so guys we are here on location at general fusion where they are attempting
to build the world's first commercially
viable nuclear fusion power plant and uh
it might not look like much but the only way that the technology
inside could be any more space age would be if i was actually shooting on the
moon today so why don't we go take a look
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so what exactly is nuclear fusion well
on an atomic level basically you take a couple of hydrogen
atoms get them up to a really high temperature
and then you like smash them together
once they're fused you'll be left with a helium atom
oh i'm steven today so because one proton plus one proton equals two
protons and you'll get some energy or
rather you'll get a lot of energy like
like ten times what you'd get from a nuclear fission reaction like the ones
that power traditional nuclear plants so
that all sounds super cool already and we haven't even gotten to the best part
yet nuclear fusion works around the clock unlike solar or wind and it's 100
clean and safe the reaction is actually
incapable of causing a meltdown or other radioactive incident and as much as this
might look like some kind of a you know death ray the only direct
byproducts are helium like for party balloons and energy so
no depleted uranium seeping into the environment for thousands of years no
greenhouse gas emissions and get this the fuel for it is practically free you
input deuterium a hydrogen isotope that you can extract from ordinary seawater
with a centrifuge
oh that's awful
and lithium and some critics might point out that
these materials particularly lithium are not technically renewable but
at least for heavy water the reaction uses so little of it and there's enough
sitting around that by the time we run out the sun will have enveloped the
earth anyway so uh yeah i think we are probably good there
well okay then Linus if it's so great
why is fusion power taking so long ah i'm glad you asked
while the fundamental principles have been reasonably well understood for
decades the engineering and science required to build something practical in
the real world are well in scientific terms a total to get right in order for
nuclear fusion to occur between two hydrogen atoms they need to be heated up
to 150 million degrees celsius that's about
10 times hotter than the center of the sun and you've got to do that efficiently
no one's going to buy a fusion power plant that consumes more power than it
outputs duh so then how would you get something
that hot ah well
you could use a device called a talkamac to make a plasma donut and then
manipulate it with liquid helium cooled magnets
sounds promising you could take a uh see here
peppercorn sized piece of frozen deuterium and then
bombard it from all sides at exactly the same time with what is quite literally
the world's most powerful laser effectively blowing up the outside
compressing the inside enough to start the reaction and
both of those methods have actually succeeded at using nuclear fusion to get
close to producing more power than they consumed
but the problem is that via both of those
methods it is extremely difficult to actually harness the power to generate
electricity ah
i'm not gonna do that again general fusion's approach is kind of
like a hybrid of the other two
and it operates kind of like a super high tech diesel engine so first they
use one of these guys to create a 5 million degree ball of plasma
then they rapidly compress it with
steam-powered pistons the pressure from which
heats it to 150 million degrees
at that point the deuterium kind of ignites releasing energy
and if all this sounds difficult don't worry in real life it is way
harder this is general fusion's last generation
large-scale plasma injector where they prototyped their process of creating a
plasma of sufficient quality that it can survive for long enough for the pistons
in the compression chamber to fully compress it
so during a cycle these valves right up here will inject
just two milligrams of deuterium evenly
into the chamber which goes all the way around in a ring then
one million amps at 15 000 volts so this is
about the same as your average lightning bolt goes across the electrical feed
right here and strips the electrons off
the deuterium creating a ball of plasma
these particles then spin around the ball of plasma
wrapping it in its own magnetic field creating an insulating layer around the
plasma to give it a longer lifespan from there
these big electromagnets here will push the ball of plasma out the front of the
injector into the compression chamber which would be under this part right
over here now the rest of this guy which is actually
about the front two thirds is just for data collection
every test that they run generates about a Gigabyte of data and even after 150
000 experiments there is still work to do i guess that's why general fusion is
so open about showing off their work
because even if you stole all the drawings and
built yourself one of these machines
there are literally hundreds of thousands of variables to tune for
plasma quality so you'd basically have built yourself a
multi-million dollar paperweight on the subject of millions of dollars much of
the research is actually done on smaller
less expensive little injector
prototypes like spector here these guys
only take a couple of months to create instead of years and they give the team
valuable insight in between larger projects mind you even this kind of
thing does not come easy
every aspect of this research is complex
and expensive like okay here how do you know
if your plasma is at five million degrees
you can't just stick a k probe in it
ah so it turns out you have to shine a
super strong laser through the plasma
and then measure the small bit of light that is deflected by the plasma and this
is only about one in every quadrillion
photons that you pump in that get turned into some kind of useful signal so
interpreting that data is quite literally the full-time job of bill here
who has a phd from the university of maryland
and that is just one example but
they are making progress inside this cage is the largest and most
powerful plasma injector in the world
it's the latest generation of the one that we looked at earlier and they're
running tests on it every day in hopes
of using a similar model to create a fusion demonstration plant in as little
as four to five years so
unlike the other one this guy is actually hooked up do you see all these
containers around me these are capacitor
banks so when all of them are operating
they'll be capable of 20 gigawatts of power that's enough to send
16.5 deloreans back in time
simultaneously the problem though is that when you're
unleashing a lightning bolt worth of power you throw out a ton of electronic
interference it's such a big problem that all of the sensor data has to be
transmitted through fiber optic cables to a nearby faraday cage full of general
fusion's own custom-made digitizer boards
they ended up designing their own because creating an electronics
engineering department was cheaper than buying gear like this off the shelf now
general fusion weren't the first ones to come up with the idea of
smashing plasma but the us naval research lab's
incredibly named project Linus ended up
getting abandoned back in the 1970s because there were a couple of problems
they just couldn't overcome behind me
is a couple of solutions this is general fusion's piston driven
compression chamber proof of concept now the real one would have many more
pistons but the operating principle would be similar
every piston would push down simultaneously with a tolerance of about
10 microseconds injecting liquid metal
stored in the pistons and in the 1000
RPM spinning grid on the inside
and that metal would squeeze the plasma
bubble that would be injected from the top
now the timing for all this has to be so precise because much like squeezing a
water balloon in your hands if you don't compress it evenly then it'll kind of
splurt out or break apart and that would
cause a misfire assuming everything goes right though and the simulations say it
should the fuel ignites fusion occurs
and that liquid metal gets heated to about 600 degrees celsius after which it
gets circulated through insulated pipes by a magnetohydrodynamic pump to a
traditional steam turbine power generator just like what you would find
at a coal or a natural gas power plant today which should make general fusion
solution sort of a drop-in upgrade for an
existing facility now
fun fact it is not a perpetual motion machine
because it does require a constant supply of fuel
but some of the steam that gets generated is actually going to be used
to actuate the pistons keeping the cycle
going general fusion hopes that once they
reach production they'll be able to run one of these reactions every second
generating about 100 to 200 megawatts of
power about the sweet spot for replacing existing coal power plants in developed
countries and not so much that it would
blow up the power distribution systems in developing countries a market where
the most new power generation will have to happen in the coming years now none
of this is a sure thing i mean nothing in life is but
if general fusion and its investors
which includes jeff bezos apparently by the way can stay on course
then the future looks really bright not just for their company but also for the
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