The need for fusion - with the UK Atomic Energy Authority

Far too many un-skippable Ads. It spoilt continuous viewing for me. A good Talk otherwise. Shame really.

Shop the royal institution store… The item they are calling," our galaxy mug", has a picture of our solar system on it.

It’ll NEVER work and is a money pit.

Solar is fusion.

1) 1852 to present is almost nothing on a geologic scale.i.e., not relevant. 2) if the United States had not canceled their thorium reactor research in the 1950s, we would, today, have abundant, clean energy, too cheap to meter. Fusion, in its best case scenario, will not be online for at least 20 more years.

Renewables will never be more than a small fraction of our requirements. Let is increase fission with waste recycling, and more to fusion when we are able.

This to me will be the ultimate human achievement in science. I truly believe fusion energy is possible if we all work together and put our minds into it❤

What happens to the neutrons after hitting the blanket? How do neutrons convert to electrons and how many electrons for each neutron? When did we invent the blankets and what are they made of?

Fusion generates Helium and a spare neutron, isn't this a bit disingenuous as that neutron is radiation?

What a stupidly expensive complicated centralized, construction shareholders wet dream way of making a steam engine . It detracts from real action today with the endless promise of free energy tomorrow.

Eunice was not the discoverer of the greenhouse effect but did the first physical demonstration of it. Weirdly political history lesson to start with.

We already have unlimited fusion energy, it's called the sun and it can supply all we need. The chance of having sufficient commercial production of fusion power by 2050 is zero

Fusion reactors will still produce waste heat.

If you are creating nuclear fusion by subjecting pellets of a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium to massive laser bombardment, then what if we could make this fusion process more efficient, by putting microscopic spheres of pure Iron in the cores of these pellets? When atomic bombs explode, that’s done by using high explosives to compress a spherical layer of fusible Uranium or Plutonium around a steel ball, an ‘Ignition ball’ to make the bomb’s fission or fusion happen. Also, astronomers determined that when the core of a star, a sun, starts to manufacture the element of Iron, it INSTANTLY goes NOVA! So, perhaps adding Iron Nano-Orbs to these fusion fuel pellets, they would do the same thing.

wow lots of energy, might be coming from the fusion! :)

A chimera if there ever was one. Matter-antimatter is the way to go.

How do you capture/convert the mass of the released Neutrons to energy?

I wasn’t going to share my thoughts about the facts that we should have had the cure for global warming, ‘I’s just climate change…’, caused by the growth of the human population some 50 years ago.
‘If we had fusion power 50 years ago, think of what the world would be like today?’
That was supposed to be a good thing?
‘Except for the economy?’
Skip it, Watch the UK Atomic Energy Authority explain when we humans knew we were at fault for heating up the world. Not for having too many children or the burning of fossil fuels that we needed to survive, trust me if… Well, keeping it simple, we would have never reached the Moon, oh, and a lot of other things…
‘I do not understand???’
With fewer humans, there are fewer minds to dream, invent, and strive for more. Oh, and being able to communicate with each other is a big deal, also!
Never mind that by 2040 we will have replaced the world’s biggest fossil fuel-burning power plants, and guess what, ‘That is enough…’.??
With Clean-Coal and Carbon Capture technologies, we will still be mining Coal and drilling for Oil.
‘Yeah, the AI Robots will be doing that.’
Oh, I thought we wanted to save jobs???

A lot of the migration that seems to be about politics, id argue are still the start of climate migration. A lot of the political conflicts causing the migration are the people who want to exploit with abandon versus those who want to exploit sustainably. Right now, those who want to exploit with abandon are winning elections, as they are scaring people that climate change policies will ruin their economies.

I wish that the date of the video recording/creating was put in the description. This video is probably quite a few years old.

Wonderful! - one note for the younger among us - the transistor was invented in the 'late 40's - integrated circuits (multiple transistors on a single chip) were created in the late 50's

I hope humanity lasts long enough for us all to harness fusion, build better rockets for interstellar space, and spread out and let everyone do their own thing xD

The facts about climate change are really quite simple, aren't they, and yet there are so many deniers.

I think they should continue research, but it's not honest to believe it is achieveable to override entropy at that scale. We've known for quite some time that it's not possible get net positive energy by fusing atoms together. The only way we know of so far is bending space as much as a sun does, and in the end it just releases the energy that's actually already there and not even all of it. The sun as a fusion reactor is like rolling an enormous ball up a hill and let it roll down, that's what we need to do for fusion reactors to give energy too because energy is always conserved and the universe (so far) always goes towards higher entropy.

The presentations felt a little “desperate” to me…..

Great lecture ❤

Patronising offensive PR garbage!

It would be nice to have fusion, but lets face it, it won't be viable in the foreseeable future, maybe in 100 years. Actually, I don't even know if fusion is desirable economically. If we compare it with nuclear power and fission. In 1932 the neutron was discovered. Fermi created new elements just 2 years later in 1934. Then in 1939 the fission chain reaction was realized. In 1942 the Manhattan Project was started. Just 3 years later in 1945 the first atomic bomb was created. The first generation nuclear power plants were build in 1954. This is a timeline of just 22 years from the first discovery to a complete and functional power plant. Around the same time in the 1930s fusion was also discovered and theoretically mapped out. Up to today we have experimental fusion reactors but they do fusion for a fraction of a second and not one of them achieved viability. That is after about 90 years of research into fusion. Now for the economical side. About all nuclear power plants were build in the 1970s-80s. A new nuclear power plant takes about 10 years to be build, currently there are just 8 new nuclear power plants being build, and some of those are basically abandonment like the UK's Hinkley Point C which wasted 32.7 billion Pounds. There is a reason, nuclear power plants are costly, take long to build and are high risk. The same would apply to fusion power plants. But we have already a viable alternative: wind and solar. It's cheap, modular, low risk. And it kind of uses fusion, too. Fusion from the sun.

I dont understand people who come here hear anything related to climate change, dislike call it woke and leave.
Your brains are actually rotted, this is what the last 10 years of a very good strategy by certain political forces to make this part of a culture and identity war has done to you.

Fusion and fission contribute to the Earth's energy balance. While they may reduce CO2 emissions, they still generate significant heat. Thus, they cannot be considered as technologies that mitigate climate change.

Altogether, there is still a lot of hand waving about the materials and engineering here. I've never seen a more hopeful presentation. Useful fusion is obviously a very long way off and we will either have resolved our difficulties toward net zero or failed by the time this technology is ready, so I am not being cynical when I say that the 30% of this talk given over to global warming and why we need this technology is irrelevant as it will not come about until the crisis has either passed or we are so critically damaged by that crisis we cannot continue to the new world promised by fusion.
That is not an arguement for abandoning the project. Governments will decide whether to continue towards workable efficient energy generation with fusion and clearly this talk is aimed at conserving the funding stream in the face of all the negativity.
The analogy with the rise of the mobile phone is very interesting. Certainly we could not have predicted 50 years ago that the Star Trek personal communicator would be in the hands of billions of ordinary individuals one day, nor the miraculous technological developments that have come as a result but there was proof as the development progressed that greater promise was accelerating the process. Giant leap followed giant leap and the funding poured in with the promise of rich returns on investment. Here the comparison with the fusion industry breaks down as progress is slow and as yet there is no real evidence that it can actually be financially viable at all.
These and other researchers should be rightly fearful for their jobs.

Fusion energy might be more politically expedient to persue but it always seemed to me that fission technology is already here and can solve the energy crisis. If we'd just continued to build nuclear power stations since the 1970s there would be no energy crisis.

All nuclear power is unsafe they said! Back we go to coal burning 2.0, this time green.

My bet is we will see a fusion reactor before 2030 from a commercial company

The extra energy of fusion has the potential to dramatically increase productivity and raise living standards, just of the advances made in switching from coal, to oil to nuclear fission and that fusion has a much higher energy density.

For me that's a much better argument for why we should do this than fear of climate change.

Amazing science! But, the reason for wanting to use fusion is a bit off. "Fusion won't produce CO2..." But CO2 is not bad in itself, is bad because in the system Sun->Space->Atmosphere->Earth keeps on the Earth more heat coming from the Sun than heat dissipating into Space. But producing excessing heat on Earth additionally to the heat from the Sun doesn't lead to the same effect?
The renewables all use the energy from Sun (yes, even winds and rivers are ultimately Sun energy) and only when humans done using it that energy disperse into the air. Is like only delaying a bit the heat dissipating into Space.
Also it amazes me that, when generally talking about climate change, people blame it all on gas emissions and fail to notice the extra heat they put in the system by burning the fossil fuels.
If you really want to solve the climate change crisis AND keep people warm, focus on REDISTRIBUTION of heat from the Sun and do it only on the human environments. The sun shines somewhere even if is night in your city, there is summer (too hot of a summer actually) somewhere when is winter in your city. Learn to move the heat and keep the heat longer once you have it!
Also work on fusion, fission or any science you want but use it for spaceships or something more useful, there is no need for lies that you do it to keep us comfortable while keeping the environment clean

Sure, this technology is progressing along admirably, but this is still clearly 10-15 years away from commercial scale. We'll almost certainly need it in the future, but for now we have to work with what we have. Fission nuclear power is highly effective and waste products can be safely contained, and if we use thorium, waste products amounts are even smaller and fuel is cheap and easily available..

Thorium nuclear power is very close to use - it requires only minor alterations to existing nuclear fission plant designs. So focusing on using fission now is far more important than fusion because it can prevent us going over those important tipping points at 2 degrees C.. As well as improving the technology to re-use used nuclear fuel.

every passive object has reciprocal S-parameter matrix. It means: S12 = S21. That means - if something is heating faster, it must also cool down faster. Eunice Footer must have faked the results or made grave mistakes in her experiments. Greenhouse effect does not exist. So called greenhouse gases contribute to the planet albedo (reflectivity). the more reflective the planet is, the less solar energy it absorbs. The planet is a net recipient of solar energy. higher reflectivity results in cooling down of the planet. That explains, why when mount Saint Helen erupted, global temperature dropped. Same with Krakatau. You can spin it anyway you want.

This technology is really cool but we need to understand the important fact. Commercial fusion power is at least 40 years away.

NIF's net power generation from fusion is only "net" if you ignore all the immense power required to generate the lasers, which is why MJ (MegaJoules) are mentioned instead of MW. It also ignores all the power required to run the rest of the NIF facility.

So the laser beams had an energy of 2 MJ and generated 3 MJ worth of fusion energy from the frozen D-T sample inside the hohlraum. That's a 50% "net" energy but only over the final laser pulses. 3 MJ though are multiple orders of magnitude less energy than what was spent to generate those lasers.

The lasers were not conjured out of thin air, yet NIF's general press releases almost seem to suggest they did. NIF's "breakthrough" is a neat science experiment but it falls way short of what's required for an actual nuclear power plant. Plants need to generate more energy than what they spend in total, otherwise they make no sense.

Will UK's STEP reactor manage to generate actual net energy or will it be a case of "net" energy over the plasma's energy alone, disregarding what's required for coolants, superconducting magnets, control systems etc?

Excellent.

Someone please explain: How do they know that the plasma produced here on earth is 1 million degrees and not, say like, 9,999,000 degrees?

There’re some serious haters here in the comments 😂

It’s a slow march towards progress, Folks. The presenters are doing their part of the effort (yes, even marketing guy convincing backers to invest).

utter nonsense

skip the first 20 minutes to get to the fusion talk

I can't see the pie, for the sky.
I can't see the sky, for the pie.
Good bye!

came here for a fusion discussions, but all its been over 10 minutes in is a weasel using marketing tactics whiling snowing the listeners about global warming

As a species we crack the fusion power process and learn how to build practical power plants or eventually we go back to living in caves or go extinct. That is in reality the game going on here. but many can't seem to grasp it. All the guff about renewables and alternative energy providing power for a growing, expanding industrialised civilisation is just not based on rational thinking. Short term, yeah fine, but the only truly sustainable long term future for an industrialised and scientific civilisation is obtaining fusion power.

So let's start really plowing some real resources into this. Let's start harnessing the power of real competition.

Yeh & we'll cure the c words soon, I really hope so

One big flaw will be operating costs of fusion reactors.Think of cooling away 5 to 15% of the gross heat by liquid He to keep the core of the reactor operating. The cryo system will eat up ~ 50% of electrical power output with astronomical operating costs. He losses in the cryo system by Onnes effect will add to the costs. Electrical fusion energy will not be "cheap" and may never reach economical break even.