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 actually in the we actually use machine learning and things like this in the design of the magnet itself. It's an incredibly complex design space. So you use those tools. The simulation of the plasma itself is actually we're at a totally different place than we were because of those things. So those are the two big drivers that I see actually that make it different. And it's interesting both those things self enforce about what you asked about before like how do you avoid delays and things well it's by having smaller teams that can actually execute on those but now you can do this because the new magnets make the devices all smaller And the computing means your human effectiveness about exploring the optimization space is way better. It's like they're all interlinked to each other.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're all interesting. So when people pull back, maybe a natural question is, why is it different infusion? Like there's a long history diffusion, right? It was going on for, like I told you, like stories from the late 1960s. Like, what's different now, right? So I think from the technology point of view, there's two massive things which are different. So one of them, I'll be parochial, it's the advent of this new superconducting materials because the most mature ways that we understand about how we're going to get diffusion power plants or magnetic fusion. And by the fact that you've got access to something which changes the economic equation by an over and order magnitude is just a totally, you know, and that wasn't that long ago. It was only September of 2021 that we actually demonstrated the technology. That changes the prospects there. And the other one is computing. And it's across the whole spectrum. It's not just in control of the fusion device.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the ways, and this was one of the challenges of fusion, is that everything was leading towards like, I have to have enormously large teams just to execute because of the scale of the project. The fact that now through both technology financing innovation, we're driving to the point where it's smaller focused teams about doing those things. So that's one way to make it faster. The other way to make it faster is modularize the problem or parse the problem. So this is the other difficulty infusion is that you tend to look at this as like, oh, it's really just about making the plasma into this state here that you get this energy gain. No. Because in the end, if you can parse out the different problems of making that. Integrated technological challenges.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, there's almost I've seen this from enough teams. Like I've seen also the futility of lone geniuses trying to solve everything by themselves. No. But also organizations that have 10,000 people in them is just not doesn't lend itself at all to innovation. So like one of our original sponsors and a good friend Vinod Koso, I don't know if you've ever talked to Vinod Kosla. He's a venture capital. He's got fantastic ideas about the right sizes of teams and things that really innovate. And there is an optimum place in there is that you get enough cross discipline and ideas, but it doesn't become so overly bureaucratic that you can't execute on it.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to build great teams is one of them. It tends to be that the smaller there's sort of, I'm not an expert in this, but I've seen this enough integrated engineering. Is there an equation?”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Confusion, you're not paying attention because there's always something interesting to go and do. So that's a really important part of what we're doing, which isn't new infusion, actually. And in fact, is in the roots of what we've done at MIT. But holy cow, like the proximity of possibility of commercial fusion is the new thing. So my catchphrases, like you may be wondering, like, why weren't we doing all these things? Like, why weren't we pushing towards economic fusion and new materials and new methods of heat extraction and so forth? Because everybody knew fusion was 40 years away. And now it's four years away.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, which tends to show up in the materials, and that's just one of the subcomponents of it. Almost everything gets hit in this, right? So you're also in a very integrated environment because in the end, all these things, while you isolate them from each other in a physics sense, in an engineering sense, they all have to work seamlessly together. So it's one of those, I mean, in my own career, I've basically done atomic physics, spectroscopy, plasma physics, ion etching. So this includes material science, something called MHD, even magnetohydrodynamics. And now all the way through, like I'm not even sure how many different careers I've had. It's also, by the way, this is also a recruiting stage for young scientists thinking to come in. My comment to sign is if you're bored.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, because most of our discussion that we've had so far is really like a physics discussion, really. Don't neglect physics is at the origin of this. But already we touched on plasma physics and nuclear physics, which are basically two somewhat overlap and independent disciplines. Then when it comes to the engineering, it's almost everything. So why is this? Well, let's build an electromagnet together, okay? What is this going to take? It's going to take, it's basically electrical engineering, computer, so you understand about how it goes together, what happens. Computational engineering to model this very complex integrated thing. Materials engineering, because you're pushing materials to the limit with respect to stress and so forth, takes cryogenic engineering, which is sort of a subdiscipline, but cooling things to extremely low temperatures.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was an economic advantage. But what we have to, I know what we have to have, what we have to have is a new generation of integrated scientists, technologists, and engineers that understand what needs to get done to get all the way to the goal line. We don't have them now”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to get into any deep technical questions about what the challenges are, but the pathway not just to make fusion work technically, but to make it economically competitive and viable so that it's actually used out in the private sector is a non-trivial task. And it's because of the newness of it. Like we're simultaneously trying to evolve the technology and make it economically viable at the same time. Those are two difficult coupled tasks. So my own research and my own drive right now is a fantastic Commonwealth Commonwealth Fusion Systems is set up. We have a commercialization unit of that particular kind which is going to drive forward a token. In fact, I was just, there's discussions, there's dialogues going on around the world with other kinds of ones like stellar radars, which prefer different kinds of challenges.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do those things. But also then realizing setting up the realistic expectations of what we need to do. We're not there. Like we don't have commercial fusion devices yet. And you ask, what are the challenges?”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, yeah. Well, actually, I feel like one of the reasons on this podcast. I mean, we see particularly the problems of the distrust in technology. And then honestly, in the scientific community as well too, it will be that one of the greatest tragedies, I would say, that if we go through all of this and almost pull off what looks like a miracle, like technologic and scientific wise, which is to make a fusion power plant, and then nobody wants to use it because they feel that they don't trust the people who are doing it or the technology. So we have to get so far out ahead of this. So I give lots of public lectures or things like this of accessing a larger range of people. We're not trying to hide anything. You can come and see, you know, come do tours of our laboratory. In fact, I want to set those up virtually as well too. You might look at our plasma-sized infusion center YouTube channel. So we are reaching out through those media. And it's really important that.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so those are sort of the programmatic challenges of doing that. And you asked about, you talked about SpaceX. So what has evolved even in the last year or so was, in fact, in March of 2022, the White House announced that it was going to start a program that kind of looks like a SpaceX analogy, that namely, wow, we've got these things in the private sector. We should leverage the private sector and the advantages of what they obtain, but also with the things, like this is going to be hard and it's going to take quite a bit of financing. So why don't we set up a program where we don't really get in the way of the private sector fusion companies, but we help them finance these difficult things, which is how SpaceX basically became successful through the COTS program. Fantastic, right? And that's evolving as well too. So the fusion ecosystem is almost unrecognizable from where it was like five years ago.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is like a thing that actually puts that energy on the grid. So Spark is named intentionally that it's like it's on for a short period of time and it doesn't have a, it has, yeah, yeah, you know, it's the spark of the fusion revolution or something like that, I guess we could call it.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The full end to end thing. So Commonwealth's goal is that I'll just comment to Commonwealth because I'll take some credit for this, is that the origins of Commonwealth were in fact in examining that. Like we could see this new technology coming forward, this new superconducting material. And the origins of our thought process were really around designing effectively the pilot plant or the commercial unit. It's called ARC, which was actually the step forward after Spark. And that was the origins of it. So all the things that were other parts of the plan, like Spark and the magnet, were actually all informed totally by building something that's going to put net electricity on the grid. And the timing of that, we still hope is actually the early 2030s.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's achieving the right temperature, density, and energy confinement time in the fuel itself, in the plasma itself. And so some of the configurations which are being chosen have quite a ways to go, in fact, of seeing those. But what their consideration is, oh, yes, but by our particular configuration, the engineering simplicity confers an economic advantage even if we're behind in sort of an science sense. Okay, which is fine. This is also what you get when you get an explosion in the private sector. You basically are distributing risks in different ways, right? Which makes sense. All of that good. So what I would say is that the next hurdle to really overcome is about making net electricity. So like we need to see a unit or several units, like put using fusion in some way to put a meaningful amount of energy on the grid.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's an obvious one like achieving the fusion state itself and high gain is a hard one, but we already talked about.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fusion power is the heating source to keep it hot. So if you go too small, it basically just cannot keep it hot. So it's interesting. So this is one of the hard parts. So this means that the individual units, you know, and it varies from concept to concept, but the National Academies report that came out last year sort of put the benchmark as being probably the minimum size looks like around 50 million watts of electricity, which is like enough for like a small to mid-size city actually. So that is sort of like a scale challenge. And in fact, it's one of the reasons why in Commonwealth and in other private sector ones, like they try to push this down, actually, of trying to get to these smaller units just because it reduces the cost of it, then probably, obviously.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So the first one is just the cost of building a single unit. So fusion has, and it's actually interesting you talked about the different models that you have. So fusion has one of its interesting limitations is that it's very hard, almost at some point becomes physically impossible to actually make small power units like a kilowatt, a thousand watts, you know, which is like a personal home. Like, you know, this is about a thousand. Is there your personal use of electricity is about like a thousand watts? This is basically impossible for a single unit to do this. So like you're not going to have a fusion power plant like is your furnace or your electric heater in your home. And the reason for this comes from the fact that fusion relies on it being, it's not just that it's very hot.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to suspect this because anything that is high tech and is like a really important thing in our economy tends to never find its way as only one manifestation like look at transportation as well too we have scooters vespas you know overland trucks cars electric cars of course we have these because they meet different demands in it so what's interesting you know that i find fascinating now is that we have infusion it's going to look like that that probably there's the while the near term focuses on electricity production there might even be different kinds of markets that actually make sense in some places less in others it comes to trade-offs because we haven't really talked about the engineering yet but the engineering really matters like to the to the operation of the device and so it could be um that you know i suspect what we'll end up with is several”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the density of fuel really matters. And actually, so does the, this means energy confinement time is also different by a factor of 10 billion as well, because it's the product of those two. So one's really dense and short-lived, and the other one's really long-lived and actually under. So, what that means is that the way to get the underlying physical state is so different among these different approaches, what it lends itself to is, does this mean that eventual commercial products will actually fill different needs in the energy system? So it sort of goes to your comment about”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here. And then Absolutely. So, actually, this is what I've been encouraged about fusion. So, fusion's still hard to let everyone be clear because of the science underneath it of achieving the right conditions for the plasma basically is a yardstick that you have to put up against all of them. What's encouraging that I see in this, and it's actually what happens when you sort of let loose the creativity of this, is maybe I'll go back to first principles. So fusion is also a fairly strange. So if you think about building a coal, like burning wood and coal and gas is actually not that much different from each other because they're kind of about the same physical conditions and you get the fuel and you light into that. Fusion is very, remember I told you that there's this condition of the temperature which is kind of universal. But if you take the density of the fuel between magnetic fusion and inertial fusion, they're different by about a factor of 10 billion.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commercial fusion, you know, what does that mean? Commercial fusion to me means that you're actually have a known quantity about what it costs, what it costs to build, and what it costs to operate, and the reliability of putting energy on the grid. That's commercial fusion. So it turns out that that's not necessarily exactly the first fusion devices that put electricity on the grid because there's a learning curve to get better and better at it. That's probably, I would suspect, the biggest hurdle is to get to the first one.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the ambition. Then the question is, and actually, this is different because the government program, and they vary around in this. So, for example, the United Kingdom's government idea was to get the first one on by 2040. And China has ambitions probably in middle 2030s, or maybe a little bit later. And Europe, continental Europe, it's a little bit, I'm not exactly sure where it is, but it's like later. It's like 2050 or 2060, because it's mostly linked to the eater timeline as well, too. The fusion companies, which makes sense, it's like, of course they've got the most aggressive timelines. It's like, we're going to map the human genome faster as well too, right? So it's interesting about where we are. And I think, you know, we're not all the way there, but my intuition tells me we're probably going to have a couple of cracks at it, actually, on that timeline. So this is where we have to be careful, though, you say.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said we should be looking to try to get like the first, and what do I mean by what does it mean to start that you've got something that's putting electricity on the grid, a pilot, what we call it. And if that can get started, like in the early 2030s, the idea of ramping it up makes sense. That's math, right?”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say, this is difficult, but it's fairly easy because it's math. So what you do is you actually go to some target like 2050 or 2060, something like this, and say, I want to be blank percent of the world's market of electricity or something like that. And we know historically what it takes to evolve and distribute these kinds of technologies because every technology takes some period of time, so-called S-curve. It's basically everything follows a logarithmic curve, exponential type curve. It's a straight line of log plot. And like you look at wind, solar, fission, they all follow the same thing. So it's easy. You take that curve and you go, that's slope and you work backwards. And you go, if you don't start in the early 2030s, like it's not going to have a significant impact by that time. So all of them share this idea. And in fact, it's not just the companies now. The US federal government has a program that was started last year.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting fusion into place so that both it meets the investors' demands, which are interesting, right? And the time scales of that, but also it's like, well, in why? It's because it's easy. There's this enormous push driver about getting carbon-free energy sources out into the market. And whoever figures those out is going to be both very, it's going to be very important geopolitically, but also economically as well too. It's a different kind of bet, I guess, or a different kind of gamble that you're taking with fusion, but it's so disruptive that it's like there's essentially a class of investors and teams that are ready to go after it as well too. So what do they share in this? They typically share getting after fusion on a time scale so that could it have any relevance towards climate change balancing climate change?”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a sector. They actually have something called the fusion industry association, which if your viewers want to go see this, this describes the difference. And they've got this plethora of approaches. Like I haven't even described all the approaches. I've basically described the mainline approaches, and they're all at varying degrees of technical and scientific maturity with very huge different balances between them. What they share is that because they're going out and getting funding from the private sector is that their stated goals are about”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From nuclear fusion. Partly driven by us, but in other places as well. So there's the advent what's so different now than three or four years ago. We launched around four years ago. What's so different now is the advent of a very nascent but seemingly robust commercial fusion endeavor. So it's not just Commonwealth fusion systems. There's something like 20 plus companies.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's interesting that EDER reasons that we started with a group of six of us at MIT. And then once we got some funding through the establishment of the company, it became a slightly larger. But in the end, we had a rather small team. This was a team of order of like 20 to 25 people design Spark in about two years, right? How does that happen? Well, we're clever, but you have to give Eater its due here as well too. Again, this is an aspect always of the bootstrap up. Like I go back to the human genome project. So modern-day genomics would not be possible without the underlying basis that came from setting that up. It had to be there. It had to be curiosity-driven public program. It's the same with Eater. But because we had the tools that were there to understand Eater, we also had the tools to understand Spark.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's way more than that. It wasn't just about surviving for the sake of surviving. It was like, in the end, for me, it became like this, I remember the moment we talk about these moments as a scientist and we were just like, we were working so hard about figuring out like, does this really, would this really work? And it's complex. Like, does the magnet work? Does the interaction with the plasma work? Does all these things work? And it was just a grind, push, push, push, push. And I remember the moment because I was sitting in my office in Brookline. And there was just like, I read like, and I was in, I don't know, whatever, the 20 or 40th slide or something into it. And it was sort of that moment like it just came together. And I like, I got it. I couldn't even sit down because all I was just like my wife was like, why are you walking around the apartment like this? Like I just couldn't, I said, it's going to work. Like it's going to work. Like, holy. That moment of realization is kind of amazing. But it's also brings the”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really a fusion, both from the research but also clearly important from the educational part of it. So we, you know, we push back against this. We got a lifeline. We were able to go. And it was in this, it was in this time scale that we basically came up with this idea. It's like, we should do this. And in the end, it was all of those people who were in the C level of the company were all literally students who got caught in that. They were PhD students at the time. So you talk about enabling another generation. It's like, yeah, there we go, right?”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sometimes that brashness doesn't bear out. You know, that's an aspect that you just take a different risk profile as well too. But you're right. It's this, you know, of the, I mean, it was interesting our own trajectory at the Fusion Center, like we were pushed into this place by necessity as well too. Because I told you we have, and we had operated for a long time a Tokamak on the MIT campus, achieved these world records like a 100 million degree plasma and stuff like, wow, this is fantastic. But, you know, somewhat ironically, I have to say, is that it was like, oh, but we're not, this isn't the future of fusion anymore. Like, we're not, we're just going to stop with small projects because it's too small, right? So we need to really move on to these much bigger projects because that's really the future of fusion. And so it was defunded. And this basically put at risk like we were going to essentially lose MIT in the e-”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of funding, which it is a different source of funding because it comes from it's also a different purpose, which is very important”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which was it's sort of like to me that's like mapping the human genome is like like that we can make net energy from fusion like it's one of those like in your drawer that you go this is a significant achievement by humanity right in the century and there's a human genome project fully government funded It's going to take 20, 25 years because we basically know the technology. We're just going to be really diligent, keep going. And then all of a sudden, what comes along? Disruptive technology, right? You can sequence shotgun sequencing and computer recognition patterns and basically, oh, I can do this a hundred times faster. So that's really the to me that the story about why we started, why we launched Commonwealth Fusion Systems was more than just about another source.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and increase efficiency is a drive that comes from the commercial aspect of it, right? And this also then changes the people in the teams which are doing it as well too. And in fact, trickles throughout the whole thing because the purpose isn't while you're advancing things like it's really good that we can put things in orbit a lot more cheaply. Like it advances science, which is an interesting synergy, right? And it's the same thing that we think is going to happen in fusion, that namely this is a bootstrap effect that actually that when you start to push yourself to think about near-term commercialization, it allows the science to get in hand faster, which then allows the commercialization to go faster, and up we go. By the way, we've seen this also in another, again, you have to watch out with analogies because we can go so far. But biotech is another one. Like you look at the human genome project.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what is interesting about SpaceX is that it proved it's more than actually just financing. It's really the purpose of the organization. So the purpose of, and I'm not against public finance or anything like that, but the purpose of a public entity like NASA correctly speaks to the political because the cost comes from the political assembly that is there and I guess from us eventually as well too, but its purpose wasn't about like making a commercial product. It's about fundamental discovery and so forth, which is all rich is all really great. So like why did SpaceX, it's interesting, why did SpaceX succeed so well is because the idea was it's like the focus that comes in the idea that you're going to relentlessly like reduce cost”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great that you brought that up. We use several historic analogs, and one of them is around SpaceX, which is an appropriate one because space, you know, putting things into orbit has just a minimum size to it and integrated technological complexity and budget and things like this. Our point when we were talking about starting a fusion commercialization company, people look at you like, isn't this still really just a science experiment? But one of the things that we pointed to was SpaceX to say, well, tell me like 25 years ago how many people”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if, in fact, if you look at it's like you just expand the size of it, they look almost identical to each other because it's based on the, and actually that comes for a reason, by the way, is that it also looks like a bigger version of the tokamak that we ran at MIT for 20 years, where we establish the scientific benefits, in fact, of these higher magnetic fields. So that's the pathway that runs. So we say, so what does this mean? The context is different because it was made because it's primarily being made by a private sector company spun out of MIT because the way that it raised money and the purpose of the entity which is there is to make commercial fusion power plants, not just to make a scientific experiment. This is actually why we have a partnership, right? Is that our purpose at MIT is not to commercialize directly, but boy, do we want to...”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Round 20 Tesla, we knew by the rules of Tokamax that this was going to be allow us to vastly shrink the sizes of these devices. So it wouldn't take although it's a worthy goal, it wouldn't take a seven nation international treaty basically to build it. You could build it with a company and a university.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it could basically keep going around and around technically for infinity. And what that for eternity. And what that means is that when you energize these large electromagnets, they're using basically zero electrical power to maintain them. Whereas if you would do this in a normal wire like copper, you basically make an enormous toaster oven that's consuming enormous amounts of power and getting hot, which is a problem. That was the technical breakthrough that was realized by myself and at the time my students and postdocs and colleagues at MIT was that we saw the advent of this new superconductor which would allow us to access much higher magnetic fields. It's basically a next generation of the technology. And it was quite disruptive to fusion that namely what it would allow that if we could get to this point where we can make the”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason is for 10 seconds is that in terms of that basically allows everything to settle in terms of the fusion in the plasma equilibrium. Everything is nice and settled. So you know you have seen the physical state at which you would expect a power plant to operate basically for magnetic fusion. Like, wow, right? But it's more than that. And it's more than that. It's because about who's building it and why and how it's being financed. So that scientific pathway was made possible by the fact that we had access to a next generation of magnet technology. So to explain this real quick, why do we call it? You said it in the words, a superconducting magnet. What does this mean? Superconducting magnet means that the materials which are in the electromagnet have no electrical resistance. Therefore, when the electric current is put into it, the current goes around unimpeded.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should get to the point where it's producing over 100 million watts of fusion power. But remember it's 40 times smaller. So Eater was 500 megawatts. Technically our design is around 150 megawatts. So it's only about a factor of three difference despite being 40 times smaller. And we see QP large order of 10 or something like this. At that state is a very important scientifically because this basically matches what eater is looking to do. The plasma is dominated by its own heating. That's very, very important. And it does that for about 10 seconds.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At its heart, it's exactly the same concept as ITER. So it's basically a configuration of electromagnets. It's arranged in the shape of a donut. And within that, we would do the same thing that happens in all the other token acts, including an ether and in this one, is that namely you put in gas, make it into a plasma, you heat it up, it gets to about 100 million degrees. The differentiator in spark is that we use the actual deuterium tritium fuel. because of the access to very high magnetic fields, it's in a very compact space. It's very, very small. What do I mean by small? So it's 40 times smaller in volume than eater. But it uses exactly the same physical principles. So this comes from the high magnetic field. So in the end, why does this matter? What it does is it does those things.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there another way that we can get to this extremely worthwhile goal that maybe it's not that pathway? And the other part that was clearly frustrating to me, because I'm an advocate of fusion, you asked me about was I, you know, I was like, well, it's laser fusion or inertial fusion or magnetic fusion. I just want fusion energy because I think it's so important to the world is that. But the other thing, if that's the case. Then why do we have only one attempt at it on the entire planet, which was eater It's like, that makes no sense to me, right? We should have multiple attempts at this with different levels of whatever you want to think about a technical schedule, scientific risk, which are incorporated in them, and that's going to give us a better chance of actually getting to the goal line.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what does this meant in terms of the speed of the project and the ability to govern it and so forth? It's just been a challenge, honestly, around this. And this is, I mean, it's very hard technically what's occurring. But when you also introduce such levels of, I mean, this isn't just me saying it. There's like GOO reports from the US government. And so it's hard to steer all of this around. And what that's tended to do is make it's not the fastest decision making process. My own personal view of it was it was interesting because you asked, you said about the magnet and commonwealth fusion systems. It was I worked most of my career on ETER because when I came into the field in the early 1990s when I completed my PhD and started to work, this was one of the most like you can't imagine being more excited about something like we're going to change the”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So this meant then too is the development of an industrial base that can actually produce the technologies like the electromagnets and so forth. And to do it with, it is a tokamak. It is one of these, yes. But very interesting, it also revealed limitations of this as well too. Well, it's interesting is that it is clearly on paper and in fact and in practice as well too the very different political systems and you consider at least geopolitical or economic rivals or whatever you want to use like working towards a common cause and one that we all think is worthy is very like okay that's very satisfying But it's also interesting to see the limitations of this. It's because, well, you've got seven chefs in the kitchen.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the fusion power is the heating source itself, this means that they're linked together. And so IDER is projected to make about 500 million watts of fusion power. So this is a significant amount. Like this is what you would use for powering cities.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So its scientific purpose is a worthy one that it's essentially in any fusion device the thing that you want to see is more and more relative amounts of self-heating. And this is something that had not been seen, although we have made fusion reactions and we'd seen small amounts of the self-heating, we never got to a dominant, this actually goes through this QP business. The goal of ITER, and it shifted around a little bit historically, but fairly quickly became we want to get to a large amount of self-heating. So this is why it has its primary feature is to get 2p of around 10. And through this, this is a way to study this plasma that has more higher levels of self-determination around on it. But it also has another feature, which was let's produce fusion power at a relevant scale. And actually they're linked together, which actually makes sense, you think about, is”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was in the mid-1980s and actually then after, so they basically signed an agreement that they would move forward to like literally collaborate on a project whose idea would be to show large net energy gain infusions commercial viability and work together on that. And very soon after that, Japan joined, as did the European Union. And now that project, it evolved over a long period of time and had some interesting political ramifications to it, but in the end, this actually also had South Korea, India, and China join as well too. So you're talking about major, a major fraction of, and now Russia, of course, inside the Soviet Union. And actually, that coalition is holding together despite the obvious political turmoil that's going around on all those things.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source