The world's energy consumption is ruining the planet but for decades physicists have been working on what could solve the world's energy and climate change woes for centuries to come - nuclear fusion. Learn about building stars on Earth in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, I'm back. I first heard about Eider, which
is the nuclear fusion reactor being built in Europe, from
a New Yorker article called Star in a Bottle by
Rathi Kachadourian. And if you find this episode floats your boat,
I highly recommend reading that article too. The whole idea
of what they're trying to do, which is to contain plasma,
that crazy intense fourth state of matter that the sun
(00:25):
and lightning are made up of, into a chamber here
on Earth where it has no business being really really
caught my attention. And if they can do it, extremely cheap, abundant,
climate friendly energy will be unlocked for all, and who
knows what will follow after that. The Eider group was
shooting for twenty twenty five to start, but recently changed
(00:46):
their date to twenty thirty four. You can pass the
time while you wait by enjoying this episode.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry, who's Barrel laughs, And
this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
She gave us the old quick start. Yeah, like, I
don't want to hear any more impressing record.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, she knows that it shuts me up, or at
least cuts off whatever conversation I'm chiding her.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
It's great. I'm telling you. If we could release the
twenty seconds before each show as its own show, yeah,
that would be terrible. Yeah, no, one who cares.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
No, we'd think it was funny and everybody else would
be like, you edit this out for a reason. Yep,
So Chuck, how you doing great? Have you ever been
to as on Provence, France? No? Is that a place?
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah? No, I haven't.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
It is a rustic little town in Provence, and it
is strangely, maybe even ironically, in the non hipster you've
been in.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
The actual Yeah, it's a real word.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Definition of the word also cite to one of the
most futuristic engineering projects humanity's ever undertaken.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Meat or meat that's a sound it makes.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Oh, I thought you're mocking me. No, no, no, for being
thrilled by the thought of this thing.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
No, it is kind of funny that this thing's in
a sleepy little town. It's like a Hamlet may Bee
Cern in Switzerland. That's not in the city, is it No,
you can't build these things in cities. That's why they're
in sleepy towns exactly, because no one knows they're being poisoned.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yeah, and you can push the mare around pretty easy, exactly.
This thing is called eider ITER, which is an acronym
for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. That's right, which really
gets the point across.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Did you know the word acronym is an acronym. That's
not true. Okay, I just want to see how long
you would try and sort it out in your head.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I would have kept going on what it means thirty seconds?
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Maybe that would have been a great joke. Could it
just kept it going. I'm not gonna tell you.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I would have been. I would have it maybe fifteen seconds,
because you would have gotten that much more sure. So
I wouldn't have looked it up. I would have figured
it out myself. Anyway. EIDER is this colossal engineering project.
Somebody compared it to the pyramids at Giza. Oh wow, Yeah,
that's that's exciting stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
The thing is is it's a nuclear fusion reactor, and
it's the culmination of decades of attempts to create a
nuclear fusion reactor. Because we've got fission down and we'll
talk about the difference in a minute, but fusion has
been very elusive, and nowhere is it more apparent than
(03:47):
in the Eider project. Because this thing is going to
cost it approximately fifty billion dollars when it's completed, fifty
billion dollars. They started in nineteen ninety three. They're hoping
to turn on the switch in twenty twenty, but it's
looking like twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four, and
it won't be starting to produce anything until the two
(04:09):
thousand and forties at the earliest.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
So what's the.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Point, I'll tell you the point. Yeah, if we can
figure out nuclear fusion chucking the world's literally the world's
energy problems will be solved for millennia. If we can
just figure this out, we will have a almost no
radioactivity nuclear option, almost limitless fuel supply, yeah, totally green,
(04:41):
yeah clean.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
No pollution, no greenhouse emissions, right.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
And with plenty of energy to spare using the already
extant infrastructure we have to supply power like, you don't
have to completely rebuild everything. You can just to the
electrical cables outside. It'll be the exact same thing.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, you can just go to a nuclear fission reactor
and press the button that says fusion and it'll all
of a sudden join atoms instead of split them.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
It's that easy.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
That's what the difference is. With fission, you're splitting atoms
and you're gaining energy from that. With fusion, you're smacking
them together. Yeah, and you're gaining even more energy because
we're you're exploiting a different fundamental force.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yeah, and that I was being coy Clearly there is
no button because we would have pushed it a long
time ago.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
And when I say no pollution and no greenhouse emissions
before the pedantic among you right in we know that
just even shipping something from here to there causes pollution
and greenhouse emissions.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Good, but we're.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Talking about that the output of the reactor itself is
very green.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
So if you want to know all about Eider, well
we're going to talk about it here or there, because
it's just you just can't talk about nuclear fusion reactors
and not mentioned Eider. But if you want to know
a lot about Eider, there is a really great article
called A Star and a Bottle, and it's by a
person named rock Fee cutcha Duran or Durian. And it
was written in the New Yorker not too long ago. Yeah,
(06:05):
and man, it is every detail you want to know
about the IDE project written really well, and it's long,
but it's totally worth the read.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Yeah, it's all over the news lately, and for good reason.
You said a lot of energy. I have a stat
I'm going to throw back to the old days here.
Per kilogram of fuel, if we're talking fusion and fission,
fusion produces four times more energy than fission.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
I saw seven.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
It's probably only things where it's like four to five
to ten or something. I found four times and ten
million times more than coal. Yeah, ten million times. Yeah,
the energy is coal. And that's with equal fuel per
kilogram of fuel. Right, It's just I mean, it is
the future.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah. And you can say, well that's great because we
want eighteen million times the amount of power that coal provides.
You can say, weather buddy, you can also bring it
backwards because you can supply an awful lot of power
then with a lot less fuel. Yeah, where we're like
the advantage of nuclear fusion are mind boggling.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Sure, and very few downsides, which we'll get to, of course.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
But yeah, I mean, like really genuinely, it's not just
like some like here's all the great stuff about it
and just don't pay attention to all these like really
horrible aspects. Yes, like there really aren't too many downsides.
The downside is we are at this moment incapable of
successfully creating a commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor. That's right,
(07:37):
But we've got an an understanding of what the challenges
are ahead of us thanks to the last fifty or
so years of really really really smart physicists working on
the problem of nuclear fusion. And the great inspiration for
nuclear fusion is the Sun. The Sun and all stars
like it are enormous, immense nuclear fusion reactors. So if
(08:02):
you are building a nuclear fusion reactor here on Earth,
you're essentially creating a star, and that is a very
difficult thing to do.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
It turns out, yeah, the Sun creates I know, we
talked about the Sun in our very famous episode on
the Sun. The Sun creates six hundred and twenty million
metric tons. It fuses six hundred and twenty million metric
tons of hydrogen at its core every second, So every
second at the Sun's core. It produces enough power to
(08:33):
light up New York City for one hundred years, New
York City every second. And that's the Sun. And all
we want to do is do the same thing on
a much smaller scale. Cret. I think the guy there's
this kid who built one in his garage and he
said he wanted to cress all this ted talk. He
wanted to create a star in a box is what
(08:53):
he called it.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, I've seen it, like this New Yorker called it
a star in a bottle.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Yeah. This kid's name is Taylor Wilson, and he's nuclear
physicist and he's like sixteen, wow. And he created Yeah,
he created a successful one. And the key, though, is
not to be able to create the fusion. The key
is to be able to harness enough plasma, which we'll
get to at a high enough temperature and density for
(09:19):
there to be a net power gain. Right, you can
create fusion, but in order to get out more than
you're putting in is the only thing that matters, because
what you want to do is create electricity exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
That's there's two huge challenges right now to nuclear fusion.
We pretty much understand it enough to start it going
and get energy from it. The problem is is material
science isn't at a point where it can build a
containment vessel to really house a thermonuclear reactor.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And then the other big obstacle is, like you said,
net energy gain, Like if you're putting in as much
or more energy then you're getting out of your nuclear reactor.
Then you're wasting energy and it's the opposite of what
you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, they're not just trying to impress people with their
science knowledge, no, but up to trying to create energy.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Up to now, though, Chucklake, every single thermonuclear reactor that's
ever been built has just been impressing people with knowledge.
Like they haven't gotten any net energy out of a
single thermonuclear fusion reactor.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Yeah, would see, I have that they have there right now.
They're up to like ten presently they're at ten megawatts.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Oh is that right? Yeah, and that's more than they
put into.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
A net gain of ten megawatts currently.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Everything I saw was when we turn this thing on,
it should have a net gain. Yeah, but I didn't
see that they've actually done it.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah, ten megawatts now in Eider is going to produce
five hundred megawatts right once it's fully operational.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Right. So the next challenge then is this, if we're
already getting a net energy gain out of it, then
that means that the net energy gain is it's not sustainable.
Like you said, you want to keep the thing going,
so you don't have to keep starting from scratch to
power it up. You want it to basically be self sustaining,
(11:11):
so you just have to add a little more fuel.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
To that's the dream.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
So let's talk about the history of fusion reactors.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Chuck, Yeah, it kind of goes back to this guy
named Lyman Spitzer. He's a thirty six year old Princeton
astrophysicist and this was in the nineteen fifties and he
was recruited to work on the H bomb and went
out and got a copy of a paper that was
(11:37):
released from Germany.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I think, right that Argentina.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Oh, Argentina.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yeah, they announced that they had to get that wrong.
They had successfully built a fusion reactor.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Right. So he gets this paper, goes on a ski trip,
starts thinking about how he can do this, takes a
little break from his job building the H bomb, and
figures out, you know, I think it's possible if we
can harness this plasma, I guess we should just go
ahead and to find what plasma is. Since we keep saying.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
It, Well, there's the normal three energy states that we're
familiar with, water solid and gas, liquid solid and gas.
Right right, there's a fourth one. It's plasma. And plasma
is basically like an energetic gas where the temperatures are
so high that whatever atoms you put into it, the
electrons are stripped off and allowed to move around freely. Basically,
(12:32):
the surface of the Sun is plasma. That's what plasma is.
It's a gas. It's a roiling gas that's really hard
to control and is really unpredictable.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Which is when you see the Sun like that rippling,
wavy looking thing.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
That's plasma, right, And the reason the Sun manages to
stay together is because it is enormously massive and has
a ton of gravity at its core.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, we don't have that advantage here on Earth.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
We don't, so we try to make up for that
by increasing the temperature.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
That's right. He was onto it way back then in
the nineteen fifties. If we can just harness this, if
we can just get it hot enough and he created
a tabletop device called the Stellar Raider, and it was
in a figure eight position. It was a pipe and
a figure eight. Yeah, and this would keep things from
banging into walls theoretically. Yeah, and he was onto something
(13:20):
because well, we'll get to Lockheed later, but they're using
a similar device now, a figure eight.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, Well I didn't realize that was a
figure eight it is, which is weird because what they
eventually found out was that a donut shape was really
the key to get that net gain. So and the
reason that they found out that a donut shape worked
was because in the I think the late fifties, the
US had run up against the wall. They're saying like, okay,
(13:48):
we've got this, but we can't control the plasma because
think about it, what you're trying to do is create
a star inside something, but it can't touch any of
the vessel that it's in or else it'll just completely
erupt it. Right.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Yeah. They compared it to holding jelly and rubber bands, right.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
It was just like you can't They couldn't figure out
how to control the plasma. So when when the US
ran up against this wall, they said, hey, rest of
the world we're going to declassify what spitz limon Spitzer
has been doing us out and like we'll share if
you guys share. And it turns out that the Russians
had already come up against this problem and licked it.
(14:30):
They figured out that if you put the thing in
what's called the toroidal shape, a donut shape using electromagnets,
you con tame the plasma essentially, And the donut shape
itself was pretty ingenious, but the real stroke of genius
was by running electromagnets in rings around the donut. So
(14:52):
it's like you have a donut and you put a
bunch of ear rings around it, right, and those are electromagnets.
So you're creating an electromagnetic force field which contains the plasma.
But then you also put an electromagnetic force field in
the middle of the plasma. So not only does it
heat it up to the temperatures you want, it also
(15:12):
stabilizes it further. So the Russians have invented what they
call the TACOMAC, which is this doughnut shape nuclear fusion
reactor that basically became the standard for the next fifty
years or so.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Yeah, you basically could achieve a really dense, super hot plasma.
And we'll get into temperatures and stuff in a bit.
But since we can't create that kind of pressure that
they have in the Sun due to their gravity, their gravity,
the Sun's gravity, right, you know, the Sun, all those people. Yeah,
like you said, we had to make up for it
here on Earth with temperatures.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right, because apparently if you are in a in the
middle of a nuclear reactor, a nuclear fusion reactor, you're
going to find that the temperatures inside are about six
times hotter than the core of the Sun, not even
the service of the Sun, the core of the Sun.
And the reason why it has to be so much
hotter is because, like you said, we can't replicate that density.
(16:09):
We can get to those temperatures that we need, but
we can't get to the density, so we have to
make up for it. So we'll talk about kind of
the physics of what's going on here and why you
have to have high temperatures and what we're making up
for with density and everything right after this. So, Chuck,
(16:29):
we're talking about nuclear fusion, and it's actually surprisingly understandable
at its most basic core.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Yeah, you're fusing atoms. It's not the hardest thing in
the world to wrap your head around. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
So with fission, we're splitting atoms. You're taking an atom
and you're splitting its nuclei apart. You're splitting the neutrons
and the protons apart from one another. And when you
do that, one of the four fundamental forces, electromagnetic force,
pushes them away and you get this burst of in energy.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
With fusion, you're taking nuclei from different atoms. You're taking
protons and neutrons, and you're smashing them together. And when
you do that, you're unleashing what's called the strong force,
which appropriately enough is stronger than electromagnetic force, which is
why nuclear fusion yields more energy than nuclear fission.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah. Einstein himself said, you know, each time you smash
these things together, you're gonna lose a little bit of mass,
and that little bit of mass is a ton of energy.
As it turns out.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
That's right, the famous equals MC squared.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Yeah, and I don't think he realized in nineteen oh five,
or maybe Einstein did.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Einstein probably did.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, Einstein probably did.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I would guess he did.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
So the problem is, even though it is very easy.
Just smash some protons together. There is a tremendous amount
of resistance to that smashing together.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
They don't want to smash together.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
No, because it's just like if you take a magnet,
two magnets, yeah, and you put the positive poles toward one,
they repel one another, right, Yeah, same thing. That's that's
the same principle on an atomic level too. If you
take protons, which are positively charged particles, and try to
put them together, they repel one another. And the closer
(18:13):
you get them together, the stronger. The repellent force is
the electromagnetic force, right, But if you can get them
close enough, the electromagnetic force is overcome by that strong force,
the strong nuclear force, and they become bound together because
the strong force is that one of those four fundamental
(18:33):
forces of the universe, and that is the force that
keeps atoms together, and that is that force is stronger
than the force that repels like charged particles.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Yeah. And when you talk about close, they need to
be within one times ten to the negative fifteen meters
of one another.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Right. So use if you'll indulge.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Me, sure you're gonna read a bunch of zero s.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yeah, it's point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one meters apart. Right,
that's how close they have to be.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
That's right, to get them to accept one another in
to fuse. I think I have a theory that if
they they are not fusing because they think they're going
to be made into a bomb, And if we told
them that when we're creating energy, they might be more
willing to fuse together.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah, because protons are piece next. Everybody knows that. Sure,
So when they do fuse together, right, when you do
cross that threshold and the strong force takes over and
overcomes the electromagnetic force, like we said, a tremendous amount
of energy is released, and it's released in part in
the form of neutrinos neutrons, right, which are right, neutral
(19:47):
particles which suddenly start carrying a tremendous amount of kinetic energy.
So let's say you have one atom, you got another atom,
and they're both like, I'm not getting close to you.
We're not going to get to Okay, we got together. Yes,
that force that mass that's displaced is transferred through the
neutron that gets kicked off of the atom, right, Yeah,
(20:09):
And it's carried out. Now, a neutron doesn't have any
kind of positive or negative charts. It's neutral. It's a neutrone,
which means that it can pass through the very electromagnetic
fields that are keeping this plasma where this reaction is
taking place together. Once that happens, Chuck, it can go
out to what's called the blanket wall and a thermonuclear
(20:30):
reactor warm it, and then that heat is transferred into
a water cooling system. The water's warmed up turns steam,
which generates a which I guess moves the turbine, and
then all of a sudden, the turbine is producing electricity.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Yeah, it's funny how just it gets so complex, but
all you're still trying to do is create steam.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, it's like it's like hooking the iss up to
a horse, right, you know, move it over there.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
So, so there are a few types of fusion reactions.
The ultimate goal right now, what we can do on
a small scale is what's called a deuterium tritium reaction. Yeah,
that's the one that we can currently achieve. That's one
atom of deuterium and one atom of tritium combining to
(21:19):
form a helium four atom and a neutron the ultimate goal.
I mean, that's good, and that'll create a lot of energy,
but there are a few downsides. Tritium is radioactive.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
For one, you have to mine it from lithium. Yeah,
and lithium's fairly rare.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
Sure, the ultimate goal is to reach deuterium. Deuterium reactions,
which is two deuterium atoms combining to form that helium
three in a neutron, and you can get that from
the sea water. It's abundant, almost limitless. And I couldn't
find this, but I think clean water can be a
residual effect of this. Am I wrong?
Speaker 1 (21:56):
I don't know if it's if well, you're probably not injecting,
but to get the deuterium, I mean, desalination plants are
the key to the future as far as supplying the
world with fresh water.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Yeah, I thought I saw somewhere where it was an
actual byproduct, but yeah, but then I couldn't find it,
so I'm not sure if that's right.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
You know what, you just drug my memory. I feel
like in a hydrogen powered car, water is one of
the by products.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
So maybe so yeah, all right, don't quote me on
that though. For the very least, it's a great way
to create energy.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Right, And what's you also can get tritium from helium,
I believe. So even now with the the deuterium tritium
reactions that we're working on, there's there's already a there's
a workaround, you know, like you can create a thermonuclear
reactor that's a breeding reactor to where the byproduct helium
(22:50):
can be used to harvest more of the fuel you're
using tritium.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Yeah, And aren't we running low on helium?
Speaker 1 (22:55):
We are? Which is like remember when we were talking
about the dirt the Zeppelin, which one was it? How
blimps work?
Speaker 3 (23:03):
Yeah? And then a long time ago we did one
on the Mars turbine. Yeah, Mars turbine react actually, but.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yes, there is very clearly a helium shortage, and the
idea that we're just using it for party balloons rather
than this yeah, is scary.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yeah. And don't be confused if we say things like
deuterium and it sounds super complex. All that is hydrogen
with an extra neutron.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, it's an isotope.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
So there's three isotopes of hydrogen and they're all still
the same element. They're all still hydrogen, but they have
different configurations as far as their neutrons go. So protium
is a hydrogen isotope with one proton and no neutrons.
Deuterium is a hydrogen isotope with one proton and one neutron,
and tritium is a hydrogen isotope with one proton and
(23:49):
two neutrons. And like you said, tritium is radioactive. But
the beauty of it is you need very very very
little of it to fuel a nuclear fusion reactor, and
it becomes a stable helium, a non radioactive helium in
the reactor, so you don't have this leftover radioactive fuel.
(24:10):
That's awesome.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
I think they said there's an it would be equivalent
of the radiation we just see every day and walking
around on the street.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Right, Yes, the background radiation. I believe I saw that too.
The thing is is the parts to the nuclear reactor
themselves will become irradiated over time. Apparently, though compared to
the kind of radio activity that's generated from nuclear fission,
this stuff you could just disassemble and bury in the
(24:37):
desert for one hundred years, go back and dig back up,
and it will be totally inactivated. So it's the stuff
that is radioactive is extraordinarily manageable.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Yeah, it is. And like I said, we don't want
to make it sound like this is perfect. There is.
They do predict the short to medium term radioactive waste
problem and they say that's due to activation of the
structural materials.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
The actual thermonuclear device itself.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah, and while you don't need much tritium, even a
few grams of tritium is problematic. But hopefully you know,
there's no accident, although they say accidents with these as
if you just turn the power off, it stops everything. Yeah,
it's not like a chain reaction can occur like a
fission reactor, there's out of your control.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
There's not a meltdown. There's which Also if you want
to know more about that, go listen to how Nuclear
Meltdowns Work episode. That was pretty good. We released it
right after Fukushima, but it applies to all fission reactors.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
So the goal is ultimately deuterium deuterium reactions where your
pair together. It does. And the reason why is again
it's abundant fuel. You can get it from desalinating seawater.
And then secondly, it's not radioactive at any point, so
it wouldn't make the the thermonuclear reactor itself radioactive, that's right.
(26:00):
The reason why we're not doing that already is because
we can't achieve the temperatures necessary.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
That's right, which leads us to the two big stumbling blocks.
Everyone knows this is a great idea. There's no one
out there saying, oh, I don't know about this fusion thing.
Creating a star in a box sounds kind of weird.
The problem is the barriers that we have here on
planet Earth, which is one temperature and two pressure. We
(26:26):
have achieved the temperature, which is the requirements, is one
hundred million kelvin and like you said, that's about six
times hotter than the Sun's core, which is pretty intense.
And the other is pressure, Like we said, we need
to get them within I'm not going to make you
read all those zeros again, but smash them that close
(26:47):
in order to fuse. And since we don't have that
kind of mass and gravity that the Sun does, there
are a few pretty genius ways that we're working around that.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah, there's basically two as it's stands, and then the
locky Martin one, which a lot of people are skeptical about.
We should say it's kind of a variation on one theme.
But there's basically there's two ways that we've figured out
to create nuclear fusion reactors so far. One is using
magnetic confinement and the other is using inertial confinement. So
(27:20):
magnetic confinement uses that tacomac technology.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah, it's sort of like CERN. You know, it's using
magnets to create pressure. I guess in CERN's case, you're
using it to create speed, right, but in this case
is to create pressure.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Right. So what you're doing is is you have a
you have this donut shaped chamber and that's your reaction chamber,
and then again rings around the donut that go on
around the inside and outside of the donut. I know,
I'm kind of imagining wonderful donuts.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
To doing Homer Simpson area.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
They create electromagnetic fields. Now, remember this plasma is hydrogen
gas that's been heated up to ature so hot that
the electrons just float off and move around freely. And
because of this higher temperature, these particles have become really
really energized, so they're moving and bouncing all over the
place and the pressure is building up. But because electrons
(28:15):
are negatively charged, and because protons are positively charged, if
you use alternating electromagnetic fields, you can contain this plasma.
So that's this incredibly hot gas that's six times hotter
than the core of the Sun can be contained within
the electromagnetic fields.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
That's right. And we talked about power and power out.
You need about seventy megawats of power to create this
to start this fusion reaction, but you're going to yield
about five hundred megawats.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
That's the Eider project, I believe.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Yeah, that's the Eider and that's only a three hundred
to five hundred second reaction. But like we said earlier,
the eventual goal is that it's sustaining itself, which is
just a beautiful concept.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Yeah. So basically what they do is they have the
gas is injected into the chamber, the hydrogen gas, and
then there's the electromagnetic fields that are holding the plasma
in place. But then remember we said, the Russians figured
out that if you put an electromagnetic field in the
middle of the whole thing, it will stabilize that plasma,
but it also heats it up, so it serves this
(29:21):
double purpose. And then just to add a little extra temperature.
They shoot it with microwaves and some other stuff and
then heat it up. And then as the plasma goes
crazy and all the fusion energy is released, the neutrons
move their way outside of the electromagnetic field into the blanket,
which they heat up, and the heat energy is transferred
(29:42):
to power that turbine or move the horse down the lane.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
And it's just creating steam.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah, and there's I mean, that's like, that's what Eider
is doing right now. That's what they're trying to prove.
And then also as Eider is spending billions and billions
and billions of dollars and running into tons of delaysh
it's an amazing project. Lockheed Martin basically just came out
and said, oh, by the way, this thing that you're
trying to do that's going to be one hundred feet
(30:09):
tall and require staggering amounts of energy and money. We're
doing one that puts out the same amount of energy
as yours, but it's a tenth of the size, which
means it's almost out of the gate commercially viable.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah. That is their skunk Works division of Lockheed, and
they announced this like three days ago here in mid October,
and they've gotten a lot of blowback from the scientific community.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Because they wouldn't release data.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
They don't have data. They said it's a high beta
device right now, and kind of shut out the scientific
community as far as questions go. And every scientist that
I saw interviewed for this said they're trying to get
some attention, to get some partners to join in.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Well. Yeah, plus it makes you want to run out
and buy Lockheed Martin stock because if one company you
can figure out how to create a thermonuclear fusion reactor
here on Earth that's scalable, it fits, Yeah, that that
person would be very wealthy.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Yeah. So it's a dubious claim, but they are, you know,
they're working toward a good thing. I'm not like poopooing
the whole thing, right, But until they have hard data
and like some proof, than I think the scientific community's
got their arms holded right now.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, and I mean they have released some details, it's
just not detailed enough for a scientist. It's detailed enough
for Aviation Week.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I bought it.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Yeah, they wrote an article on it, and basically, what
the what The guy they interviewed was saying was that
over at Eider they have a low beta ratio, which
is the amount of electro magnetism that you need compared
to the amount of plasma you can put into the chamber. Yeah,
so there's like five percent plasma to ninety five percent
(31:50):
electromagnetivity or electromagnetism just to keep this plasma thing from
just blowing up, right, because that can happen. Sure, they
might not melt down, but if everything went wrong, the
whole thing could blow up.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Well, and you know, you know what an atomic bomb is.
It's a fusion reaction, right, and this.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Is a lot of those all put together in one
hundred foot tower. This guy was saying that the beta
ratio for their machine is like one. So what he
was saying is they figured out a way and again
it's not very detailed, sure, but they figured out a
way to contain the plasma, but in a way that
(32:26):
also allows it to expand because if you think about it,
the more plasma there is, the more hydrogen atoms there are,
more hydrogen atoms, more isotopes there are, the more nuclear
fusion reactions or events you can have, the more energy
you can yield. Right, So they're saying they figured out
how to contain the plasma, but again, like you said,
the scientific community is really skeptical because they think it's
(32:49):
just a pr sign.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Well, I think they made the mistake by saying they
invented a magicometer to make it all happen and that's
it and don't ask about it.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Yeah, right.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
I did see though, that we're was using the figure
eight stellarator configuration. Yeah, and I think that's true. I
tried to. I found a couple of more sources that
were kind of vague about it, and I think the
details on it are just a vague period. But I
don't know why they would abandon the donut shaped if
the Figure eight was you know, nineteen fifties technology that's
(33:19):
sort of been disproven.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Well, supposedly their whole jam was that even in the
donut in the Tacomac. Yeah, this donut shaped reactor, plasma
has a tendency to just move around and make its
way out. Sure like it's not. It's still not fully contained,
and they're using something basically mirrors to catch the plasma
(33:40):
that's getting out and moving it to parts of the
electromagnetic field that are less dense. So there's a bunch
of protons in this part of the field, that field
is being strained, but then maybe there's not that many
protons over here, so they use mers to direct the
protons to the low density area.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
To keep it all even of the field.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Yeah, to even the whole thing out, which makes sense.
But again, if you're not releasing data, don't expect the
scientific community to buy it.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
You got that right.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
So there's another way to build a thermonuclear reactor that's
currently being work done too, and we'll talk about that
right after this.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Fish. So, buddy, Magnetic confinement is pretty neat, and we
talked about that, and that's understandable and I love it.
I want to date it. But internal confinement I want
to marry because it has lasers. At the National Ignition
Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, they are actually using laser beams.
(34:44):
They have a device called the NIF device where they
focus one hundred and ninety two laser beams on a
single point and a ten meter diameter target chamber called
a haul realm that's got to be German, and basically
inside that target chamber they have a little tiny pie
sized pellet of deterium, tritium, and a little plastic cylinder.
(35:05):
It's funny that it can be plastic somehow.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, you'd think it would introduce like impurities or something
into it.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Yeah, or it would need to be like iron or something.
I don't know. It just seems unstable. But uh, that
is one point eight million jewels of power from these lasers.
They're going to heat the cylinder up, generate some X rays,
and then that radiation will convert that pellet into plasma
and compress it. So again they're creating plasma, but instead
of smashing it together with magnets, they're superheating it with lasers.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
So that that's your Your money's on that one. You
like that.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
I just think it's neat because I like lasers.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
But that's your preference of the two.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yes, well, actually whichever one works is going to be
my preference, okay.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
And that one'll yield fifty to one hundred times more energy,
more energy out than energy put in, So that's that's
a good goal.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
So yeah, I guess basically the whole point of magnetic
confinement is that if you can do without electromagnets, you're
you have a more simple and elegant.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
You mean internal confinement or inertial inertial.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yeah, that's what I mean, inertial confinement. Basically, the whole
thing just happened so fast. You don't even need these
magnets to confine plasma because you're not creating the sustained ignition, right.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
Yeah, I might have said internal confinement before.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
By the way, it's inertial.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
That's all right.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
So what about cold fusion, buddy? That was all the
rage I remember back in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah, because in nineteen eighty nine some researchers said that
they successfully created nuclear fusion using just room temperature stuff
like palladium. They took palladium and.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Banana peels and beer cans.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Pretty much heavy water which had deuterium in it, and
they put the whole thing together and created nuclear fusion
without the high temperatures, hence the name cold fusion. And
if you can get around these high temperatures, then you
work out the whole material science problem, right, And if
you work out the whole material science problem, then this
(37:08):
is it's a desirable thing. They have cold fusion. The
problem is is a lot of scientists tried to replicate
these guys' findings and weren't able to so basically they
were kicked to the curb.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
So does that mean has cold fusion been abandoned or
are people still trying to get on that train.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
No.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
In two thousand and five, some UCLA researchers basically said,
we think we might have this thing down, and they did.
It's something called pyroelectric crystal fusion. Pyroelectric fusions, yeah, where
basically it's the same result they do what would be
called cold fusion. The problem is that has a negative
(37:47):
net energy yield. You have to put in a lot
more energy than you get out of it.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Right, Well, that's no good.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
No.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
Eider seems like they are making headway more than Lockheed
despite their claim they are, Like we said, it's in
Europe and it's being financed by a bunch of different countries.
The US is in, but they're kicking in. I think
the least amount only about seventeen million euros last year.
(38:14):
Of course we contributed dollars, but they're giving it to
us in euros. I think the EU spends the most
about eighty million. South Korea and China kicked in about
twenty and nineteen million. Respectively each And I saw earlier
where Russia was involved, but then I didn't see what
they had contributed financially.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Are they still all right? Well, maybe they're just we're
writing a chit for them for later. They'll just pay
us back. But it is a very expensive prospect and
you need, you know, countries getting together for something like this.
It's not the kind of thing that like the US
can take on on their own, I guess unless you're
Luckheed Martin, right, and you don't have to prove your data, right.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
So this nuclear fusion, we'll see what happens.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Man? No? I just say everybody should go read a
Star in a Bottle on the New Yorker. It's really
really good.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Yeah, it's pretty neat there. You can also go to instructibles.
If you want to build a nuclear fusion reactor in
your garage, you can do so. You're not going to
create energy, because, like we said, you're going to be
putting more than you get out. But there are instructions
and that kid did it. His was a little more
advanced than the instructibles one, obviously.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
But yeah, nice, the sixteen year old kid.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Yeah, He's amazing because his was legit. He's done more
than that too. His TED talk was pretty impressive.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
He's like working on UH with homemand security already for
various projects that have nothing to do with this.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah. Sure, yeah, Well, if you want to learn more
about nuclear fusion, you can type those words in the
search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. And since I said that,
it's time for a listener mail and Chuck. Before we
do listener mail, I want to give a shout out
to our Kiva team.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah, for the that you don't know, we did a
podcast many years back on micro lending in Kiva. Kiva
dot org is an organization where you can loan entrepreneurs
and well it used to be just developing countries. Now
you can do it here in North America as well,
twenty dollars at a time that you can get paid
(40:21):
back for. You can get your money back if you're
not happy, or you can just keep reloaning that money
and it helps them get their small business going. And
we started a Kiva team many years ago and it
is killing it. So you got some stats for us.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
So basically, as of October nineteenth, we have loaned our
team has loaned two point seven million dollars to people
in developing countries nice and in the US here there,
And the big one is we've exceeded one hundred thousand
(40:55):
loans man by our team. Our team only has eight
seventy nine members, so a eight seventy nine of you guys,
Thank you, way to go.
Speaker 3 (41:03):
Congratulations, Yes, and thanks as always to Glenn and Sonia
are de facto Kiva. Uh what would you call them? Presidents? Presidents,
Presidents of the stuff you should know, Team yep, captains
of the stuff you should know Team no presidents, okay,
presidents presidentes. Glenn's like, yes, president.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Yeah, they've been really like keeping it going for us.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Yeah, and when you know, sometimes we'll forget and Glenna nudges. Hey, guys,
remember the Kiva team.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
We should mention it, right, So the nice though, the
next goal we have is for three million dollars in
loans and we're on our way to it. So come
join us. We uh, don't begrudge people who are late
to the party. Just go to kiva dot org slash
teams slash stuff you should know and you can sign up.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
So now it's time for listener mail right.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Indeed, sir, I'm going to call this sky writing follow
up from Australia. Hey, guys, recently listened to how sky
running works and it reminded me of something. Although this
may not be suitable for listener mail, which I disagree actually,
because I'm reading it clearly. I was maybe eight or
nine when a few friends and I were out on
the street playing and doing things that nine year olds
(42:11):
would do. It's so awkward to say that.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
So you're not replacing something right there, No.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Huh, they were just doing nine year old things, okay,
good clean fun. We looked up and saw a plane
starting a skywrite and were instantly intrigued what was being written.
They started with an H and then an O. This
went on for maybe twenty eight minutes until finally the
word Hooters was scrawled across the sky, albeit backwards. So
I guess they have the Hooters restaurant chicken wing chain
(42:40):
in Australia.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
I guess a rich kid, yeah, really immature rich kid yeah?
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Or that. My brain couldn't comprehend how this person managed
to screw up writing a word backwards. The best reason
my childish brain could come with is that skywriting took
place somewhere between us and a group of people that
it was initially intended for, or that I just thought
it was written up and downwards rather than across the sky.
Until now, I'd never understood or bothered to learn why
(43:08):
it was like that. So thank you for keeping the
podcast great and allowing me to figure that out. That
is from Marlin. Oh boy, uh hapourachichi happerachichi.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Nice?
Speaker 3 (43:23):
Have you ever seen a word like that?
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Ha?
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Poor Rachi hapoor rochi Marlin from Sydney, Australia.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Man, thanks a lot, Marlin.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
H And that's Marlin with an a even Oh yeah, Marlan.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Huh, Well, thanks a lot, Marlin. We're gonna say it
like that.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
If you have an awesome last name and want to
share it with us, you can tweet to us at
s YSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com,
slash stuff you should Know. You can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always,
joined us at our home on the webs uf you
should Know dot com.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
H
Hey, everybody, I'm back. I first heard about Eider, which
is the nuclear fusion reactor being built in Europe, from
a New Yorker article called Star in a Bottle by
Rathi Kachadourian. And if you find this episode floats your boat,
I highly recommend reading that article too. The whole idea
of what they're trying to do, which is to contain plasma,
that crazy intense fourth state of matter that the sun
(00:25):
and lightning are made up of, into a chamber here
on Earth where it has no business being really really
caught my attention. And if they can do it, extremely cheap, abundant,
climate friendly energy will be unlocked for all, and who
knows what will follow after that. The Eider group was
shooting for twenty twenty five to start, but recently changed
(00:46):
their date to twenty thirty four. You can pass the
time while you wait by enjoying this episode.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry, who's Barrel laughs, And
this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
She gave us the old quick start. Yeah, like, I
don't want to hear any more impressing record.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, she knows that it shuts me up, or at
least cuts off whatever conversation I'm chiding her.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
It's great. I'm telling you. If we could release the
twenty seconds before each show as its own show, yeah,
that would be terrible. Yeah, no, one who cares.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
No, we'd think it was funny and everybody else would
be like, you edit this out for a reason. Yep,
So Chuck, how you doing great? Have you ever been
to as on Provence, France? No? Is that a place?
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah? No, I haven't.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
It is a rustic little town in Provence, and it
is strangely, maybe even ironically, in the non hipster you've
been in.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
The actual Yeah, it's a real word.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Definition of the word also cite to one of the
most futuristic engineering projects humanity's ever undertaken.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Meat or meat that's a sound it makes.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Oh, I thought you're mocking me. No, no, no, for being
thrilled by the thought of this thing.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
No, it is kind of funny that this thing's in
a sleepy little town. It's like a Hamlet may Bee
Cern in Switzerland. That's not in the city, is it No,
you can't build these things in cities. That's why they're
in sleepy towns exactly, because no one knows they're being poisoned.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yeah, and you can push the mare around pretty easy, exactly.
This thing is called eider ITER, which is an acronym
for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. That's right, which really
gets the point across.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Did you know the word acronym is an acronym. That's
not true. Okay, I just want to see how long
you would try and sort it out in your head.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I would have kept going on what it means thirty seconds?
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Maybe that would have been a great joke. Could it
just kept it going. I'm not gonna tell you.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I would have been. I would have it maybe fifteen seconds,
because you would have gotten that much more sure. So
I wouldn't have looked it up. I would have figured
it out myself. Anyway. EIDER is this colossal engineering project.
Somebody compared it to the pyramids at Giza. Oh wow, Yeah,
that's that's exciting stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
The thing is is it's a nuclear fusion reactor, and
it's the culmination of decades of attempts to create a
nuclear fusion reactor. Because we've got fission down and we'll
talk about the difference in a minute, but fusion has
been very elusive, and nowhere is it more apparent than
(03:47):
in the Eider project. Because this thing is going to
cost it approximately fifty billion dollars when it's completed, fifty
billion dollars. They started in nineteen ninety three. They're hoping
to turn on the switch in twenty twenty, but it's
looking like twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four, and
it won't be starting to produce anything until the two
(04:09):
thousand and forties at the earliest.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
So what's the.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Point, I'll tell you the point. Yeah, if we can
figure out nuclear fusion chucking the world's literally the world's
energy problems will be solved for millennia. If we can
just figure this out, we will have a almost no
radioactivity nuclear option, almost limitless fuel supply, yeah, totally green,
(04:41):
yeah clean.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
No pollution, no greenhouse emissions, right.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
And with plenty of energy to spare using the already
extant infrastructure we have to supply power like, you don't
have to completely rebuild everything. You can just to the
electrical cables outside. It'll be the exact same thing.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, you can just go to a nuclear fission reactor
and press the button that says fusion and it'll all
of a sudden join atoms instead of split them.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
It's that easy.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
That's what the difference is. With fission, you're splitting atoms
and you're gaining energy from that. With fusion, you're smacking
them together. Yeah, and you're gaining even more energy because
we're you're exploiting a different fundamental force.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yeah, and that I was being coy Clearly there is
no button because we would have pushed it a long
time ago.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
And when I say no pollution and no greenhouse emissions
before the pedantic among you right in we know that
just even shipping something from here to there causes pollution
and greenhouse emissions.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Good, but we're.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Talking about that the output of the reactor itself is
very green.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
So if you want to know all about Eider, well
we're going to talk about it here or there, because
it's just you just can't talk about nuclear fusion reactors
and not mentioned Eider. But if you want to know
a lot about Eider, there is a really great article
called A Star and a Bottle, and it's by a
person named rock Fee cutcha Duran or Durian. And it
was written in the New Yorker not too long ago. Yeah,
(06:05):
and man, it is every detail you want to know
about the IDE project written really well, and it's long,
but it's totally worth the read.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Yeah, it's all over the news lately, and for good reason.
You said a lot of energy. I have a stat
I'm going to throw back to the old days here.
Per kilogram of fuel, if we're talking fusion and fission,
fusion produces four times more energy than fission.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
I saw seven.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
It's probably only things where it's like four to five
to ten or something. I found four times and ten
million times more than coal. Yeah, ten million times. Yeah,
the energy is coal. And that's with equal fuel per
kilogram of fuel. Right, It's just I mean, it is
the future.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah. And you can say, well that's great because we
want eighteen million times the amount of power that coal provides.
You can say, weather buddy, you can also bring it
backwards because you can supply an awful lot of power
then with a lot less fuel. Yeah, where we're like
the advantage of nuclear fusion are mind boggling.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Sure, and very few downsides, which we'll get to, of course.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
But yeah, I mean, like really genuinely, it's not just
like some like here's all the great stuff about it
and just don't pay attention to all these like really
horrible aspects. Yes, like there really aren't too many downsides.
The downside is we are at this moment incapable of
successfully creating a commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor. That's right,
(07:37):
But we've got an an understanding of what the challenges
are ahead of us thanks to the last fifty or
so years of really really really smart physicists working on
the problem of nuclear fusion. And the great inspiration for
nuclear fusion is the Sun. The Sun and all stars
like it are enormous, immense nuclear fusion reactors. So if
(08:02):
you are building a nuclear fusion reactor here on Earth,
you're essentially creating a star, and that is a very
difficult thing to do.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
It turns out, yeah, the Sun creates I know, we
talked about the Sun in our very famous episode on
the Sun. The Sun creates six hundred and twenty million
metric tons. It fuses six hundred and twenty million metric
tons of hydrogen at its core every second, So every
second at the Sun's core. It produces enough power to
(08:33):
light up New York City for one hundred years, New
York City every second. And that's the Sun. And all
we want to do is do the same thing on
a much smaller scale. Cret. I think the guy there's
this kid who built one in his garage and he
said he wanted to cress all this ted talk. He
wanted to create a star in a box is what
(08:53):
he called it.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, I've seen it, like this New Yorker called it
a star in a bottle.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Yeah. This kid's name is Taylor Wilson, and he's nuclear
physicist and he's like sixteen, wow. And he created Yeah,
he created a successful one. And the key, though, is
not to be able to create the fusion. The key
is to be able to harness enough plasma, which we'll
get to at a high enough temperature and density for
(09:19):
there to be a net power gain. Right, you can
create fusion, but in order to get out more than
you're putting in is the only thing that matters, because
what you want to do is create electricity exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
That's there's two huge challenges right now to nuclear fusion.
We pretty much understand it enough to start it going
and get energy from it. The problem is is material
science isn't at a point where it can build a
containment vessel to really house a thermonuclear reactor.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And then the other big obstacle is, like you said,
net energy gain, Like if you're putting in as much
or more energy then you're getting out of your nuclear reactor.
Then you're wasting energy and it's the opposite of what
you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, they're not just trying to impress people with their
science knowledge, no, but up to trying to create energy.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Up to now, though, Chucklake, every single thermonuclear reactor that's
ever been built has just been impressing people with knowledge.
Like they haven't gotten any net energy out of a
single thermonuclear fusion reactor.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Yeah, would see, I have that they have there right now.
They're up to like ten presently they're at ten megawatts.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Oh is that right? Yeah, and that's more than they
put into.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
A net gain of ten megawatts currently.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Everything I saw was when we turn this thing on,
it should have a net gain. Yeah, but I didn't
see that they've actually done it.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah, ten megawatts now in Eider is going to produce
five hundred megawatts right once it's fully operational.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Right. So the next challenge then is this, if we're
already getting a net energy gain out of it, then
that means that the net energy gain is it's not sustainable.
Like you said, you want to keep the thing going,
so you don't have to keep starting from scratch to
power it up. You want it to basically be self sustaining,
(11:11):
so you just have to add a little more fuel.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
To that's the dream.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
So let's talk about the history of fusion reactors.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Chuck, Yeah, it kind of goes back to this guy
named Lyman Spitzer. He's a thirty six year old Princeton
astrophysicist and this was in the nineteen fifties and he
was recruited to work on the H bomb and went
out and got a copy of a paper that was
(11:37):
released from Germany.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I think, right that Argentina.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Oh, Argentina.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yeah, they announced that they had to get that wrong.
They had successfully built a fusion reactor.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Right. So he gets this paper, goes on a ski trip,
starts thinking about how he can do this, takes a
little break from his job building the H bomb, and
figures out, you know, I think it's possible if we
can harness this plasma, I guess we should just go
ahead and to find what plasma is. Since we keep saying.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
It, Well, there's the normal three energy states that we're
familiar with, water solid and gas, liquid solid and gas.
Right right, there's a fourth one. It's plasma. And plasma
is basically like an energetic gas where the temperatures are
so high that whatever atoms you put into it, the
electrons are stripped off and allowed to move around freely. Basically,
(12:32):
the surface of the Sun is plasma. That's what plasma is.
It's a gas. It's a roiling gas that's really hard
to control and is really unpredictable.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Which is when you see the Sun like that rippling,
wavy looking thing.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
That's plasma, right, And the reason the Sun manages to
stay together is because it is enormously massive and has
a ton of gravity at its core.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, we don't have that advantage here on Earth.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
We don't, so we try to make up for that
by increasing the temperature.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
That's right. He was onto it way back then in
the nineteen fifties. If we can just harness this, if
we can just get it hot enough and he created
a tabletop device called the Stellar Raider, and it was
in a figure eight position. It was a pipe and
a figure eight. Yeah, and this would keep things from
banging into walls theoretically. Yeah, and he was onto something
(13:20):
because well, we'll get to Lockheed later, but they're using
a similar device now, a figure eight.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, Well I didn't realize that was a
figure eight it is, which is weird because what they
eventually found out was that a donut shape was really
the key to get that net gain. So and the
reason that they found out that a donut shape worked
was because in the I think the late fifties, the
US had run up against the wall. They're saying like, okay,
(13:48):
we've got this, but we can't control the plasma because
think about it, what you're trying to do is create
a star inside something, but it can't touch any of
the vessel that it's in or else it'll just completely
erupt it. Right.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Yeah. They compared it to holding jelly and rubber bands, right.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
It was just like you can't They couldn't figure out
how to control the plasma. So when when the US
ran up against this wall, they said, hey, rest of
the world we're going to declassify what spitz limon Spitzer
has been doing us out and like we'll share if
you guys share. And it turns out that the Russians
had already come up against this problem and licked it.
(14:30):
They figured out that if you put the thing in
what's called the toroidal shape, a donut shape using electromagnets,
you con tame the plasma essentially, And the donut shape
itself was pretty ingenious, but the real stroke of genius
was by running electromagnets in rings around the donut. So
(14:52):
it's like you have a donut and you put a
bunch of ear rings around it, right, and those are electromagnets.
So you're creating an electromagnetic force field which contains the plasma.
But then you also put an electromagnetic force field in
the middle of the plasma. So not only does it
heat it up to the temperatures you want, it also
(15:12):
stabilizes it further. So the Russians have invented what they
call the TACOMAC, which is this doughnut shape nuclear fusion
reactor that basically became the standard for the next fifty
years or so.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Yeah, you basically could achieve a really dense, super hot plasma.
And we'll get into temperatures and stuff in a bit.
But since we can't create that kind of pressure that
they have in the Sun due to their gravity, their gravity,
the Sun's gravity, right, you know, the Sun, all those people. Yeah,
like you said, we had to make up for it
here on Earth with temperatures.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right, because apparently if you are in a in the
middle of a nuclear reactor, a nuclear fusion reactor, you're
going to find that the temperatures inside are about six
times hotter than the core of the Sun, not even
the service of the Sun, the core of the Sun.
And the reason why it has to be so much
hotter is because, like you said, we can't replicate that density.
(16:09):
We can get to those temperatures that we need, but
we can't get to the density, so we have to
make up for it. So we'll talk about kind of
the physics of what's going on here and why you
have to have high temperatures and what we're making up
for with density and everything right after this. So, Chuck,
(16:29):
we're talking about nuclear fusion, and it's actually surprisingly understandable
at its most basic core.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Yeah, you're fusing atoms. It's not the hardest thing in
the world to wrap your head around. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
So with fission, we're splitting atoms. You're taking an atom
and you're splitting its nuclei apart. You're splitting the neutrons
and the protons apart from one another. And when you
do that, one of the four fundamental forces, electromagnetic force,
pushes them away and you get this burst of in energy.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
With fusion, you're taking nuclei from different atoms. You're taking
protons and neutrons, and you're smashing them together. And when
you do that, you're unleashing what's called the strong force,
which appropriately enough is stronger than electromagnetic force, which is
why nuclear fusion yields more energy than nuclear fission.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah. Einstein himself said, you know, each time you smash
these things together, you're gonna lose a little bit of mass,
and that little bit of mass is a ton of energy.
As it turns out.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
That's right, the famous equals MC squared.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Yeah, and I don't think he realized in nineteen oh five,
or maybe Einstein did.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Einstein probably did.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, Einstein probably did.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I would guess he did.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
So the problem is, even though it is very easy.
Just smash some protons together. There is a tremendous amount
of resistance to that smashing together.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
They don't want to smash together.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
No, because it's just like if you take a magnet,
two magnets, yeah, and you put the positive poles toward one,
they repel one another, right, Yeah, same thing. That's that's
the same principle on an atomic level too. If you
take protons, which are positively charged particles, and try to
put them together, they repel one another. And the closer
(18:13):
you get them together, the stronger. The repellent force is
the electromagnetic force, right, But if you can get them
close enough, the electromagnetic force is overcome by that strong force,
the strong nuclear force, and they become bound together because
the strong force is that one of those four fundamental
(18:33):
forces of the universe, and that is the force that
keeps atoms together, and that is that force is stronger
than the force that repels like charged particles.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Yeah. And when you talk about close, they need to
be within one times ten to the negative fifteen meters
of one another.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Right. So use if you'll indulge.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Me, sure you're gonna read a bunch of zero s.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yeah, it's point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one meters apart. Right,
that's how close they have to be.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
That's right, to get them to accept one another in
to fuse. I think I have a theory that if
they they are not fusing because they think they're going
to be made into a bomb, And if we told
them that when we're creating energy, they might be more
willing to fuse together.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah, because protons are piece next. Everybody knows that. Sure,
So when they do fuse together, right, when you do
cross that threshold and the strong force takes over and
overcomes the electromagnetic force, like we said, a tremendous amount
of energy is released, and it's released in part in
the form of neutrinos neutrons, right, which are right, neutral
(19:47):
particles which suddenly start carrying a tremendous amount of kinetic energy.
So let's say you have one atom, you got another atom,
and they're both like, I'm not getting close to you.
We're not going to get to Okay, we got together. Yes,
that force that mass that's displaced is transferred through the
neutron that gets kicked off of the atom, right, Yeah,
(20:09):
And it's carried out. Now, a neutron doesn't have any
kind of positive or negative charts. It's neutral. It's a neutrone,
which means that it can pass through the very electromagnetic
fields that are keeping this plasma where this reaction is
taking place together. Once that happens, Chuck, it can go
out to what's called the blanket wall and a thermonuclear
(20:30):
reactor warm it, and then that heat is transferred into
a water cooling system. The water's warmed up turns steam,
which generates a which I guess moves the turbine, and
then all of a sudden, the turbine is producing electricity.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Yeah, it's funny how just it gets so complex, but
all you're still trying to do is create steam.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, it's like it's like hooking the iss up to
a horse, right, you know, move it over there.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
So, so there are a few types of fusion reactions.
The ultimate goal right now, what we can do on
a small scale is what's called a deuterium tritium reaction. Yeah,
that's the one that we can currently achieve. That's one
atom of deuterium and one atom of tritium combining to
(21:19):
form a helium four atom and a neutron the ultimate goal.
I mean, that's good, and that'll create a lot of energy,
but there are a few downsides. Tritium is radioactive.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
For one, you have to mine it from lithium. Yeah,
and lithium's fairly rare.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
Sure, the ultimate goal is to reach deuterium. Deuterium reactions,
which is two deuterium atoms combining to form that helium
three in a neutron, and you can get that from
the sea water. It's abundant, almost limitless. And I couldn't
find this, but I think clean water can be a
residual effect of this. Am I wrong?
Speaker 1 (21:56):
I don't know if it's if well, you're probably not injecting,
but to get the deuterium, I mean, desalination plants are
the key to the future as far as supplying the
world with fresh water.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Yeah, I thought I saw somewhere where it was an
actual byproduct, but yeah, but then I couldn't find it,
so I'm not sure if that's right.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
You know what, you just drug my memory. I feel
like in a hydrogen powered car, water is one of
the by products.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
So maybe so yeah, all right, don't quote me on
that though. For the very least, it's a great way
to create energy.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Right, And what's you also can get tritium from helium,
I believe. So even now with the the deuterium tritium
reactions that we're working on, there's there's already a there's
a workaround, you know, like you can create a thermonuclear
reactor that's a breeding reactor to where the byproduct helium
(22:50):
can be used to harvest more of the fuel you're
using tritium.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Yeah, And aren't we running low on helium?
Speaker 1 (22:55):
We are? Which is like remember when we were talking
about the dirt the Zeppelin, which one was it? How
blimps work?
Speaker 3 (23:03):
Yeah? And then a long time ago we did one
on the Mars turbine. Yeah, Mars turbine react actually, but.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yes, there is very clearly a helium shortage, and the
idea that we're just using it for party balloons rather
than this yeah, is scary.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yeah. And don't be confused if we say things like
deuterium and it sounds super complex. All that is hydrogen
with an extra neutron.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, it's an isotope.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
So there's three isotopes of hydrogen and they're all still
the same element. They're all still hydrogen, but they have
different configurations as far as their neutrons go. So protium
is a hydrogen isotope with one proton and no neutrons.
Deuterium is a hydrogen isotope with one proton and one neutron,
and tritium is a hydrogen isotope with one proton and
(23:49):
two neutrons. And like you said, tritium is radioactive. But
the beauty of it is you need very very very
little of it to fuel a nuclear fusion reactor, and
it becomes a stable helium, a non radioactive helium in
the reactor, so you don't have this leftover radioactive fuel.
(24:10):
That's awesome.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
I think they said there's an it would be equivalent
of the radiation we just see every day and walking
around on the street.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Right, Yes, the background radiation. I believe I saw that too.
The thing is is the parts to the nuclear reactor
themselves will become irradiated over time. Apparently, though compared to
the kind of radio activity that's generated from nuclear fission,
this stuff you could just disassemble and bury in the
(24:37):
desert for one hundred years, go back and dig back up,
and it will be totally inactivated. So it's the stuff
that is radioactive is extraordinarily manageable.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Yeah, it is. And like I said, we don't want
to make it sound like this is perfect. There is.
They do predict the short to medium term radioactive waste
problem and they say that's due to activation of the
structural materials.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
The actual thermonuclear device itself.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah, and while you don't need much tritium, even a
few grams of tritium is problematic. But hopefully you know,
there's no accident, although they say accidents with these as
if you just turn the power off, it stops everything. Yeah,
it's not like a chain reaction can occur like a
fission reactor, there's out of your control.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
There's not a meltdown. There's which Also if you want
to know more about that, go listen to how Nuclear
Meltdowns Work episode. That was pretty good. We released it
right after Fukushima, but it applies to all fission reactors.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
So the goal is ultimately deuterium deuterium reactions where your
pair together. It does. And the reason why is again
it's abundant fuel. You can get it from desalinating seawater.
And then secondly, it's not radioactive at any point, so
it wouldn't make the the thermonuclear reactor itself radioactive, that's right.
(26:00):
The reason why we're not doing that already is because
we can't achieve the temperatures necessary.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
That's right, which leads us to the two big stumbling blocks.
Everyone knows this is a great idea. There's no one
out there saying, oh, I don't know about this fusion thing.
Creating a star in a box sounds kind of weird.
The problem is the barriers that we have here on
planet Earth, which is one temperature and two pressure. We
(26:26):
have achieved the temperature, which is the requirements, is one
hundred million kelvin and like you said, that's about six
times hotter than the Sun's core, which is pretty intense.
And the other is pressure, Like we said, we need
to get them within I'm not going to make you
read all those zeros again, but smash them that close
(26:47):
in order to fuse. And since we don't have that
kind of mass and gravity that the Sun does, there
are a few pretty genius ways that we're working around that.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah, there's basically two as it's stands, and then the
locky Martin one, which a lot of people are skeptical about.
We should say it's kind of a variation on one theme.
But there's basically there's two ways that we've figured out
to create nuclear fusion reactors so far. One is using
magnetic confinement and the other is using inertial confinement. So
(27:20):
magnetic confinement uses that tacomac technology.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah, it's sort of like CERN. You know, it's using
magnets to create pressure. I guess in CERN's case, you're
using it to create speed, right, but in this case
is to create pressure.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Right. So what you're doing is is you have a
you have this donut shaped chamber and that's your reaction chamber,
and then again rings around the donut that go on
around the inside and outside of the donut. I know,
I'm kind of imagining wonderful donuts.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
To doing Homer Simpson area.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
They create electromagnetic fields. Now, remember this plasma is hydrogen
gas that's been heated up to ature so hot that
the electrons just float off and move around freely. And
because of this higher temperature, these particles have become really
really energized, so they're moving and bouncing all over the
place and the pressure is building up. But because electrons
(28:15):
are negatively charged, and because protons are positively charged, if
you use alternating electromagnetic fields, you can contain this plasma.
So that's this incredibly hot gas that's six times hotter
than the core of the Sun can be contained within
the electromagnetic fields.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
That's right. And we talked about power and power out.
You need about seventy megawats of power to create this
to start this fusion reaction, but you're going to yield
about five hundred megawats.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
That's the Eider project, I believe.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Yeah, that's the Eider and that's only a three hundred
to five hundred second reaction. But like we said earlier,
the eventual goal is that it's sustaining itself, which is
just a beautiful concept.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Yeah. So basically what they do is they have the
gas is injected into the chamber, the hydrogen gas, and
then there's the electromagnetic fields that are holding the plasma
in place. But then remember we said, the Russians figured
out that if you put an electromagnetic field in the
middle of the whole thing, it will stabilize that plasma,
but it also heats it up, so it serves this
(29:21):
double purpose. And then just to add a little extra temperature.
They shoot it with microwaves and some other stuff and
then heat it up. And then as the plasma goes
crazy and all the fusion energy is released, the neutrons
move their way outside of the electromagnetic field into the blanket,
which they heat up, and the heat energy is transferred
(29:42):
to power that turbine or move the horse down the lane.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
And it's just creating steam.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah, and there's I mean, that's like, that's what Eider
is doing right now. That's what they're trying to prove.
And then also as Eider is spending billions and billions
and billions of dollars and running into tons of delaysh
it's an amazing project. Lockheed Martin basically just came out
and said, oh, by the way, this thing that you're
trying to do that's going to be one hundred feet
(30:09):
tall and require staggering amounts of energy and money. We're
doing one that puts out the same amount of energy
as yours, but it's a tenth of the size, which
means it's almost out of the gate commercially viable.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah. That is their skunk Works division of Lockheed, and
they announced this like three days ago here in mid October,
and they've gotten a lot of blowback from the scientific community.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Because they wouldn't release data.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
They don't have data. They said it's a high beta
device right now, and kind of shut out the scientific
community as far as questions go. And every scientist that
I saw interviewed for this said they're trying to get
some attention, to get some partners to join in.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Well. Yeah, plus it makes you want to run out
and buy Lockheed Martin stock because if one company you
can figure out how to create a thermonuclear fusion reactor
here on Earth that's scalable, it fits, Yeah, that that
person would be very wealthy.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Yeah. So it's a dubious claim, but they are, you know,
they're working toward a good thing. I'm not like poopooing
the whole thing, right, But until they have hard data
and like some proof, than I think the scientific community's
got their arms holded right now.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, and I mean they have released some details, it's
just not detailed enough for a scientist. It's detailed enough
for Aviation Week.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I bought it.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Yeah, they wrote an article on it, and basically, what
the what The guy they interviewed was saying was that
over at Eider they have a low beta ratio, which
is the amount of electro magnetism that you need compared
to the amount of plasma you can put into the chamber. Yeah,
so there's like five percent plasma to ninety five percent
(31:50):
electromagnetivity or electromagnetism just to keep this plasma thing from
just blowing up, right, because that can happen. Sure, they
might not melt down, but if everything went wrong, the
whole thing could blow up.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Well, and you know, you know what an atomic bomb is.
It's a fusion reaction, right, and this.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Is a lot of those all put together in one
hundred foot tower. This guy was saying that the beta
ratio for their machine is like one. So what he
was saying is they figured out a way and again
it's not very detailed, sure, but they figured out a
way to contain the plasma, but in a way that
(32:26):
also allows it to expand because if you think about it,
the more plasma there is, the more hydrogen atoms there are,
more hydrogen atoms, more isotopes there are, the more nuclear
fusion reactions or events you can have, the more energy
you can yield. Right, So they're saying they figured out
how to contain the plasma, but again, like you said,
the scientific community is really skeptical because they think it's
(32:49):
just a pr sign.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Well, I think they made the mistake by saying they
invented a magicometer to make it all happen and that's
it and don't ask about it.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Yeah, right.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
I did see though, that we're was using the figure
eight stellarator configuration. Yeah, and I think that's true. I
tried to. I found a couple of more sources that
were kind of vague about it, and I think the
details on it are just a vague period. But I
don't know why they would abandon the donut shaped if
the Figure eight was you know, nineteen fifties technology that's
(33:19):
sort of been disproven.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Well, supposedly their whole jam was that even in the
donut in the Tacomac. Yeah, this donut shaped reactor, plasma
has a tendency to just move around and make its
way out. Sure like it's not. It's still not fully contained,
and they're using something basically mirrors to catch the plasma
(33:40):
that's getting out and moving it to parts of the
electromagnetic field that are less dense. So there's a bunch
of protons in this part of the field, that field
is being strained, but then maybe there's not that many
protons over here, so they use mers to direct the
protons to the low density area.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
To keep it all even of the field.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Yeah, to even the whole thing out, which makes sense.
But again, if you're not releasing data, don't expect the
scientific community to buy it.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
You got that right.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
So there's another way to build a thermonuclear reactor that's
currently being work done too, and we'll talk about that
right after this.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Fish. So, buddy, Magnetic confinement is pretty neat, and we
talked about that, and that's understandable and I love it.
I want to date it. But internal confinement I want
to marry because it has lasers. At the National Ignition
Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, they are actually using laser beams.
(34:44):
They have a device called the NIF device where they
focus one hundred and ninety two laser beams on a
single point and a ten meter diameter target chamber called
a haul realm that's got to be German, and basically
inside that target chamber they have a little tiny pie
sized pellet of deterium, tritium, and a little plastic cylinder.
(35:05):
It's funny that it can be plastic somehow.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, you'd think it would introduce like impurities or something
into it.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Yeah, or it would need to be like iron or something.
I don't know. It just seems unstable. But uh, that
is one point eight million jewels of power from these lasers.
They're going to heat the cylinder up, generate some X rays,
and then that radiation will convert that pellet into plasma
and compress it. So again they're creating plasma, but instead
of smashing it together with magnets, they're superheating it with lasers.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
So that that's your Your money's on that one. You
like that.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
I just think it's neat because I like lasers.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
But that's your preference of the two.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yes, well, actually whichever one works is going to be
my preference, okay.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
And that one'll yield fifty to one hundred times more energy,
more energy out than energy put in, So that's that's
a good goal.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
So yeah, I guess basically the whole point of magnetic
confinement is that if you can do without electromagnets, you're
you have a more simple and elegant.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
You mean internal confinement or inertial inertial.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yeah, that's what I mean, inertial confinement. Basically, the whole
thing just happened so fast. You don't even need these
magnets to confine plasma because you're not creating the sustained ignition, right.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
Yeah, I might have said internal confinement before.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
By the way, it's inertial.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
That's all right.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
So what about cold fusion, buddy? That was all the
rage I remember back in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah, because in nineteen eighty nine some researchers said that
they successfully created nuclear fusion using just room temperature stuff
like palladium. They took palladium and.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Banana peels and beer cans.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Pretty much heavy water which had deuterium in it, and
they put the whole thing together and created nuclear fusion
without the high temperatures, hence the name cold fusion. And
if you can get around these high temperatures, then you
work out the whole material science problem, right, And if
you work out the whole material science problem, then this
(37:08):
is it's a desirable thing. They have cold fusion. The
problem is is a lot of scientists tried to replicate
these guys' findings and weren't able to so basically they
were kicked to the curb.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
So does that mean has cold fusion been abandoned or
are people still trying to get on that train.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
No.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
In two thousand and five, some UCLA researchers basically said,
we think we might have this thing down, and they did.
It's something called pyroelectric crystal fusion. Pyroelectric fusions, yeah, where
basically it's the same result they do what would be
called cold fusion. The problem is that has a negative
(37:47):
net energy yield. You have to put in a lot
more energy than you get out of it.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Right, Well, that's no good.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
No.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
Eider seems like they are making headway more than Lockheed
despite their claim they are, Like we said, it's in
Europe and it's being financed by a bunch of different countries.
The US is in, but they're kicking in. I think
the least amount only about seventeen million euros last year.
(38:14):
Of course we contributed dollars, but they're giving it to
us in euros. I think the EU spends the most
about eighty million. South Korea and China kicked in about
twenty and nineteen million. Respectively each And I saw earlier
where Russia was involved, but then I didn't see what
they had contributed financially.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Are they still all right? Well, maybe they're just we're
writing a chit for them for later. They'll just pay
us back. But it is a very expensive prospect and
you need, you know, countries getting together for something like this.
It's not the kind of thing that like the US
can take on on their own, I guess unless you're
Luckheed Martin, right, and you don't have to prove your data, right.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
So this nuclear fusion, we'll see what happens.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Man? No? I just say everybody should go read a
Star in a Bottle on the New Yorker. It's really
really good.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Yeah, it's pretty neat there. You can also go to instructibles.
If you want to build a nuclear fusion reactor in
your garage, you can do so. You're not going to
create energy, because, like we said, you're going to be
putting more than you get out. But there are instructions
and that kid did it. His was a little more
advanced than the instructibles one, obviously.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
But yeah, nice, the sixteen year old kid.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Yeah, He's amazing because his was legit. He's done more
than that too. His TED talk was pretty impressive.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
He's like working on UH with homemand security already for
various projects that have nothing to do with this.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah. Sure, yeah, Well, if you want to learn more
about nuclear fusion, you can type those words in the
search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. And since I said that,
it's time for a listener mail and Chuck. Before we
do listener mail, I want to give a shout out
to our Kiva team.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah, for the that you don't know, we did a
podcast many years back on micro lending in Kiva. Kiva
dot org is an organization where you can loan entrepreneurs
and well it used to be just developing countries. Now
you can do it here in North America as well,
twenty dollars at a time that you can get paid
(40:21):
back for. You can get your money back if you're
not happy, or you can just keep reloaning that money
and it helps them get their small business going. And
we started a Kiva team many years ago and it
is killing it. So you got some stats for us.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
So basically, as of October nineteenth, we have loaned our
team has loaned two point seven million dollars to people
in developing countries nice and in the US here there,
And the big one is we've exceeded one hundred thousand
(40:55):
loans man by our team. Our team only has eight
seventy nine members, so a eight seventy nine of you guys,
Thank you, way to go.
Speaker 3 (41:03):
Congratulations, Yes, and thanks as always to Glenn and Sonia
are de facto Kiva. Uh what would you call them? Presidents? Presidents,
Presidents of the stuff you should know, Team yep, captains
of the stuff you should know Team no presidents, okay,
presidents presidentes. Glenn's like, yes, president.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Yeah, they've been really like keeping it going for us.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Yeah, and when you know, sometimes we'll forget and Glenna nudges. Hey, guys,
remember the Kiva team.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
We should mention it, right, So the nice though, the
next goal we have is for three million dollars in
loans and we're on our way to it. So come
join us. We uh, don't begrudge people who are late
to the party. Just go to kiva dot org slash
teams slash stuff you should know and you can sign up.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
So now it's time for listener mail right.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Indeed, sir, I'm going to call this sky writing follow
up from Australia. Hey, guys, recently listened to how sky
running works and it reminded me of something. Although this
may not be suitable for listener mail, which I disagree actually,
because I'm reading it clearly. I was maybe eight or
nine when a few friends and I were out on
the street playing and doing things that nine year olds
(42:11):
would do. It's so awkward to say that.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
So you're not replacing something right there, No.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Huh, they were just doing nine year old things, okay,
good clean fun. We looked up and saw a plane
starting a skywrite and were instantly intrigued what was being written.
They started with an H and then an O. This
went on for maybe twenty eight minutes until finally the
word Hooters was scrawled across the sky, albeit backwards. So
I guess they have the Hooters restaurant chicken wing chain
(42:40):
in Australia.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
I guess a rich kid, yeah, really immature rich kid yeah?
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Or that. My brain couldn't comprehend how this person managed
to screw up writing a word backwards. The best reason
my childish brain could come with is that skywriting took
place somewhere between us and a group of people that
it was initially intended for, or that I just thought
it was written up and downwards rather than across the sky.
Until now, I'd never understood or bothered to learn why
(43:08):
it was like that. So thank you for keeping the
podcast great and allowing me to figure that out. That
is from Marlin. Oh boy, uh hapourachichi happerachichi.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Nice?
Speaker 3 (43:23):
Have you ever seen a word like that?
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Ha?
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Poor Rachi hapoor rochi Marlin from Sydney, Australia.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Man, thanks a lot, Marlin.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
H And that's Marlin with an a even Oh yeah, Marlan.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Huh, Well, thanks a lot, Marlin. We're gonna say it
like that.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
If you have an awesome last name and want to
share it with us, you can tweet to us at
s YSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com,
slash stuff you should Know. You can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always,
joined us at our home on the webs uf you
should Know dot com.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
H
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