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

1. “Couldn't figure out how to bargain to the point of some part of the treaty. I can't even remember the details of it anymore. But they needed some kind of a symbol, almost to say, but we're still going to keep working towards something that's important for all of us. What did they pick? A fusion project?”

   2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Divides is a very important thing, even when it's a very teeny fraction of the overall populations, it can be held up as an example of that. But it's interesting that if you look at then that continued collaboration, which continues to this day, is that this actually played a major role, in fact, in east-west relations like Soviet West relations, is that back in the Reagan-Gorbachev days, which of course were interesting in themselves of all kinds of changes happening on both sides, but still like a desire to push down the stockpile of nuclear weapons and all that within that context, there was a very fairly significant historic event that at one of the Reagan Gorbachev summits is that they had really, they didn't get there.”

   2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Are you heuristic or altruistic aspect of this? It's like this is something that could change the future of humanity and its nature and its relationship with energy. Isn't this something that we should work on together? And that went along in those ones. And in particular, that any kind of place where you can actually have an open exchange of people who are sort of at the intellectual frontiers of your society, this is a good thing, right, of being able to collaborate. I've had the, I mean, I have had an amazing career. I've worked with people from, it's hard to throw a dart at a country on the map and not hit a country of people that I've been able to work with. How amazing is that? And even just getting small numbers of people to bridge the cultural and societal”

   2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “It's a great question. So, as I said, there was a reason because it was so hard. That was one of the reasons they declassified it. And actually they started working together in some sense on it as well. And I think it was really, there was...”

   2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Anyway, so back to this. So, why so, yes, tokamacs have been have achieved the highest in magnetic fusion by far like the best amounts of these conditions that I talked about. And in fact, pushed right up to the point where they were near QP of one. Just didn't quite get over one”

   2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Well, you can see where this goes right from this, you know, we're kind of telling the stories backwards almost, but the advent of a tokamac, along with the fact that you could make very strong magnetic fields with the technology that had been developed at that laboratory, that was the origins of sort of pushing together the physics of the plasma containment and the magnet technology and put them together in a way that I would say is a very typical MIT success story, right? We don't do just pure science or pure technology. We sort of set up this intersection between them. And there were several pioneers of people at MIT, like Bruno Coppi, who's a professor in the physics department and Ron Parker, who was a professor in electrical engineering and nuclear engineering. It's like even the makeup of the people, right? Got this blends of science and engineering in them. And that's actually was the origin of the plasma science infusion center. Was doing those things.”

   2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “And they use this laser and they shot the laser beam like through the plasma. And by looking at the scattered light that came from they go basically the scattered light gets more broadened in its spectrum if it gets hotter. So you could exactly tell the temperature of this. And even though you're not physically touching the plasma, it's like, holy cow, you're right. It is. It is 10 million degrees. And so this was one of those explosions of like everyone in the world then wanted to build a tokamak because it was clearly like, wow, this is like so far ahead of everything else that we tried before. So that actually has a part of the story to MIT in the Plows Nights Infusion Center was why is there a strong fusion and a major fusion program at MIT? It was because we were host to the Francis Bidder Magnet Laboratory, which is also the National High Field Magnet Laboratory.”

   2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “To make fusion reactions, and everyone just goes, Oh, you know, no way, it's just hype from it's like there's no way because we failed at this. It's a great story in the history of fusion is that then, but they insisted, said, no, look, you can see this from our data. It's like this thing is really hot and it seems to be working. This is, you know, late 1960s. And there was a team that went from the United Kingdom's fusion development lab, and they brought this very fancy, amazing new technology called a laser.”

   2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “And this actually perpetuates all the way till now for we can talk about the project that that has sort of captured in now. And the reason they declassified it is because everything sucked basically about trying to make this confinement and high temperature plasma. And then the Russians, then the Soviets, came along with this device called a Tokamak, which is a Russian acronym, which basically means magnetic coils arranged in the shape of a donut. And they said, holy cow, like everyone was stuck at a meager, like half a million degrees or half a million degrees, which is like infusion terms of zero, basically. And then they come along, they say, oh, we've actually achieved a temperature 20 times higher than everybody else. And it's actually starting.”

   2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Of the concepts which are there, the tokamak is by far the most mature in terms of its breadth of performance and thinking about how it would be applied in a fusion energy system. In the history of this was that many, in fact you asked about if we go back to the history of the Palestinians and fusion center the history of fusion is that people scientists had started to work on this in the 1950s. It was all hush hush and Cold War and all that kind of stuff. And it's like they realized, holy cow, this is like really hard. Like we actually don't really know what we're doing in this because everything was at low temperatures. They couldn't get confinement. It was interesting. And then they declassified it. And this is one of the few places that the West and the Soviet Union actually collaborated on was the science. Even during the Cold War. Even during the middle of the Cold War, it was really...”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “It's different than a token bag, but it actually works on the same physical principle, that namely in the end it produces a plasma which loops in magnetic fields, which loop back on themselves. But in that case, the totality basically, the totality of the confining magnetic field is produced by external three-dimensional magnets, so they're twisted. And it turns out the precision of those is more stringent.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Of this kind of magnetic confinement called a stellarator, which we have these names for historic reasons, which is different.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “The configuration of the electromagnets and about how you're achieving this requirement. It's fairly precise, but it doesn't have to be, particularly in something like a Tokamak, what we do is we produce planar coils, which just means they're flat. And we situate them. So if you think of a circle like this, what does it produce if you put current through it? It produces a magnetic field which goes through the circle like this. So if you align many of them like this, this, this, this, there's things online you can go see a picture. You keep arranging these around in a circle itself. This forces the magnetic field lines to basically just keep executing around like this. So you tend to align, that one tends to requires good alignment. It's not like insane alignment because you're actually exploiting the symmetry of the situation to help it. There's another kind of configuration of magnetic.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “We were probably listening to our conversation with some of my colleagues yesterday. So it's actually, it depends on the configuration about how you're doing it.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “And they go around like this, but they stream freely along the magnetic field line. So this is why the nature of the containment is that if you can get that circle smaller and smaller, it stays further away from Earth temperature materials. That's why the confinement gets better. But the problem is that because it free streams along, so if I just have a long straight magnetic field, okay, it'll just keep leaking out the ends like really fast. So you get rid of the ends. So you basically loop it back around. So what these look like are typically donut shaped or more technically toroidal shape, but donut shaped things where this collection of magnetic fields loops back on itself and it also for reasons which are more complicated to explain basically it also twists slowly around in this direction as well too. So that's what it looks like. That's what the plasma looks like because that's what the fuel looks like. So then this means this”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “The geometry, yeah, so the geometry is typically what you do is you want to produce a magnetic field that loops back on itself. And the reason for this was goes down to the nature of the force that I described. Which is that there's no containment or force along the direction of the magnetic field. So here's a magnetic field. In fact, more technically or more graphically what it's doing is that when the plasma is, here's plasma particles here. Here's a magnetic field. What it does is it forces all those because of this Lorentz force, it makes all of those charge particles.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Yeah, sure. It's fun, yeah. There's a lot to parse there. So maybe, so we already explained an electromagnet, which in general is what you do is you take electric current and you force it to follow a pattern of some kind, typically like a circular pattern around and around and around, around. It goes, the more time the more current and the more times it goes around, the stronger the magnetic field that you make. And as I pointed out, it's like really important in magnetic confinement because it is the force that's produced by fact, technically it goes like the magnetic field squared because it's a pressure which is actually being exerted on the plasma to keep it contained.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “He gets into a car, and then one of those things in the junkyard comes down and picks up the car and then puts it into the crusher. This is his stunt, which is pretty hilarious. Anyway, but that thing that picks him up, like, how does that work? That's actually not a permanent magnet. It's an electromagnet. And so you can turn by turning off and on the power supply, it turns off and on the magnetic field. So this means you can pick it up and then when you switch it off, the magnetic field goes away and the car drops. Okay, so that's what it looks like.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “And its simplest, what it is, it's an electric current which is going in a pattern around and around and around. And what this does is it produces a magnetic field which goes through it by the laws of electromagnetism. So that's how we make the magnetic field in these configurations. And the key there is that it's not limited by the magnetic property of the material. The magnetic field amplitude is set by the amount of the geometry of this thing and the amount of electric current that you're putting through. And the more electric current that you put through, the more magnetic field that you get. The closest one that people maybe see is one of my favorite skits actually was Super Dave Osborne past you know called bizarre Super Dave Osborne which was a great comedian cult he was a stunt man and one of his tricks was that he”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “There's essentially two ways to create a magnet. So, one of them is that we're familiar with fridge magnets and so forth. These are so-called permanent magnets. And what it means is that within these, the atoms arranged in a particular way that it produces the electrons basically arranged in a particular way, that it produces a permanent magnetic field that is set by the material. So those have a fundamental limitation how strong they can be, and they also tend to have this circular shape like this. So you don't typically use those. So what we use are so-called electromagnets. And what is this? It's like, so the other way to make a magnetic field also go back to your elementary school physics or science class is that you take a nail and you wrap a copper wire around it and connect it to a battery then it can pick up iron filings this is an electromagnet”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Of the magnetic field. There's only force in the directions orthogonal to the magnetic field. So, by the way, is a huge deal in a whole other discipline of plasma physics, which is like the study of our near atmosphere. So the study of aurora borealis, what's happening in the near atmosphere, what happens when solar flares hit the magnetic field. In fact, remember I said fusion is the reason that life is responsible in the universe? Well, you could also argue so is magnetic confinement because the charged particles which are being emitted from the galaxy and from our own star would be very, very damaging to on Earth. So we get two layers of protection. One is the atmosphere itself, but the other one is the magnetic field which surrounds the earth and basically traps these charged particles so they can't get away. It's the same deal.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Several features to it. One is that the stronger, the strength of the magnetic field, the stronger the force. And for this reason is that if you increase the strength of magnetic fields, this means that the containment, because namely the force which you're pushing against it is more effective. And the other feature is that there is no force. So for those who remember magnetic fields, what are these things? They're also invisible. But if you think of a permanent magnets or your fridge magnet, there are field lines, which we actually designate as arrows which are going around. You sometimes see this in school when you have the iron filings on a thing and you see the directions of the magnetic field lines or when you use a compass, right? So that's telling you because we're living in an immersed magnetic field made by the earth, which is at very low intensity magnetic field, strong enough we can actually see what direction it so this is the arrow that the magnetic field is pointing. It's always pointing north and for us is that so an interesting feature of this force is that there is no force along the direction.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “So this is called the Lorentz force for those who are keeping track. So that is the force that we use to replace physical containment. So this, again, how do you hold something at a hundred million degrees? It's impossible in a physical container. This is not like, you know, it's not this plastic bottle holding in this liquid or a gas chamber. What you're doing is you're using, you're immersing the fuel in a magnetic field that basically exerts a force at a distance. This comes back again to again like why plasms are so strange. It's the same thing here. And if it's immersed in this magnetic field, you're not actually physically touching it, but you're making a force go onto it. So that's the inherent feature of magnetic confinement. And then magnetic confinement devices are like a token are basically configurations which exploit the features of that magnetic containment.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “The key force that matters here is that if you have a charged particle, that namely it's a particle that has an electric net electric charge, and it's in the proximity of a magnetic field, then there is a force which is exerted on that particle.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “So we wouldn't do that. Yeah, to be continued. So, what are we doing it with? So, in the one that I just described, it's like you say, so you have to replace this with some force which is better than that. And so what I mean by that, it's stronger than that. So what I talked about, the laser fusion, this is coming from the force, which is enormous compared to gravity, like from the rocket action of pushing it together. So in magnetic confinement, We use another force of nature, which is the electromagnetic force. And that's very, it's orders and orders of magnitude stronger than the gravitational force.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Is of course possible to make a son, although he doesn't have stars, but it is not impossible on Earth because for the simple reason that it takes the gravitational force is extremely weak. And so it takes something like the size of a star to make fusion occur in the center.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Go back to that. So, why inertial confinement works on the same principle that a star works? So what is the confinement mechanism in the star is gravity? It's its own inertia of something the size of the sun basically pushes literally a force by gravity against the center. So the center is very, very hot, 20 million degrees, and literally outside the sun, it's essentially zero because it's vacuum of space. How the hell does that do that? It does that, and it's out of, like, why doesn't just leak all of its heat? It doesn't leak its heat because it all is held together by the fact that it can't escape because of its own gravity. So this is why the fusion happens in the center of the SAR. Like we think of the surface of the sun as being hot. That's the coldest part of the star. So if our own sun, this is about 5,500 degrees, a beautiful symmetry, by the way. It's like, so how do we know all this? Because we can't, of course, see directly into the interior of the sun by knowing the volume and the temperature of the surface of the sun. You know exactly how much power it's putting out. And by this, you know that this is coming from fusion reactions occurring.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Keeps pushing the needle forward is a good thing. But we also have to be realistic about what it means to making a fusion energy system.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Because they need to publish the paper, but it reveals enormous amounts of scientific information about what's happening in that process that I just described. So exciting. I mean, and I have colleagues there that have worked for 30 years on this for that moment. Of course you're excited for them, right? And one of those, like, there is nothing, it's hard to describe to people who aren't, it's almost addicting to be a scientist when you get to be at the forefront of research of anything. And you're looking at it, particularly when you're the person who did it, right? And you go, no human being has ever seen this or understood this. It's like, it's pretty thrilling, right? So even in proxy, it's incredibly thrilling to see this. It's not, I don't think it's rivalry or jealousy. It's like, I can tell you already, fusion is really hard. So anything that...”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Like, how do you know that this happened, this measurement, right? So, one of the ways to do this is if I told you that in the DT fusion, what it actually, the product that comes out is helium, what we call an alpha, but it's helium, and a free neutron, right? So the neutron contains 80% of the energy released by the fusion reaction, and it also, because it lacks a charge, it basically tends to just escape and go flying out. So this is what we would use eventually for that's mostly what fusion energy would be. So what my colleagues, my scientific colleagues at the Plasma Science Infusion Center built were extraordinary measurement tools of being able to see the exact details of not only the number of neutrons that were coming out, but actually what energy that they're at. And by looking at that configuration, it reveals enormous, I'm not going to scoop them.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “All of the above. I mean, the ignition, you know, I have to just wave the flag a little bit. So MIT was a central player in this accomplishment. Interesting, I'd say it showed our two, some of our two best traits. So one of them was that...”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Physics, I can draw the car, I can show you all the equations that tell you about how it slows down and converts kinetic energy into heat and then what that heat means. You can write like an ideal thermal cycle, like a carnot cycle. So the physics of that, yeah, great. The integrated engineering of this is a whole other thing”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “So, in the end, you have to basically convert it into heat in some way. So most of the end, what fusion makes mostly is very energetic particles from the fusion reaction. So you have to slow those down in some way and then make heat out of it. So basically the conversion of the kinetic energy of the particles into heating some engineered material that's on the outside of this.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Like that, right? So you're doing it there. And then comes the other aspect. So it's making the targets, delivering them, being able to repeatedly get them to burn. And then we haven't even talked about like how do you then get the fusion energy out, which is meanly because these things are basically micro implosions which are occurring. So this energy is coming out to some medium on the outside that you've got to figure out how to extract the energy out of this thing.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “This had a gain of around 1.5 that namely the fusion energy was approximately 1.5 times the laser input energy. This is a fairly significant threshold. However, from the science of what I just told you is that there's two fundamental efficiencies which come into it, which really come from physics, really. One of them is hydrodynamic efficiency. What I mean by this is that it's a rocket. So this just has a fundamental efficiency built into it, which comes out to orders of like 10%. So this means that your ability to do work on the system is just limited by that. And then the other one is the efficiency of laser systems themselves, which if they're wall plug efficiency is 10%, you've done spectacularly well. In fact, the wall plug efficiency of the ones used in that experiment are like more like 1%, right?”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “No, no, no. The rest is incredibly complicated engineering. Well, in fact, there's still physics hurdles to overcome. So where does this come from? And it's actually because if you want to make an energy source out of this.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “So you have to make the BBs very fast. There's reports on this, but about what does it mean? The starting point is can you make this gain? So this was a scientific achievement primarily.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Because what they had done was it's clear that they propagated, they got this, what they call a hotspot, and in fact that this heating had propagated out into the fuel. And that's the science behind inertial fusion.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “The effect is like if you know the thing, so adiabatic cooling we're actually fairly familiar with. If you take a spray can, right? And you push the button when it rapidly expands, it cools. This is the nature of a lot of cooling technology we use actually. Well, the opposite is true that if you would take all of those particles and jam them together very fast back in, they want to heat up. And that's what happens. And then what happens is you basically have this very cold, compressed set of fusion fuel. And at the center of this, it goes to this hundred million degrees Celsius. And so if it gets to that 100 million degrees Celsius, the fusion fuel starts to burn. And when that fusion fuel starts to burn, it wants to heat up the other cold fuel around it. And it just basically propagates out so fast that what you would do ideally, you would actually burn an effusion sense most of the fuel that's in the pellet. So this was very exciting.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “You want to keep the fuel cold and just literally just ideally compress it. And then in something which is at the very center of that compressed sphere, because you've compressed it so rapidly, the laws of physics basically require for it to increase in temperature.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “This is why you use lasers because you're applying this energy in very, very short periods of time, like under a fraction of a billionth of a second. And so basically that, and then the force which is coming from this comes from the energy of the lasers, which is basically the rocket action, which does the compression.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Almost from classical physics, although there's some quantum in it as well. But basically, if you can do this very uniformly and so-called adiabatically, like you're not actually heating the fuel, what happens is you get adiabatic compression such that the very center of this thing all of a sudden just spikes up in temperature because it's actually done so fast. So why is it called inertial fusion? It's because you're doing this on such fast time scales that the inertia of the hot fuel basically is still finite so it can't like push itself apart before the fusion happens.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “The lasers actually don't heat. This is what was confusing. People think the lasers, oh, we're going to get it to 100 million degrees. In fact, you want the exact opposite of this. What you want to do is get essentially a rocket going out like this. And then what happens is that the sphere, like, and this is happening in a billionth of a second or last, actually, this rapidly, that force so rapidly compresses the fuel that what happens is that you're squeezing down on it and it's like, what was the that's bad actually? I should have started with a basketball. It goes from like a basketball down to something like this. A billionth of a second. And when that happens, I mean, scale that in your mind. So when that happens, and in this comes from.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Assembly of this fuel, like a ball, and what is the purpose of the lasers? The purpose of the lasers is to provide optical energy to the very outside of this, and what happens is that energy is absorbed because it's in the solid phase of matter. So it's absorbed really in the surface. And then what happens is that when it's absorbed in something called the ablator, what does that mean? It means it goes instantly from the solid phase to the gas phase. So it becomes like a rocket engine. But you hit it like very uniformly. So all there's like rocket engines coming off this surface. Think of like an asteroid almost where there's like rockets coming off all this thing. So what does that do? Well, what does a rocket do? It actually pushes by Newton's laws, right? It pushes the other thing on the other side of it equal and opposite reaction. It pushes it in. So what it does is that.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Is a solid, it's actually, and it's very, and these are particular experiments, they can introduce one of these targets once per day approximately, something like that, because it's very, it's a kind of amazing technology, actually. I know some of the people that worked on this back in the day is they actually make these things at a BB size of this frozen fuel. It's actually a cryogenic temperatures. And they're almost like smooth to the atom level. I mean, they're amazing pieces of technology. So what you do in the end is what you have is a spherical...”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “What actually happens? Actually, there's usually mass confusion about this. So what's going on in this form of it? So the fuel. is delivered in a discrete, the fusion fuel, the deuterium intradium, is in a discrete spherical. It's more like a BB, let's call it a BB. So it's a small one. And all the fuel that you're going to try to burn is basically there. And it's about that size. So how are you going to get, and it's that literally, it's like a 20 degrees above absolute zero because the deuterium and tritium are kept in a liquid and solid state. Oh, wow. So the fuel.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “It's more self sustaining. It's more self referential system in a sense. And it sort of self-evolves in a way. Again, it's not that it's going to evolve to a dangerous state. It's just that we want to see what happens when the fusion is the dominant heating source.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Like, wow, I mean, we'd seen it in glimpses before in magnetic confinement at relatively small levels, but apparently it seems like in this experiment, it's likely to be a dominant by self-heating. That's a very important, that's a very interesting.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “But it really is a scientific threshold because what QP actually denotes is the relative amount of self-heating that's happening in the plasma. So, what do I mean by this? Is that in the end, in these systems, what you want is something that where the relative amount of heating, which is keeping the fuel hot, is dominated by from the fusion reactions themselves. And so it becomes sort of like thinking like a bonfire is a lot more interesting physically than just holding a blowtorch to a wet log, right? There's a lot more dynamics. It's a lot more self-evolved and so forth. And what we're excited as scientists is that it's clear that in that experiment, that they actually got to a point where the fusion reactions themselves were actually altering the state of the plasma.”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Conceptually simple that you get past one that everyone understands when you're less than one that's much less interesting than getting past one so there's a really big you start to give”

    2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source