. Good work, Matt.
Your channel is one of my favorites. It reminds me of a periodical I read as a kid, Popular Science, but in video form. Thanks for the great information you provide. 😎🖖🏽
To say fusion is a complete waste of time is ignorant, but it does still have a long way to go. Like even with increased interest, we probably won't see practical implementation of fusion for power generation anytime in the near future.
I got offered a job at Vulcan many moons ago. On the maintenance team. Awesome facility with massive doors from memory 11,000 tonnes. I turned it down because back then the traffic around Oxford was horrendous and would of extended my working day by 2.5 hours.
With AI computing, YES, Fushion energy wil be a reality. However, with the earth being the best solution for clean renewable energy it doesn't make sense to spend billions of dollars for research. Ocean wave energy, Geothermal energy, Solar energy, Wind energy and even other sources that haven't been exploited yet. Spending the money for a more realistic outsource of renewable energy is the way.
Is AI going to conjure tritium from the ether? We can’t power an electric grid with a technology that requires an isotope that basically doesn’t exist on earth. Commercial reactors based on contemporary fusion technology is probably closer to 300 years away than 30.
Yeah dude, nope. By the time fusion, in any form, will be actually commercially viable and producing energy to the grid we have covered Earth's energy needs with renewables many times over.
Few serious people believe a 100% renewable national-scale power grid is possible. You need to balance generation and consumption perfectly. Renewable power is variable and while we can have a mostly renewable power grid and engineer solutions for a lot of these problems, you need some base load power generation in the form of fossil fuels or nuclear power. Idk about you but I’d vastly prefer nuclear.
It's called energy storage. And ni it's not just lithium ion batteries. There are at least a dozen ways of storing the renewable excess and provide a steady baseline.
A lot of advanced technology has these sorts of holistic, knock-on advances. Space travel is very similar; so many things developed for the ISS, for example, have proven useful in other applications and even become normal parts of the lives of a lot of people. Maybe we won't get to useful fusion power in 30 years still, but the tech we develop along the way will still be useful.
Completely agree with the adjacent technology innovation and advances. TAE has formed a Life Sciences division to treat cancer with neutron beams and Power Solutions to delver advanced EV drive trains and power storage solutions (No Need for Giant Flywheels) - I do however believe we will see a Q> 1 before the end of the decade.
honestly this topic makes me have faith for humanity and it makes me so giddy i would love to do the thing you did and just go around all of these places to even just look .
Personally, it makes me think of humans even less. The math's wrong because it doesn't account for positron generation from high speed plasma collisions inside a vacuum where a star's Corona and Chromosphere's, and scientists just chalk it all up to nuclear fusion being magic. And yes, positron generation in nature is a thing that happens, it's why satellites keep picking up gamma radiation bursts from storms here, on _Earth..._
Brilliant video Matt. Really looking forward to the rest of them as they come out. As a proud Brit its good to see that there is recognition of the research that we do in this country in the area of fusion energy. JET certainly has a number of firsts to its name and the new facilities have a lot to look up to. I would think that if you asked 1000 people in the UK what the JET facility and Culham do 95% of them would never have heard of them. We do so much good, even brilliant science on very keen budgets and then we don't shout about it. I'm hoping that anything that comes from this in a commercial sense is not just sold off to the highest bidder as usually happens. Just look at ARM as an example.
I hav visited the NIF that recently set a record fo producing more energy that was applied to cause that fussion reaction. So advancements are slowly being made. The NIFs record dose'nt include the energy required to produce the laser beam that caused it.
The toughest challenges will be lowering the prices to less than today under capitalism. They should share all patents and production methods 100% to even out the competition.
So glad to see focus on the proper research being done on fusion. Sad to see Real Engineering and some other channels agree to full-video ads for Helion.
Also the plasma, itself. They talk about the low fuel cost, but these things will constantly eat themselves by stray plasma so the parts have to be continually replaced. That means disposal of the radioactive stuff from the neutrons, but also continuing operating costs from part replacements and the associated down time.
I actually think this will be a thing in our lifetime, progress has been slow but it's speeding up. Very exciting tech, I can hardly wait for your following videos on it.
@@UndecidedMF me too! I really believe it will be something we see in our lifetime, if not in a decade or hopefully 2 at the most, maybe it's just 10 or 20 years away?
People were saying that in the 60s. Tokamak is so bad that one of these research centers could have hired someone right out of school and then they worked their entire lives to age 65 and retired without ever making energy! An entire working career without ever achieving the thing they exist to achieve. This would not happen in the private sector. It's a big expensive too complex toy that consumes way too much energy to be viable. The JET tokamak consumes 800megawatts to generate and maintain the plasma. They same themselves on their webpage that if it works, it will generate between 1000 and 2000mw of power (1-2GW)
First time on this channel. Good stuff. Hope you'll post more of this stuff soon...i know this is a tech channel but it would be interesting to know more about fusion projects from a regulatory and legal aspect.
Where are you going to get all the tritium you need? How about putting a viable heat exchanger on it? How have you fixed the parasitic losses? Have you sorted out the material fatigue issues?
Gotta love Italian people leading the way into fusion. It’s unfortunate our country doesn’t support our physicists, but I am VERY glad the UK is giving them a chance to make the world a better place. 🇮🇹 BRAVI!
I am Italian too, and worked in JET for 15 or so years! Fantastic experience and I witnessed and contributed to the progress of fusion. JET was designed, assembled and operated by teams of European scientists and engineers, bringing in the best from all over Europe. And, very importantly, JET financing comes from the European Commission, making all that has been shown possible
It's worth pointing out that fusing iron and heavier elements consumes energy instead of releasing more. Likely due to all the energy needed for the extra binding force carriers (guess). This is why heavier elements tend to only be created in supernovae and very powerful particle accelerators. And it's why fission is better with very heavy elements, and fusion is better with very light elements. Though of course if you could convert the lighter elements completely to radiant energy, then that would work just fine. However for that you need matter-antimatter annihilation to the best of our knowledge. But it also slowly happens all the time due to the weak nuclear force. Nuclear decay. That said Hydrogen is stable. Although Hydrogen's isotopes are not. Also. It's neat how they disperse the plasma. I wonder if it could be possible to funnel it in a vortex.
@@karlwithak. Not even close to a bomb. For a bomb of any kind you need a cascading reaction that maintains itself for long enough for an out of control conflagration. The plasmas in experimental fusion reactors simply do not work like that. Something as simple as the plasma touching the walls (as opposed to being magnetically suspended) may damage the walls, but it also cools the plasma to a severe degree, enough to disrupt the entire run.
Use DT, then switch to DD. Scale up the size to about 4 to 6x and design the fusion channel into a vortex tube. Use a conventional fission reactor for preheat and startup as well as generate tritium for startup. Use a 3 phase microwave field to excite the plasma, which will then spin inside the tube like an electric motor. As the plasma travels towards the neck of the vortex tube, the speed of rotation will increase, and the magnetic field will heat it further. Finally, when fusing begins, the waste heat from it will preheat the incoming plasma and the reaction will be self sustained as long as the gas blowers are operational and helium is purged.
It makes more sense to use helium-3. Our moon is loaded with it. The energy produced by the helium-3 would be 250 times greater than the energy needed to extract it from the moon and get it to Earth. It becomes even more worthwhile when used on the moon for a future research station.
I think you can make a good argument that being able to make net positive fusion energy is now less than 30 years away. What I would like to see you cover is the analysis of future LCOE for fusion v. the renewables we are now putting on the grid. It is hard for me to see the fusion LCOE getting lower than the ever dropping renewable LCOE (any time soon) because even when it starts working, the cost of these facilities (even if you assume the fuel is essentially free) will be higher than building out existing renewables for the same power. If fusion starts to work in the next 10 years, then it might be reasonable to see a commercial grid plant in 20 years. However, in the next 20 years we also expect to see the cost of drilling a deep hole for geothermal to drop to the point where a cheap power station can be built anywhere on Earth that supplies energy 24 hours a day, every day in the year (no fuel cost, no neutrons making radioactive waste). Please do a video on the LCOE projections for all these potentials for future grid power.
Sooo many "experts" in the comments. Thank goodness we have people on this planet with the vision, intellect, and drive to pursue what appears to many to be impossible.
Matt, Please do a “history of fusion” to date, highlighting the technical aspects and advances. And separately, please do a video explaining AI. How it works…Risks….in simple terms for us non computer people.
I want to slightly disagree with you on the point about "fusion being perpetually 30 yrs away just being a technical problem." just look at cost overruns, project delay's, and other political and administrative factors. even with EV's, that are technically here already, there is MASSIVE pushback, backlash and more. entrenched status quo's have a pretty serious inertia, and it's pretty clear that it isn't just technical prowess that is part of this inertia. that being said, while i am a believer in fusion, it's been made pretty clear to me that it's going to be the "hydrogen car" of the future, rather than the electric buses that ARE the empirical transition that is happening today. that is, a promise that underdelivers, too late, over budget, and was always meant to placate critics rather than be a new status quo. solar beat's out fusion in so many easy, affordable, applicable, understandable, visible and safe ways. as a great musician once said "why waste daylight when the hearse comes at night?"
Progress indeed! When I was a kid, fusion power was 30 years away, and always would be. Then in my middle years, it was 20 years away, and always would be. Now I'm an old man and it is 10 years away, and always will be. Progress!
As much as I hope the challenges of fusion energy are solved, I am growing less hopeful that it will be the holy grail of energy that it has been hyped to be. Even if experimental reactors eventually produce significant energy output, we are still decades away from bringing the first reactors on-line, providing electricity to the grid. By that time, renewables and storage will have become mature and cheap enough that there will be little need for fusion. In the end, I think that fusion will be a niche technology, not the game changing solution we have been sold on.
Your video implies that the fusion of two hydrogen atoms yields more energy than the fission of one radioactive atom. This didn't sound right, so I checked. Deuterium + Tritium fusion results in 17MeV, while U235 fission results in 200MeV. The reality is much more complicated, as there are multiple pathways, but in any case your video is wrong. Fusion releases a much higher percentage of the mass energy, because the atoms are much lighter. So 1kg of deuterium can release more energy than 1kg of Uranium, because there are many more atoms of hydrogen in a kilogram, not because the individual reactions are more energetic.
If only they put this much effort in perfecting nuclear fission power instead of process that require vast power and density to start maybe wouldn't have to worry about global warming at this point.
Fusion is still 30 years away and probably always will be the only thing that has really progress is the size and inventing new terms for smaller and smaller parts of the progress I close to break even to keep funding flowing.
This is so cool. Also, I noticed that lady in the JET at 9:24 even has a James Webb Telescope necklace. Seeing a bunch of geeks do cool stuff is great.
Would like to see more on robotics. Enjoy your vids. I'm 69 and have been following Fusion since the 70's in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines which I had subscriptions to then.
'Solar cell technology that MIGHT work in ~10years', 'battery tec that MIGHT works in ~15years', 'fusion reactors that MIGHT work in ~35years',.. Why not examine something COMPLETY different one day, like... you know... something that ALLREADY works (since ~70years in fact) like a good old fission reactor?!😁
Not sure about your solar and battery comment and them not working. You should do some research. Fission reactor. Too expensive to build. Who wants to live near one? Spent fuel needs stored somewhere safe for 1,000,000 years. ( SNF (Spent Nuclear Fuel) will have 233U, with a half-life of 159,200 years ). Many times SNF is stored in pools on site, in large amounts (like 10 or 20 years of it), and needs to have active pumped water to keep it cool. If this is interrupted, the heat can boil off the pool water and radio active material can be released. How can something be called clean energy when you have to go bury something?
I found this show very enjoyable and I look forward to seeing more. Also I was a bit surprised that they're using Deuterium and I'm not fully concerned about the amount of neutron that is expelled from the reaction since that new trying to damage the reactor wall. Helium three is actually a better choice to go with because it doesn't expel out so much neutron. Plus our own moon is loaded with helium three hence the reason why they're trying to establish a moon base there to one day mine the helium three.
My concern is all the waste heat generated from all the fusion schemes. These things are massive heaters, we don't need to be heating up the planet more. Especially since a large proportion of the electrical output will also end up as heat.
You breezed past the scale of the tritium problem. There isn't enough production (and never will be due to how it is produced) to support a single power plant, yet alone the thousands needed to supply humanity with power.
There's enough Lithium to breed Tritium for the entire world supply for over a thousand years. The breeder reaction is proven and tested, we only need to do it at scale and thousands of people are working on that right now. It'll be 20 years at best, before enough reactors exist that the world's current supply chain of Tritium is too small. So that's 20 years to make a really good breeder blanket, using a proven process with proven yields.
Saying never is a bit to far IMO. Breeding tritium is absolutely possible and there are some fusion companies that claim they can do it. We'll have to see, but it is absolutely a major sticking point for some forms of fusion.
Now, when fusion power may finally be LESS than 30 years away, do we want/need it? With solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, does it make sense to spend big on a tech we may not need?
The more tools we have in our tool belt, the better. Each tech has its own pros and cons, and different places around the world have different needs and conditions.
I designed a launchpad proposal for SpaceX that use the same heat sink diversion deflector design. This confirms I am correct in my design principles and calculations.
cool looking machines and robotics, Matt, but nowhere in the video is the main problem, from my layman's understanding with nuclear fusion, addressed. That is, the amount of energy needed to contain the plasma far exceeds the amount of energy that is produced. Makes me think the 30 year joke is still very much in play.
From a partner of someone who actually works there as a Robotics Engineer: yes, of course it is. Sadly, we're nowhere near to having commercially viable fusion power even in 30 years from now.
I'M JEALOUS For over 20 years I have lived just a couple of miles away from JET but not been able to get on a tour despite enquiring many times. Similar story with Tokomak Energy UK and they are only a few hundred meters away.
Oh, not you too. Fusion is not now, nor ever will be, commercially viable. We are at least two orders of magnitude from commercially viable return on energy investment. It will always cost at least ten times as much to get electricity from fusion as to get the same amount of electricity from wind, solar or geothermal. There's no breakthrough in fundamental Physics or the facts of engineering coming that will overcome that.
@@Rattus-Norvegicus It's like being able to do a lot of math and Physics, following the principles of engineering and logical induction from inference based on all available observations. What's it like to take the word of charlatans who consume billions of dollars across long decades while demonstrably overstating their very wrong position over and over and over again?
It took 2 years to build the first self-sustaining fission reactor (the chicargo pile), it has taken over 70 years and we're still not there with fusion, that is how far we are away...
That's sorta the problem with fission, it's so easy to start and it just never stops. That's how you get a meltdown. Fusion on the other hand, perfectly easy to shut down with no lingering radiation... so much so that we can't get it to keep going lol
Everything isn't of equal difficulty. Flying a plane is harder than riding a bike. Fusion is harder than Fission. Trying to compare the two as if they were equal, when you're not a scientist, makes a very different point than the one you intended.
Seems like everything is almost paralyzed for the past several decades. There is progress, but just a tiny fraction of what we used to accomplish. For example, the interstate highway near where I live crosses a a river on the state line. The bridge is nearly a century old, and they've been trying to replace it for half that time. Meanwhile, the bypass highway bridge was built around 1980 on time, under budget, paid in full.
Too right fusion is harder than fission, by default solving fusion is more than solving fission (e.g. neutron damage resistance, higher melting temps, robotic maintenance, etc). Accidents in fusion are going to be near instant and uncontrollable but the safety framework isn't developed yet. So all considered fusion reactors (if you've got tritium to start it, and other materials to build it) will inherently not be as reliable as fission reactors and they probably aren't as safe either but we'll need to wait for a proper regulatory framework to find out.
@@dscraggs I can only hope the Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes good use of the experiments in progress to anticipate risks and quickly develop that regulatory framework.
Fusion energy is not 30 years away it is here NOW. Energy from the sun in solar/wind/storage is fusion energy and is already the cheapest, cleanest method to supply energy. Nuclear fusion if it ever becomes cost effective is still decades away and we cannot wait for this theory to become reality. Spend more on hi voltage low loss transmission lines, that way we can spread the energy production to match the energy generation.
Yep, I did bring that up. The response is almost always along the lines of, "Just look at the progress that's been made." Someone else in the comments put it really well, it's not about breakthroughs but milestones.
This was an awesome update on the progress of fusion energy. I’m surprised you can go in the chamber without a radiation suit on! I would have thought that area would be extremely irradiated. I’m also curious about the fuel supply chain. Deuterium is relatively common, helium is extremely limited, and the energy gains of tritium must be worth it if they’re pushing that route 🤷♂️
It seems to me that the manual manipulation of those robot arms would be more intuitive with a VR headset. There's probably some other complication I don't know about, though.
Meanwhile, there's an absolutely massive fusion reactor in the sky that bathes the Earth in some 173,000 terawatts continuous clean power! And that's just at tiny tiny fraction of its total power.
It’s a fantastic experiment, but unless they’ve found the tritium fairy… That small hiccup of the earth not having enough tritium to operate a single commercial reactor is worth more than one sentence.
Thanks for a most informative video. The extremely high quality of your production rivals anything produced by the world’s greatest documentary makers. Impressive!
Thank you Matt! I always enjoy your videos, but the best thing is when I can see the passion in the eyes and smile of someone lucky enough to witness structure like these. Keep up the good work!
I think fusion is a waste of time, money and brain power. I doubt that it will ever be cost effective compared to solar and wind. There are so many unanswered problems, and the technology is extremely complicated. Even if it succeeds in becoming a commercially viable reality it is a source of power that warms the earth directly, not a problem at current energy usage levels, but if it were to succeed and become cheap, then we'd probably use lots more power and unlike renewables, fusion creates waste heat. Solar and Wind capture energy that would become waste heat, so that is not a problem. And, on top of all that, fusion will not deal with the current crisis which demands solutions that can be implemented NOW. We can't wait several more decades for fusion. All the work being done by the very smart people working on fusion would be better spent on developing better energy storage systems to support solar and wind power.
It's impressive, but recent research and progress in LENR (low energy nuclear reactions) might give us working fusion reactors the size of a shoebox within a few years, making all this redundant! 🙃
Hey! I have a great idea! Let's just get a whole bunch of hydrogen, I mean really a lot and put it all into a massive ball. Then it will start fusing under the force of it's own gravity. Oh look! There's one right there in the sky! And it's been working for about 4.5 billion years. It must be pretty reliable.
You're spelling centre incorrectly - you are in the UK. I worked for UKAEA and BNFL on some major projects... Very interesting stuff.... The UK is also leading in AI... but that is in the top secret GCHQ.... It is way beyond Elon Musk's experiments.
Since I was 12, watching the black and white reel to reel movie showing a little vial of fuel that will power a locomotive coast to coast, I have been hearing 30yrs over and over?!?!?! By the way, I'm 60 now!!🤣🤣🤣🤣
Wow! Looks like fusion is only 29.5 years away now! Clearly, investing these resources and energy into advanced scalable fission reactor development would be 1000x more practical, cost effective, and expeditious in providing the IMMEDIATE energy solutions our climate disruption crisis is demanding.
It is not the drugs, it is the side effects. I am a NUC and I used to teach Pressurized Thermal Shock. In the 60's a lot of fission reactor vessels were built. A problem came up in the early 80's. The welding rods were coated with copper to prevent corrosion. Fine in any other industry. But the copper in a high neutron flux deteriorated. This is just one of those things that nobody even thought of. This weakened the welds in the 9- to 12-inch-thick reactor vessels. This was a disaster, thankfully no vessels cracked open (but the oops at Rancho Seco was writing on the wall). What will be our next oops? We have a fine fusion reactor placed at a safe distance of 93 million miles. Lets use that.
I very much hope, fusion energy proves to be not only technically feasible, but also proves to be a commercial succes. Fusion energy will only have a significant global impact if it is also available for the less rich and often heavily populated countries. I am afraid, this will probably take some more decades to happen. Meanwhile, we have some serious sh*t going on, that needs immediate action/off the shelve & readily available solutions. We need to cut down on CO2 emission drastically. Yesterday. This calls for parallel solutions, and perhaps unconventional regulations. First: enormous energy consumption reduction. E.g. global strict minimum energy efficiency for housing, transport (no trucks, welcome Aptera), all sorts of machinery. And also: we cannot continue flying all over the globe, just to shop in Milan or whatever. A lot of people will not like the idea of giving up their "rights". But in times of crisis, everyone should do their best. Second: we need a LOT more green energy production, and there will be no single solution: solar panels, every house/commercial building should have them, wind farms, nuclear, you name it. Did I mention cheap large scale energy storage? And finally, especially for the loooooooooong run: perhaps nuclear fusion....
GM has, hold up your your fingers now, one EV, the Bolt. They have no other real production BEV auto. Yes they made a couple of hummers and three Cadillac vehicles. But that's it. Again, at this point don't tell me you have been doing that for years. Show me, oops got nothing. there. On top of that the touted while being made in "North America" will mean Mexico for both the Equinox & the Blazer. Really bad effing move as far as I'm concerned.
Hey Matt, your graphic at 3:03 shows two Hydrogen-1 (Protium) atoms fusing into one Helium-4 atom. Somehow you gained approximately two neutrons' worth of mass that you didn't account for. You might want to start that reaction over with a pair of Hydrogen-2 (Deuterium) atoms.
Wide spread commercial fusion energy, still feels like 30 years away. Maybe it will arrive, like the cavalry (assuming, the cavalry weren't there to kill you.) and help us pull hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere.
