October 6, 2020 • 46 mins
Will humans figure out how to make fusion work on Earth, to provide plentiful clean power?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey Tory here. Before we jump in, we just wanted
to let you know that Daniel and I are participating
in a live event this Thursday with Atlas Obscura. That's right.
Do you shout questions at the podcast? Do you have
things you'd like to ask us live? Wellcome join us
on Thursday October eight, twenty twenty. It's four thirty pm
Pacific times seven thirty pm US Eastern time. You can
(00:23):
ask us questions, I'll answer them and Jorge will scribbled
clever doodles. We talked about the big questions in the universe,
and I'll be drawing cartoons live. So please join us.
To buy tickets, just google Daniel and Jorge Atlas Obscura
and you'll see the event. Come join us, see you there, Hey, Jorge,
(00:49):
I need some feedback on the name of a new
megaphysics project my specialty. What do you have so far?
What do you think of destroyer of World? That's a
terrible idea? All right? How about um planet eater? I'm
not sure I would go on a tour of that one.
What if we just shortened it to like eater? How's
(01:09):
that eater? That would be a name for a snack bar,
but I'm not sure it would work for a physics experiment.
I think it's good. We're going with it while you're kidding, right,
Nobody would actually name their physics projects eater, would they? Hi?
(01:39):
Am or Hey, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of
PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and
I'm a lover of silly physics acronyms, and I am
a lover of eating. So we are in a good
company today. Stars are aligning. You might even say they're
fusing together. Dan, that's right, all the bananas are aligned.
But welcome to a podcast Dan and Jorge Explain the Universe,
(02:01):
a production of I Heart Radio in which we seek
to explain to you all the craziness in the universe,
the way things work, the way things don't work, what
we do understand, what we don't understand, Where you can
take a banana, and where you should definitely never ever
take a banana. That's right, practical advice like that. And
also we talk about all the things that science is
(02:21):
up to these days, all the things that they're trying
to understand and know about and discover, but also all
the things that you're trying to make that's right. Science
is actively trying to make your life better. We are
working hard at the big questions of the day, and
not just where do you come from? What's the universe
made out of? What will be the ultimate fate of
the universe, but also how can you power your electric car?
(02:45):
And can you charge your phone anywhere all the time?
Most important, how can we power your Netflix addiction a
little bit more efficiently and ecologically friendly? You mean your
podcast addiction, right, because all these folks number one form
of entertainment is listening to awesome science podcasts, that's right, Yeah,
podcast and chills in you Netflix and Chill. I think
(03:08):
a lot of people probably listen to this podcast when
they're exercising. So you know, if you just hook up
your treadmill to like a generator, it could be a
zero net waste endeavor here. Yeah, but then what powers
the people? Right? Then it's essentially a banana powered podcast. Yeah.
Bananas are solar powered, right, So it all works out true.
(03:31):
In the end, it all comes down to energy from
the sun. Everything we do on Earth almost is eventually
derived from the energy of the Sun. Yeah, the Sun
powers the life on Earth and it's pretty warm and toasty,
and so scientists have been looking at the Sun for
a long time thinking, man, if we only had a
little sun here on Earth, he could warm us up
(03:51):
and give us all the energy that we need. So
I can talk about creating little black holes and that
freaks you up, but you can just talk about like
making a little sun here on Earth. You realize, of course,
that the Sun is a constantly exploding hydrogen bomb, right, yeah,
but does the Sun create a runaway sucking chain reaction
that grows and grows and grows. So hey, black holes
(04:14):
have their uses to We just did a whole episode
about black hole power and starships. They could take us
through other star systems. So anyway, I just got to
speak up from black holes here. Okay, you have a
pet one in your backyard. No, I'm just you know,
I'm a shill for the big black hole lobby. But
you're right, the sun is amazing. The Sun is wonderful,
and the Sun does power everything that we do. And
(04:37):
as we look around for greener, cleaner sources of energy,
it does seem tempting to think, well, the universe does
it this way, why can't we do it that way also,
and it's something that physicists have been working on for decades. Yeah,
for a long time. They've been trying to make this
idea of living sun on Earth possible. And so to
the end the program, we'll be talking about one such experiment.
(05:00):
It's happening right now as we speak. There are sciences
in this moment, in this world trying to treat a
little sun or more like a sun donut, exactly like
a plasma donut. I don't know what flavor that is,
but I don't recommend taking a bite out of it.
But yeah, exactly. One problem is that the Sun is
massive and exploding constantly, and the reason it doesn't tear
(05:22):
itself apart is because it has so much gravity. And
so we need to figure out other ways to sort
of replicate the parts of the Sun that we want
to keep without having the sort of like earth destroying
aspects that are less interesting to us. Yeah, and so
today we'll be asking the question, what is the eater
(05:43):
experiment and will it create fusion here on Earth? Now? Daniel,
so you were serious? This is actually called the eater experiment,
that's right, I T e R. And it's pronounced by
plasma physicists everywhere to be the eater experiment. Not iteter
or eat or anything like that. People call it eater
(06:03):
without any sort of sense of irony or understanding that absurd.
That is what language pronounces the eye and the e,
you know, the open e. Is it like a weird
collaboration between French and US scientists. It's a huge international collaboration.
So I don't know who's responsible for that. And it's
likely that other countries pronounced the acronym differently, you know,
(06:25):
in French they probably pronounced or something right. Yeah, I
don't even know how the Japanese would do it. But
here in America we call it the eater experiment. Again,
just to verify, it's not trying to eat the entire earth.
It's trying to do the opposite. It's trying to feed
the whole earth. It's exactly. It's trying to fuel the
Earth into an attempt at magnetic confinement fusion. But as usual,
(06:47):
I was curious did people know about the eater experiment.
We actually got a few emails from listeners asking us
to talk about this, so I thought, hey, maybe our
listeners know all about this, So I pulled them to
figure out what they knew, And I asked them if
they knew what the Eater experiment was all about. Do
you think they wrote you because they were curious or concerned? Daniel,
They're like, oh, physics are making something called the Eater experiment.
(07:11):
Should we be worried? No. I think they wrote me
because they were hopeful. You know, the Eater experiment really
does represent something positive. If they make it work and
we get fusion to work, we could have essentially almost
limitless energy, which could really transform our economies and lift
a lot of people out of poverty. So it's tantalizing,
(07:32):
you know, it's really inspires hope, and so I think
they were hoping that I would say, yes, it's around
the corner and we're going to solve all of our problems.
But you're like, no, I am in the black hole
lobby pocket unfortunately, so I can't chill for fusion. Although
you know, if you want to create a black hole
to power your starship, you need a very good source
of energy. And so it might be that we build
(07:52):
a little star and run it as a fusion experiment
in order to gather energy and then pump that via
lasers into a black hole, so every you can be happy.
You get your star I get my black hole. If
I have a son, why would I need a black
hole to power your starship? Man? You should listen to
that episode. It's pretty awesome. All right, Well, think about
(08:13):
it for a second. Is soone as you what the
eater experiment was? Would you respond that you are hungry,
thank you? Or what would you say? Here's what people
had to say. Something to do intergalactic telescope, extraterrestrial radar.
I believe it's a nuclear fusion experiment that needs to
replicate the Sun's fusion power to create clean energy. I
(08:35):
have not heard of that one, but I will be
very interested to learn what it is. I think it's
the French and French abbreviation kind of like certain in fact,
but I believe it has to do with nuclear fusion,
with with building a nuclear fusion reactor, something to do
(08:55):
with acronyms interplanetary terrestrial exploration in research. Maybe that sounds good. Yeah,
I'm surprised after that that nobody said yes. And I'll
have a side of fries with that either piece. That's right?
Some chips please? Yeah? So um and some people I've
heard of it, and some people had no idea. Yeah.
And for the record, the acronym I T e R
(09:17):
stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor I T E R. Oh. No, yeah,
I know. Thermonuclear sounds like war games right now. I
was I was saying, they omitted the nuclear, so she
really should be itner. No, No, thermonuclear is one word,
so's t otherwise be eater, I guess. But they actually
(09:40):
they didn't like that expression, so they renamed it just
I T E R. Now it's an acronym officially that
doesn't stand for anything. It's just either what was it originally?
I International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor? Oh? I see, but how
did they rename it? They just renamed it I T
e R. So used to be the International Thermonuclear Experimental
(10:02):
Reactor and acronym for that was I T e R.
But now the name is just I T E R. Oh.
I see. They made the acronym the name, yes, exactly,
that they wouldn't have to print under T shirts like thermonuclear.
Is that what you mean? Exactly? I think thermonuclear didn't
pull very well in the surrounding communities when they were
building this. Seriously, Okay, but it's still a thermo nuclear.
(10:25):
It's just hidden in the name exactly the physics of
it have been change is just a change and what
we call it and how we refer to it. All right, well,
let's jump into it. Daniel, explain to us what is
the Eater experiment and is it going to eat us?
The Eater experiment is going to eat hydrogen and create electricity,
is the idea. But the big idea is that Eater
(10:46):
is what we think will be the first working fusion reactor,
something cable of taking in fuel and creating electricity, and
it will operate on fusion, which again is different from vision.
We have nuclear reactor now which operate on the principle
of fission breaking up big heavy elements like uranium and
plutonium to create energy. This operates under fusion, which is
(11:10):
sticking together light elements to create energy, right, because fusion
is putting things together and somehow that releases energy. Also,
like I think we're used to breaking things apart and
that releasing energy. But it's kind of weird to think
that you can put things together and that will also
give your energy. Yeah, And it's pretty weird because if
you have really heavy elements, anything essentially above iron, then
(11:32):
if you break it apart, you get energy out. And
for those you can think of them like two little
objects sort of held together by a coiled spring, and
the bond there holds in energy. Right, The spring has energy,
and if you somehow break it, then things fly out.
You get energy out when you break those bonds. But
anything lighter than iron, it works the opposite way. It's
(11:55):
like the things are stuck together and to break them
up you need to add energy, right, Like, for example,
if you wanted the Earth to no longer be moving
around the Sun, if you want to break the bond
between the Earth and the Sun, you need to add energy.
You need to give the Earth a push, so that
bond has sort of negative energy. And so in the
same way, if you went in the reverse, if you
(12:16):
created that bond instead of breaking it, you'd be releasing energy.
So anything lighter than iron, if you fuse it, if
you stick it together, you release energy, and if you
tear it apart then that takes energy. Right. It's still
kind of weird to think about, isn't it. Like you know,
it wants to be together, but if you put them
together it costs you like, it's hard to do that. Yeah, well,
(12:38):
it's weird in lots of ways. But you know, imagine,
for example, you had to planets and you want to
get them in orbit around each other. If they're moving
it really high speeds. Then to do that, you would
have to remove some of their energy. You'd have to
slow them down relative to each other so they could
form a bond, and so has to essentially extract energy
from that system. And so that's what we're doing here,
(12:59):
is we're taking two hydrogen atoms and we're slowing them down.
We're getting them close enough together, reducing their relative energy
so that we can extract that energy and make them
bond together. But it is pretty weird. I agree, it's
counterintuitive to imagine sticking things together and having energy come out, right,
And I think it all has to do is kind
of like this balance between the different fundamental forces, right,
(13:21):
Like the thing that makes it hard to put to
hydrogen nuclei together is the allerg for a magnetic force, right,
because they repel each other electromagnetically. But if you get
in close enough, then another force takes over and then
that's the one that releases energy. Right. Yeah, So there's
two separate ideas there. One is why does hydrogen and
light elements, why do they release energy when they fuse?
(13:42):
Whereas heavy stuff, why does it release energy when it
breaks up? And that's because of the strong force. And
that's like how these quirks and the protons and neutrons
fit together to make their bonds. And it's very very
complicated and difficult to calculate. And then there's the second angle,
which is what makes it hard to get too protons together. Essentially,
two hydrogen atoms are basically just two protons and you're
(14:05):
right there positively charged, and so they don't like to
come together. So getting them together, get them near each
other so that they can fuse, is difficult. It's sort
of like trying to get a hole in one in
mini golf. When the hole is the very top of
a volcano. You've got to get it like ride up
the topic. You don't get it in exactly the right spot.
It just rules away because it likes to repel all
(14:27):
the golf balls, right. And and that'sually what kind of
like the distance that the forces act on, right, Like
the electromagnetic force acts a pretty long distances, but the
strong nuclear force only works if you're like really close
to that hole at the top of the volcano. Yeah,
the strong nuclear force is really really powerful, and so
it's essentially always balanced in any distance greater than you know,
(14:48):
pretty close to the proton, and so you don't really
feel it unless you're really really close up. And you're right,
the electromagnetic force is balanced. It sort of longer distances,
and you can have protons that are positively charged, and
it's field essentially goes infinite. You can feel another proton
on the other side of the universe, although this strength
is very small, but you're right. As two protons reach
(15:10):
each other, it starts out that the electromagnetic force is dominant.
But if you get close enough, the strong force takes over.
But you've got to get them close enough and to
positively charged protons don't like to get together. They really resisted.
It's like a brother and sister hugging. Yeah, so if
you put them together, they'll snap together and they'll release
a bunch of energy, like they'll release photons or how
(15:31):
does that energy come out? It's complicated. You get hygen together,
you get helium, you get new tree nos, you get photons.
There's actually a few steps in that process, and what
happens inside the sun is a big mix of all
these different things, and photons are created and then be
absorbed and new trios are created, so it's a big gamush.
But yeah, basically, you get hygiene together the fuses to
(15:52):
make helium, and if you get it hot enough, that
helium confused to make the next thing, and then that
confused to make the next thing. And that's what's happening
in the inside of stars. And as stars get older,
they get these denser and denser cores. The hydrogen fuses
and then the helium fuses, and eventually you get you know,
carbon and nitrogen, oxygen all the way up to iron.
(16:12):
And that's when they run out of fuel because the
iron for it to fuse, costs energy, so it starts
to cool the star and that's when the beginning of
the end of the life of the star starts. But
until then, it's a pretty efficient way to kind of
create energy, right, Like a gramm of fuel here for
a fusion reactor will give you a ton of energy,
(16:34):
that's right, like tons and tons like a lot of energy.
You're much more efficiently converting mass into energy than in
almost anything else we know other than like antimatter matter collisions,
but antimatter is pretty difficult to find. The real advantage
of fusion is that the fuel is everywhere. Like hydrogen
is very, very plentiful in the universe. We have a
(16:55):
lot of it in water, for example, And you're right,
it produces a huge amount of energy. So one gram
of fuel produces as much energy is eighty thousand tons
of oil, So it's a lot more efficient than fossil fuels.
That's crazy. Like a gram of hydrogen is one like
a cup, like like a tea spoon. What is it?
(17:17):
I guess it depends a lot on the pressure in
the temperature, right, but it's not a lot. You know,
A gram is about how much a raisin ways, So
a raisin's words of hydrogen is the same as eighty
thousand tons of oil. That's like a whole container ship.
And what makes it attractive toys that we were sort
of surrounded by fuel that we could use for a
(17:37):
fusion reactor, right, Like you can get hydrogen just from water,
and we have a lot of water. Yeah, we have
a lot of water, and hydrogen is the most plentiful
thing in the universe. Some of like nineties percent of
the universe is hydrogen. Not like we're going to go
out there to gather it, but you know, you imagine
if fusion is going to power your spaceships or whatever.
It's not that hard to find hydrogen, whereas things like
(17:59):
uranium is much much rarer. You know, uranium is created
when neutron stars collide and die. It's very rare process,
which is why there isn't very much of it. But
hydrogen is everywhere. It was the number one thing made
during the Big Bang, and it's still number one. It's
planning to be number one for billions of years into
the future. So yeah, we're not going to run out
of hydrogen, right And one of the best parts about
(18:20):
a fusion reactor is that it's super green, right, Like,
it doesn't create any toxic waste or radioactive waste or
like carbon or carbon at all. Right, Like, it just
makes helium and energy, And who doesn't want more helium.
We could all have balloons, We can all talk with
silly voices. We should do a whole podcast with just
helium voices. No, you're right, it doesn't create radioactive waste
(18:43):
the way that fission does you know fission, you have
really heavy elements like uranium, they break up, you still
have heavy elements that are radioactive, and those can take
tens of thousands of years to break down even further.
So you've got this stuff that's not useful for generating
energy and sticks around basically poisoning your ironman four thousands
and thousands of years. Fusion is different. It's not clean,
(19:06):
but essentially already produces helium and energy. The other thing
it does is it produces very high speed neutrons. Now
you can try to capture the energy of those neutrons,
which would be great, but you know those neutrons can
cause radio activity in the material that surrounds it, So
there is some radioactive waste from fusion. It's not completely zero,
but it's almost negligible compared to fusion. All right, Well,
(19:29):
it sounds amazing, and it would be awesome if we
can make fusion work here on Earth and make our
own little sun and powers and then get us all
nice and toasty. But there are a lot of challenges.
For example, how do how do you make it work?
And how do you keep it from not exploding your
entire plant? So let's get into that. But first, let's
take a quick break, all right, Daniel, we're we're talking
(20:03):
about a fusion and making fusion work here on Earth,
and specifically about the Eater experiment. And it's in Europe, right,
and they're they're trying to make fusion work right now,
that's right. They're building it in France and they're working
on it. And it's the culmination of decades and decades
of research of trying to make fusion work here on Earth,
which turns out to not be very easy. As we
(20:24):
talked about before, you have to get these hydrogens close
to each other, and how do you do that efficiently?
And for a lot of hydrogens, you can't just like
shoot two protons at each other. That's what we do
basically at the LHC. That's not very efficient for generating energy, right, Yeah,
So it's it's pretty hard to do. But we've been
trying for decades and decades to make this work because
I guess the payoff would be pretty cool. But I
(20:47):
guess the hard part is getting these hydrogens to come
together and get close en out that they snap together
and release this energy. And so what are the different
ways that we can do that? Do we throw them
at each other or do you just kind of create
a container and squeeze it enough so that it actually happens.
So we need high enough numbers to make this efficient,
which is why we can't just like use colliders. There's
(21:08):
a whole other branch of fusion research where they use
lasers and try to zap fuel. We won't talk about
that today, but the basic idea of magnetic confinement fusion
is to make a little star basically to create plasma,
to take a bunch of hydrogen gas and make it really,
really hot and dense. And the idea is that those
are the conditions you need for these hydrogens to bang
(21:29):
into each other to cause fusion. So basically you have
to leave them nowhere else to go. You've got to
crowd all the hydrogens together so there's no escape. They
got to fuse with each other. And then, of course
the trick is how do you build a really hot,
dense plasma and how do you contain it because it
would basically melt any device you made out of normal matth. Yeah,
(21:50):
I think you're basically trying to do exactly what's happening
in the sun right Like in the sun all that
hydrogen is there, but it's trapped and it's being squeezed
to get there by the sheer size of the Sun
everything else kind of squeezing it together, and so it
becomes it's kind of like hot, pressurized plasma that then
triggers fusion. That's right, And so the Sun uses basically
(22:13):
a gravitational bottle. Right. It says, I'm just gonna go
really big so that I have my own gravity that
sucks myself in. But we don't really have that option.
We don't want to build another Sun. We got one already,
and if we built a fusion reactor the size of
the Sun, it would destroy us. So the challenge of
building a mini one one that's practical for human purposes
is finding another way to keep that plasma hot and
(22:35):
dense and contained. And the big idea is to use magnets,
because magnets can bend the direction of stuff without actually
touching it. Right, You can have like magnetically levitating trains
and all sorts of other magnetic confinement. So you try
to build a magnetic bottle that doesn't actually have to
touch the plasma itself, right, because I guess the plasma
(22:57):
is charged right, Like everything in the plasma has a charge,
and and so it's repelled by the magnets, and so
you can contain and using magnets, but you couldn't contain
other things with magnets. They had to be electric charge.
That's right. A plasma is electrically charged gas, right. That's
what it means that it's gotten hot enough that the
electrons have so much energy that they just say bye
(23:18):
bye to their protons and they're just flying around free.
And so you have a gas of positive and neglearly
charged particles. That's the definition of a plasma. And that
happens naturally when you heat it up exactly. And you're
right that magnetic fields only act on charged particles, and
they cause charge particles to bend in a circle. So
then the next challenge is, well, how do you build
a bottle that if you can't like push back on
(23:39):
the particles, you can just sort of bend them to
move in a circle that maintains this plasma in a
constant state. And so that's how they came up with
this geometry of basically a donut. You have all the
particles basically going in a circle, whizzing in a circle,
and you have magnetic fields that create sort of a
tube around it. Then the magnetic fields force the particle,
(24:00):
They bend the particles to move in the circle, and
it's sort of a dynamo effect. The motion of those
charged particles creates more magnetic field, which helps contain it.
So it should be sort of building on itself, the
same way that like the motion of hot iron inside
the Earth helps the magnetic field, and the magnetic field
helps move the iron sort of builds on itself. So
(24:22):
I see, you couldn't just make like a bottle that
looks like a bottle, or like a bottle that's like
a sphere. That wouldn't quite work for fusion here on Earth.
The tricky thing is getting these things stable. And so
a bottle that just looks like a bottle wouldn't be
stable because there'd be lots of points where the plasma
could just approach the edge of it. You need to
be totally symmetric, so the particles are always bent away
(24:42):
from the edge of the bottle and into some configuration
that helps strengthen the bottle. And so that's this idea.
It's called a tocomac, and it's a plasma basically in
a donut whizzing in a circle, where the plasma itself
helped create the magnetic field that contains it. Wasn't that
the name of a pokemon to I forget a really expensive,
short lived pokemon. I guess the problem. It's kind of
(25:05):
like if you make a son, how do you hold it? Right?
Like how do you hold the sun? You can't touch it.
You can't use oven mits. It will just melt everything.
And it's good you know that you think about these
things before you build your son. So I congratulate you
on your forward thinking there. You know, sometimes you open
the oven and you're like, wait a second, I need
oven mits, right, this is that moment, right, plan to
get your oven mits in advance, all right. So they're
(25:27):
hard to sort of make and contain and keep going stable.
And so you said, we've been doing it for decades,
So what are some of the other attempts that we've made. Yeah,
the hard thing is to keep these things stable because
plasma is very hot and very crazy. These things don't
just fly along nicely like a bunch of cars in
a race, you know, all moving in parallel really high speeds.
(25:48):
They tend to bounce off each other, and anytime you
have a small instability, you can build into larger instabilities
and the whole thing falls apart. So people have been
working for years to figure out how exactly to make
these things stable, Like do you have it be a
perfect donut? Do you have it like a d shape?
Do you have a twist? All sorts of crazy ideas
for how to prevent these instabilities from being created and
(26:10):
from growing, Like do you make it a cronut or
a Danish? Do you glaze it? Who puts cheese in
the middle of a reactor anyway? I mean it is
sort of like a Danish, isn't it. There's like something
in the middle. There's not a hole in the middle.
There's something in the middle. There's a hole in the middle. Yeah,
it's it's like a donut. It's like a bagel. There's
nothing in the middle. I guess the magnetic bottle is
a donut. But you actually have to put the magnet
(26:31):
in the middle. You need the equipment which helps create
and contain the magnetic fields in the middle. That's right,
But you don't have plasma that you don't have magnetic
fields there. The active elements are a donut. But people
have been working on this for a long time, and
there's a reactor at Princeton which was leading it for
a long time. It's called the t F t R
the teethter, and they measure the performance of these things
(26:53):
using a ratio energy out to energy in because it
takes energy to start the reactor. It's like you know,
starting a fire. You've got to light it, you need
to heat the plasma, you need to create the magnetic field,
so it costs some energy and then you get fusion.
That happens, and the way you measure the performance of
your actor is are you getting more heat out than
you put in? Because nobody wants to build a reactor
(27:15):
that's a loss of energy. And so the ratio here
they're called the Q factor is energy out over energy in.
A number greater than zero means you're producing energy. Yeah,
you have fusion. But a number less than one means
it's still costing new energy. You're having to put more
energy in. Then it's actually producing eating up your electricity building. Yeah, exactly,
(27:35):
And so so far at Princeton, the best they achieve
was a queue of four tenth which means they were
able to make fusion happen and create a mini sun.
But if they had turned off the energy they were
pumping into it, it would have dissipated. Right, it costs
the more energy to make it wasn't self sustaining. I
guess it's kind of like the fusion itself, like getting
(27:56):
too hydrogen atoms together takes energy to get them really
close those but if you managed to get them together
just right, they'll snap together and release energy. So it's
kind of like that that ratio of like putting energy
to make it happen and then hopefully it happens. You
know that you get enough energy out of it exactly
because that energy that comes out of those hydrogens can
then help the other hydrogens fused. And that's a condition
(28:18):
they call ignition, where it's creating enough energy to sustain itself.
You don't need to anymore be lighting it from the outside.
And so, you know, it was a huge accomplishment to
get up to point four, and before that people hadn't
really gotten fusion to work at all. So they created
you know, sustained fusion reactions, just not self sustained. And
did that one looked like a donut to or was
(28:39):
it more like that one also look looked like a donut. Yeah,
and then there was one in England, the jet reactor,
which reached a queue of point six. Right, So they've
been making progress, but they realized at some point that
these things were limited by their size. Like, in order
to get more fusion happening, you needed a bigger plasma.
You needed like more plasma and less surface you were
(29:01):
edges for the energy to sort of leak out. You
needed like a fatter donut. You needed a bigger donut.
And let's face it, who doesn't need a bigger donut? Right?
You never eat a donut. You're like, I wish this
donut was smaller. Well, that's because you're a big eater,
and I'm a physicist, so I want to build a
big eater experiment. I guess what you're saying is that
you need to scale it up, because then you get
(29:22):
kind of like, you know, kind of like more donut
per surface area. Is that kind of what it means?
It's denser and you have more internal bits than surface bits,
and so you get more fusion going on. And the
goal here is to get a queue of ten to
get something which we think would be like economically feasible
where you can go to an energy company and say, hey,
(29:42):
we have a design, spend two billion dollars building this.
You want to promise that this thing is going to
produce ten times as much energy as you're putting into it.
So that's the goal. But why tend Why not one
point one? Would one point one be like a net positive?
It would be a net positive, But you know, to
be economically feasible, you've got to produce more than that.
(30:03):
You know, at one point one is pretty small. It
costs a lot to build these things and to operate
these things, and also just to be competitive. Right, there
is a market if you build fusion energy, but it's
super duper expensive. Nobody's going to buy it, and we're
still going to be burning fossil fuels. And so you
have to make fusion happen, and then you have to
make it economically cheap so that it will actually be
(30:23):
consumed and take over the energy grid. So the goal
there is Q of ten. I guess you know, I'm
wondering why a little percentage isn't good enough, because couldn't
you like take the energy that it makes and use
it to power itself and so then you would just
have like almost like this perpetual motion machine that you
just gotta feed in seawater. Yeah, but you know, more
efficiency is definitely better. And remember there's overhead costs and
(30:46):
running this thing and then building this thing and making
it work, and so this is more of a like
a social economic question than engineering question. But they've determined
that a QUE ten is the target, and you know,
I think they're hoping to achieve much much higher queues eventually,
So this is like a research goal. I think they
want to get QUE hundred or a thousand. This process
(31:06):
really has enormous potentials. You're a limit, like what's the
highest que you can get out of a fusion reactor?
I don't think there is a limit. You know, you
can get this thing to be self sustaining so that
it essentially takes no more energy in I guess you
optimize your magnetic fields. You know, maybe not infinite, but
there's no real like upper limit the que you can get.
All right, it sounds amazing, and so let's get into
(31:29):
how we are going to make it work and whether
or not eater is gonna eat up this problem. But
first let's take another quick break all right, we're talking
(31:50):
about making fusion on Earth, making a sun donut, a
solar donut here on Earth that can maybe power all
of our energy needs forever and very efficiently and super
eco friendly without any or much radioactive waste. Now, Danny
were saying, we've been trying for decades here and now
(32:11):
the latest project is called Eater in Europe and trying
to make this work. And so how's it going from them, Well,
it's been going. That's about as good as you can say.
That doesn't sound good. Hasn't been great. Now things have
taken a much better turn recently, but it's been a
tricky project. You know, I've been watching this feel from
Afar and for a long time I thought this is
sort of like they're super conducting super collider. They decided
(32:34):
we're gonna go really big. We're gonna spend billions, but
we're gonna make it awesome. And the project, you know,
it needs sustained political support. And they started out in
the nineties and the US was part of it, and
then the US pulled out and we thought all the
project was going to fall apart. Yeah, why do we
pull out? Why do we pull out? Why do we
ever cancel our support for a science project. It's some
(32:56):
politics thing, you know, these billions versus those billions. Congress
is fickle. Then they fickle pickled again. And the US
was back in in two thousand three, and so now
that you as is back in. So they've been working
these things since the nineties. And one of the ideas
here is not just let's build a reactor that works,
but let's spread the knowledge of fusion reactors around the world.
(33:18):
We don't just want to develop a very capable fusion
economy in the US. We want to do it also
in India and in China and in Russia, etcetera. And
so it's very decentralized project. Like you guys build a
vacuum chamber, you guys build these diagnostics. And that's a
cool idea and a nice vision, but didn't really work
very well for organizing a billions of dollars project that
(33:40):
needs to be completed on schedule. Yeah, it seems like
you want to make it work first before you tell
other people how to make it work. Yeah. Well, I
think part of selling it was you know, all these
other countries please pitch in hundreds of millions of dollars
and you'll get to participate in the economics of it,
you'll get to be a leader and how to build
this part of the device. I think that was part
of the political selling points. But you know, they also
(34:03):
paid the price because it's very hard to organize stuff
that's so decentralized, with lots of different cultures participating, and
so the cost started out estimated around four billion euros
and now it's looking to be like more than twenty
billion euros, which is pretty steep. I mean, it's hard
to imagine a commercial operation spending twenty billion euros to
(34:24):
build a reactor, but you know, the ideas they build
this one, they figure out how to make it better
and cheaper, etc. Yeah, I feel I feel like bill
is not even that much. I mean, for like, you know,
super cheap, free energy for the rest of humanity's history.
Sounds like a bargain. All right, well, I'm glad you're
so open to investments. I'd like to pitch to you
that my Fusion Energy company. Would you like to invest
(34:46):
facing Nigeria organized by a prince, Yes, please just click
on this link. No, but then there was a guy
who took over in two thousand fifteen, and he's sort
of centralized power a little bit and decision making. And
since two thousand fifteen, it's really been on track. It's
been very well organized. They got good spreadsheets, etcetera. And
(35:06):
people now think in the community that it's going pretty well.
They're making steady progress. And they actually just recently the
last few weeks shipped some of the cryostat, this thing
that is going to hold the plasma. They shifted from
Korea to France to start assembly. So it's coming together.
It's coming together. We're starting to see real progress. And
you know, this thing is going to be enormous, Like
(35:26):
how big was the one at Princeton? Was it like
desktop size? No, it was definitely not a desktop size.
It was like a really large room. You know, the
plasma on the scale of like a meter high. This
thing is going to be like twelve The donuts gonna
be twelve meters high, twelve meters high. It's going to
be enormous. But that's what they think. They need to
get a queue of ten to get ten times as
much energy out as in. So it's a big task, right,
(35:49):
and nobody ever built these things before. Remember when you
do physics research at this scale. You're not like going
to Best Buy and purchasing a fusion reactor and there's
a customer support when it doesn't work. Right, Nobody's ever
done this before, and so every decision, every piece of technology,
every redoubt, everything has to be designed and thought about,
usually by physics grad students, and so you know, I'm
(36:11):
impressed when it works at all. It feels sort of
like they try to jump to orders of magnitude in
with this one, right, Like I feel like me, do
you think maybe they try to bite off too much?
Like they went from point four q two point six?
You know, I would think the next logical step is
like two cute or something, but no, they went for ten. Yeah,
you know it's strategic, right. If they get que of
(36:32):
ten to work, then boom, fusion is a thing. Fusion
is now commercially viable. It's a whole new era for humanity.
So I think they decided to just you know, go
for the home run, and it's a strategic choice. If
it doesn't work, then you know that the whole branch
of research is probably dead. But you know, there are
other ways people are exploring fusion, so they're definitely swinging
(36:54):
for the fences, and that's a question of strategy, not science.
And I understand, and I'm rooting for them. I really
hope make it work. I'm sick of all our crazy, dirty,
expensive energy. You'd be wonderful if they made fusion work.
And you know, this thing, it's on track, and they're
expecting to finish the vessel that holds the plasma in
about and to turn the thing on in to make
(37:17):
first plasma. Well, it's pretty soon. That's pretty soon. Yeah,
that's you know, around the corner. And then they're going
to tweak in and play with it and gradually ramp
it up over the next few years. And they're hoping
to get you actual power generated by this thing around. Now.
That's assuming that it works. Is there anything still uncertain
about the theory of it or do we know pretty
(37:39):
well that it's going to work. It's just a matter
of like timing the bolts. Well, the theorists are pretty confident.
They think it's a pretty straight scale up and that
if you build this thing and you do it correctly,
it should really work. I mean, we've seen fusion happen.
We know how to do it. They've just dealt with
a lot of the issues of plasma instability. They think
they know how to do that, how to manage the
(37:59):
magnetic fields to suppress those instabilities, So they're pretty confident.
On the other hand, you know, there's a lot of
things that crop up for the first time in reality
that you didn't expect when you're doing them on paper.
They've done complicated simulations, etcetera. So they're pretty confident. But
even if that's all correct, even if their theory is correct,
and you build a thing and you turn it on
and it generates power, there are still some problems they
(38:22):
haven't even actually started to think about, Like what, well,
you know this thing is going to generate energy, but
they haven't figured out how to capture that energy, Like
what are you gonna do about energy? Yeah, what what
do you mean that there's no plan for, you know,
actually taking the energy out. But because if you don't
think the energy out, it's it's just gonna explode, isn't it?
Or heat up? The energy A lot of is produced
(38:43):
in the form of neutrons. So these neutrons are created
and they fly out with a lot of energy, and
neutrons again aren't captured by the plasma because they're not
charged as to the idea is figure out a way
to capture these neutrons outside of the plasma and turn
them into heat, and then turn that heat into steam
and turn that steam to electricity. But nobody's really figured
out how to make that part work. And you know,
(39:05):
neutrons are not great for you, Like, if you stand
near a high energy source of neutrons, you'll basically get
cancer very quickly. And neutrons will also make stuff radioactive.
So if you just turn this thing on empower it
without doing anything about the neutrons, it'll turn the entire
reactor and then building it's in radioactive pretty quickly, and
not like good radioactive, but like activate it make it
(39:28):
radioactive potentially for a long time. So what's the plan?
I mean, didn't they figure that out before they turn
it on? Well, I think it's a two step plan.
They're like, let's figure out how to make the energy
and then we'll figure out how to capture it. But
it's it's a bit of the Oven Midst sort of situation.
You want to make sure you know how to handle
this thing before you build it. So they have a
sketch of an idea. It's actually really clever if you
(39:48):
surround this thing in blankets of lithium, then neutrons when
they hit lithium, they capture the energy, the heat up
and you can you know, extract that energy through heat
turning into electricity. Plus it turns the lithium blankets into
exactly the kind of hydrogen you need to run as
fuel for your reactor. So you need to turn lithium
(40:10):
into basically deuterium or tritium, various isotopes of hydraight what
So it's a nice little solution. Sorry, let me get
maybe a picture here. So we have this donut and
it's really hot, and it's containing a magnetic bottle and
it's giving off huge, huge amounts of neutrons. But don't
these neutrons and hit the walls of the container that
(40:32):
it's holding and then destroy it or heat it up.
Are you saying put the blankets of lithium before that
or within that. Well, they haven't made a whole lot
of progress on this. A lot of these ideas are
still sort of in early stages, and the Element of
the Eater program that was supposed to focus on exactly
those questions hasn't received a whole lot of funding. They're
(40:53):
really focusing just on generating the fusion and generating the energy,
and so the folks I spoke to definitely acknowledge that
they needs to be worked on more. But you're right,
you can't put the lithium blankets directly inside or they
get melted by the plasma, and so they'll be parts
of the reactor which will be irradiated by the neutrons
and they will need to be you know, eventually replaced.
(41:13):
So that's what I was talking about, is saying there
is some waste generated by a fusion reactor. Essentially the
reactor itself becomes irradiated and needs to be rebuilt and replaced.
But if you put these lithium blankets around the reactor,
it should capture that energy from the neutrons and create
more fuel you need to fuel the reactor. So it's
a nice little cycle if you can make it work.
(41:35):
But you know, this hasn't really be improved in practice
at the level we would need to actually get energy
electricity out of eather. How do the neutrons create you said,
it takes lithium, and the lithium catches it and then
the lithium transforms into these heavy hydrogens. Yeah, so lithium
is not a very heavy element, and if you smash
(41:55):
neutrons into it, then it cracks open and you can
get hydrogens, and you can get deuteriums, you can get tritiums,
and so it basically turns into the fuel you need
to funnel back into the reactor. But then then then
don't you need more lithium? What if you're run out
of lithium? Yeah, essentially you need more lithium. But again,
lithium is not that rare. It's atomic number three. But
(42:17):
you know, these are the parts of this whole research
program that are not as fleshed out as the rest
of it. They're like, first, let's get Q of ten.
Let's produce a huge hot, you know, nasty burning doughnut,
and then we'll figure out how to use that donut
to run your eyes. Let's make a huge what did
you call it, huge, nasty burning donut, and then we'll
figure out who knows that was the alternative name for
(42:40):
this program. They went with eater Instead, they went the
other way. They're like, I couldn't make this more appealing.
Let's call it the thermonuclear donut, all right? Well, hopefully
they'll figure it out. I mean, it seems like they're
they're confidant that it can be figured out and they
just have to kind of put funding into it. Yeah,
(43:01):
they really do hope that it works, and the whole
field is sort of like place their bet on this.
There are other ways people are working on fusion. There
are other devices like a stellarator, which doesn't have a
current of plasma so doesn't create its own magnetic field.
You create the magnetic field from the outside, and it
used to be that was essentially impossible to do because
it was so complicated. But now with computer aided design,
(43:24):
you can actually build the kind of crazy magnetic fields
we need. So that's another area that's a that's a
different project called the Drinker Experiment. And then there is
the National Ignition Facility here in the US, which is
using lasers to zapp pellets of hydrogen and deterium to
try to make fusion. But this one is sort of
the biggest bet, and I really hope that it works
(43:45):
and that it creates energy and that it changes something
about the nature of science. You know. I do particle physics,
and we hope to learn about the nature of the universe,
but there aren't really immediate practical applications. Here's one place
where physics really can make a difference, I think in
the whole history of humanity. You know, you can change
our relationship with our environment. Interesting, you're rooting for it
(44:07):
because you feel like people will see signs differently if
we get it to work, Like science can be useful
and a practical out for your Netflix and podcast. Yeah,
that's the one benefit. But also I just think there
are a lot of folks out there that could really
benefit from cheap energy. You know, if you have cheap energy,
then a lot of other problems are solved, like fresh water.
(44:28):
All you need to get fresh water is saltwater plus energy.
So if energy is free or cheap, then all of
a sudden, fresh water is not hard to get. And
there a lot of problems that are like that where
the solutions are easy if energy is cheap, you know,
climate change for example, and so a lot of problems
could we could look at them very differently if energy
becomes very cheap. And also, yes, it'd be nice to
(44:50):
have a feather in the cap of physics. Better life
through physics, even if physicists don't have a life. We're
giving up ours for everybody else's all right. Well, we'll
keep an an eye out on this project, and hopefully
we'll hear good news in in a few years from
it that they can make it work. Hopefully it will
make standy progress, and we will hear that they will
(45:10):
have produced energy. So good luck Eaters, and we hope
that you make it work. Good luck with that hot, burning,
nasty donut. Maybe that should be the name of the
snack bar at the Eater Experiment. Just don't eat it
because there's new trials all over the place here. All right, Well,
we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for listening, See you
(45:31):
next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and
Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of I Heart Radio.
Or more podcast from my heart Radio visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(45:51):
your favorite shows.
Hey Tory here. Before we jump in, we just wanted
to let you know that Daniel and I are participating
in a live event this Thursday with Atlas Obscura. That's right.
Do you shout questions at the podcast? Do you have
things you'd like to ask us live? Wellcome join us
on Thursday October eight, twenty twenty. It's four thirty pm
Pacific times seven thirty pm US Eastern time. You can
(00:23):
ask us questions, I'll answer them and Jorge will scribbled
clever doodles. We talked about the big questions in the universe,
and I'll be drawing cartoons live. So please join us.
To buy tickets, just google Daniel and Jorge Atlas Obscura
and you'll see the event. Come join us, see you there, Hey, Jorge,
(00:49):
I need some feedback on the name of a new
megaphysics project my specialty. What do you have so far?
What do you think of destroyer of World? That's a
terrible idea? All right? How about um planet eater? I'm
not sure I would go on a tour of that one.
What if we just shortened it to like eater? How's
(01:09):
that eater? That would be a name for a snack bar,
but I'm not sure it would work for a physics experiment.
I think it's good. We're going with it while you're kidding, right,
Nobody would actually name their physics projects eater, would they? Hi?
(01:39):
Am or Hey, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of
PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and
I'm a lover of silly physics acronyms, and I am
a lover of eating. So we are in a good
company today. Stars are aligning. You might even say they're
fusing together. Dan, that's right, all the bananas are aligned.
But welcome to a podcast Dan and Jorge Explain the Universe,
(02:01):
a production of I Heart Radio in which we seek
to explain to you all the craziness in the universe,
the way things work, the way things don't work, what
we do understand, what we don't understand, Where you can
take a banana, and where you should definitely never ever
take a banana. That's right, practical advice like that. And
also we talk about all the things that science is
(02:21):
up to these days, all the things that they're trying
to understand and know about and discover, but also all
the things that you're trying to make that's right. Science
is actively trying to make your life better. We are
working hard at the big questions of the day, and
not just where do you come from? What's the universe
made out of? What will be the ultimate fate of
the universe, but also how can you power your electric car?
(02:45):
And can you charge your phone anywhere all the time?
Most important, how can we power your Netflix addiction a
little bit more efficiently and ecologically friendly? You mean your
podcast addiction, right, because all these folks number one form
of entertainment is listening to awesome science podcasts, that's right, Yeah,
podcast and chills in you Netflix and Chill. I think
(03:08):
a lot of people probably listen to this podcast when
they're exercising. So you know, if you just hook up
your treadmill to like a generator, it could be a
zero net waste endeavor here. Yeah, but then what powers
the people? Right? Then it's essentially a banana powered podcast. Yeah.
Bananas are solar powered, right, So it all works out true.
(03:31):
In the end, it all comes down to energy from
the sun. Everything we do on Earth almost is eventually
derived from the energy of the Sun. Yeah, the Sun
powers the life on Earth and it's pretty warm and toasty,
and so scientists have been looking at the Sun for
a long time thinking, man, if we only had a
little sun here on Earth, he could warm us up
(03:51):
and give us all the energy that we need. So
I can talk about creating little black holes and that
freaks you up, but you can just talk about like
making a little sun here on Earth. You realize, of course,
that the Sun is a constantly exploding hydrogen bomb, right, yeah,
but does the Sun create a runaway sucking chain reaction
that grows and grows and grows. So hey, black holes
(04:14):
have their uses to We just did a whole episode
about black hole power and starships. They could take us
through other star systems. So anyway, I just got to
speak up from black holes here. Okay, you have a
pet one in your backyard. No, I'm just you know,
I'm a shill for the big black hole lobby. But
you're right, the sun is amazing. The Sun is wonderful,
and the Sun does power everything that we do. And
(04:37):
as we look around for greener, cleaner sources of energy,
it does seem tempting to think, well, the universe does
it this way, why can't we do it that way also,
and it's something that physicists have been working on for decades. Yeah,
for a long time. They've been trying to make this
idea of living sun on Earth possible. And so to
the end the program, we'll be talking about one such experiment.
(05:00):
It's happening right now as we speak. There are sciences
in this moment, in this world trying to treat a
little sun or more like a sun donut, exactly like
a plasma donut. I don't know what flavor that is,
but I don't recommend taking a bite out of it.
But yeah, exactly. One problem is that the Sun is
massive and exploding constantly, and the reason it doesn't tear
(05:22):
itself apart is because it has so much gravity. And
so we need to figure out other ways to sort
of replicate the parts of the Sun that we want
to keep without having the sort of like earth destroying
aspects that are less interesting to us. Yeah, and so
today we'll be asking the question, what is the eater
(05:43):
experiment and will it create fusion here on Earth? Now? Daniel,
so you were serious? This is actually called the eater experiment,
that's right, I T e R. And it's pronounced by
plasma physicists everywhere to be the eater experiment. Not iteter
or eat or anything like that. People call it eater
(06:03):
without any sort of sense of irony or understanding that absurd.
That is what language pronounces the eye and the e,
you know, the open e. Is it like a weird
collaboration between French and US scientists. It's a huge international collaboration.
So I don't know who's responsible for that. And it's
likely that other countries pronounced the acronym differently, you know,
(06:25):
in French they probably pronounced or something right. Yeah, I
don't even know how the Japanese would do it. But
here in America we call it the eater experiment. Again,
just to verify, it's not trying to eat the entire earth.
It's trying to do the opposite. It's trying to feed
the whole earth. It's exactly. It's trying to fuel the
Earth into an attempt at magnetic confinement fusion. But as usual,
(06:47):
I was curious did people know about the eater experiment.
We actually got a few emails from listeners asking us
to talk about this, so I thought, hey, maybe our
listeners know all about this, So I pulled them to
figure out what they knew, And I asked them if
they knew what the Eater experiment was all about. Do
you think they wrote you because they were curious or concerned? Daniel,
They're like, oh, physics are making something called the Eater experiment.
(07:11):
Should we be worried? No. I think they wrote me
because they were hopeful. You know, the Eater experiment really
does represent something positive. If they make it work and
we get fusion to work, we could have essentially almost
limitless energy, which could really transform our economies and lift
a lot of people out of poverty. So it's tantalizing,
(07:32):
you know, it's really inspires hope, and so I think
they were hoping that I would say, yes, it's around
the corner and we're going to solve all of our problems.
But you're like, no, I am in the black hole
lobby pocket unfortunately, so I can't chill for fusion. Although
you know, if you want to create a black hole
to power your starship, you need a very good source
of energy. And so it might be that we build
(07:52):
a little star and run it as a fusion experiment
in order to gather energy and then pump that via
lasers into a black hole, so every you can be happy.
You get your star I get my black hole. If
I have a son, why would I need a black
hole to power your starship? Man? You should listen to
that episode. It's pretty awesome. All right, Well, think about
(08:13):
it for a second. Is soone as you what the
eater experiment was? Would you respond that you are hungry,
thank you? Or what would you say? Here's what people
had to say. Something to do intergalactic telescope, extraterrestrial radar.
I believe it's a nuclear fusion experiment that needs to
replicate the Sun's fusion power to create clean energy. I
(08:35):
have not heard of that one, but I will be
very interested to learn what it is. I think it's
the French and French abbreviation kind of like certain in fact,
but I believe it has to do with nuclear fusion,
with with building a nuclear fusion reactor, something to do
(08:55):
with acronyms interplanetary terrestrial exploration in research. Maybe that sounds good. Yeah,
I'm surprised after that that nobody said yes. And I'll
have a side of fries with that either piece. That's right?
Some chips please? Yeah? So um and some people I've
heard of it, and some people had no idea. Yeah.
And for the record, the acronym I T e R
(09:17):
stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor I T E R. Oh. No, yeah,
I know. Thermonuclear sounds like war games right now. I
was I was saying, they omitted the nuclear, so she
really should be itner. No, No, thermonuclear is one word,
so's t otherwise be eater, I guess. But they actually
(09:40):
they didn't like that expression, so they renamed it just
I T E R. Now it's an acronym officially that
doesn't stand for anything. It's just either what was it originally?
I International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor? Oh? I see, but how
did they rename it? They just renamed it I T
e R. So used to be the International Thermonuclear Experimental
(10:02):
Reactor and acronym for that was I T e R.
But now the name is just I T E R. Oh.
I see. They made the acronym the name, yes, exactly,
that they wouldn't have to print under T shirts like thermonuclear.
Is that what you mean? Exactly? I think thermonuclear didn't
pull very well in the surrounding communities when they were
building this. Seriously, Okay, but it's still a thermo nuclear.
(10:25):
It's just hidden in the name exactly the physics of
it have been change is just a change and what
we call it and how we refer to it. All right, well,
let's jump into it. Daniel, explain to us what is
the Eater experiment and is it going to eat us?
The Eater experiment is going to eat hydrogen and create electricity,
is the idea. But the big idea is that Eater
(10:46):
is what we think will be the first working fusion reactor,
something cable of taking in fuel and creating electricity, and
it will operate on fusion, which again is different from vision.
We have nuclear reactor now which operate on the principle
of fission breaking up big heavy elements like uranium and
plutonium to create energy. This operates under fusion, which is
(11:10):
sticking together light elements to create energy, right, because fusion
is putting things together and somehow that releases energy. Also,
like I think we're used to breaking things apart and
that releasing energy. But it's kind of weird to think
that you can put things together and that will also
give your energy. Yeah, And it's pretty weird because if
you have really heavy elements, anything essentially above iron, then
(11:32):
if you break it apart, you get energy out. And
for those you can think of them like two little
objects sort of held together by a coiled spring, and
the bond there holds in energy. Right, The spring has energy,
and if you somehow break it, then things fly out.
You get energy out when you break those bonds. But
anything lighter than iron, it works the opposite way. It's
(11:55):
like the things are stuck together and to break them
up you need to add energy, right, Like, for example,
if you wanted the Earth to no longer be moving
around the Sun, if you want to break the bond
between the Earth and the Sun, you need to add energy.
You need to give the Earth a push, so that
bond has sort of negative energy. And so in the
same way, if you went in the reverse, if you
(12:16):
created that bond instead of breaking it, you'd be releasing energy.
So anything lighter than iron, if you fuse it, if
you stick it together, you release energy, and if you
tear it apart then that takes energy. Right. It's still
kind of weird to think about, isn't it. Like you know,
it wants to be together, but if you put them
together it costs you like, it's hard to do that. Yeah, well,
(12:38):
it's weird in lots of ways. But you know, imagine,
for example, you had to planets and you want to
get them in orbit around each other. If they're moving
it really high speeds. Then to do that, you would
have to remove some of their energy. You'd have to
slow them down relative to each other so they could
form a bond, and so has to essentially extract energy
from that system. And so that's what we're doing here,
(12:59):
is we're taking two hydrogen atoms and we're slowing them down.
We're getting them close enough together, reducing their relative energy
so that we can extract that energy and make them
bond together. But it is pretty weird. I agree, it's
counterintuitive to imagine sticking things together and having energy come out, right,
And I think it all has to do is kind
of like this balance between the different fundamental forces, right,
(13:21):
Like the thing that makes it hard to put to
hydrogen nuclei together is the allerg for a magnetic force, right,
because they repel each other electromagnetically. But if you get
in close enough, then another force takes over and then
that's the one that releases energy. Right. Yeah, So there's
two separate ideas there. One is why does hydrogen and
light elements, why do they release energy when they fuse?
(13:42):
Whereas heavy stuff, why does it release energy when it
breaks up? And that's because of the strong force. And
that's like how these quirks and the protons and neutrons
fit together to make their bonds. And it's very very
complicated and difficult to calculate. And then there's the second angle,
which is what makes it hard to get too protons together. Essentially,
two hydrogen atoms are basically just two protons and you're
(14:05):
right there positively charged, and so they don't like to
come together. So getting them together, get them near each
other so that they can fuse, is difficult. It's sort
of like trying to get a hole in one in
mini golf. When the hole is the very top of
a volcano. You've got to get it like ride up
the topic. You don't get it in exactly the right spot.
It just rules away because it likes to repel all
(14:27):
the golf balls, right. And and that'sually what kind of
like the distance that the forces act on, right, Like
the electromagnetic force acts a pretty long distances, but the
strong nuclear force only works if you're like really close
to that hole at the top of the volcano. Yeah,
the strong nuclear force is really really powerful, and so
it's essentially always balanced in any distance greater than you know,
(14:48):
pretty close to the proton, and so you don't really
feel it unless you're really really close up. And you're right,
the electromagnetic force is balanced. It sort of longer distances,
and you can have protons that are positively charged, and
it's field essentially goes infinite. You can feel another proton
on the other side of the universe, although this strength
is very small, but you're right. As two protons reach
(15:10):
each other, it starts out that the electromagnetic force is dominant.
But if you get close enough, the strong force takes over.
But you've got to get them close enough and to
positively charged protons don't like to get together. They really resisted.
It's like a brother and sister hugging. Yeah, so if
you put them together, they'll snap together and they'll release
a bunch of energy, like they'll release photons or how
(15:31):
does that energy come out? It's complicated. You get hygen together,
you get helium, you get new tree nos, you get photons.
There's actually a few steps in that process, and what
happens inside the sun is a big mix of all
these different things, and photons are created and then be
absorbed and new trios are created, so it's a big gamush.
But yeah, basically, you get hygiene together the fuses to
(15:52):
make helium, and if you get it hot enough, that
helium confused to make the next thing, and then that
confused to make the next thing. And that's what's happening
in the inside of stars. And as stars get older,
they get these denser and denser cores. The hydrogen fuses
and then the helium fuses, and eventually you get you know,
carbon and nitrogen, oxygen all the way up to iron.
(16:12):
And that's when they run out of fuel because the
iron for it to fuse, costs energy, so it starts
to cool the star and that's when the beginning of
the end of the life of the star starts. But
until then, it's a pretty efficient way to kind of
create energy, right, Like a gramm of fuel here for
a fusion reactor will give you a ton of energy,
(16:34):
that's right, like tons and tons like a lot of energy.
You're much more efficiently converting mass into energy than in
almost anything else we know other than like antimatter matter collisions,
but antimatter is pretty difficult to find. The real advantage
of fusion is that the fuel is everywhere. Like hydrogen
is very, very plentiful in the universe. We have a
(16:55):
lot of it in water, for example, And you're right,
it produces a huge amount of energy. So one gram
of fuel produces as much energy is eighty thousand tons
of oil, So it's a lot more efficient than fossil fuels.
That's crazy. Like a gram of hydrogen is one like
a cup, like like a tea spoon. What is it?
(17:17):
I guess it depends a lot on the pressure in
the temperature, right, but it's not a lot. You know,
A gram is about how much a raisin ways, So
a raisin's words of hydrogen is the same as eighty
thousand tons of oil. That's like a whole container ship.
And what makes it attractive toys that we were sort
of surrounded by fuel that we could use for a
(17:37):
fusion reactor, right, Like you can get hydrogen just from water,
and we have a lot of water. Yeah, we have
a lot of water, and hydrogen is the most plentiful
thing in the universe. Some of like nineties percent of
the universe is hydrogen. Not like we're going to go
out there to gather it, but you know, you imagine
if fusion is going to power your spaceships or whatever.
It's not that hard to find hydrogen, whereas things like
(17:59):
uranium is much much rarer. You know, uranium is created
when neutron stars collide and die. It's very rare process,
which is why there isn't very much of it. But
hydrogen is everywhere. It was the number one thing made
during the Big Bang, and it's still number one. It's
planning to be number one for billions of years into
the future. So yeah, we're not going to run out
of hydrogen, right And one of the best parts about
(18:20):
a fusion reactor is that it's super green, right, Like,
it doesn't create any toxic waste or radioactive waste or
like carbon or carbon at all. Right, Like, it just
makes helium and energy, And who doesn't want more helium.
We could all have balloons, We can all talk with
silly voices. We should do a whole podcast with just
helium voices. No, you're right, it doesn't create radioactive waste
(18:43):
the way that fission does you know fission, you have
really heavy elements like uranium, they break up, you still
have heavy elements that are radioactive, and those can take
tens of thousands of years to break down even further.
So you've got this stuff that's not useful for generating
energy and sticks around basically poisoning your ironman four thousands
and thousands of years. Fusion is different. It's not clean,
(19:06):
but essentially already produces helium and energy. The other thing
it does is it produces very high speed neutrons. Now
you can try to capture the energy of those neutrons,
which would be great, but you know those neutrons can
cause radio activity in the material that surrounds it, So
there is some radioactive waste from fusion. It's not completely zero,
but it's almost negligible compared to fusion. All right, Well,
(19:29):
it sounds amazing, and it would be awesome if we
can make fusion work here on Earth and make our
own little sun and powers and then get us all
nice and toasty. But there are a lot of challenges.
For example, how do how do you make it work?
And how do you keep it from not exploding your
entire plant? So let's get into that. But first, let's
take a quick break, all right, Daniel, we're we're talking
(20:03):
about a fusion and making fusion work here on Earth,
and specifically about the Eater experiment. And it's in Europe, right,
and they're they're trying to make fusion work right now,
that's right. They're building it in France and they're working
on it. And it's the culmination of decades and decades
of research of trying to make fusion work here on Earth,
which turns out to not be very easy. As we
(20:24):
talked about before, you have to get these hydrogens close
to each other, and how do you do that efficiently?
And for a lot of hydrogens, you can't just like
shoot two protons at each other. That's what we do
basically at the LHC. That's not very efficient for generating energy, right, Yeah,
So it's it's pretty hard to do. But we've been
trying for decades and decades to make this work because
I guess the payoff would be pretty cool. But I
(20:47):
guess the hard part is getting these hydrogens to come
together and get close en out that they snap together
and release this energy. And so what are the different
ways that we can do that? Do we throw them
at each other or do you just kind of create
a container and squeeze it enough so that it actually happens.
So we need high enough numbers to make this efficient,
which is why we can't just like use colliders. There's
(21:08):
a whole other branch of fusion research where they use
lasers and try to zap fuel. We won't talk about
that today, but the basic idea of magnetic confinement fusion
is to make a little star basically to create plasma,
to take a bunch of hydrogen gas and make it really,
really hot and dense. And the idea is that those
are the conditions you need for these hydrogens to bang
(21:29):
into each other to cause fusion. So basically you have
to leave them nowhere else to go. You've got to
crowd all the hydrogens together so there's no escape. They
got to fuse with each other. And then, of course
the trick is how do you build a really hot,
dense plasma and how do you contain it because it
would basically melt any device you made out of normal matth. Yeah,
(21:50):
I think you're basically trying to do exactly what's happening
in the sun right Like in the sun all that
hydrogen is there, but it's trapped and it's being squeezed
to get there by the sheer size of the Sun
everything else kind of squeezing it together, and so it
becomes it's kind of like hot, pressurized plasma that then
triggers fusion. That's right, And so the Sun uses basically
(22:13):
a gravitational bottle. Right. It says, I'm just gonna go
really big so that I have my own gravity that
sucks myself in. But we don't really have that option.
We don't want to build another Sun. We got one already,
and if we built a fusion reactor the size of
the Sun, it would destroy us. So the challenge of
building a mini one one that's practical for human purposes
is finding another way to keep that plasma hot and
(22:35):
dense and contained. And the big idea is to use magnets,
because magnets can bend the direction of stuff without actually
touching it. Right, You can have like magnetically levitating trains
and all sorts of other magnetic confinement. So you try
to build a magnetic bottle that doesn't actually have to
touch the plasma itself, right, because I guess the plasma
(22:57):
is charged right, Like everything in the plasma has a charge,
and and so it's repelled by the magnets, and so
you can contain and using magnets, but you couldn't contain
other things with magnets. They had to be electric charge.
That's right. A plasma is electrically charged gas, right. That's
what it means that it's gotten hot enough that the
electrons have so much energy that they just say bye
(23:18):
bye to their protons and they're just flying around free.
And so you have a gas of positive and neglearly
charged particles. That's the definition of a plasma. And that
happens naturally when you heat it up exactly. And you're
right that magnetic fields only act on charged particles, and
they cause charge particles to bend in a circle. So
then the next challenge is, well, how do you build
a bottle that if you can't like push back on
(23:39):
the particles, you can just sort of bend them to
move in a circle that maintains this plasma in a
constant state. And so that's how they came up with
this geometry of basically a donut. You have all the
particles basically going in a circle, whizzing in a circle,
and you have magnetic fields that create sort of a
tube around it. Then the magnetic fields force the particle,
(24:00):
They bend the particles to move in the circle, and
it's sort of a dynamo effect. The motion of those
charged particles creates more magnetic field, which helps contain it.
So it should be sort of building on itself, the
same way that like the motion of hot iron inside
the Earth helps the magnetic field, and the magnetic field
helps move the iron sort of builds on itself. So
(24:22):
I see, you couldn't just make like a bottle that
looks like a bottle, or like a bottle that's like
a sphere. That wouldn't quite work for fusion here on Earth.
The tricky thing is getting these things stable. And so
a bottle that just looks like a bottle wouldn't be
stable because there'd be lots of points where the plasma
could just approach the edge of it. You need to
be totally symmetric, so the particles are always bent away
(24:42):
from the edge of the bottle and into some configuration
that helps strengthen the bottle. And so that's this idea.
It's called a tocomac, and it's a plasma basically in
a donut whizzing in a circle, where the plasma itself
helped create the magnetic field that contains it. Wasn't that
the name of a pokemon to I forget a really expensive,
short lived pokemon. I guess the problem. It's kind of
(25:05):
like if you make a son, how do you hold it? Right?
Like how do you hold the sun? You can't touch it.
You can't use oven mits. It will just melt everything.
And it's good you know that you think about these
things before you build your son. So I congratulate you
on your forward thinking there. You know, sometimes you open
the oven and you're like, wait a second, I need
oven mits, right, this is that moment, right, plan to
get your oven mits in advance, all right. So they're
(25:27):
hard to sort of make and contain and keep going stable.
And so you said, we've been doing it for decades,
So what are some of the other attempts that we've made. Yeah,
the hard thing is to keep these things stable because
plasma is very hot and very crazy. These things don't
just fly along nicely like a bunch of cars in
a race, you know, all moving in parallel really high speeds.
(25:48):
They tend to bounce off each other, and anytime you
have a small instability, you can build into larger instabilities
and the whole thing falls apart. So people have been
working for years to figure out how exactly to make
these things stable, Like do you have it be a
perfect donut? Do you have it like a d shape?
Do you have a twist? All sorts of crazy ideas
for how to prevent these instabilities from being created and
(26:10):
from growing, Like do you make it a cronut or
a Danish? Do you glaze it? Who puts cheese in
the middle of a reactor anyway? I mean it is
sort of like a Danish, isn't it. There's like something
in the middle. There's not a hole in the middle.
There's something in the middle. There's a hole in the middle. Yeah,
it's it's like a donut. It's like a bagel. There's
nothing in the middle. I guess the magnetic bottle is
a donut. But you actually have to put the magnet
(26:31):
in the middle. You need the equipment which helps create
and contain the magnetic fields in the middle. That's right,
But you don't have plasma that you don't have magnetic
fields there. The active elements are a donut. But people
have been working on this for a long time, and
there's a reactor at Princeton which was leading it for
a long time. It's called the t F t R
the teethter, and they measure the performance of these things
(26:53):
using a ratio energy out to energy in because it
takes energy to start the reactor. It's like you know,
starting a fire. You've got to light it, you need
to heat the plasma, you need to create the magnetic field,
so it costs some energy and then you get fusion.
That happens, and the way you measure the performance of
your actor is are you getting more heat out than
you put in? Because nobody wants to build a reactor
(27:15):
that's a loss of energy. And so the ratio here
they're called the Q factor is energy out over energy in.
A number greater than zero means you're producing energy. Yeah,
you have fusion. But a number less than one means
it's still costing new energy. You're having to put more
energy in. Then it's actually producing eating up your electricity building. Yeah, exactly,
(27:35):
And so so far at Princeton, the best they achieve
was a queue of four tenth which means they were
able to make fusion happen and create a mini sun.
But if they had turned off the energy they were
pumping into it, it would have dissipated. Right, it costs
the more energy to make it wasn't self sustaining. I
guess it's kind of like the fusion itself, like getting
(27:56):
too hydrogen atoms together takes energy to get them really
close those but if you managed to get them together
just right, they'll snap together and release energy. So it's
kind of like that that ratio of like putting energy
to make it happen and then hopefully it happens. You
know that you get enough energy out of it exactly
because that energy that comes out of those hydrogens can
then help the other hydrogens fused. And that's a condition
(28:18):
they call ignition, where it's creating enough energy to sustain itself.
You don't need to anymore be lighting it from the outside.
And so, you know, it was a huge accomplishment to
get up to point four, and before that people hadn't
really gotten fusion to work at all. So they created
you know, sustained fusion reactions, just not self sustained. And
did that one looked like a donut to or was
(28:39):
it more like that one also look looked like a donut. Yeah,
and then there was one in England, the jet reactor,
which reached a queue of point six. Right, So they've
been making progress, but they realized at some point that
these things were limited by their size. Like, in order
to get more fusion happening, you needed a bigger plasma.
You needed like more plasma and less surface you were
(29:01):
edges for the energy to sort of leak out. You
needed like a fatter donut. You needed a bigger donut.
And let's face it, who doesn't need a bigger donut? Right?
You never eat a donut. You're like, I wish this
donut was smaller. Well, that's because you're a big eater,
and I'm a physicist, so I want to build a
big eater experiment. I guess what you're saying is that
you need to scale it up, because then you get
(29:22):
kind of like, you know, kind of like more donut
per surface area. Is that kind of what it means?
It's denser and you have more internal bits than surface bits,
and so you get more fusion going on. And the
goal here is to get a queue of ten to
get something which we think would be like economically feasible
where you can go to an energy company and say, hey,
(29:42):
we have a design, spend two billion dollars building this.
You want to promise that this thing is going to
produce ten times as much energy as you're putting into it.
So that's the goal. But why tend Why not one
point one? Would one point one be like a net positive?
It would be a net positive, But you know, to
be economically feasible, you've got to produce more than that.
(30:03):
You know, at one point one is pretty small. It
costs a lot to build these things and to operate
these things, and also just to be competitive. Right, there
is a market if you build fusion energy, but it's
super duper expensive. Nobody's going to buy it, and we're
still going to be burning fossil fuels. And so you
have to make fusion happen, and then you have to
make it economically cheap so that it will actually be
(30:23):
consumed and take over the energy grid. So the goal
there is Q of ten. I guess you know, I'm
wondering why a little percentage isn't good enough, because couldn't
you like take the energy that it makes and use
it to power itself and so then you would just
have like almost like this perpetual motion machine that you
just gotta feed in seawater. Yeah, but you know, more
efficiency is definitely better. And remember there's overhead costs and
(30:46):
running this thing and then building this thing and making
it work, and so this is more of a like
a social economic question than engineering question. But they've determined
that a QUE ten is the target, and you know,
I think they're hoping to achieve much much higher queues eventually,
So this is like a research goal. I think they
want to get QUE hundred or a thousand. This process
(31:06):
really has enormous potentials. You're a limit, like what's the
highest que you can get out of a fusion reactor?
I don't think there is a limit. You know, you
can get this thing to be self sustaining so that
it essentially takes no more energy in I guess you
optimize your magnetic fields. You know, maybe not infinite, but
there's no real like upper limit the que you can get.
All right, it sounds amazing, and so let's get into
(31:29):
how we are going to make it work and whether
or not eater is gonna eat up this problem. But
first let's take another quick break all right, we're talking
(31:50):
about making fusion on Earth, making a sun donut, a
solar donut here on Earth that can maybe power all
of our energy needs forever and very efficiently and super
eco friendly without any or much radioactive waste. Now, Danny
were saying, we've been trying for decades here and now
(32:11):
the latest project is called Eater in Europe and trying
to make this work. And so how's it going from them, Well,
it's been going. That's about as good as you can say.
That doesn't sound good. Hasn't been great. Now things have
taken a much better turn recently, but it's been a
tricky project. You know, I've been watching this feel from
Afar and for a long time I thought this is
sort of like they're super conducting super collider. They decided
(32:34):
we're gonna go really big. We're gonna spend billions, but
we're gonna make it awesome. And the project, you know,
it needs sustained political support. And they started out in
the nineties and the US was part of it, and
then the US pulled out and we thought all the
project was going to fall apart. Yeah, why do we
pull out? Why do we pull out? Why do we
ever cancel our support for a science project. It's some
(32:56):
politics thing, you know, these billions versus those billions. Congress
is fickle. Then they fickle pickled again. And the US
was back in in two thousand three, and so now
that you as is back in. So they've been working
these things since the nineties. And one of the ideas
here is not just let's build a reactor that works,
but let's spread the knowledge of fusion reactors around the world.
(33:18):
We don't just want to develop a very capable fusion
economy in the US. We want to do it also
in India and in China and in Russia, etcetera. And
so it's very decentralized project. Like you guys build a
vacuum chamber, you guys build these diagnostics. And that's a
cool idea and a nice vision, but didn't really work
very well for organizing a billions of dollars project that
(33:40):
needs to be completed on schedule. Yeah, it seems like
you want to make it work first before you tell
other people how to make it work. Yeah. Well, I
think part of selling it was you know, all these
other countries please pitch in hundreds of millions of dollars
and you'll get to participate in the economics of it,
you'll get to be a leader and how to build
this part of the device. I think that was part
of the political selling points. But you know, they also
(34:03):
paid the price because it's very hard to organize stuff
that's so decentralized, with lots of different cultures participating, and
so the cost started out estimated around four billion euros
and now it's looking to be like more than twenty
billion euros, which is pretty steep. I mean, it's hard
to imagine a commercial operation spending twenty billion euros to
(34:24):
build a reactor, but you know, the ideas they build
this one, they figure out how to make it better
and cheaper, etc. Yeah, I feel I feel like bill
is not even that much. I mean, for like, you know,
super cheap, free energy for the rest of humanity's history.
Sounds like a bargain. All right, well, I'm glad you're
so open to investments. I'd like to pitch to you
that my Fusion Energy company. Would you like to invest
(34:46):
facing Nigeria organized by a prince, Yes, please just click
on this link. No, but then there was a guy
who took over in two thousand fifteen, and he's sort
of centralized power a little bit and decision making. And
since two thousand fifteen, it's really been on track. It's
been very well organized. They got good spreadsheets, etcetera. And
(35:06):
people now think in the community that it's going pretty well.
They're making steady progress. And they actually just recently the
last few weeks shipped some of the cryostat, this thing
that is going to hold the plasma. They shifted from
Korea to France to start assembly. So it's coming together.
It's coming together. We're starting to see real progress. And
you know, this thing is going to be enormous, Like
(35:26):
how big was the one at Princeton? Was it like
desktop size? No, it was definitely not a desktop size.
It was like a really large room. You know, the
plasma on the scale of like a meter high. This
thing is going to be like twelve The donuts gonna
be twelve meters high, twelve meters high. It's going to
be enormous. But that's what they think. They need to
get a queue of ten to get ten times as
much energy out as in. So it's a big task, right,
(35:49):
and nobody ever built these things before. Remember when you
do physics research at this scale. You're not like going
to Best Buy and purchasing a fusion reactor and there's
a customer support when it doesn't work. Right, Nobody's ever
done this before, and so every decision, every piece of technology,
every redoubt, everything has to be designed and thought about,
usually by physics grad students, and so you know, I'm
(36:11):
impressed when it works at all. It feels sort of
like they try to jump to orders of magnitude in
with this one, right, Like I feel like me, do
you think maybe they try to bite off too much?
Like they went from point four q two point six?
You know, I would think the next logical step is
like two cute or something, but no, they went for ten. Yeah,
you know it's strategic, right. If they get que of
(36:32):
ten to work, then boom, fusion is a thing. Fusion
is now commercially viable. It's a whole new era for humanity.
So I think they decided to just you know, go
for the home run, and it's a strategic choice. If
it doesn't work, then you know that the whole branch
of research is probably dead. But you know, there are
other ways people are exploring fusion, so they're definitely swinging
(36:54):
for the fences, and that's a question of strategy, not science.
And I understand, and I'm rooting for them. I really
hope make it work. I'm sick of all our crazy, dirty,
expensive energy. You'd be wonderful if they made fusion work.
And you know, this thing, it's on track, and they're
expecting to finish the vessel that holds the plasma in
about and to turn the thing on in to make
(37:17):
first plasma. Well, it's pretty soon. That's pretty soon. Yeah,
that's you know, around the corner. And then they're going
to tweak in and play with it and gradually ramp
it up over the next few years. And they're hoping
to get you actual power generated by this thing around. Now.
That's assuming that it works. Is there anything still uncertain
about the theory of it or do we know pretty
(37:39):
well that it's going to work. It's just a matter
of like timing the bolts. Well, the theorists are pretty confident.
They think it's a pretty straight scale up and that
if you build this thing and you do it correctly,
it should really work. I mean, we've seen fusion happen.
We know how to do it. They've just dealt with
a lot of the issues of plasma instability. They think
they know how to do that, how to manage the
(37:59):
magnetic fields to suppress those instabilities, So they're pretty confident.
On the other hand, you know, there's a lot of
things that crop up for the first time in reality
that you didn't expect when you're doing them on paper.
They've done complicated simulations, etcetera. So they're pretty confident. But
even if that's all correct, even if their theory is correct,
and you build a thing and you turn it on
and it generates power, there are still some problems they
(38:22):
haven't even actually started to think about, Like what, well,
you know this thing is going to generate energy, but
they haven't figured out how to capture that energy, Like
what are you gonna do about energy? Yeah, what what
do you mean that there's no plan for, you know,
actually taking the energy out. But because if you don't
think the energy out, it's it's just gonna explode, isn't it?
Or heat up? The energy A lot of is produced
(38:43):
in the form of neutrons. So these neutrons are created
and they fly out with a lot of energy, and
neutrons again aren't captured by the plasma because they're not
charged as to the idea is figure out a way
to capture these neutrons outside of the plasma and turn
them into heat, and then turn that heat into steam
and turn that steam to electricity. But nobody's really figured
out how to make that part work. And you know,
(39:05):
neutrons are not great for you, Like, if you stand
near a high energy source of neutrons, you'll basically get
cancer very quickly. And neutrons will also make stuff radioactive.
So if you just turn this thing on empower it
without doing anything about the neutrons, it'll turn the entire
reactor and then building it's in radioactive pretty quickly, and
not like good radioactive, but like activate it make it
(39:28):
radioactive potentially for a long time. So what's the plan?
I mean, didn't they figure that out before they turn
it on? Well, I think it's a two step plan.
They're like, let's figure out how to make the energy
and then we'll figure out how to capture it. But
it's it's a bit of the Oven Midst sort of situation.
You want to make sure you know how to handle
this thing before you build it. So they have a
sketch of an idea. It's actually really clever if you
(39:48):
surround this thing in blankets of lithium, then neutrons when
they hit lithium, they capture the energy, the heat up
and you can you know, extract that energy through heat
turning into electricity. Plus it turns the lithium blankets into
exactly the kind of hydrogen you need to run as
fuel for your reactor. So you need to turn lithium
(40:10):
into basically deuterium or tritium, various isotopes of hydraight what
So it's a nice little solution. Sorry, let me get
maybe a picture here. So we have this donut and
it's really hot, and it's containing a magnetic bottle and
it's giving off huge, huge amounts of neutrons. But don't
these neutrons and hit the walls of the container that
(40:32):
it's holding and then destroy it or heat it up.
Are you saying put the blankets of lithium before that
or within that. Well, they haven't made a whole lot
of progress on this. A lot of these ideas are
still sort of in early stages, and the Element of
the Eater program that was supposed to focus on exactly
those questions hasn't received a whole lot of funding. They're
(40:53):
really focusing just on generating the fusion and generating the energy,
and so the folks I spoke to definitely acknowledge that
they needs to be worked on more. But you're right,
you can't put the lithium blankets directly inside or they
get melted by the plasma, and so they'll be parts
of the reactor which will be irradiated by the neutrons
and they will need to be you know, eventually replaced.
(41:13):
So that's what I was talking about, is saying there
is some waste generated by a fusion reactor. Essentially the
reactor itself becomes irradiated and needs to be rebuilt and replaced.
But if you put these lithium blankets around the reactor,
it should capture that energy from the neutrons and create
more fuel you need to fuel the reactor. So it's
a nice little cycle if you can make it work.
(41:35):
But you know, this hasn't really be improved in practice
at the level we would need to actually get energy
electricity out of eather. How do the neutrons create you said,
it takes lithium, and the lithium catches it and then
the lithium transforms into these heavy hydrogens. Yeah, so lithium
is not a very heavy element, and if you smash
(41:55):
neutrons into it, then it cracks open and you can
get hydrogens, and you can get deuteriums, you can get tritiums,
and so it basically turns into the fuel you need
to funnel back into the reactor. But then then then
don't you need more lithium? What if you're run out
of lithium? Yeah, essentially you need more lithium. But again,
lithium is not that rare. It's atomic number three. But
(42:17):
you know, these are the parts of this whole research
program that are not as fleshed out as the rest
of it. They're like, first, let's get Q of ten.
Let's produce a huge hot, you know, nasty burning doughnut,
and then we'll figure out how to use that donut
to run your eyes. Let's make a huge what did
you call it, huge, nasty burning donut, and then we'll
figure out who knows that was the alternative name for
(42:40):
this program. They went with eater Instead, they went the
other way. They're like, I couldn't make this more appealing.
Let's call it the thermonuclear donut, all right? Well, hopefully
they'll figure it out. I mean, it seems like they're
they're confidant that it can be figured out and they
just have to kind of put funding into it. Yeah,
(43:01):
they really do hope that it works, and the whole
field is sort of like place their bet on this.
There are other ways people are working on fusion. There
are other devices like a stellarator, which doesn't have a
current of plasma so doesn't create its own magnetic field.
You create the magnetic field from the outside, and it
used to be that was essentially impossible to do because
it was so complicated. But now with computer aided design,
(43:24):
you can actually build the kind of crazy magnetic fields
we need. So that's another area that's a that's a
different project called the Drinker Experiment. And then there is
the National Ignition Facility here in the US, which is
using lasers to zapp pellets of hydrogen and deterium to
try to make fusion. But this one is sort of
the biggest bet, and I really hope that it works
(43:45):
and that it creates energy and that it changes something
about the nature of science. You know. I do particle physics,
and we hope to learn about the nature of the universe,
but there aren't really immediate practical applications. Here's one place
where physics really can make a difference, I think in
the whole history of humanity. You know, you can change
our relationship with our environment. Interesting, you're rooting for it
(44:07):
because you feel like people will see signs differently if
we get it to work, Like science can be useful
and a practical out for your Netflix and podcast. Yeah,
that's the one benefit. But also I just think there
are a lot of folks out there that could really
benefit from cheap energy. You know, if you have cheap energy,
then a lot of other problems are solved, like fresh water.
(44:28):
All you need to get fresh water is saltwater plus energy.
So if energy is free or cheap, then all of
a sudden, fresh water is not hard to get. And
there a lot of problems that are like that where
the solutions are easy if energy is cheap, you know,
climate change for example, and so a lot of problems
could we could look at them very differently if energy
becomes very cheap. And also, yes, it'd be nice to
(44:50):
have a feather in the cap of physics. Better life
through physics, even if physicists don't have a life. We're
giving up ours for everybody else's all right. Well, we'll
keep an an eye out on this project, and hopefully
we'll hear good news in in a few years from
it that they can make it work. Hopefully it will
make standy progress, and we will hear that they will
(45:10):
have produced energy. So good luck Eaters, and we hope
that you make it work. Good luck with that hot, burning,
nasty donut. Maybe that should be the name of the
snack bar at the Eater Experiment. Just don't eat it
because there's new trials all over the place here. All right, Well,
we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for listening, See you
(45:31):
next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and
Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of I Heart Radio.
Or more podcast from my heart Radio visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(45:51):
your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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