The latest developments in fusion energy - with the UKAEA 

How does the Hydrogen in the Sun remain separated from Helium and gradual and controlled Fusion occur? Does anyone know?

Where has the desk gone? The famous desk..

That what they said about interphenomeners, but just look at what came to be in gravitational interstellar sensory gathering.

@@savage22bolt32 That desk keeps on vanishing and returning. Don't worry, it'll be back. There must be a hole in the floor or something.

@@nathanroberson you are paying attention!

It would be interesting to know what reactions will replace tritium and possible deuterium.

Anyone that claims they know when it will be feasible is a fool. The "20 year" scientists, the hype sellers, and you doing it here. You dont have the slightest idea when break throughs will happen in order to put the pieces together, but it seems like its coming together.

Virtually all nuclear power advocates along with the vast majority of the Earth's 8.0+ billion other humans have become masterful in excluding the following warnings from their consciousness. I urge readers to search for the following article titles. They often do this to avoid becoming depressed. This 'Titanic' is about to hit the iceberg but we keep hoping. IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian) UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill) * This statement was made 5 years ago.

No it isn’t, Helion is a joke

@@jb76489 ....they have results

7th generation? What happened to the previous 6 generations? How much electricity did they generate? Remember to put a minus sign in front of your answer!

well, no, there are other forms of fuel, both neutronic and aneutronic, each with it's own cross section issues and efficiencies and so forth, but of course i'm sure you know all that. And it's spelt "percent" not "procent"....but i'm sure you knew that too........

@@ashleyobrien4937 Yes, there are other possible fusion reactions but deuterium-tritium is the lowest hanging fruit. Still, you will need a rather high ladder to reach it. For other reactions I don't think that even the tallest skylift would suffice. That's right, "procent" is Swedish. I was let down by the spelling checker.

Still a dream, still _just_ 20 years away.

@@lenwhatever4187 200,000 years waiting for flight. Industrial revolution in 1760s. 140 years later, we fly. 66 years later, we were on the moon. Technology’s not the issue; only the will to make it happen. I think we can achieve fusion. (We certainly would have had it by now if it received proper funding)

@@evilpanky We have "achieved fusion". That is not the problem.... Getting more out of it than we put in with some amount of control is the roadblock.... always has been.... might always be. Funding he says... it's making boat ownership look cheap already. (boat = a hole in the water one throws money into) Fusion = a hole in the universe one throws money into. The current technology being tried may just not be the right way... lasers and magnets both take too much power. Maybe some smart kid with a totally new idea will make this work one day

@@lenwhatever4187 I reckon it can totally be done. JET achieved Q = 0.7, ITER (while not commercial or net electric) will achieve ignition (Q > 5 or so). I'm certain ARC and STEP will achieve net electric. I'm also hoping for positive results from the Inertial Confinement stuff. We've achieved amazing results with such shoestring budgets.

@@lenwhatever4187 Also, when people say "achieve fusion", they generally mean commercially-relevant fusion. Fusion's been done in labs since the 1930's.

That would be amazing! We’re still making water hot! You should read up on “aneutronic fusion” and “direct energy conversion”; I think you’ll be pleased!

@@evilpanky Thank you!

are you kidding ? "serious merit" ??? Do you seriously think that nations and multinationals would spend billions on a "maybe" ? is it not likely that they just MIGHT just have experts who know a bit more about it you ? or I ?...come on man....

Great video But i cannot imagine how to build economical reactor on base of neutronic DT reaction. Today we only can state that if Tokamaks will be big enough, they will produce net power. No doubt. In ITER 840 m3 plasma is projected to produce 500 MW fusion powe for 3600 seconds. Then next shot. In about one year I am sure the condition of first wall and other critical components facing to plasma should be revised. If maintenance neede plasma facing components will be strongly radioactive and need remote handling. There 18 toroidal magnets weighing 310 ton each. Vacuum chamber weighs as far as i remember about 5000 ton. I quote these numbers only to show how costly maintenance will be. New creative idia is needed allowing us to go to aneutronic fusion. But ITER is projected for plasma temperature 15 keV. DHe3 reaction needs on order of magnitude higher temperature. And even bigger reactor or to invent method to run reactors at higher value of beta (ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic pressure) 20 years is unreal

That is the mission statement of the NIF, it is to do research in understanding how fusion works in thermo nuclear weapons sometimes called hydrogen bombs. It has only recently been hijacked into a mission that will produce hyperthetical power plants. BTW, all of the energy that comes from so called hydrogen fusion bombs, only a small part is really from fusion. It is more acurate to describe them as Fission/Fusion/Fission weapons since most of the energy comes from the uranium blanket. Teller describes them as Super A bombs, fusion makes fission go much better.

@@johnjakson444 It reminds me of Von Neumann working on the hydrogen bomb. Everyone wanted computers for the hydrogen bomb, and he wanted the hydrogen bomb for computers. Hijacking a weapons programme for the public good sounds alright to me!

The Amerucan version of everything is bigger explosions with lasers. Levity aside, yeah there are multiple ways to create the fusion. Magnetic conduction which is generally most talked about, the laser firing causing fusion in a billionth of a second is another. This industry is fascinating and exciting.

Why do you think you felt the need to say something so dumb Jeff?

@jb76489 Hardly dumb. Factually correct. It was funny because it is true. If you feel the need to correct me where I'm wrong please do so.​

Yes, there is. It's very promising.

There is one which essentially uses the magnetic field generated by the fusion as pressure against the magnetic field which contains the fusion, and generates the power using the pressure like some kind of magnetic engine. I believe Sabine Hossenfelder has a video on it specifically, though I forget its name.

How much energy was used to power the lasers? She conveniently "forgot" to mention that one.

@@Sekir80 She didn't "forget" that. At 52:57, she stated that they'd need a gain of 15-16 to have a self-sustaining plant. They already increased the gain by a factor of 1000 so 7 or 8 times more is maybe achievable in the foreseeable time, but on top of that they'll have to come up with a way to reload the machine with targets for a firing rate of 10 Hz, about the rate of fire of a Maxim gun. From my layman perspective, it seems like inertial confinement has a lot more challenges to overcome to go from experimental to industrial when compared to toroidal magnetic confinement. On the one slide, they talked about bringing down the cost of a pellet down to 30 cents. A typical coal fired power plant of about 750 MW consumes about $330 in coal in 1/10 of a second. I don't think the energy that goes into making the targets is going to be the big issue here, when these things are produced at scale.

@@Sekir80 she mentioned that & it's lower vs the output, thus ignition -more out than in. however, i suspect the energy used to make the pellet wasn't included.

2 boiled eggs and a pickled cabbage

The lab announcement made no mention into the energy that went into creating the diamond shell fuel capsules. They did mention that hundreds of them are manufactured but only a few can meet the extreme standards needed to be used as fuel pellets. In the December 5, 2022, experiment announcement, one estimate was that the vaporized target assembly cost was greater than $100,000. The experiment resulted in about enough fusion energy to boil two liters of water. In such presentations numerous details are left out.

The widely announced December 5, 2022, NIF experiment left out many key details. One was that the microscopic fusion reaction lasted for only approximately 0.000,000,000,08 second. Only approximately 4% of the extremely expensive fuel reacted before the rest was blown away from the reaction center. It took around a week to set up the experiment.

Not to say you are wrong, but it's also important to realize that just because a couple of times in the past an idea that seemed futuristic and impossible turned out to be actualized, millions of other ideas that seemed futuristic and impossible turned out to be just that. Turning over known science and the status quo is extremely rare. Newtonian physics wasn't overturned by Relativity, which wasn't overturned by Quantum physics, they built upon each other and apply equally well, depending on size and speed. Fusion, as is being looked at now, isn't such a case. To your other point that even if it doesn't ever work there may be discoveries made during the research that may be of great unknown benefit (whether in technologies or simply in knowledge) seems reasonable, but it is just as, if not more so, reasonable that if the billions of dollars being spent on fusion was instead spent elsewhere (there are only so many science dollars to go around) even more benefits would arise from that research.

I second this. Maybe I'm just too optimistic, but there's got to be at least some benefit to investing in fusion. Even if we don't get it working in our lifetimes.

Maybe, but we need to remember that resources are always limited i.e. we sacrifice spending in other areas to prioritise this. We also need to face the reality that this is very unlikely to arrive in time to help meet UN zero carbon goals. Lets hope at least one of the 100 plus startup disrupts the field to falsify that assessment.

Just don't use money for this research that could usefully be used to limit the effect of climate change! We must do that today! 20 years to get this tech working in the lab is too late

NIF is not meant to be a commercially viable fusion power plant, it is for testing methodology. They can't really afford to put in more efficient lasers, they were built almost 15 years ago. Part of what they are researching is material that will survive the continual high-powered laser shots. Material sciences is probably the most important engineering discipline.

@@viperswhip Material Sciences is so unappreciated for Fission and Fusion to be achieved.

it happens because helium is more dense than hidrgen so it ¨sinks¨ to the center of the star meanwhile hidrogen in the other inner layers can continue fusing, but it is no gradual or controlled fusion it happens very violently and widespread around the particular layer of the star and is contained thanks to the enourmus gravity that pulls to the center.

@@bullkathos4358 It is hard to imagine sinking Helium at 15 million degrees, how do the atoms know which way to go? Do He atoms push / sink toward the center and the H ejects out all the way to the earth at which point H atoms convert to Photons?

​@@ShonMardani the helium does not need to move in any particular direction, on average it will have an easier time moving towards the center and slightly harder time moving out which over time randomly moving makes it sink.

@@krabkit nicely put. There’s a subtly to the nuclear processes happening inside the Sun which is hard to grasp intuitively at first. Appreciating how the core and the envelope of the Sun differ and over the huge scale of the inside of the sun, averages matter greatly. Fascinating topic!

@@ShonMardani you’re asking good questions. Remember the Sun is huge, and a helium atom will be feeling the force of gravity over a travel distance of 100,000’s of miles so it all adds up to an eventual pull toward the center. Consider this, the photon emitting from fusing H atoms in the core takes on average, millions of years to finally be emitted as sunlight! The core is complicated!

It’s hard enough to develop the technology required to achieve stable fusion……but we know even less about the inner workings of the global ecosystem. Scrubbing greenhouse gasses gets into the realm of climate modification, and because we simply don’t know where to stop….some level of greenhouse gasses are required to sustain life……I for one think Mother Nature is infinitely more capable of managing the environment.

Don't hold your breath!

Yes. If they cant, thays their fault. Helium doesnt dissapear, it shows up in the room ventilation would capture it

I didn't think we were weried about it before as we have enough for about 3000 years if I recall correctly.

I th8nk it’ll be captured, yes, but it’ll be very small amounts of helium.

The amount of Helium produced will be miniscule compared to what industry uses.

@@JohnDunne001 Speaking theoretically about an experimentally proven set of technologies; on fusion generating helium and able to convert hydrogen.... There are two things working for us, the direct production, and the indirect enablement to capture helium from the aptmosphere and run the machines or vehichles required to caputure it. Hydrogen based fuels are energy based to produce, so at least we get unlimited energy and rocket / jet / car fuel. Helium doesnt just dissapear into space, we just relied on helium being relatively easier to aquire from underground repositories and low efficiency air capture technologies. Ultimately, when energy is fully abundant, we would be able to aquire resources easier, and thus make more fusion reactors with said resources in a slightly positve reinforcement loop. If we start running out of resources on earth, we can mine the whole solar system and recycle better (restore sillica for instance) and virtually never run out. How do we reach it? Having fusion reactors on a pathway in space to turn cargo water into oxygen and hydrogen as fuel, for refuling smaller ships over hops. Then the channel flown in space can be a space road, with sparesely spread out space drones following behind the ship literally launched from the station into another station. The drones purpose is to collect the dispelled ions (H2O, from recombining in combistion) by the rocket, given the rocket has charged its expelled gas via ion thrusters. The drones attracts water, curving its trajectory into collisions, and these drones are positively charged with zenneck surface waves which are positive pulsed surface charge. It can attract the ship's expelled gas. Multiple drones shot at different times and speeds can capture most water but not all. The drones use slight fuel to slow and aim, and the recepitcal of the drone can capture ions too. The station shoots drones equally in both direction. Each time, balancing it in space. Re-capturing drones from a previous station in the line. Thus it may be called a water collector or scientifically a 'Zenneck Samudra drone' meaning 'a drone with positively pulsed electrified surface where water gathers' Cheers all, feel free to spread the idea. This was an original idea of mime, that I'm aware of, based on @e.t.h.e.r.official on IG's description of the B-52 secondary ion thrust electro-mechanisim, and years of expensive research on electromagnetic theory and its underlying applications and evidence. If a similar ion thrust enginer was used on earth, no recaputre drones are needed, and addding a positively charged leading edge will attract negative ions expelled, causing them to move forwards and create forward thrust. Not sure if this applies to rockets in space, but worth a try, as it may operate a bit like an Albuquerque warp drive? See ya around

Relatively quickly? Thousands to millions of years is not good enough for you?

Fusion is infinitely sustainable for a spacefaring civilization -- the two technologies are complementary. Perhaps they will mature alongside eachother.

"indirect fusion" (solar power) lol oh boy that's a good one ! haha! that's like saying Trepanning is just like a paracetamol tablet....

@@ashleyobrien4937 the sun is a fusion reactor and we just capture that energy. Fossil fuels are even more indirect or stored fusion as organism gained energy from the sun long ago and became fossil fuels.

The plasma produces neutrons that carry away 80% of the energy of the fusion reaction. These hit and heat the coolant, making it hot. This coolant then goes out to power the turbine! Most of the remaining 20% of the reaction power stays in the plasma as charged particles, helping to keep it hot enough to keep the fusion reactions going!

Water is a fantastic neutron absorber. (one of the reasons its used in nuclear reactors)

Even if it were 3000 years away, it'd be a good investment. Fusion power means the problem of energy is solved forever.

@@dr.zoidberg8666 True

Place sun in slot E5

Meat balls heated with plasma

Amen!

sure, if you have seen them all, which you have not.