Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet - with Arthur Turrell 

It’s been ten years away for the past 60 years

If they're looking for a denser state of matter, they can just read the comments here :) Very interesting talk RI.

Kudos to all the people that are actively trying to make the world a better place!

I worked in fusion research in the late 80's. Funding dried up and I moved on. I still miss it.

I am listening about 50 years without results, I would like to see an efficiency graph of the different current experiments

Excellent presenter with wonderful analogies, graphics and enthusiasm. I hope to see him again on Ri. And he knows how to use his media with good audio and movement of his image to match the graphics. Great job.

I love the enthusiasm for this research, however the fusion research community needs to be honest about what they are achieving. The Q numbers reported are only Qplasma and not Qtotal. The earlier glowing reports on fusion have lead to the joke that nuclear fusion is 30 years away for 30 years now. Lets be honest about where we are in achieving the dream.

Fantastic Arthur ,Even a layman like me could follow what you are saying , This mind boggling stuff , we are truly working at the very cutting edge of our scientific knowledge regarding nuclear fusion, but I can see that with further research and development Nuclear fusion would have profound positive advantages for all humanity .

The guy starts by saying the source of energy can last millions of year - and not forever like many say. 10 Kudos for him!!!!

I'm old enough to remember ZETA as a kid, in 1957 - 8. (FYI: 'Zero Energy Thermonuclear Assembly'). Curiously, the discussions then of the limitations and problems (more out than in, etc) are familiar form all those decades ago! Plus, you never mentioned the process of turning 'energy out' from the plasma fusion into electricity. You can't send plasma down power cables!

I still say they should clear the lecture hall and do the webcam video from the desk just to keep the scene feeling closer to normal. Or use green-screen with picture of the lecture hall behind the presenters... What? We're a few years too early for Holodecks to demand they record it that way... lol

Fusion has been that big leap that has perpetually been 'just around the corner' for decades as countless billions are poured into it. It's a fascinating topic but a bit of honesty in the way its handled by the media would be refreshing, it won't be ready by 2030, and saying it's good by 2050 is optimistic at best.

Careful: Net energy gain is talking about the energy entering the plasma, and getting out of the plasma. The actual machines in total (pumping lasers, running magnets, converting energy out to electricity) are nowhere near a breakeven point. Basically the energy needed to run the magnets simply gets ignored in the calculation.

Arthur, I had a question: why try to jump from fusion bombs, to controlled fusion reactions for electrity; when the logical mid-step would be fusion ROCKETS, which produce a semi-controlled reaction? This will produce not only essential space-travel needs, but also the research can be used toward the final step of sustained fusion reactions for energy. If all fusion research was focused in rockets, then it could be achieved much more quickly, than jumping straight to fusion powerplants.

Let me make a wild guess: nuclear fusion as a power provider is 20 years away. Of course, my engineering college professor said those exact words 50 years ago.

Yes, fusion exists and we can probe it at the edges. No, we are nowhere near building a commercially viable reactor

Fusion - The forever energy of the future. 1975: We will have fusion in 50 years 2000: We will have fusion in 50 years 2020: We will have fusion in 50 years

Very engaging and well presented - thankyou! !

The thing I want to know is how you can change infrared light into Ultraviolet light with a crystal, What are the processes?

My Scienceguy suggestion Theory (2cents) here; We need to start with ä total amount of matter that we need over time. Hope this Helps someone...

KATE as one of the 7 billion humans living on earth, I want to congratulate you for the amazing work you are doing for humanity. I am thoroughly aware of what ENERGY means for the welfare of humanity and all other species in our world. THANK YOU DEEPLY!!!

"and tonight i'm going to take you on a journey of discovery" Well the journey won't discover much as the guy won't even leave the room he's in! So in fact we're all going nowhere!

Thanks so much for updating and broadening our minds on artificial fusion. Quantum leaps in the wide world of physics over the last 60+ yrs, thanks to global efforts. Your in-depth explanation and data/facts compilation are much appreciated. Keep up with the good work and let us know more in future.

The sad fact is not enough people are working towards the development of practical fusion power generation. Tokamaks have been around for over 60 years. If we as a species worked toward this end goal, it would already be mature and in use. Great explanation and championing for a more sustainable future. Thank you!

My biggest question is about your very last point. I am confident the engineering problems will be solved over the next twenty years such that fusion power plants can be made, but at what cost? Let's suppose it will cost $100m (just a number) to build a small fusion power plant in 20 years. Let's put aside the cost of fuel and cost of replacing and disposing the parts that become radioactive from neutron exposure. However much power that fusion plant produces, it has to be greater than spending $100m in other fuel-less power plants, such as wind, solar and geothermal, or no one with put up the investment to build. Twenty years from now, all of the renewable costs will be lower than today, so fusion has to target an ever dropping cost. My question is: do you know of work looking at projecting power plant cost curves to see when fusion could beat conventional sources in the future, especially, geothermal which is projected to provide cheap 24/7 power anywhere in the world?

I was shocked by the ratio of time spent on laser fusion, NIF, type things compared to tokamak systems which, to me, seem a far more sensible approach.

Solar power is in fact Wireless nuclear power, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Dr Turrell’s statement that for a practical power plant one would need to get 30 times the energy out compared to the energy put in (i.e. Q = 30), is commendable for its honesty. However, with ITER predicted to only reach Q = 1, how will it be possible to increase this by a factor of 30?

This was great, good job for putting this together in a way that even I understood

Great primer on topic and a good capitulation of current state of research and hardware design. Gladly shared. Thanks for posting, RI.

It's sounds more like a sales pitch and not like science. Optimistically we are still 50 years for a real net gain from fusion. It maybe that after those 50 years it will still take 20-25 years to commercial fusion power plants. So all in all, we are about 75+ years for fusion, if it ever becomes commercially viable. You somehow didn't brake down the numbers and all you have to say that it's "inevitable". It doesn't even matter if we reach net energy gain. It must be sustainable over long period of time (decades) to have net energy gain. Politicians love fusion because it's a magic bullet that would solve all our energy problems and you don't have to invest now in green energy.

If the world's lithium is inside all the car batteries, you don't have access to this non-renewable fuel source. What is the current net energy output accounting for all processes?

great that they built the Livermore facility over one of the most active earthquake faults in the world..

so by lighting a match we have "in effect" built a volcano on Earth?

6:15 when the crystals absorb the infrared light and reemit it as ultraviolet 6:39 the gold absorbs the ultraviolet light and reemits it as x-rays. X-rays (and gamma rays) are seen in nuclear reactions, right? I'm wondering how the lower energy light can cause the crystals and gold to emit higher energy light. Activation energy? My question is: Where is the potential energy stored in the gold? Is it a nuclear reaction?

You said that fusion produces about 4 times as much energy per kg as fission. I'm guessing this is basically due to the fact that you need to use heavy elements to get an exothermic reaction from fission, so they just simply weigh more. With fusion, you get an exothermic reaction from light elements, like hydrogen, helium, etc.

I'd hoped that this video would be about SPARC, ITER, and planned fusion machines in China and the UK. Instead, it didn't say anything that I didn't already know. :-(

This presenter and subject battery is truly worthy of the RI wonderful

Might be easier to build a Dyson Sphere around the Sun.

So we need more energy to watch videos about, how to make more energy... How ironic.... Humanity.. you can't beat it.

Interesting, but don't give up on Thorium reactors for electricity generation. China is building a Thorium reactor.

Uranium mines will always be insidious sources of radionuclides, and waste from nuclear reactors will always be a hazard. Also nuke plants will always be vulnerable to wars, earthquakes, and solar flares.

very good professor. he teaches very well. Thanks from Brazil

Dr. Turrell makes a 'tskt' sound whenever he starts a new breath of statements. I DO THE EXACT SAME THING. Hashtag relatable, from across the pond.

That laser blinded me now i cant see.

Excellent presentation, but the problem with the recent big breakthrough in nuclear fusion is the miniscule amount of energy produced for a huge cost. The net gain is 1 megajoule of energy, with 2 going in and 3 coming out. But a megajoule of electricity costs a nickel and the pellet used to produce the energy costs $10,000. Also, the electricity to power the laser, the confinement device, and everything else in this system is not counted toward the 2 megajoules of energy going in. Could nuclear fusion power an average home? Well, there would need to be 1,000 of these systems costing billions to do so. Is this commercially viable? You tell me.

I will start by saying there is nothing incorrect about what you have presented. We have made some really amazing machines that dazzle investors. But so far, the energy in making these machines, coupled with their operating cost, is a net loss EVEN IF we could harness up to 20% of that energy, which we cannot... amazing as it may be, we have no way to harness the release because it is so short lived, and so energy intensive in it's creation, that it has no payout. Giving energy to the grid? These machines take electricity. I want to see a viable design on RETURNING energy to the grid, not taking it. Nuclear energy has a positive history for doing just that. SHOW ME THE ENERGY. Telling us about the need for energy is beside the point.

AND------the power produced from these super complex machines will only cost you……………wait for it……………………$50B/kW hr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We know that fusion can work, it's really a matter of how to do the engineering right and on what scale.

This should have really started at around 38:16 which is where it starts to get interesting. You have my attention.

Fusion is the ultimate answer to human survival.

Commonwealth Fusion is building a tokamak with superconducting containment around 30 tesla.

Oh my gosh, The Star Builders! That's on my "to read" list! This is definitely pushing me to read it sooner.

@The Royal Institution - oops, you forgot to add "and Dr. Kate Lancaster" in the title. Oops, you forgot to include Dr. Lancaster in the description, her bio is quite impressive and she is actually _doing_ the things that Arthur is talking about :). You have two paragraphs about Arthur, and nothing on Kate. You even thank 40+ Patreon supporters. This is actually a pretty bad goof IMHO.

How do laser amplifiers work? And why is it important to start with such a tiny impulse?

Absolutely superb viewing. Many thanks.

there are so many ways to describe this experience, but the best way and simplicity to describe it is to be able to replant another planet

Multiple choice question was impossible to get "fully correct" the sun is not "fire". Fire is an electrochemical reaction that involves oxygen. The sun does not contain much oxygen at all and oxygen is not reacting in a combustion (fire) reaction. The other two answers (except all of the above) we correct but were basically the same thing.

I'm approaching 2x30yrs old, and... I do understand research eventually pays dividends. I have lived through the great "Transistor Revolution" where most devices as a kid were run by vacuum tube, and a hand-held AM transistor radio was magicial. Now I'm typing on a laptop with ~3 billion transistors, in just the CPU. The pressure is certainly on to make a commercially viable fusion reactor. Ye who wins that race will be rich beyond all dreams, but only before we must "abandon Earth" because we have ruined the environment. Of course, the flip side of that coin is "unlimited energy" makes many/most forms of work irrelevant. We work for "chemical energy" to power our bodies, electrical energy to power/heat our homes, drive zero-emission cars. This is the "Star Trek" reality where all needs for human existence are met without everyone working until they die. Now they can live to enjoy life.

25:25 this place is a miracle

This was an excellent lecture, very well presented too!

If the name “The Star Builders” inspires your imagination I suggest reading “Star Maker”. Totally not related to this but just reminded me of that my favorite sci-fi book

Good content. The production values are pretty good and the audio is understandable. However, the audio is hollow with bad short reverberations. You really should step this up. There are dozens of YT videos that explain how to do this.

*No...actually...fusion is 60 years in past...*

just a note... try and avoid using a conjunctive ('and') between most sentences. If you chop those out, you will sound much crisper. You can remove them during the edit phase. They need to be replaced with silence or you will sound really odd.

I hope that ITER is a success. I hope we can clean up this mess we have created before it is too late.

Superconductive cooling eliminates electrical resistance, and disrupts magnetic fields. You can't use this property, to manipulate nuclear repulsion, thereby decreasing the energy threshold for fusion?

Fusion power is just around the corner. Nothing could be more true: it was just around the corner fifty years ago, it's just around the corner now, and it will be just around the corner in 2100. You can't get much more just around the corner than that.

Surely the label 'Holy Grail' would also include it being affordable? There's little value in a technology that will never be economic. Fission energy in the form of Molten Salt Reactors achieve most of what Fusion achieves, and also has virtually unlimited fuel supplies. It's also capable of using our existing stockpile of Nuclear Waste as fuel, since the current reactors use barely 4% of the available energy in the fuel. In my opinion, Fusion is a White Elephant. It's fascinating, but simply not practical to do at any scale economically when it's going to face Molten Salt Reactors as competition.

It's here guys ❤️

What about suppression of Thorium Reactors?

Jack & Jill moving forward up an incline at 35deg to in capsule a gallon of h2o to bring back to the lab and make element 182 heavy water

I listened to the audiobook version of The Star Builders twice since the NIF announcement of net energy gain back in December '22. Dr. Turrell's narration was easy to understand for an absolute layman like myself; not to mention timely!

Has the race for cold fusion gone cold 🥶

Here is the explanation for why fusion is always 20 years away; A black hole is simply a minimum entropy star. It is invisible because all it emits are optically invisible gamma rays. It is made of nothing but quarks that have been separated and uses dark matter as the catalyst. Once the quarks have been separated from a sufficient enough collision, it is the sheer density and pressure of the dark matter of space that keeps the quarks apart indefinitely. As a result of this separation, the dark matter is thrown out of the reaction as gamma rays. That is where all the cosmic and gamma rays come from in our universe. Space is made of extremely pressurized electron neutrinos. A black hole starts transforming itself into potential energy by first fusing the electron neutrinos of space and the quarks to create the first neutrons the mass will possess. This turns the black hole into a neutron star but the neutrons are only a thin layer on the surface of the quark plasma. This gives the mass its first optical light as well. The neutrons naturally break down into the first hydrogen the mass will possess. The constantly forming neutrons then fuse with the hydrogen to form the first helium using the beta minus decay, neutron capture method. This is the true fusion of the universe and has absolutely nothing to do with creating energy. It is only a method of turning kinetic energy into potential energy. That is why fusion has never, and will never work for energy production. Quark plasma is what scientists seek. The beta minus decay reaction continues creating heavier elements making the star darker until a crust forms and the light is extinguished. At this point, an atmosphere is allowed to develop since the surface is now protected from the quark plasma underneath. The endless quark plasma energy is what allows all the reactions to take place. We live on an ex-black hole. Gravity is created from a manipulation of the electron neutrinos of space. The energy of a mass breaks down electrons at the core and turns them into electron neutrinos. These particles are shot from the mass gravitationally invisible. They push out on the natural pressure of space to cause gravitational lensing since it is all the same matter. Gravity is created as the natural pressure of space pushes through the outgoing matter to react with normal matter as gravity. At absolute zero, this manipulation stops and so does gravity no matter what the size of the mass may be. Gravity had nothing to do with the energy we see because a massive collision in space created the galaxies as quark plasma shrapnel. The reason the force of gravity remains unexplained is because a cloud of gas and dust must be able to transform itself into a star. This assumption completely disregards 95% of the mass of our universe. Our galaxy was spinning when it was born in the collision. Quark plasma is invisible and can make shapes. The centrifugal force created a massive disk with a bulbous center. The center separated from the disk and our black hole was formed. The remaining quark plasma disk was left to create all the solar systems. Each one was created with a single mass of quark plasma as well. Our solar system did exactly what our galaxy did. A disk with a bulbous center was formed by centrifugal force. The center separated from the disk and our Sun was born as a black hole. The remaining quark plasma disk was left to create the planets and their corresponding moons and rings. Even our planets were formed exactly like our galaxy and solar system was. This is the Theory of Everything. All laws are consistently followed. No stone is unturned. Our universe is very understandable. All it takes is going back to what Edwin Hubble discovered and realizing that it was only the galaxies expanding, not the universe. Hubble never believed in the expanding universe theory but nobody listened. Georges Lamaitres primeval atom theory was accepted immediately and set into stone. It was the biggest mistake science has ever made.

If Hydrogen Fusion is in a race I hope people can still remember where they last saw it all that way back looking down the track. In the Tortoise and the Hare scenario it is still very much the Tortoise. A noisy one full of hope but still plodding along consuming vast amounts of energy, money and brainpower promising the world. Usually in these futuristic scenarios trying to push current technology to the edge the answer is in something nobody has actually thought of yet. It looks as though in the UK the mini nuclear fission generator is the realistic practical solution outside of the dream world.

Could you have Kevin Blanch PHD scientist on your show. He is a fan of nuclear also

I understood that all Tokamaks were going to have to be pulsed for seconds or minutes not run continuously? And the joke is - That fusion is 30 years away and always _will_ be. 8-)

I'm confused ? isn't fusion taking Hydrogen and converting it to Helium? you said they start with Helium ?

what a time to be alive!!!!!!!!!!

Hmm..interesting, but in all the discussions and what's in the papers you read are never given the basic fact that Q(total) is different from Q(plasma)! The former being the TOTAL energy output/intput and the latter just a parameter for the plasma output/input ratio. As is well know the perennial problem is this: Q(total) > 1. All the reports are about Q(plasma) becoming better, from 0.67 (1997) to 0.7 (2021). We still have no easily publicly available data on Q(total) -specialists I'm sure have that data. Consequently we (non-specialists) do not know the exact Q(plasma) / Q(total) ratio, i.e not clear what the REAL efficiency is. All the frequently quoted figures of 0.67 or 0.7, mentioned above, we read about are from the popular press or non-specialist journals, so no clue about the 'true efficiency' figures - only figures for Q(plasma), which is not a true efficiency figure! Further to all this, the main output of the fusion process is heat not electricity. That still has to be achieved at good efficiencies but we know heat -> electricity is not highly efficient, perhaps at best 50%. Once we factor that in too, then the whole process from start to finish,i.e. making electricity from fusion (fusion power) looks like a very distant dream!

I forgot…Lazers too!

Definitely would have preferred a discussion sole about fusion and its progress and lack of progress instead of so much climate diatribe...

Due to the recent leaps in fusion power research it is now only about 30 years away from becoming a reality.

I saw that fishon was accomplished with a small bead of hydrogen incapulated, yet it will take thousands of these small orbs. Fleischmanns yeast Active Dry Yeast,1292 as anexampl, is able to create millions of small orbs. So if you can contain a hydrogen ball at a certain temperature and spin it in a coating machine, you could have a constant source.

Study Projectile Fusion from First Light Fusion. Improve it with 5 projectiles striking and compressing at same time.

Look, it's very interesting stuff, but if I'm looking for a hopefully rather well conceived presentation of electrical generation from nuclear fission I really don't need fundamental information like "electricity is important for modern society" or "energy produced from fossil fuel is bad for the climate". Really, you're wasting my time at that point.

The video explains everything you need to know about fusion except that "Fusion is always 40 years away."

Please don't call them "Star Builders", it sounds so naff.

The vast majority of fusion articles and presentations such as the above are promotional in nature and typically the journalists never bother to seek out countering viewpoints. Most fans of fusion power tend to immerse themselves in only one side of the story and tend to be clueless regarding the issues presented in the following articles. Readers will have to search for them since posting the links to them automatically blocks my postings. ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy What No One Else Is Telling You About Nuclear Fusion Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040 How close is nuclear fusion power? The Theranos Trial Shows Why We Should Be Suspicious of Nuclear Fusion

Those figures for JET are ambiguous as they don’t include all the input energy. Only the heating component. Substantially lower on the order of 100 below the required energy to break even. For example 11 megawatts of fusion power as opposed to 700 megawatts of total input power. And that doesn’t account for losses for conversion which could be as high as 50%

Do you think fusion happens natrually inside Earth or elsewhere in the solarsystem? Does nuclear fusion create a magnetic field? Help me.

Year 2100: cold fusion, and warm superconductivity powers the world

I like to clarify why the use of FUSION has been put aside, and the development of FISSION has been given the biggest priority. The reason is that FISSION produces an element to create ATOMIC BOMBS that Fusion does not in such large quantities. All these "atomic reactors" producing "electricity" in fact are ATOMIC BOMBS factories mainly. All the atomic bombs making the world more insecure is the result of the current "nuclear energy" using the Nuclear reactors we have today. HOWEVER, once we change from Fission to Fusion, the nuclear waste will be reduced to a minimum and the nuclear waste will stop its radioactivity in only 10 years, instead of hundreds of thousands of years. FUSION IS THE FUTURE FOR HUMANITY.

the graph showing energy use (coal, nuclear, oil, solar, wind) is in accurate, when you consider that everything was powered by the sun, and still is.

If we can find a way to do this safely, it could be a huge game changer for everyone… Thank you so much for putting this wonderful presentation together.

I was expecting apresentation on nuclear power, not climate change.

I'm sorry, but I'm highly dubious that fusion power will ever achieve what is promised. If it ever produces more usuable energy than it consumes and wastes, it won't be cheap, and it won't be clean. The container walls need to be replaced eventually, and become radioactive. I suspect an honest, full lifecycle analysis would reveal fusion to be an elusive technology, exhorbitant in price.

Its not so much the possibility of fusion that is at issue, it's its practicality as a power source. In particular I am not all sure that laser thing will do much good. Let's face it NIF is mainly about building bigger, better H bombs, not nuclear power. Any way, finding money and space for something the size of three football fields using some of the world's most expensive technology doesnt seem very likely. If we put money and effort from nuclear fusion into better nuclear fission power plants that are a known practical propositions, then we could really starting getting somewhere. And calling the folks involved with NIF 'star builders' rather than weapons builders (which is what they really are) just adds to my scepticism.

That proposal business sounds a bit like what astronomers have to go through to gain time on facilities.