YouSaid · the spoken record

Dennis Whyte

lines on the record: 244
first: 2023-01-21
most recent: 2023-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's almost like one of my lifelong goals is to make it not magic. It's like it's boring is all heck. And this means we're using it everywhere, right? Yeah.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So she's building an applied math model that is explaining she was showing me on this simulation. She goes, oh, look, look at this. And I said, oh, oh, that's like how political parties evolve, right? And even though it was a rather, you know, quote unquote simple mathematical model, it wasn't really. It was like, oh, wow.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do those things well. I have to give a shout out to my daughter, by the way, who's interested, who she's an applied math major and she's amazing at math. And over the break, she was showing she's doing research. And it's basically about how ideas and ethos are transmitted within a society. Right.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How the heck does this happen? It's kind of like it's so these are the kinds of things mathematically and organization wise that I think of just because they're they're sort of they're awe inspiring and there's”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's something about the way the whole darn thing holds together that just sort of escapes your imagination. And that's, to me, this thing of, and then we have different words, we call them holistic or spiritual, the way that it all hangs together. In fact, one of the interesting things you ask about what I think about, one of the craziest things that I think that how does it hold together is our society. Like how does what? Because there's no way, like you just think of the United States, there's 330 million people kind of working like this engine about going towards making all these things happen. But there's like no one in charge of this, really, right?”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I see scientists, some of my colleagues do this as well. What is spirituality compared to science and so forth? My own feeling in this is that... As a scientist, because I've had the pleasure of being able to both understand what my predecessors did, but I also had the privilege of being able to discover things as a scientist. And I see that. And you just the range of our conversations, like that is my, in a weird way, it's the awe that comes from looking at that. That is, if you're not in awe of the universe and nature, you haven't been paying attention. I mean, my own personal feeling is that I feel if I go snorkeling on a coral reef, I feel more awe than I could ever feel like in a church.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are we so connected to each other? As a physicist, I go, it's, you know. This is a repeatable thing that's due to a set of synapses that fire in a particular pattern and all this.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because by definition, it has to look like this I have to say, there's other times. I can say in the history of the whole”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's very tempting, yeah. It's an interesting hole to go down as a scientist because we're a part of what people have a hard time, people who aren't scientists have a hard time understanding what scientists do to themselves. And a great scientist does a very non-intuitive or non-human thing. What we do is we train ourselves to doubt ourselves, like how. Like that's a great scientist. We doubt everything we see. We doubt everything that we think because we basically try to turn off the belief valve, right? That humans just naturally have. So when it comes to these things, I can make my own comments to this. It's like, personally, you see these things about the ratios of life. And I made a comment. I said, well, you know, some part of my brain that just goes, yeah, well, yeah, because we're the only interesting, you know, multiverse.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possible solutions in front of us apply your talents in a way that you're passionate about and is going to make a difference.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of things that we are talking about today, like we are extraordinarily privileged, we are in a place where it's just, it's almost unfathomable compared to most of the misery that humans have lived in for our history. So don't give up about this, okay? But also roll up your sleeves and let's get going at solving, at getting real solutions to the problems that are in front of us, which are significant. I would argue most of them are linked to what we use in energy, but it's not just that. It's around all the aspects of like, what does it mean? What does it mean to have a distributed energy source that lifts billions of people out of poverty, particularly outside of like the Western nations, right? That seems to me a pretty compelling moral goal for all of us, but particularly for this upcoming generation. And then the other part is that we've got”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not there. We're in a place that don't say the world's going to end in 300 days or something. It's not, okay? And when we mean by this is that we have a robust society that's figured out how to do amazing things and we're going to keep doing amazing things. But that shouldn't be complacency about what our future is and the future for their children as well too. And in the end, I mean, it's a very, it's a staggering legacy to think of what we've built up primarily by basically using carbon fuels. Like people almost tend to think of this as an evil thing that we've done. I think it's an amazing thing that we've done. But we owe it to ourselves and to this thing that we've built. And we've talked about the end of the world, just nonsense. What it is, is it's the end of this kind of lifestyle and civilization at this scale and the ability to execute on these kinds.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Oh, the first thing I would say is don't give up. I get to see multiple sides of this. And there seems to be a level of despair in a young generation. It's like, you know, it's almost like the Monty Python skit. Like, I'm not dead yet, right? I mean, yeah.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many other places. Well, I like to, you know, it's interesting that we have this fascination with alien life. We have what is essentially alien life on Earth already. Like you think about the organisms that develop around deep sea like thermal vents. One of my favorite books of all time from Stephen Jay Gould. If you've never read that book, it kind of blows your mind. It's about the Cambrian explosion of life. And it's like, oh, you look at these things. And it's like the chance of us existing as a species. The genetic diversity was larger back then. This is about 500 million years ago or something like that. It is a mind-altering trip of thinking about our place in the universe, I have to say.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when we say destroy ourselves, all we'd have to do is that we basically go humans are all left and we're still living on the planet. But all we have to do is go to the technology of 1800. Were invisible in the universe again. So it was when I listened to the podcast. I thought I wanted to talk about this as well because it comes from, well, it comes from a science point of view, actually, of what it means. But also, to me, it's like another compelling driver of telling us why we should try really hard not to screw this up. We're in this unique place of our ability to discover and to make it. And I just don't want to give up about thinking that we can get through.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So basically, we will never line up in time because you get this little teeny window in time of where civilization might occur and you can never see it because these sort of like scatterflies around the galaxy and you never, yeah.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're doomed because by definition any species that gets to that point that can modify their environment like that, they'll actually push themselves past. That's one of the most”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rare accent. Super rare. And then, of course, the other part is that also just the other scary part of it, which if you look at the fairy paradox, is we got to this point. How long has it been humans? So humans, Homo sapien has been around for whatever, 100,000 years, 200,000 years, something like that. Our ability in that timeline to actually make an imprint on the universe by emitting radio waves or by modifying nature in a significant way has only been for about 100 of those hundred thousand years. And are we, is it a good question? So is it by definition by the fact that when you are able to reach that level of being able to manipulate nature, for example, discover like fission or burning fossil fuels and all this, is that what it says, oh.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the physics all the same? Yeah, all the physics is all the same. Yeah. Right. So this is the, and this is the Fermi paradox. Where the hell is everybody in the universe? Well, there's some, the scariest one of those is that I would point out that there's been order of many tens of millions of species on the planet Earth, and only one ever got to the point of sophisticated tool use that we could actually start essentially leveraging the power of what's in nature to our own will. Does this mean that basically this means, so almost, look, there is almost certainly life or DNA equivalence or whatever would be somewhere. I mean, just because you just need a soup and you need energy and you get organics and whatever the equivalent of amino acids are, but most of the life on Earth has been that those are still amazing, but it's still not very interesting.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's almost even impossible with fusion power actually. It's so hard. It's so hard because you have to carry the fuel with you and the rocket equation tells you about how much fuel you use to take. So what you end up with is like how long does it take to go to these places? And it's like staggering periods of time”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what we considered was something, so it turns out that there's thorium, which is a heavy element, so it's a so-called fertile element that we know fairly little about the geology of Mars in a deep sense. And we know that there's a lot of this on the surface of Mars. So one of the things we considered was what would happen, that it's basically a combination of a fusion device that actually makes fuel from the thorium. But the underlying energy one was fission itself as well too. So this is one of the examples of trying to be clever around those things. Or what is it, you know, this also means interstellar travel, it's like, oh yeah, that looks almost like impossible basically from an energy balance point of view. It's just because the energy required that you have to transport to get there. Almost the only things that would work are DT fusion and basically”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. So one of the fun on a weekend when I sat down and figured out what would it mean for interstellar travel like to have a DT fusion. In fact, one of the, I talked about my design class. One of my design classes was how you use essentially a special configuration of a fusion device for not only traveling to, but colonizing Mars. Because you talk about energy use being at the heart of civilization. It's like, so what if you want to go to Mars not to just visit it, but actually leave people there and make it something happen in these massive amounts of energy. So what would that look like? And it actually transforms how you're thinking about doing that as well too. Oh, yeah, so we do all those kinds of fun. And actually, it was a fairly quasi-realistic.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We weren't going big. I say, you know, it's again, I'll point out like when my godmother was born, none of this was in front of us, right? It's like we live in an amazing time. Like my grandfather plowed fields with a horse. I get to work on designing fusion reactors. Pretty amazing time.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then black holes. I mean, in some sense, black holes are way better understood than those things as well, too. So all it tells us is that we shouldn't have hubris about the ideas that we understand everything. Who knows what the next major intellectual insight will be about how the universe functions?”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rearrangement of those nuclei, not atoms. That's why Rubber Kelvin wasn't wrong. He just was working with the wrong assumptions, right? So fast forward to today, like what would this mean, right? There's a couple of things like this that sit out there in physics. And I'll point out one of them, which is very interesting. We don't know what the hell makes up 90% of the mass in the universe. So, you know, the search for dark matter, right? What is it? We still haven't discovered it. 90% of the mass of the universe is undetectable. Like what?”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it changes everything. Until you had that, like you had steam engines, by the way, you had telegraph wires, you had all those things. But that realization opened up, those two realizations opened up everything, like lasers, all these things about the modern world of what we use. And that set it up. So all I would point out is that there's a story already that sometimes there's these nagging things at the edge of science that, you know, we seem, we pat ourselves on the back and we think we got everything under control. And of course, by the way, that was the origin of also that it, think about this, that was 1908. It took like another 20 some years before people put that together with that's the process that's powering stars.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's called the nucleus. And until, and you talk about, so how revealing is this? It's like this totally changes your idea of the universe because a nucleus is a very unintuitive, non-intuitive thing. It's like, why is all the mass in something that is like zero? Basically, it was the realization that matter is empty It's all empty space”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like what the hell? Like that fit no model of any idea, right? But Rutherford refused to ignore what was a clear, like they validated it and he sat down and based on classical physics, he made the most extraordinary discovery, which was the nucleus, which is a very, very strange discovery. What I mean by that, because what he could figure out from this is that in order for these particles to bounce back and hit this plate, they were hitting something that must be heavier than them and that basically something like 99.99% of the mass of the matter that was in this gold foil was in something that contained about one trillionth of the volume of it.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there was also another part of the experiment which was that. Like, here's the alphas, here's the source. They're going this way. They could tell they were going in one direction only, basically. They're going in this direction. And you put all these over here because you want to see how they deflect and bend through it. But you put a control in the experiment. But you basically put glass plates back here. Because obviously everything should just deflect, but nothing should bounce back. So it's a control in the experiment. But what did they see? They saw things bouncing back.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, very interesting. Through it goes. And so what did you set up? So it turns out in these experiments, what you did was because if these so-called alphas, which actually now we know something else, is they go through, they would deflect how much they deflect tells you how strong an electric field they saw. So you put detectors because if you put like a piece of glass in front of this, what will happen is that when the alpha particle hits, it literally gives a little of light like this. It scintillates a little blue flash. So he would train his students or postdocs or whatever the heck they were at the time. You have to train yourself because you have to put yourself in the dark for like hours to get your eyes adjusted. And then they would start the experiment and they would sit there and literally count the things. And they could see this pattern developing, which was revealing about what was going on.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About what the nature of the charge distribution is in matter because they didn't know like where the hell is this stuff coming from even though they'd solved electromagnetism they didn't know like what made up charges”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most extraordinary experiment, which is like, which was that, okay, they had these funny rocks, they emitted these particles. In fact, they called them alpha particles, alpha just A in the alphabet, right? Because it was the first thing that they discovered. And what were they doing? So they were taking these alpha particles. And by the way, I do this to all my students because it's a demonstration of what you should be as a good scientist. So he took these alpha things and he was classically trained physicists, knew everything about momentum scattering and so over like that. And he took this and these alpha, which clearly were some kind of energy, but they couldn't quite figure out what it was. So he said, let's try to figure that we'll actually use this to try to probe the nature of matter. He took this, took these alpha particles in a very, very thin gold foil. And so what you wanted to see was that as they were going through, the way that they would scatter based on classical, in fact, the Coulomb collision, based on classical mechanics, this will tell me, reveal something.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, one guy sitting in a postal office, you know, in Switzerland figures out that all these, you know, Einstein, of course, which was like figured out all this crazy, like took these seemingly unconnected things and it's like, boom, there it is. This is what it wasn't just him, but it was like there's quantum physics. This explains this other disaster. And then this other guy, my hero, Ernest Rutherford, experimentalist.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the light, and then it basically just the whole thing falls apart. In fact, it gives a physical explanation, which is total nonsense. It tells you that every object should basically be producing an infinite amount of heat. And by the way, here's the sun, and we can look at the sun and we can figure out it's made out of hydrogen. And Lord Kelvin actually made a very famous calculation, who was basically one of the founders of thermodynamics. So you look at the hydrogen. Hydrogen has a certain energy content. You know the latent heat, basically, of hydrogen. We know the mass of the sun because we knew the size of it. And he conclusively proved that basically there could only, the sun could only make net energy for about two or three thousand years. So therefore, all this nonsense about because clearly the sun can only last for two or three thousand years if you think about the chemical, and this is basically the chemical energy content of hydrogen and what comes along in one decade.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we've got basically Newtonian mechanics and we've got Maxwell's equations, which describe basically how matter gets pushed around and how electromagnetism works. Holy cow, what a feat. But there are these few nagging things. Like, for instance, there's certain kinds of rocks that for some reason, like if you put a photographic plate around it, like it's burned or it gets an image on it. Well, where's the electromagnetism in that? There's no electromagnetic properties of this rock. Oh yeah, and the other thing too is that if I take this wonderful classical derivation of how Everything looks fantastic. Perfect match, oh until I get to high frequencies.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. Let me tell you a story about this It's a real story. So there were really, really clever scientists in the end of the late 1800s in the world. You talk about James Clerk Maxwell and you talk about Lord Kelvin and you talk about Lorentz actually who named after these other ones and on and on and on and like Faraday and they discovered electromagnetism. Holy cow. And it's like they figure out all these things. And yet there were these weird things going on that you couldn't quite figure out. It's like, what the heck is going on with this, right? But we teach this all the time in physics classes, right? So what was going on? Well, there's just a few kind of things unchecked, but basically we're at the end of discovery because we figured out how everything works.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is repeatable, and then it's going to take more extraordinary effort. And to date, this has not met that threshold, in my opinion.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people have looked at that, but even like something like quantum tunneling has a limit as to what it can actually do. So there are people who are genuine that really want to see it make, but it sort of goes to the extraordinary. We know fusion happens at these high energies. We know this extremely accurately and I can show you a plot that shows that as you go to lower, lower energy, it basically becomes immeasurable. If you're going down this other pathway, it means there's really a very different physical mechanism involved. So all I would say is that I actually poke in my head once in a while to see what's going on in that area. And as scientists, we should always try to make ourselves open. But in this one, it's like, but show me something that I can measure.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very, very, very unlikely. And this comes from, so this would require a pretty fundamental shift in our understanding of physics as we know it now. And we know a heck of a lot about how nuclear reactions occur. By the way, what's interesting is that they actually have a different name for it. They call it leaner, like low energy nuclear reactions. But we do have low energy nuclear reactions. We know these, it's because these come from particularly the weak interaction, the weak force nuclear force. And so it's at this point as a scientist you always keep yourself open, but you also demand proof, right? And that's the thing.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in that one, if human error occurs, then it just stops. And this is done. And all of those things, this is the requirement of us as technologists and developers of this technology to not ignore that dimension, in fact, of the design. And that's why me personally, I'm actually pouring myself more and more into that area because this is going to be, I actually really think it is an aspect of the economic viability of fusion, because it clearly differentiates ourselves and also sets us up to be about what we want fusion to be. Again, on paper, fusion can supply all of our energy, like all of it. So this means I want it to be like really environmentally benign, but this takes engineering ingenuity, basically, to do that.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a physics perspective, you can't run away like it did at Chernobyl, which was basically human error of letting the reactors run out of control, essentially.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this has implications for what we build from a fusion engineering point of view, but has major implications for where you can cite fusion devices, right? So in many ways, it becomes more like, well, you know, we have fences around industrial heat sources and things like this for a reason, right? For personal safety, it looks more like that, right? It's not quite as simple as that, but that's what it should look like. And in fact, we have research projects going on right now at MIT that are trying to push the technologies to make it more look like that. I think that those are key. And then in the end, as I said, like, so Chernobyl is physically impossible, actually, in a fusion system.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the consequences of those are both economic and societal acceptance and so forth, but don't bury those. Bring these up front, talk to people about them, and make people realize that you're actually, you know, the way I would look at is that you're making fusion more economically attractive by making it more societally acceptable as well too. And then realize is that, you know, I think there's a few interesting boundaries basically. So one of them, speaking of boundaries, that successful fusion devices, I'm pretty sure will require that you don't have to have an evacuation plan for anybody who lives at the site boundary.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, we just want something that works, right? But if we come with just something that works but doesn't actually satisfy the societal demands for safety and disposal, I mean, we will have materials that we have to dispose of out of fusion. But there's technological questions about what that looks like. So will this look like something that you have to, you know.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, to be clear, fusion has the intrinsic safety with respect to, it can't run away. Those are physics bases. Technology and engineering bases of running, again, anything that makes large amounts of power and heats things up has got intrinsic safety in it. And by the fact that we actually produce very energetic particles, this doesn't mean that there's no radiation involved in ionizing radiation to be more accurate infusion. It's just that it's in a very different order of magnitude, basically. So what are the lessons in fusion? So one of them is make sure that you're looking at aspects of the holistic environmental and societal footprint that the technology will have. As technologists, we tend not to focus on these, particularly in early stages of development.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's three by Lalin wasn't really a disaster because nothing escaped from the thing, but Chernobyl and Fukushima had obvious consequences in the populations that lived nearby.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or to paraphrase something, right? Which is that the famous quote by Margaret Meade, you know, never doubt that a small group of dedicated persons will change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's hard to imagine a more powerful force than like 15 MIT PhD students working together towards solving a problem. And what I always, in fact, we just recently just taught the most recent, you know, I say I teach it. I mean, I guide it, actually. The most recent version of this where they actually designed based on this National Academies report, they actually designed like a pilot plant that has bases and similarities to what we had done before, but I kept wanting to like push the envelope and where they are. It's like the creativity and the energy that they bring to these things is kind of like, it keeps me going. Like, I'm not going to retire anytime soon. When I keep seeing that kind of dedication and it's wonderful around on that, it almost not to overuse a...”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At MIT. And in the design class, like one of the features that I kept, I mean, it was interesting, I actually learned, I really learned along with the students about this, but like this insistence on the features, like we can't have so many coupled integrated hard technology developments. Like we have to separate these somehow. So we worked and worked and worked at this. And in fact, that's what really, in my opinion, the greatest advantage of the arc design and built into the Commonwealth fusion system idea is to parse out the problems. Like, how can we attack these in parallel? Yeah. And so it really comes to, we talked about philosophy. It's like a design philosophy. Like, how do you attack these kinds of problems? And, you know, you do it like that.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's through that learned experience. I mean, of the things that I'm the most proud of about what came out. In fact, the origins of thinking about how we would use the high temperature superconducting magnets came out of my design class.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source