WEBVTT

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so guys we are here on location at general fusion where they are attempting

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to build the world's first commercially

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viable nuclear fusion power plant and uh

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it might not look like much but the only way that the technology

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inside could be any more space age would be if i was actually shooting on the

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moon today so why don't we go take a look

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tunnelbear.com LTT

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so what exactly is nuclear fusion well

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on an atomic level basically you take a couple of hydrogen

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atoms get them up to a really high temperature

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and then you like smash them together

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once they're fused you'll be left with a helium atom

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oh i'm steven today so because one proton plus one proton equals two

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protons and you'll get some energy or

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rather you'll get a lot of energy like

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like ten times what you'd get from a nuclear fission reaction like the ones

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that power traditional nuclear plants so

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that all sounds super cool already and we haven't even gotten to the best part

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yet nuclear fusion works around the clock unlike solar or wind and it's 100

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clean and safe the reaction is actually

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incapable of causing a meltdown or other radioactive incident and as much as this

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might look like some kind of a you know death ray the only direct

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byproducts are helium like for party balloons and energy so

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no depleted uranium seeping into the environment for thousands of years no

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greenhouse gas emissions and get this the fuel for it is practically free you

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input deuterium a hydrogen isotope that you can extract from ordinary seawater

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with a centrifuge

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oh that's awful

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and lithium and some critics might point out that

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these materials particularly lithium are not technically renewable but

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at least for heavy water the reaction uses so little of it and there's enough

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sitting around that by the time we run out the sun will have enveloped the

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earth anyway so uh yeah i think we are probably good there

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well okay then Linus if it's so great

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why is fusion power taking so long ah i'm glad you asked

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while the fundamental principles have been reasonably well understood for

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decades the engineering and science required to build something practical in

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the real world are well in scientific terms a total to get right in order for

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nuclear fusion to occur between two hydrogen atoms they need to be heated up

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to 150 million degrees celsius that's about

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10 times hotter than the center of the sun and you've got to do that efficiently

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no one's going to buy a fusion power plant that consumes more power than it

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outputs duh so then how would you get something

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that hot ah well

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you could use a device called a talkamac to make a plasma donut and then

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manipulate it with liquid helium cooled magnets

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sounds promising you could take a uh see here

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peppercorn sized piece of frozen deuterium and then

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bombard it from all sides at exactly the same time with what is quite literally

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the world's most powerful laser effectively blowing up the outside

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compressing the inside enough to start the reaction and

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both of those methods have actually succeeded at using nuclear fusion to get

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close to producing more power than they consumed

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but the problem is that via both of those

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methods it is extremely difficult to actually harness the power to generate

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electricity ah

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i'm not gonna do that again general fusion's approach is kind of

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like a hybrid of the other two

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and it operates kind of like a super high tech diesel engine so first they

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use one of these guys to create a 5 million degree ball of plasma

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then they rapidly compress it with

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steam-powered pistons the pressure from which

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heats it to 150 million degrees

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at that point the deuterium kind of ignites releasing energy

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and if all this sounds difficult don't worry in real life it is way

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harder this is general fusion's last generation

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large-scale plasma injector where they prototyped their process of creating a

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plasma of sufficient quality that it can survive for long enough for the pistons

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in the compression chamber to fully compress it

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so during a cycle these valves right up here will inject

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just two milligrams of deuterium evenly

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into the chamber which goes all the way around in a ring then

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one million amps at 15 000 volts so this is

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about the same as your average lightning bolt goes across the electrical feed

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right here and strips the electrons off

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the deuterium creating a ball of plasma

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these particles then spin around the ball of plasma

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wrapping it in its own magnetic field creating an insulating layer around the

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plasma to give it a longer lifespan from there

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these big electromagnets here will push the ball of plasma out the front of the

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injector into the compression chamber which would be under this part right

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over here now the rest of this guy which is actually

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about the front two thirds is just for data collection

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every test that they run generates about a Gigabyte of data and even after 150

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000 experiments there is still work to do i guess that's why general fusion is

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so open about showing off their work

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because even if you stole all the drawings and

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built yourself one of these machines

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there are literally hundreds of thousands of variables to tune for

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plasma quality so you'd basically have built yourself a

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multi-million dollar paperweight on the subject of millions of dollars much of

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the research is actually done on smaller

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less expensive little injector

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prototypes like spector here these guys

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only take a couple of months to create instead of years and they give the team

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valuable insight in between larger projects mind you even this kind of

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thing does not come easy

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every aspect of this research is complex

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and expensive like okay here how do you know

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if your plasma is at five million degrees

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you can't just stick a k probe in it

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ah so it turns out you have to shine a

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super strong laser through the plasma

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and then measure the small bit of light that is deflected by the plasma and this

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is only about one in every quadrillion

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photons that you pump in that get turned into some kind of useful signal so

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interpreting that data is quite literally the full-time job of bill here

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who has a phd from the university of maryland

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and that is just one example but

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they are making progress inside this cage is the largest and most

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powerful plasma injector in the world

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it's the latest generation of the one that we looked at earlier and they're

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running tests on it every day in hopes

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of using a similar model to create a fusion demonstration plant in as little

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as four to five years so

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unlike the other one this guy is actually hooked up do you see all these

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containers around me these are capacitor

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banks so when all of them are operating

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they'll be capable of 20 gigawatts of power that's enough to send

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16.5 deloreans back in time

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simultaneously the problem though is that when you're

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unleashing a lightning bolt worth of power you throw out a ton of electronic

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interference it's such a big problem that all of the sensor data has to be

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transmitted through fiber optic cables to a nearby faraday cage full of general

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fusion's own custom-made digitizer boards

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they ended up designing their own because creating an electronics

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engineering department was cheaper than buying gear like this off the shelf now

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general fusion weren't the first ones to come up with the idea of

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smashing plasma but the us naval research lab's

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incredibly named project Linus ended up

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getting abandoned back in the 1970s because there were a couple of problems

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they just couldn't overcome behind me

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is a couple of solutions this is general fusion's piston driven

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compression chamber proof of concept now the real one would have many more

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pistons but the operating principle would be similar

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every piston would push down simultaneously with a tolerance of about

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10 microseconds injecting liquid metal

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stored in the pistons and in the 1000

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RPM spinning grid on the inside

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and that metal would squeeze the plasma

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bubble that would be injected from the top

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now the timing for all this has to be so precise because much like squeezing a

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water balloon in your hands if you don't compress it evenly then it'll kind of

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splurt out or break apart and that would

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cause a misfire assuming everything goes right though and the simulations say it

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should the fuel ignites fusion occurs

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and that liquid metal gets heated to about 600 degrees celsius after which it

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gets circulated through insulated pipes by a magnetohydrodynamic pump to a

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traditional steam turbine power generator just like what you would find

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at a coal or a natural gas power plant today which should make general fusion

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solution sort of a drop-in upgrade for an

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existing facility now

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fun fact it is not a perpetual motion machine

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because it does require a constant supply of fuel

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but some of the steam that gets generated is actually going to be used

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to actuate the pistons keeping the cycle

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going general fusion hopes that once they

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reach production they'll be able to run one of these reactions every second

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generating about 100 to 200 megawatts of

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power about the sweet spot for replacing existing coal power plants in developed

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countries and not so much that it would

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blow up the power distribution systems in developing countries a market where

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the most new power generation will have to happen in the coming years now none

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of this is a sure thing i mean nothing in life is but

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if general fusion and its investors

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which includes jeff bezos apparently by the way can stay on course

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then the future looks really bright not just for their company but also for the

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tech tips and enter Linus tech tips in the how did you hear about us section

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