YouSaid · the spoken record

Ian Hutchinson

lines on the record: 114
first: 2020-07-29
most recent: 2020-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Scientism, in my view, is a terrible intellectual error. It's the belief that somehow the methods of sciences we've developed them with experiments and in the end it relies particularly upon reproducibility in the world and on a kind of clarity that comes from measurements and mathematics and related types of skills. powerful though they are for finding out about the world are not all the knowledge, do not give us all the knowledge we have and there's many other forms of knowledge and the illustration that I usually use to try to help people to think about this is to say well look let's think about human history I mean to what extent can human history be discovered scientifically the answer is essentially it can't and the reason is because human history”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the short answer is that by scientism we mean the belief that science is all the real knowledge there is. That's a shorthand. There are lots of different facets of it which one can explore. And the book in which I explored it most thoroughly was actually an earlier book called Monopolizing Knowledge. And the purpose of that title is to draw attention to the fact that in our society as a whole, in particularly in the West today, we have grown so reliant on science that we tend to put aside other ways of getting to know things. And so, of course, at MIT, we are focused on science and we do focus on it very much. But the truth is that there are many ways of getting to know things in our world. Know things reliably in our world, and a lot of them are not science.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's certainly been... The outlook of Jews and Christians throughout history that God is seen in the creation, that we, when we look at the creation, we see to some extent the wonder, the majesty, the might of the person or the entity, but the person who created it. And that's a way in which scientists particularly have over the ages and certainly over most of the last five centuries since the scientific revolution, scientists have seen in a certain sense the hand of God in creation. I mean, this leads us perhaps to a different discussion, but I mean, it's remarkable to me how influential Christianity and religion in generally Has been in science.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is, in a certain sense, a watchword for answering this question for Christians. It is that supremely, if we want to help ourselves understand who God really is, we look to Jesus, we look to what he did, we look to what he said, and so forth. And we believe that he is one with the Father, and that's why we believe in the Trinity. I mean, it's basically because that revelation is extremely central to Christian belief and teaching.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one has to, therefore, work in terms of metaphors and images and so forth. And I think we would know very little about who God is if it was simply left to our own devices. If we were just, here you are, you're in the universe, try to figure out who made it and so forth. Well, you know, philosophers think they can do a little bit of that, maybe, and theologians think that they can do a little bit more. But Christians think that God has actually helped us along a lot by revealing himself. And we say that he's revealed himself supremely in the person of Jesus Christ. And so, you know, when Jesus says to his disciples, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father, then...”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me start by saying none of the above, okay? I mean, clearly God, the Christian God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, et cetera, Is not any of those things because all of those things you just mentioned are phenomena or Entities in the created world. And the most fundamental thing about monotheism as, you know, Abraham and Moses and so forth handed it down is that God is not an entity within the creation, within the universe, that God is the creator of it all. And that's what Genesis, first two chapters of Genesis, is really about telling us how God created the world. It's about telling us and telling the early Hebrews that God created the world. And that therefore he is not simply an entity within it. On the other hand, you know, our finite minds have a pretty hard time in compassing that.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Myself included, believe that prayer is, in a certain sense, a connection with God. And there are times when I have felt, you know, that God spoke to me, I don't mean necessarily orally in words, but showed me things or enlightened me or inspired me in ways that I attribute to him. So I see it as a two-way relationship in a certain sense. Of course, it's a very asymmetrical relationship, but nevertheless, Christians think that it's a two-way street. We're not just talking into the air when we say I'm going to pray for someone.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's okay. No problem. As a Christian, I believe that I have a relationship with God, which is best expressed by saying that it's personal. That comes about because Jesus through his acts has. Reconciled me with God, me a sinner, me someone full of sins, of failings, of ways in which I don't live up to even my own ideals, let alone the ideals of a holy God, have been reconciled to the Creator of everything And so Christians.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was one thing. And the other thing that came to me when I was at Cambridge, it became clear that Christianity ultimately is not some kind of moral Theory or philosophy or something like that. It is, or at least it claims to be, a personal relationship with God, which is made possible by what Jesus did on the cross and his life and his teaching. And it's a personal call to a relationship with God. And that I'd never really thought of it in those terms when I was younger. And that thought became attractive to me. I mean, I think most people find the person of Christ and his teachings, you know, compelling in a certain sense.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is actually rather good. I mean, it's not a proof. It's not kind of some kind of scientific demonstrate or mathematical demonstration, but it's actually extremely good. It's not scientific evidence by and large. It's historical evidence.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My impression, the way I felt at the time, and they thought Christianity made sense and Testified to its significance in their lives. And so that was a very important influence on me And ultimately, I mean, the reason I didn't see Christianity as some kind of great evil the way it's sometimes portrayed by the radical atheists of this century. I mean, I think that's nonsense. That Christianity is, in fact, the foundation of Western society, in Western culture. So, I mean, maybe I was in that sense favorably disposed towards Christianity as a religion, but as a personal faith, it didn't mean anything to me. But I became convinced really of two things. One is that”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very poetic way of putting it. But yes, I would accept that. I became a Christian when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University. I had gone to a school in which there was religion, kind of was part of the society. There were prayers at the daily gathering of the students, the assembly of the students. But I didn't really believe it. I just sort of went along with it and it wasn't particularly aggressive or benign. It just sort of was there. But I didn't believe it. It didn't make much sense to me. But I came across Christians from time to time. And when I went to Cambridge University, two of my closest friends turned out were Christians. And I think it was that was the most important influence on me that here were... Two people who were really smart like me I'm giving you my”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in my latest book, Can of Scientists Believe in Miracles, I devote most of the first chapter to telling how I became a Christian, why I became a Christian. I didn't grow up as a Christian.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a terrible mistake if we give the impression that technology is going to solve it all. Technology will make tremendous contributions. And I think it's worth working on it. It's a disaster if you think it's going to solve all of our problems. And actually, I've written a whole book about the question of scientism and the over-emphasis on science both as a way of solving problems through technology, but also as a way of gaining knowledge. I think it's not all of the knowledge there is either.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The challenge is society. The challenge is human choices. The challenge is almost entirely human and sociological, not technology. And when people talk about energy, they think that there's some kind of technological magic bullet for this. But there isn't, okay? And there isn't for the reasons I just mentioned, not because it's obvious there isn't, but actually there isn't. And in any case, It's true of energy, it's true of pollution, it's true of human population, it's true of most of the big challenges in our society are not scientific or technological challenges. They're human, sociological challenges. And that's why I think it's a terrible mistake, even for folks like me who work at, well, the High Temple of Science and Technology in... In America and maybe in the galaxy. I mean, you know, it's”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In short, There is no technological solution to, for example, for population control. I mean, we have the technology just, you know, to prevent ourselves bearing children. That's not a problem. Technology is in. Solved.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, when people talk about, you know, let's use natural gas because, you know, maybe it only uses 60% of the energy of coal. It's complete nonsense. That's not even scratching the surface of what we would need to do. Is that going to be feasible? I very much doubt it. And therefore, I actually doubt that we can reach a level of energy fossil energy use that is 1% of the current use in the West without totally dramatic changes, either in our society, our use of energy and so forth, which actually, of course, much of that energy is used for producing food and so on and so forth. So it's actually not so obvious that we can cut down our energy usage by that factor. Or we've got to reduce. The human population”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we've also reached a situation in which there is far less inequity in the world in the sense that people have share the energy resources more uniformly. Then what that is equivalent to would be to reduce the CO2 emissions in Western economies, not by a factor of 10, but by a factor of 100. In other words, has to go down to 1% of what it is now, okay?”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, so let's talk a bit about energy because that's something I know a lot about, having thought about it most of my career. In order to reach steady state CO2 level that's acceptable in terms of global climate change and so on and so forth. We need to reduce our carbon emissions by at least a factor of 10 worldwide. What's more, you know, the average energy consumption, and hence CO2 emission of people in the world is less than a tenth of what we per capita than what we have in the West, in America and Europe and so forth. So if you have in mind some utopia in the future, where we've reached a sustainable use of energy.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The resources of our planet. And we can't continue to do that. So I think there are lots of technical reasons why a continually expanding economy and civilization is impossible and therefore actually I'm as much nervous about the fact that our population is 8 billion or something right now worldwide as I am about the fact that a few million people would be would be killed by COVID-19. I mean, I don't want to be callous about this, but from the big picture, it seems like that's much more of a problem overpopulation. People not dying is ultimately more of a problem than people dying. So, you know, that probably sounds incredibly callous to your listeners, but I think it's simply, you know. Sober assessment of the situation.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am certainly not confident that my children and grandchildren will experience the benefits of civilization that I have enjoyed. I think it's possible for our civilizations to break down catastrophically. I also think that it's possible for our civilizations to break down progressively. And I think they will if we continue to have the explosion of population on the planet that we currently have. I mean, it's quite wrong to think of our problems as mostly being CO2. If we can just solve CO2, then we can go on having this continually expanding economy everywhere in the world. Of course you can't do that. I mean, there is a finite bearing capacity of our planet.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I must say, I'm extremely thankful that it hasn't. I don't know whether I'm surprised about it. I've never thought about it from the point of view of is it surprising that we've avoided it? I'm just very thankful that we have. I think that there is a sense in which cooler heads have prevailed at crucial moments. I think there is also a sense in which, you know, mutually assured destruction has in fact worked as a policy to restrain the great powers from going to war. And in fact, you know, the The fact that we haven't had a world war since the 1940s is perhaps even attributable to nuclear weapons in a kind of strange and peculiar way. But I think humans are deeply flawed and sinful people. And I certainly don't feel that we're guaranteed that it's going to go on like this.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not yet. I mean, there are those people who think it will be, but you may have heard of the big experiment called the National Ignition Facility, which was built at Livermore starting in the late 1990s and has been in operation since around about 2010. It was designed with the claim that it would reach ignition, fusion ignition in this pulsed form where the reactions are got over with so quickly before the whole thing flies apart. It didn't actually reach ignition and it doesn't look as if it will, although we never know. Maybe people figure out how to make it work better. But the answer is, in principle, it seems possible to reach ignition in this way, maybe not with that particular laser facility.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll just set off an explosion, okay, and then I'll gather the energy from that somehow. I don't quite know how, but let's not ask that question too much. Then it is possible to imagine generating fusion alone explosions. And the way you do it is you take some small amount of deuterium tritium fuel, you bombard it with energy from all sides, and this is what the lasers are used for, extremely powerful lasers, which compresses the pellet of fusion and heats it, it compresses it to such a high density and temperature that the reactions take place very, very quickly, and in fact they can take place so quickly that it's all over with before the thing flies apart. Wow. And that is”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Set off or to try to set off little fusion bombs alone without the surrounding fission explosion. And that is what is called laser fusion. So another approach to fusion, which actually is mostly researched in the weapons complex, the national labs and so forth. Because it's more associated with the technology of weapons, is inertial fusion. So if you decide instead of trying to make your plasma just sit there in this torus, in the tokamak and be controlled steady state with a magnetic field, if you're willing to accept that...”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to turn on because you need very high temperatures and you need confinement of that long enough for the reactions to take place. And so a bomb, actually, a thermonuclear bomb or a hydrogen bomb. Has essentially A chemical implosion which then sets off a fission explosion which then sets off and compresses hydrogen isotopes and other things which I don't know because I've never had a security clearance. So, I can't betray any secrets about weapons because I've never been a party to them because I know a lot about this problem I can guess, okay, and sets off fusion reactions in the middle. Okay, so that's basically, it's that sequence of things which produce these enormous multi-megaton bombs that have very large yields. And so fusion alone can't get you there. It is actually possible.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the earliest nuclear weapons, the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan, et cetera, et cetera, were pure fission weapons. They used enriched uranium or plutonium. And their energy is essentially entirely derived from fission reactions. But it was early realized that more energy was available if one could somehow combine a fission bomb with Fusion reactions. Because the fusion reactions give more energy per unit mass than fission reactions. And this was called the super. You might have heard of the expression the super, or more simply hydrogen bombs. bombs which use isotopes of hydrogen and effusion reactions associated with them.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think part of that is their association with nuclear weapons. Because when you say the word nuclear, people don't instantly think about nuclear energy. They think about nuclear weapons. And so there is perhaps a natural tendency to do that. But yes, I agree with you. People are very poor at estimating risks and they react emotionally, not rationally in most of these situations.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they address some of the problems of fission energy. I don't mean to say that fish and energy is overwhelmingly problematic, but clearly there have been catastrophes associated with fission reactors. Fukushima actually is, I think, in many ways often overstated as a disaster, because after all, nobody was killed by the reactors, essentially, zero. And that's in the context of a disaster tsunami that killed between 15 and 20,000 people more or less instantaneously. So, you know, in the scale of risks, one should take the view that in my estimation that fission energy came out of that looking pretty good. Of course, that's not the popular conception.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The materials needed for a nuclear weapon, and that's a very serious concern. So those are the four problems. Fusion has major advantages in respect of all of those problems. It has more longer-term fuel resources. It has far more benign waste issues. the radioactivity from fusion reactions is at least 100 times less than it is from fission reactions. It has essentially none of this after heat problem because it doesn't produce fission products that are highly radioactive and generating their own heat when it's turned off. In fact, the hard part of fusion is turning it on, not turning it off. And finally, you don't need the same fission technology to make fusion work. And so it's got terrific advantages from the point of view of Proliferation control. So those are four main issues which make fusion seem attractive technologically.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they were shut down safely. What then happened after that at Fukushima was, you know, there was this enormous tidal wave many tens of meters high that came through and destroyed the electricity grid feed to the Fukushima reactors. And their cooling was then turned off. And it was the afterheat of the turned off reactors that eventually caused the problems that led to release. And so that's a safety concern. And then finally, there's a problem of proliferation. And that is that fission reactors need fissile fuel and the technologies for producing and enriching and so forth, the fuels can be used, can be bad actors to generate”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough uranium to support fission energy worldwide for thousands of years, but maybe not for millions of years. So that's resources. Secondly, there are issues to do with wastes. Fission wastes are highly radioactive, and some of them are volatile. And so, for example, in Fukushima, the problem was that some fraction of the fish and waste were volatilized and went out as a cloud and polluted areas with cesium 137, strontium-90, and things like that. So that's a challenge of fission. There's a problem of safety beyond that, and that is that in fission... It's hard to turn the reactor off. When you stop the nuclear reactions, there is still a lot of heat being liberated from the fission products. And that is actually what the problem was at Fukushima. The Fukushima reactors were shut down the moment that the earthquake took place.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, let me say one or two words about the contrast between fission and fusion, and then we'll come on to the question of the disasters and so forth. Fission does have some drawbacks and they're largely to do with four main areas. One is do we have enough uranium or other fissile fuels to supply our energy needs for a long time? The answer to that is we know we have...”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are rapidly building fission plants. We're not rapidly building fission plants in the US, although we are actually building two at the moment, two new ones, but we do still get 20% of our electricity from fission energy. And we could get a lot more.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come from nuclear power, whether it's fission or fusion for that matter, are so moderate in quantity that we shouldn't really be worried about them. I mean, yes, fission products are highly radioactive and we need to keep them away from people, but there's so little of them. It's that keeping them away from people is not particularly difficult. And so while people complain a lot about the drawbacks of fish and energy, I think most of those complaints are ill-informed. We can talk about the challenges and the disasters, if you like, of fission reactors. But I think fission in the near term offers a terrific opportunity for environmentally friendly energy, which in the world as a whole is rapidly being taken advantage of. China and India and places like that.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so we have nuclear energy today because fission reactors are relatively easy to build. You've got to have, what's hard is getting the materials, okay? And that's just as well because if everyone could get those materials, you know, there would be weapons proliferation and so forth. But it wasn't all that long after even the discovery of nuclear fission that fission reactors were built and fission reactors, of course, operated before we had weapons. So I think nuclear power is obviously important to meet the energy challenges of our age. It is completely, intrinsically completely CO2 emissions free. And in fact, the wastes that”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But fusion is very worthwhile and we should be doing it. And so my disappointment that I just expressed was in a certain sense a personal disappointment I do think that fusion energy is a terrific challenge. It's very difficult to bring the energy source of the sun and stars down to Earth. This does contrast in a certain sense with fission energy. By contrast, fission energy to build a fission reactor proved to be amazingly easy. You know, we did it within a few years of discovering nuclear fission. People had figured out how to build a reactor and did so during the Second World War.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I absolutely think that fusion research is completely justified. In fact, we should be spending more time and effort on it than we currently do. But it isn't going to be a magic bullet that somehow solves all the problems of energy. By the way, that's a generic statement you can make about any energy source, in my view. I think it's a grave mistake to think that science of any sort is suddenly going to find a magic bullet for meeting all the energy needs of society or any of the other needs of society, by the way. And we can talk about that, I hope, later. Yes, definitely.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's actually one of the big disappointments of my career in a certain sense, which is that we won't get to burning fusion reaction until well past the first operation of ITER. And whether I'm alive or not, I don't know, but I certainly will be well and truly retired by the time that happens. And so when I realized maybe some years ago that that was going to be the case, it was a discouragement to me, let's put it like that.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been an objective that is in many ways motivated my entire career and the career of many people like me in the field. I have to admit, though, that one of the problems with ITER is that it's an extremely big and expensive and long time to build experiment. And so it won't even come into operation until about 2025, even though it's been being built for. Ten years, and it's been, it was designed for 30 years before that”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that experiment is designed to reach this burning plasma state and to generate about 500 megawatts of fusion power for hundreds of seconds at a time. It'll still only be an experiment. It won't put electricity on the grid or anything like that. It's to figure out whether it works and what the remaining engineering challenges are. It's a scientific experiment. It won't be engineered to run round the clock and so on and so forth, which ultimately one needs to do in order to make something that's practical for generating electricity. But it will be the first demonstration on Earth of a controlled fusion reaction for long time periods.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we are at the moment worldwide fusion research is at the moment in the process of building a very big experiment that's located in the south of France. It's called ITER I-T-E-R, which means the way or just means the Tokamak Experimental Reactor, if you like”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there have been experiments that have generated net nuclear energies or nuclear powers in the vicinity of a few tens of megawatts for a few seconds. So that's 10 megajoules. That's not much energy. It's a few donuts worth of energy. Literal donut. But we have studied how well Tokamex confined plasmas. And so we now understand in rather great detail the way they work. And we're able to predict what is going to be required in order to build a Tokamec that becomes self-sustaining, that becomes essentially ignited or very so close to ignited that it doesn't matter. At the moment, At least if you use the modest magnetic field values, still very strong, but limited magnetic field values, you have to build a very...”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those fusion reactions take place, energy is released, large amounts of energy is released in the form of particles. One of the particles that's released is an alpha particle, which is also charged and is also confined. And that alpha particle stays in the donut and heats the other particles that are in that donut. So it transfers its energy to those and it keeps them hot. There's some leaking of heat all the time, a little bit of radiation, some transport and so forth. There is also a neutron released from that reaction. The neutron carries out four-fifths of the fusion energy, and that will have to be captured in a blanket that surrounds the chamber in which we take the energy. Drive some kind of electrical generator from thermal engine, gas turbine or something like that, and power the...”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, eventually, I mean, in a fusion reactor, there will be deuterons and tritons, and they will be very hot. There will be 100 million degrees Celsius or something. So they're moving thermally with very large thermal energies in random directions. And they will collide with one another and have fusion reactions.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what that does is makes the field lines themselves into much bigger helices. For reasons that are too complicated to explain, that clinches the confinement of the particles, at least in terms of their single particle orbits, so they don't leave the chamber.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's why it's toroidal, and that's why we have a strong magnetic field. It's providing a confinement against motion in the direction that would lead the particles to leave the chamber. It turns out that, and here we're getting a little bit technical, but it turns out that a toroidal field alone is not enough. And so you need more fields to produce true confinement of plasma. And we get those by passing a current as well through the plasma itself.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inside this toroidal chamber and just simply go round and round the chamber, then because of this helical orbit, the particles can't move fast across the magnetic field, but they can move very quickly along the magnetic field. And if you have a magnetic field that doesn't leave the chamber, it doesn't matter if they move along the magnetic field. It doesn't mean they're going to exit the chamber. But if you just add a straight magnetic field, as you know, for example, coming from Helmholtz coil or a bar magnet, then you'd have to have ends. It would come to the ends of the chamber somewhere and the particles would hit the ends and they would lose their energy.”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best prospect in the least in the near term for making fusion energy work is one in which there's a very strong magnetic field the long way around the doughnut, around the torus. So you've got to imagine that there's this doughnut shape with an embedded magnetic field just going round and round the long way. The big advantage of that is that plasma particles when they're in the presence of a magnetic field feel strong forces from the magnetic field. And those forces make the particles gyrate around the direction of the magnetic field line. So basically the particles follow helical orbits following like a spring that's directed along the magnetic field. Well, if you make the magnetic field in”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Russian acronym from which the word tokamak is built just means toroidal magnetic chamber. So it's a toroidal chamber. A torus is a geometric shape which is like a donut with a hole down the middle. And so it's the meat of the donut. That's the torus. And it's got a magnetic field. So that's really all Takamak means. But the particular configuration that is very widespread is the sort of...”
2020-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source