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

“Q sub P or something like this. Okay, okay, so this is which means what it means is that it's in the plasma. So all we're considering is the energy balance or gain that comes from the plasma itself. We're not considering the technologies which are around it which are providing the containment and so forth. So why the excitement and so forth? Well, because for one reason, it's a rather simple threshold to get over to understand that you're getting more energy out from the fusion, even a theoretical sense than you were from the starting match.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. There is, well, there's several special definitions of this. So one of them is that if you like in a fire, if you light a match and you have it there and it's an infinitesimal amount of energy compared to what you're getting out of the fire, we call this ignition. Which makes sense, right? This is like what our own son is as well. So that was not ignition in that sense as well. So what we call this scientific, the one that I just talked about, which is for some instance, when I get enough fusion energy released compared to the size of the match, we call this scientific break-even. break even, and it's because you've gotten past the fact that this is unity now at this point.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as I said, we've made many of the, and what do I mean by we? It's like the fusion community has pursued aspects of this through a variety of different confinement methodologies, is that the key part about what happens, what was the threshold we had never gotten over before was that if you only consider the plasma fuel, not the total engineering system, but just the plasma fuel itself, we had not gotten to the point yet where basically the size of the match was smaller than the amount of energy that we got from the fusion.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it goes to the set of criteria that I talked about before about getting high energy gain. So in the end, what are we after infusion? Is that we basically assemble this plasma fuel in some way and we provide it a starting amount of energy? Think of lighting the fire. And what you want to do is get back significant excess gain from the fact that the fusion is making more, is releasing the energy. So it's like the equivalent of like, we want to have a match, a small match, light of fire, and then the fire keeps us hot. It's very much like that.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would probably overwhelm us actually if we could see all of it. But my main point goes back to your thing about fire and self-protection. If these radiation was such a critical aspect of the health of organisms on Earth, we would almost certainly have evolved methods to detect it, and we have none. Yes”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 10 to the 28 atoms, and they're coming in and they're interacting with those things. And those, particularly the ones where the light is at higher average energy per light particle, those are the ones that can possibly have an effect on human health. So it's interesting humans and all animals of Evolved on Earth where we're immersed in that all the time. There's a natural source of radiation all the time, yet we have zero ability to detect like zero”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's light in different parts of the spectrum, right? And so it turns out besides the visible light that we can see here, we are immersed in almost the totality of the electromagnetic spectrum. There is visible light, there's infrared light, there is microwaves going around, is that's how our cell phone works. It's way past our detection capability. But also higher energy ones, which have to do with ultraviolet light, how you get a sunburn. And even x rays in things like this at small levels are continually being like from the concrete in the walls of this hotel. There's x-rays hitting our body continuously. I can bring out a, we can go down to the lab at MIT, I can bring out a detector and show you every single room I'll have these.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People that could, it's a fascinating question, right? Obviously, there's some advantage that you have there that isn't there, and even color distinguishing, right, of something safe to ease, not safe, whatever it would be. I'll actually go back to this because it's something that I tell all of my students when I'm teaching ionizing radiation and radiological safety, whatever you say, there's a cultural concern or that when people hear the word”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This goes off in a bit of it. You're right. This is actually interesting because as a scientist, you also think about evolutionary functions and how we got like, why do we have the senses that we do? Yeah, it's an interesting question. Like, why can bees see in the ultraviolet and we can't? Then you go, well, it's natural selection. For some reason, this wasn't really particularly important to us, right? Why can't we see in the infrared and other things can? It's like,”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, it's invisible to the eye because it's so hot that it's basically emitting light in frequencies that we can't detect. It's invisible. In fact, light goes through light goes through it so easy that if you were to look at it, what you would see in our own particular configuration, what we make is in the end is a donut-shaped, it's a vacuum vessel to keep the air out of it. And when you turn on the plasma, it gets so hot that most of it just disappears in the visible spectrum. You can't see anything. And there's very, very cold plasma, which is between 10 and 100,000 degrees, which is out in the very periphery of it, which is kind of, so the very coal plasma is allowed to interact with has to interact with something eventually at the boundary of the vacuum vessel. And this kind of makes a little halo around it. And it glows as beautiful purple light, basically. And that's the.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At about 100 million, so you almost always design your device around that minimum, and then you try to get it contained well enough, and you try to get enough density. So that temperature thing sounds crazy, right? That's what we've actually achieved in the laboratory, like our experiment here at MIT when it ran its optimum configuration. It was at 100 million degrees. But it wasn't actually the product of the density in the confinement time wasn't sufficient that we were to place that we were getting high net energy gain, but it was making fusion reactions. So this is the sequence that you go through. Make a plasma, then you get it hot enough, and when you get it hot enough, the fusion reactions start happening so rapidly that it's overcoming the rate at which it's leaking heat to the outside world. And at some point, it just becomes like a star, like a sun, our own sun and a star doesn't have anything plugged into it. It's just keeping itself hot.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough, but not too much, yes. And so in the end, the way that there's a fancy name for it, it's called the Lawson criterion because it was formulated by scientists in the United Kingdom about 1956 or 1957. And this was essentially the realization of, oh, this is what it's going to take, regardless of the confinement method. What it is actually power balance is just says, oh, there's a certain amount of heat coming in, which is coming from the fusion reaction itself because the fusion reaction heats the fuel versus how fast you would lose it. And it basically summarizes, it's summarized by those three parameters, which is fairly simple. So temperature. And then the reason we say 100 million degrees is because almost for this kind of fusion, deuterium, tritium fusion, the minimum and the density and the confinement time product is”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this means that basically it is a thermal system. So it's like the air in this room, it's like the water, it's the water in this. These all have temperatures, but it means that there's a distribution of those energies because the particles have collided so much that it's there. So this is distinguished from having high energy particles like what we have in particle accelerators like CERN and so forth. Those are high kinetic energy, but it's not a temperature, so it actually doesn't count as confinement. So we go through all of those. You have temperature, and then the other requirement, not too surprising, is actually that there has to be enough density of the fuel”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Name we call the energy confinement time. So this means if you release a certain amount of energy into this fuel, kind of how long you sit there and you look at your watch, how long does it take for this energy to like leave the system? So you could imagine that in this room that, you know, these heaters are putting energy into the air in this room and you waited for a day, but all the heat have gone to outside if I open up the windows. Oh, there, that's the energy confinement time. Okay, so it's the same concept as that. So this is an important one. So all fusion must have confinement. There's another more esoteric reason for this, which is that people often confuse temperature and energy. So what I mean by that, so this is literally a temperature, which means that it is a system in which all the particles, every particle, has high kinetic energy and is actually in a fully relaxed state, namely that entropy has been maximized. It gets a little bit more technical.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mention the magnetic one. Magnetic one, and there's one thing called inertial as well, too. But the general principle actually has nothing to do with, in particular with what the technology is that you use to confine it. It's because this goes back to the fact that the requirement in this is high temperature and thermal content. So it's like building a fire. And what this means is that when you release the energy into this or apply heat to this, if it just instantly leaks out, it can never get hot, right? So you're familiar with this. It's like if you've got something that you're trying to apply heat to, but you're just throwing the heat away very quickly. This is why we insulate homes, by the way, and things like that, right? It's like you don't want the heat that's coming into this room to just immediately leave because you'll just start consuming infinite amounts of heat to try to keep it hot. So in the end, this is one of the requirements, and it actually has a”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beautiful. It's a gas cylinder So now you've touched on the other necessary requirements. So it turns out it's not just temperature that's required. You must also confine it. So what does this mean? Confine it.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way that you do this is primarily again, this is not exactly true in all kinds of fusion, but the primary one that we work on, magnetic fusion, this is all happening in a hard vacuum. So it's like it's happening in outer space. So basically you've gotten rid of all the other particles, except for these specialized fuel particles”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really simple equation. It's the ideal gas law basically almost. In the end, you've got a certain number of these fusion particles in the plasma state. They're in the plasma state. There's a certain number of particles. And if the confinement is perfect, if you put in a certain content of energy, then basically eventually they just come up in a temperature and they go up to high temperature. This turns out to be, by the way, extraordinarily small amounts of energy. And you go, what? It's like I'm getting something to like 100 million degrees. That's going to take the biggest flame burner that I've ever seen. No. And the reason for this is it goes back to the energy content of this. So yeah, you have to get it to high average energy, but there's very, very few particles.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For all kinds of fusion. So this is the reason why stars can work as well. The stars would have to be much, much hotter, actually, to be able to. In fact, it's not clear that they would actually ignite, in fact, without this effect. So we get to that. So this is why there's another requirement. So you must make a plasma, but you also must get it very hot in order for the reactions to have a significant probability to actually fuse. And it actually falls effectively almost to zero for lower temperatures as well too.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is like throwing a ping pong ball at a piece of paper and then every 100 of them just like magically show up on the other side of the paper without seemingly breaking the paper. I mean to use a physical analogy and that”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through an effect called quantum tunneling, which is really just the transposition of the fact that it's a wave so that it has a finite probability of this. By the way, you talk about, do you have a hard time conceptualizing this? This is one of them.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So as they get closer, they're pushing harder and harder apart. Then it gets a little bit more exotic, which maybe you'll like though, that it turns out that people understood this at the beginning of the age of after Rutherford discovered the nucleus. It's like, oh, yeah, it's like, how are we going to, how's this going to work, right? Because how do you get anything within these distances? extraordinary energy and it does and in fact when you look at those energies they're very very high But it turns out quantum physics comes to the rescue because the particles aren't actually just particles, they're also waves. This is the point of quantum, right? You can treat them both as waves and as particles and it turns out if you get if they get in close enough proximity to each other then the particle pops through basically this energy barrier.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's different requirements in this. So making a plasma takes about this. But at 10,000 degrees, even at a million degrees, there's almost no probability of the fusion reactions occurring. And this is because while the charged particles can hit into each other, if you go back to the very beginning of this, remember I said, oh, these charged particles have to get to within distances which are like this size of a nucleus because of the strong nuclear force. Well, unfortunately, as the particles get closer, the repulsion that comes from the charge, the coulomb force, increases like the inverse distance squared.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's purple, yeah. Yeah. Spoon, it is kind of beautiful. Yeah, plasmas are actually quite astonishing sometimes in their beauty. Actually, one of the most amazing forms of plasma is lightning, by the way, which is instantaneous form of plasma that exists on Earth but immediately goes away because everything else around it's at room temperature.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About 10,000 degrees Well, you can't stick your hand into it, but there's a glass tube you can basically see this with your bear. And you can put your hand on the glass tube because it's.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you asked about the definitions of the requirements for fusion. So the most famous one, or some sense the most intuitive one, is the temperature. And the reason for that is that you can make many, many kinds of plasmas that have zero fusion going on in them. And the reason for this is that the average, so you can make a plasma at around 10,000. In fact, if you come, by the way, you're welcome to come to our laboratory at the PSFC. I can show you a demonstration of a plasma that you can see with your eyes instead of about 10,000 degrees and you can put your hand up beside it and all this. And it's like, and nothing, there's zero fusion going on.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the influential field of each other. And so they talk to each other less in an energy and momentum exchange point of view. Just one of the counterintuitive aspects of plasmas.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plasmas are weird in the sense that it's not like that. So it's because the particles have electric charge. And that's in fact the definition of a plasma it says these have a technical name, it's called a Coulomb collision. It just means that it's dictated by this force which is being pushed between the charged particles is that the definition of a plasma is a medium in which the collective behavior is dominated by these collisions at a distance. So you can imagine then this starts to give you some strange behaviors which I could quickly talk about. One of the most counterintuitive ones is as plasmas get more hot as they get higher in temperature than the collisions happen less frequently. Like what? That doesn't make any sense when particles go faster you think they would collide more often but because the particles are interacting, they're interacting through their electric field when they're going faster they actually spend less time”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rate that they go at and the distance that they go at, and so forth. So, this was figured out by Einstein and others at the beginning of the Brownian motion, all these kinds of things. These were set up at the beginning of the last century and was really like this great revelation. Wow, this is why matter behaves the way that it does. Like, wow, but it's really like, and also in liquids and in solids, like what really matters is how you're interacting with your nearest neighbor. So you think about that one, the gas particles are basically going around until they actually hit into each other though, they don't really exchange information. And it's the same in a liquid. You're kind of beside each other, but you can kind of move around. And in a solid, you're literally like stuck beside your neighbor. You can't move like.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got a particular color. In fact, you can do it in liquids as well gradually will disperse away from you. This is fundamentally set because of the way that those particles are bouncing into each other.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go to how a gas works, right? So, the reason a gas, and it goes back to Feynman's brilliance in saying that this is the most important concept. The reason actually solid liquid and gas phases work is because the nature of the interaction between the atoms changes. And so in a gas, you can think of this as being this room and the things, although you can't see them, is that the molecules are flying around, but then with some frequency, they basically bounce into each other. And when they bounce into each other, they exchange momentum and energy around on this. And so it turns out that the probability and the distances and the scattering of those of what they do, it's those interactions that set the about how a gas behaves. So what do you mean by this? So for example, if I take an imaginary test particle of some kind, like I spray something into the air.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This means that they start, it fundamentally changes the behavior. It doesn't behave like a gas. It doesn't behave like a solid or a liquid. It behaves like a plasma. So why is it disappointing that we don't speak about this? It's because 99% of the universe is in the plasma state. It's called stars. And in fact, our own sun at the center of the sun is what clearly a plasma, but actually the surface of the sun, which is around 5,500 Celsius, is also a plasma. It's hot enough that is that. In fact, the things that you see sometimes you see these pictures from the surface of the sun, amazing, like satellite photographs of those big arms of things and of light coming off of the surface of the sun and solar flares, those are plasmas.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which are made of nuclei, which contain the positive particles in the neutrons, and then the electrons, which are very, very light, very much less mass than the nucleus, and that surround us. This is what makes up an atom. So a plasma is what happens when you start pulling away enough of those electrons that they're free from the ions. So almost all the atoms that make up us up and this water and all that, the electrons are in tightly bound states and basically they're extremely stable. Once you're at about 5,000 or 10,000 degrees, you start pulling off the electrons. And what this means is that now the medium that is there, its constituent particles mostly have net charge on them. So why does that matter? It's because now this means that the particles can interact through their electric charge. In some sense they were when it was in the atom as well too. But now that they're free particles.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heating up the gas. So it turns out that once you get above, it's approximately $5,000 or $10,000 Celsius, then you hit a new phase of matter. And actually, that's the phase of matter that is for all pretty much all the temperatures that are above that as well too. And so what does that mean? So it actually changes face. So it's a different state of matter. And the reason that it becomes a different state of matter is that it's hot enough that what happens is that the atoms that make up go back to Feynman, right? Everything's made up of these individual things, these atoms. But atoms can actually themselves be”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, plasma is a phase of matter or state of matter. So unfortunately our schools don't, it's like, I'm not sure why this is the case, but all children learn the three phases of matter, right? And what does this mean? So we'll take Nick Waters, an example. So if it's cold, it's ice, it's in a solid phase, right? And then if you heat it up, the temperature that typically depends sets the phase, although it's not only temperature. So you heat it up. and you go to a liquid and obviously it changes its physical properties because it can you can pour it and so forth right and then if you heat this up enough it turns into a gas and a gas behaves differently because there's a very sudden change in the density actually that's what's happening so it changes by about a factor of 10 000 in density from the from the liquid phase into when you make it into steam at atmospheric pressure all very good except the problem is they forgot like what happened”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fusion breaks the trend of this is that it has more energy intensity than fission on paper, but it actually does not have the consequences of control and sort of rapid release of the energy because it's actually the physical system just doesn't want to do that.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but see, that's the thing fusion breaks that trend in the following way. So one of them, so fusion doesn't work on a chain reaction. There's no chain reaction, zero. So this means it cannot physically exponentiate away on you because it works. And actually, this is why stars, by the way, we know this already. It's why stars are so stable, why most stars and suns are so stable. It's because they are regulated through their own temperature and their heating. Because what's happening is not that there's some probability of this exponentiating away is that the energy that's being released by fusion basically is keeping the fire hot. And these tend to be, and when it comes down to thermodynamics and things like this, there's a reason, for example, it's pretty easy to keep a constant temperature like in an oven and things like this. It's the same thing infusion. So this is actually one of the features that I would argue.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say terrify. I mean, we should be. This is the progress of humanity. Every time that we've gotten access, you talk again, you know, the day the universe changed, those really changed when we got access to new kinds of energy sources. But every time you get access, and typically what this meant was you get access to more intense energy, right? And that's what that was. And so the ability to move from burning wood to using coal to using gasoline, and then finally to use this is that both the potency and the consequences are elevated around those things.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so what you do is you very quickly put together enough of these materials that can undergo fission with room temperature neutrons and you put them together fast enough that what happens is that this process can essentially grow mathematically like very fast. And so this releases large amounts of energy. So that's the underlying reason that it works. So you've heard of a fusion weapon. So this is interesting is that it's dislike fusion energy in the sense that what happens is that you're using fusion reactions to, but it's simply, it increases the gain, actually, of the weapon rather than it's not a pure, at its heart, it's still a fission weapon. You're just using fusion reactions as a sort of intermediate catalyst basically to get even more energy out of it. But it's not directly applicable to be used. An energy source”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very important, and when you intentionally design it, that it creates more than one. Fission reaction per starting reaction that it exponentiates away. Which is what a nuclear weapon is”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Free neutrons. Free neutrons, particularly if they get slowed down to room temperature, trigger, can trigger other fission reactions if there's other uranium nearby or fissile materials. So this means that the way that it releases energy is that you set this up in a very careful way such that every, on average, every reaction that happens exactly releases enough neutrons and slows down that they actually make another reaction, one exactly one. And this means is that because each reaction releases a fixed amount of energy, you do this and then in time this looks like just a constant power output. So that's how our fission power plant works.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She goes into practical implications of it, which is that fission could happen at room temperature. It's because there's this neutron has no electric charge and therefore it's literally room temperature neutrons that actually trigger the reaction. So this means in order to establish what's going on with it, and it works by a chain reaction, is that you can do this at room temperature. So Enrico Fermi did this like on a university campus, University of Chicago campus, the first sustained chain reaction was done underneath a squash court with a big blocks of graphite. Don't get me wrong, an incredible human achievement, right? But that's, you know, and then you think about fusion. I have to build a contraption of some kind that's going to get to 100 million degrees. Okay, wow, that's a big difference. The other one is about the chain reaction, that namely fission works by the fact that when that fission occurs, it actually produces”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's kind of in the middle of the periodic table because this goes from that. And so what that means is that if you take something heavier than iron, like uranium, which is more than twice as heavy that, and you split apart, somehow just magically, you can just split apart as constituents and you get something that's lighter, because it moves to a more stable energy state, it releases kinetic energy. That's the energy that we use. Kinetic energy meaning the movement of things. So it's actually an energy you can do something with. And fusion sits on the other side of that because it's also moving towards iron, but it has to do it through fusion together. So this leads to some pretty profound differences. As I said, they have some underlying physics or science proximity to each other, but they're literally the opposite. So fusion, why is this?”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shows the relative amount of stored energy and all of the elements that are stable and make up basically the world and the universe. And it turns out that this one has a maximum amount of stability or storage at iron.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the fission, right? The fissioning. And so when that happens because the products that are, and it roughly splits in two, but it's not even that. It's actually more complicated. It splits into this whole array of lighter elements and nuclei. And when that happens, there's less rest mass left than the original one. So it's actually the same. So it's again, it's rearrangement of the strong nuclear force that's happening. But that's the source of the energy. And so in the end, it's like, so this is a famous graph that we show everybody is basically, it turns out every element that exists in the periodic table, all the things that make up everything. Remember, you asked a good question. It was like, so should we think of mass as being the same as stored energy? Yes. So you can make a plot that basically”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it relies on the same underlying physical principle, but it's exactly the opposite, which actually the names imply, fusion means bringing things together, fusion means splitting things apart. So fission requires the heaviest instead of the lightest and the most unstable versus the most stable elements. So this tends to be uranium or plutonium, primarily uranium. So take uranium. So uranium-235 is one of the that this is one of the heaviest unstable elements. And what happens is that this is, and fission is triggered by the fact that one of these subatomic particles, the neutron, which has no electric charge, basically gets in proximity enough to this and triggers an instability effectively inside of this, what is teetering on the border of instability and basically splits it apart.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, usually what we worry about is the viability, because in the end, we build pretty complex objects to realize these requirements. And so what we try really hard to do is like not damage those components. But those are things which are internal to the fusion device. And this is not something that you would consider about like it would, as you say, destroy human civilization because that release of energy is just inherently limited because of the fusion process. So it doesn't say that there's zero. So you asked about the other feature of it, that it's safe. So it is the process itself is intrinsically safe, but because it's a complex technology, you still have to take into account consideration aspects of the safety.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Safety protocols. Fusion is interesting because it's not really directly weaponizable because what I mean by that is that you have to work very hard to make these. Conditions at which you can get energy gain from fusion. And this means that when we design these devices with respect to application in the energy field is that they, you know, while they will, because they're producing large amounts of power and they will have hot things inside of them, this means that they have like a level of industrial hazard, which is very similar to that you would have like a chemical processing plant or anything like that, any kind of energy plant actually has these as well too. But the underlying underneath the core technology can't be directly used in a nefarious way because of the power that's being emitted. It just basically, well, if you try to do those things typically, it just stops working.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It varies from concept to concept, but in generally it's fairly easy to do that. And the easiest thing, it can't physically run away from you because the other part of it is that there's just at any given time, there's a very, very small amount of fuel available to fuse anyway. So this means that that's always intrinsically limited to this. So even if the power consumption of the device goes up, it just kind of burns itself out immediately.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That means that you want to run it at the optimization in temperature such that if it deviates away from that temperature, the reactivity gets lower. And the reason for this is because it's hard to keep the reactivity going. Like it's a very hard fire to keep going, basically.”
2023-01-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source