Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWill humans figure out how to make fusion work on Earth, to provide plentiful clean power?
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What's good It's calling and Eating. Waldbroke is back for season three, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartRadio. We're serving up some real stories and life lessons from people like van Leython DC, Young Flight, Phone, Thugs and Harmony and many more. They're sharing the dishes that got them through their struggles and the wisdom they gained along the way. We're cooking up something special, so tune in every Thursday. Listen to Eating Wallbroke on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio, app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your.
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Hey Tore here? Before we jump in, we just want to let you know that Daniel and I are participating in a live event this Thursday with Atlas Obscure.
That's right. Do you shout questions of the podcast. You have things you'd like to ask us live? Will come join us on Thursday October eighth, twenty twenty. It's four thirty pm Pacific times, seven thirty pm US Eastern time. You can ask us questions, I'll answer them and Jorge will scribble clever doodles.
We talked about the big questions in the universe, and I'll be drawing cartoons live. So please join us to buy tickets.
Just google Daniel and Jorge at liss Obscura and you'll see the event. Come join us, see you there, Hey, Jorge, I need some feedback on the name of a new megaphysics project.
Oh, my specialty. What do you have so far? What do you think of destroyer of World? That's a terrible idea?
No, all right? How about planet Eater?
I'm not sure I would go on a tour of that one.
What if we just shortened it to like eater? How's that eater?
That would pick a name for a snack bar, But I'm not sure it would work for a physics experiment.
I think it's good. We're going with it with while.
You're kidding, right, Nobody would actually name their physics projects eater, would they?
Hi?
I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm a lover of silly physics acronyms.
And I am a lover of eating. So we are in a good company today. The stars are aligning. You might even say they're fusing together.
Then that's right, All the bananas are aligned.
Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we seek to explain to you all the craziness in the universe, the way things work, the way things don't work, what we do understand, what we don't understand, Where you can take a banana, and where you should definitely never ever take a banana.
That's right, practical advice like that. And also we talk about all of the things that science is up to these days, all the things that they're trying to understand and know about and discover, but also all the things that you're trying to make.
That's right, Science is actively trying to make your life better. We are working hard at the big questions of the day, not just where do you come from, what's the universe made out of? What will be the ultimate fate of the universe, but also how can you power your electric car? And can you charge your phone anywhere all the time?
And most important, how can we power your Netflix addiction a little bit more efficiently and ecologically friendly?
You mean your podcast addiction, right, because all these folks number one form of entertainment is listening to awesome science podcasts.
That's right. Yeah, podcasts and Chill is a new Netflix and Chill. I think a lot of people probably listen to this podcasts when they're exercising. So you know, if you just hook up your treadmill to like a generator, it could be a zero net waste endeavor here.
Yeah, but then what powers the people? Right? Then it's essentially a banana powered podcast.
Yeah, bananas are solar powered, right, So it all works out true.
In the end, it all comes down to energy from the Sun. Everything we do on Earth almost is eventually derived from the energy of the Sun.
Yeah. The Sun powers the life on Earth, and it's pretty warm and toasty, and so scientists have been looking at the Sun for a long time thinking, man, if we only had a little sun here on Earth, you could warm us up and give us all the energies that we need.
So I can talk about creating little black holes, and that freaks you out, but you can just talk about like making a little sun here on Earth. You realize, of course, that the Sun is a constantly exploding hydrogen bomb, right.
Yeah, but does the Sun create a runaway sucking chain reaction that grows and grows and grows.
So hey, black holes have their uses too. We just did a whole episode about black hole powered starships that could take us through other star systems. So anyway, I just got to speak up for black.
Holes here, you have a pet one in your backyard.
No, I'm just you know, I'm a shill for the big black hole lobby. But you're right. The sun is amazing. The sun is wonderful, and the sun does power everything that we do. And as we look around for greener, cleaner sources of energy, it does seem tempting to think, well, the universe does it this way, why can't we do it that way? Also, and it's something that physicists have been working on for decades.
Yeah, for a long time. They've been trying to make this idea of a living sun on Earth possible. And so to the end of the program, we'll be talking about one such experiment. Red's happening right now as we speak. There are signs is in this moment in this world trying to treat a little sun. We're more like a sun donut.
Exactly like a plasma donut. I don't know what flavor that is, but I don't recommend taking a bite out of it. But yeah, exactly. One problem is that the Sun is massive and exploding constantly, and the reason it doesn't tear itself apart is because it has so much gravity. And so we need to figure out other ways to sort of replicate the parts of the Sun that we want to keep without having the sort of like earth destroying aspects that are less interesting to us.
Yeah, and so today we'll be asking the question what is the eater experiment and will it create fusion here on Earth?
Now?
Daniel, so you were serious? This is actually called the eater experiment.
That's right, it R and it's pronounced by plasma physicists everywhere to be the eater experiment, not it or eter or anything like that. People call it eater without any sort of sense of irony or understanding that absurd.
That is what language pronounces the I and the E, you know, the open e. Is it like a weird collaboration between French and US scientists.
It's a huge international collaboration. So I don't know who's responsible for that, And it's likely that other countries pronounce the acronym differently, you know, in French they probably pronounced it or something right. Yeah, And I don't even know how the Japanese would do it, but here in America we call it the eater experiment.
Again, just to verify, it's not trying to eat the entire earth. It's trying to do the opposite. It's trying to feed the whole earth.
It's exactly, it's trying to fuel the Earth. It's an attempt at magnetic confinement fusion. But as usual, I was curious did people know about the eater experiment. We actually got a few emails from listeners asking us to talk about this, so I thought, Hey, maybe our listeners know all about this. So I pulled them to figure out what they knew, and I asked them if they knew what the eater experiment was all about.
Do you think they wrote you because they were curious or concerned? Daniel, They're like, oh, physicis are making something called the eater experiment. Should we be worried?
No?
I think they wrote me because they were hopeful. You know, the Eater experiment really does represent something positive. If they make it work, and we get fusion to work, we could have essentially almost limitless energy, which could really transform our economies and lift a lot of people out of poverty. So it's tantalizing. You know, it really inspires hope, and so I think they were hoping that I would say, yes, it's around the corner and we're going to solve all of our problems.
But you're like, no, I am in the black hole lobby pocket unfortunately, so I can't chill for fusion.
Although you know, if you want to create a black hole to power your starship, you need a very good source of energy, and so it might be that we build a little star and run it as a fusion experiment in order to gather energy and then pump that via lasers into a black hole. So everybody can be happy. You get your star, I get my black hole.
If I have a son, why would I need a black hole.
To power your starship? Man, you should listen to that episode. It's pretty awesome.
All right. Well, think about it for a second. If someone as you what the eater experiment was, would you respond that you are hungry, thank you? Or what would you say? Here's what people had to say.
Something to do galactic telescope extraterrestrial radar.
I believe it's a nuclear fusion experiment that needs to replicate the Sun's fusion power to create clean energy.
I have not heard of that one, but I will be very interested to learn what it is.
I think it's French and French abbreviation kind of like certain. In fact, I believe it has to do with nuclear fusion, with building a nuclear fusion reactor.
Something to do with acronyms.
Interplanetary terrestrial exploration research.
Maybe that sounds good. Yeah, I'm surprised after that. Then nobody said yes, and I'll have a side of fries with that, E fee some chips please.
Yeah. So some people I've heard of it, and some people had no idea.
And for the record, the acronym i ER stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor iter. Oh No, yeah, I know thermonuclear sounds like wargames, right.
No.
I I was saying, they omitted the nuclear, so she really should be itner.
No, No, thermonuclear is one word, so's t otherwise be ener, I guess. But they actually they didn't like that expression, so they renamed it just it R. Now it's an acronym officially that doesn't stand for anything. It's just either Wait what.
Was it originally? I International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Oh, I see, how did they rename it?
They just renamed it it R. So it used to be the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and an acronym for that was it R. But now the name is just it e R.
Oh. I see they made the acronym the name, yes, exactly, so that they wouldn't have to print on their T shirts like thermonuclear. Is that what it means?
Exactly? I think thermonuclear didn't pull very well in the surrounding communities when they were building these.
Seriously, Oh okay, but it's still a thermonuclear it's just hidden in the name exactly.
The physics of it have been change. It's just a change in what we call it and how we refer to it.
All right, well, let's jump into it. Daniel, explain to us what is the ether experiment and is it going to eat us?
The Eater experiment is going to eat hydrogen and create electricity, is the idea. But the big idea is that eater is what we think will be the first working fusion reactor, something capable of taking in fuel and creating electricity, and it will operate on fusion, which again is different from fission. We have nuclear reactors now, which operate on the principle of fission, breaking up big heavy elements like uranium and plutonium to create energy. This operates under fusion, which is sticking together light elements to create energy.
Right, because fusion is putting things together and somehow that releases energy. Also, like, I think we're used to breaking things apart and not releasing energy. But it's kind of weird to think that you can put things together and that we'll all give you energy.
Yeah, And it's pretty weird because if you have really heavy elements, anything essentially above iron, then if you break it apart, you get energy out. And for those you can think of them like two little objects sort of held together by a coiled spring, and the bond there holds in energy. Right, the spring has energy and if you somehow break it, then things fly out. You get energy out when you break those bonds. But anything lighter than iron, it works the opposite way. It's like the things are stuck together and to break them up you need to add energy. Right, Like, for example, if you wanted the Earth to no longer be moving around the Sun, if you want to break the bond between the Earth and the Sun, you need to add energy, You need to give the Earth a push, so that bond has sort of negative energy. And so in the same way, if you went in the reverse, if you created that bond instead of breaking it, you'd be releasing energy. So anything lighter than iron, if you fuse it, if you stick it together, you release energy, and if you tear it apart, then that takes energy.
It's still kind of weird to think about it is, and then like, you know, it wants to be together, but if you put them together it costs you, Like it's hard to do that.
Yeah, well it's weird in lots of ways. But you know, imagine, for example, you had two planets and you want to get them in orbit around each other. If they're moving at really high speeds, then to do that, you'd have to remove some of their energy. You'd have to slow them down relative to each other so they could form a bond, and so has to essentially extract energy from that system. And so that's what we're doing here, is we're taking two hydrogen atoms and we're slowing them down. We're getting them close enough together, reducing their relative energy so that we can extract that energy and make them bond together. But it is pretty weird. I agree, it's counterintuitive to imagine sticking things together and having energy come.
Out, right, And I think it all has to do. It's kind of like this balance between the different fundamental forces, right, Like the thing that makes it hard to put to hydrogen nuclei together is the alert thromagnetic force, right, because they repel each other electromagnetically, But if you get in close enough, then another force takes over and then that's the one that releases energy.
Right. Yeah, So there's two separate ideas there. One is why does hydrogen and light elements why do they release energy when they fuse? Whereas heavy stuff, why does it release energy when it breaks up? And that's because of the strong force. And that's like how these quarks and these protons and neutrons fit together to make their bonds. And it's very, very complicated and difficult to calculate. And then there's the second angle, which is what makes it hard to get two protons together, since you two hydrogen atoms are basically just two protons, and you're right, they're positively charged and so they don't like to come together, so getting them together get them near each other so that they can fuse is difficult. It's sort of like trying to get a hole in one in mini golf. When the hole is at the very top of a volcano. You got to get it like right up the top. If you don't get it in exactly the right spot rolls away because it likes to repel all the golf balls.
And it had to do with kind of like the distance that the forces act on, right, Like, the electromagnetic force acts at pretty long distances, but the strong nuclear force only works if you're like really close to that hole at the top of the volcano.
Yeah, the strong nuclear force is really really powerful, and so it's essentially always balanced in any distance greater than you know, pretty close to the proton, and so you don't really feel it unless you're really really close up and you're right. The electromagnetic force is balanced these sort of longer distances, and you can have protons that are positively charged and it's feels essentially goes infinite. You can feel another proton on the other side of the universe, although this strength is very small, but you're right. As two protons reach each other, it starts out that the electromagnetic force is dominant, but if you get close enough, the strong force takes over. But you've got to get them close enough. And two positively charged protons don't like to get together. They really resist it. It's like a brother and sister hugging.
Yeah, so if you put them together, they'll snap together and they'll release a bunch of energy, like they'll release photons or how does that energy come out?
It's complicated. You get hygrogen together, you get helium, you get neutrinos, you get photons. There's actually a few steps in that process. And what happens inside the sun is a big mix of all these different things, and photons are created and then reabsorbed and neutrinos are created, so it's a big gimush. But yeah, basically, you get hygroen together, the fuses to make helium, and if you get it hot enough, that helium confuse to make the next thing, and then that confuse to make the next thing. And that's what's happening in the inside of stars. And as stars get older, they get these denser and denser cores. The hydrogen fuses and then the helium fuses, and eventually you get you know, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen all the way up to iron, and that's when they run out of fuel because the iron for it to fuse costs energy, so it starts to cool the star and that's when the beginning of the end of the life of the star starts.
Right.
But until then, it's a pretty efficient way to kind of create energy, right, Like a gram of fuel here for a fusion reactor will give you a ton of energy, that's right, Like tons and tons, like.
A lot of energy. You're much more efficiently converting mass into energy than in almost anything else we know other than like antimatter matter collisions, but antimatter is pretty difficult to find. The real advantage of fusion is that the fuel is everywhere. Like hydrogen is very very plentiful in the universe. We have a lot of it in water, for example, And you're right, it produces a huge amount of energy. So one gram of fuel produces as much energy as eighty thousand tons of oil, So it's a lot more efficient than fossil fuels.
That's crazy. Like a gram of hydrogen is what like a cop like a like a tea spoon, what is it?
I guess it depends a lot on the pressure and the temperature, right, but it's not a lot. You know, a gram is about how much a raisin weighs, So a raisins where of hydrogen, it's the same as eighty thousand tons of oil. That's like a whole container ship. Yeah.
And what makes it attractive too, is that we are sort of surrounded by fuel that we could use for a fusion reactor, right, Like you can get hydrogen just from water, and we have a lot of water.
Yeah, we have a lot of water, and hydrogen is the most plentiful thing in the universe. Some of like ninety six percent of the universe is hydrogen. Not like we're going to go out there to gather it, but you know, you imagine if fusion is going to power your spaceships or whatever. It's not that hard to find hydrogen, whereas things like uranium is much much rarer. You know, uranium is created when neutron stars collide and die. It's very rare process, which is why there isn't very much of it. But hydrogen's everywhere. It was the number one thing made during the Big Bang, and it's still number one. It's planning to be number one for billions of years into the future. So yeah, we're not going to run out of hydrogen.
And one of the best parts about a fusion reactor is that it's super green, right, Like, it doesn't create any toxic waste or radioactive waste or like carbon or carbon at all. Right, yeah, like, it just makes helium and energy. And who doesn't want more helium. We could all have balloons, We.
Can all talk with silly voices. We should do a whole podcast with just helium voices. No, you're right, it doesn't create radioactive waste the way that fission does. You know, fission, you have really heavy elements like uranium, they break up. You still have heavy elements that are radioactive and those can take tens of thousands of years to break down even further. So you got this stuff that's not useful for generating energy and sticks around basically poisoning your environment for thousands and thousands of years. Fusion is different. It's not one hundred percent clean, but essentially you're right, it produces helium and energy. The other thing it does is it produces very high speed neutrons. Now you can try to capture the energy of those neutrons, which would be great, but you know those neutrons can cause radioactivity in the material that surrounds it, so there is some radioactive waste from fusion. It's not completely easier, but it's almost negligible compared to fission.
All right, Well, it sounds amazing and it would be awesome if we can make fusion work here on Earth and make our own little sun and power us and then get us all nice and toasty. But there are a lot of challenges. For example, how do you make it work and how do you keep it from not exploding your entire plan. So let's get into that, But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, we're talking about a fusion and making fusion work here on Earth, and specifically about the Eater experiment. And it's in Europe, right, and they're trying to make fusion work right.
Now, that's right. They're building it in France and they're working on it. And it's the culmination of decades and decades of research of trying to make fusion work here on Earth, which turns out to not be very easy. As we talked about before, you have to get these hydrogens close to each other, and how do you do that efficiently? And for a lot of hydrogens, you can't just like shoot two protons at each other, that's what we do basically at the LHC. That's not very efficient for generating.
Energy, right, Yeah, So it's pretty hard to do. But we've been trying for decades and decades to make this work because I guess the payoff would be pretty cool. But I guess the hard part is getting these hydrogens to come together and get close enough that they snap together and release this energy. And so what are the different ways that we can do that. Do we throw them at each other or do you just kind of create a container and squeeze it enough so that it actually happens.
So we need high enough numbers to make this efficient, which is why we can't just use colliders. There's a whole other branch of fusion research where they use lasers and try to zap fuel when we'll talk about that today. But the basic idea of magnetic confinement fusion is to make a little star basically to create plasma, to take a bunch of hydrogen gas and make it really, really hot and dense. And the idea is that those are the conditions you need for these hydrogens to bang into each other to cause fusion. So basically you have to leave them nowhere else to go. You got to crowd all the hydrogens together so there's no escape. They got to fuse with each other. And then, of course the trick is how do you build a really hot, dense plasma and how do you contain it because it would basically melt any device you made out of normal mass.
Yeah, I think you're basically trying to do exactly what's happening in the sun. Right Like in the sun, all that hydrogen is there, but it's trapped and it's being squeezed together by the sheer size of the Sun everything else kind of squeezing it together, and so it becomes it's kind of like hot pressurized plasma that then triggers fusion.
That's right, And so the Sun uses basically a gravitational bottle.
Right.
It says, I'm just going to go really big so that I have my own gravity that sucks myself in. But we don't really have that option. We don't want to build another sun. We got one already, and if we build a fusion react to the size of the Sun, it would destroy us. So the challenge of building a mini one one that's practical for human purposes is finding another way to keep that plasma hot and dense and contained. And the big idea is to use magnets, because magnets can bend the direction of stuff without actually touching it. Right, you can have like magnetically levitating trains and all sorts of other magnetic confinement. So you try to build a magnetic bottle that doesn't actually have to touch the plasma.
It's right, because I guess the plasma is charged, right, Like everything in a plasma has a charge, and so it's repelled by the magnets and so you can contain it using magnets, but you can't contain other things with magnets. They have to be electric charge.
That's right. A plasma is electrically charged gas, right, That's what it means. That it's gotten hot enough that the electrons have so much energy that they just say bye bye to their protons and they're just flying around free. And so you have a gas of positive and negatively charged particles. That's the definition of a plasma. And that happens naturally when you heat it up exactly. And you're right that magnetic fields only act on charge particles, and they cause charged particles to bend in a circle. So then the next challenge is, well, how do you build a bottle that if it can't like push back on the particles, it can just sort of like bend them to move in a circle that maintains this plasma in a constant state. And so that's how they came up with this geometry of basically a donut. You have all the particles basically going in a circle, whizzing in a circle, and you have magnet fields that create sort of a tube around it. Then the magnetic fields force the particles, they bend the particles to move in the circle, and it's sort of a dynamo effect. The motion of those charged particles creates more magnetic field, which helps contain it. So it should be sort of building on itself, the same way that like the motion of hot iron inside the Earth helps the magnetic field, and the magnetic field helps move the iron sort of builds on itself. Oh, I see.
You couldn't just make like a bottle that looks like a bottle, or like a bottle that's like a sphere. That wouldn't quite work for fusion here on Earth. The tricky thing is getting these things stable. And so a bottle that just looks like a bottle wouldn't be stable because there'd be lots of points where the plasma could just approach the edge of it. You need to be totally symmetric, so the particles are always bent away from the edge of the bottle and into some configuration that helps strengthen the bottle. And so that's this idea.
It's called a toocomac and it's a plasma basically in a doughnut, whizzing in a circle where the plasma itself helped create the magnetic field that contains it?
Isn't that the name of a pokemon too?
I forget a really expensive, short lived pokemon.
I guess the problem is kind of like if you make a sun, how do you hold it? Right? Like, how do you hold the sun? You can't touch it. You can't use oven mits. It'll just melt everything.
And it's good. You know that you think about these things before you build your son, So I congratulate you on your forward thinking there.
Yeah.
You know sometimes you open the oven and you're like, wait a second, I need oven mits, right, this is that moment, right, plan to get your oven mids in advance, all right.
So they're hard to sort of make and contain and keep going stably. And so you said, we've been doing it for decades. So what are some of the other attempts we've made.
Yeah, the hard thing is to keep these things stable because plasma is very hot and very crazy. These things don't just fly along nicely like a bunch of cars in a race, you know, all moving in parallel really high speeds. They tend to bounce off each other. And anytime you have a small instability, it can build into larger instabilities, and the whole falls apart. So people have been working for years to figure out how exactly to make these things stable, Like do you have it be a perfect donut? Do you have it like a d shape? Do you have a twist? They're all sorts of crazy ideas for how to prevent these instabilities from being created and from growing, Like.
Do you make it a cronut or a Danish?
Do you glaze it? Who puts cheese in the middle of a reactor anyway?
I mean it is sort of like a Danish, isn't it. There's like something in the middle. There's not a hole in the middle. There's something in the middle.
No, there's a hole in the middle. Yeah, it's like a doughnut. It's like a bagel. There's nothing in the middle.
I guess the magnetic bottle is a donut. But you actually have to put the magnet in the middle.
Yeah, you need the equipment which helps create and contain the magnetic fields in the middle.
That's right.
But you don't have plasma there. You don't have magnetic fields there. The active elements are a donut. But people have been working on this for a long time, and there's a reactor at Princeton, which was leading edge for a long time. It's called the TFTR the tiefter. Yeah, and they measure the performance of these things using a ratio energy out to energy in because it takes energy to start the reactor. It's like you know, starting a fire. You got to light it, you need to heat the plasma, you need to create the magnetic field. So it costs some energy and then you get fusion that happens. And the way you measure the performance of reactor is are you getting more heat out than you put in? Because nobody wants to build a reactor, that's a loss of energy. And so the ratio here they call it the Q factor is energy out over energy in. A number greater than zero means you're producing energy. Yeah, you have fusion, But a number less than one means it's still costing you energy. You're having to put more energy in than it's actually.
Producing, eating up your electricity bill.
Yeah, exactly. And so so far at Princeton, the best they achieved was a queue of four tenths right forty percent, which means they were able to make fusion happen and create a mini sun. But if they had turned off the energy they were pumping into it, it would have dissipated, right, it cost the more energy to make it wasn't self sustaining.
I guess it's kind of like the fusion itself, Like getting two hydrogen atoms together takes energy to get them really close, but if you manage to get them together just right, they'll snap together and release energy. So it's kind of like that that ratio of like putting energy to make it happen, and then hopefully it happens enough that you get enough energy out of.
It exactly because that energy that comes out of those hydrogens can then help the other hydrogens fuse. And that's a condition they call ignition, where it's creating enough energy to sustain itself. You don't need to anymore be lighting it from the outside. And so you know, it was a huge accomplishment together too point four and before that people hadn't really gotten fusion to work at all. So they created you know, sustained fusion reactions, just not self sustained.
Wow.
And did that one look like a donu too? Or was it more like.
That one also looked like a donut? Yep? And then there was one in England the jet reactor which reached a QO point six. Right, So they've been making progress, but they realized at some point that these things were limited by their size. Like, in order to get more fusion happened, you needed a bigger plasma. You needed like more plasma and less surface fewer edges for the energy to sort of leak out.
You needed like a fatter donut.
You needed a bigger donut. And let's face it, who doesn't need a bigger donut?
Right?
You never eating a donut. You're like, I wish this donut was smaller.
Oh, well, that's because you're a big eater.
And I'm a physicist, so I want to build a big eater experiment.
I guess what you're saying is that you need to scale it up, because then you get kind of like, you know, kind of like more donut per surface area. Is that kind of what it means? Yeah, it is denser.
It's denser, and you have more internal bits than surface bits, and so you get more fusion going on. And the goal here is to get a queue of ten to get something which we think would be like economically feasible where you can go to an energy company and say, hey, we have a design, spend two billion dollars building this. You want to promise that this thing is going to produce ten times as much energy as you're putting into it. So that's the goal.
But why ten? Why not one point one? One point one be like a net positive.
It would be a net positive, but you know, to be economically feasible, you've got to produce more than that. You know, one point one is pretty small. It costs a lot to build these things and to operate these things, and also just to be competitive. Right, there is a market if you build fusion energy, but it's super duper expensive. Nobody's going to buy it, and we're still going to be burning fossil fuels. And so you have to make fusion happen, and then you have to make it economically cheap so that it will actually be consumed and take over the energy grid. So the goal there is Q of ten.
I guess you know, I'm wondering why a little percentage isn't good in it, because couldn't you like take the energy that it makes and use it to power itself and so then you would just have like almost like this perpetual motion machine that you just got to feed at sea water.
Yeah, but you know, more efficiency is definitely better. And I remember there's overhead costs in running this thing and then building this thing and making it work, and so this is more of a like a social economic question than an engineer in question. But they've determined that a Q ten is the target, and you know, I think they're hoping to achieve much much higher queues eventually, So this is like a research goal. I think they want to get que one hundred or a thousand. This process really has enormous potential.
You're a limit, like what's the highest queue you can get out of a fusion reactor?
I don't think there is a limit. You know, you can get this thing to be self sustaining so that it essentially takes no more energy in I guess you optimize your magnetic fields. You know, maybe not infinite, but there's no real like upper limit to the queue you can get.
All right, it sounds amazing, and so let's get into how we are going to make it work and whether or not eater is gonna eat up this problem. But first, let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're talking about making fusion on earth, making a sun donut, a solar donut here on Earth that can maybe power all of our energy needs forever, very efficiently and super eco friendly, without any or much radioactive waste. Now, Daniel were saying, we've been trying for decades here and now the latest project is called Eater in Europe and trying to make this work. And so how's it going for them?
Well, it's been going. That's about as good as you can say.
That doesn't sound good.
It hasn't been great. Now things have taken a much better turn recently, but it's been a tricky project. You know, I've been watching this feel from Afar and for a long time I thought this is sort of like their super conducting super collider. They decided we're gonna go really big. We're gonna spend billions, but we're gonna make it awesome. And the project, you know, it needs sustained political support. And they started out in the nineties and the US was part of it, and then the US pulled out and we thought all the project was going to fall apart in ninety nine.
Oh yeah, why do we pull out?
Why do we pull out? Why do we ever cancel our support for a science project? It's some politics thing, you know, these billions versus those billions. Oh, Congress is fickle. Then they fickle pickled again, and the US was back in in two thousand and three, and so now the US is back in. So they've been working this thing since the nineties. And one of the ideas here is not just let's build a reactor that works, but let's spread the knowledge of fusion reactors around the world. We don't just want to develop a very capable fusion economy in the US, we want to do it also in India and in China and in Russia, et cetera. And so it's very decentralized project. Or like you guys build a vacuum chamber, you guys build these diagnostics. And that's a cool idea and a nice vision, but didn't really work very well for organizing a billions of dollars project that needs to be completed on schedule.
Yeah, it seems like you want to make it work first before you tell other people how to make it work.
Yeah. Well, I think part of selling it was, you know, all these other countries, please pitch in hundreds of millions of dollars and you'll get to participate in the economics of it. You'll get to be a leader and how to build this part of the device. I think that was part of the political selling points. But you know, they also pay the price because it's very hard to organize stuff that's so decentralized with lots of different cultures participating, and so the cost started out estimated around four billion euros and now it's looking to be like more than twenty billion euros, which is pretty steep. I mean, it's hard to imagine a commercial operation spending twenty billion euros to build a reactor. But you know, the idea is they build this one, they figure out how to make it better and cheaper, et cetera.
Yeah, I feel like twenty billion is not even that much. I mean, for like, you know, super cheap, free energy for the rest of humanity's history. Sounds like I'm bargain.
All right, Well, I'm glad you're so open to investments. I'd like to pitch to you. Then my fusion Energy company would you like to invest.
Is basing Nigeria organized by a prince?
Yes, please just click on this link. No, but then there was a guy who took over in twenty fifteen and he sort of centralized power a little bit and decision making. And since twenty fifteen it's really been on track. It's been very well organized. They got good spreadsheets, et cetera. And people now think in the community that is going pretty well. They're making steady progress. And they actually just recently last few weeks shipped some of the cryostat, this thing that is going to hold the plasma. They shipped it from Korea to France to start assembly.
So it's coming together.
It's coming together. Yeah, we're starting to see real progress. And you know, this thing is going to be enormous.
Like how big was the one at Princeton. Was it like desktop size?
No, it was definitely not desktop size. It was like a really large room. You know, the plasma on the scale of like a meter high. This thing is going to be like twelve meters.
The doughnut's going to be twelve meters high, twelve meters high.
It's going to be enormous. But that's what they think. They need to get a QUEU of ten to get ten times as much energy out as in. So it's a big task, right, and nobody ever built these things before. Remember, when you do physics research at this scale, you're not like going to Best Buy and purchasing a fusion reactor and there's a customer support when it doesn't work. Right, Nobody's ever done this before, and so every decision, every piece of technology, every readout, everything has to be designed and thought about, usually by physics grad students, and so, you know, I'm impressed when it works at all.
It feels sort of like they try to jump two orders of magnitude in with this one, right, Like I feel like, do you think maybe they try to bite off too much? Like they went from point four Q two point six. You know, I would think the next logical step is like two Q or something, but no, they went for ten.
Yeah, you know it's strategic, right. If they get Q of ten to work, then boom, fusion is a thing. Fusion is now commercially viable. It's a whole new era for humanity. So I think they decided to just go for the home run, and it's a strategic choice if it doesn't work, then you know that whole branch of research is probably dead. But you know, there are other ways people are exploring fusion. So they're definitely swinging for the fences. And that's a question of strategy, not science, and I understand, and I'm rooting for them. I really hope they make it work. I'm sick of all our crazy, dirty, expensive energy. It'd be wonderful if they made fusion work. And you know, this thing is on track, and they're expecting to finish the vessel that holds the plasma in about twenty twenty four and to turn the thing on in twenty twenty five to make first plasma.
Oh, it's pretty soon.
That's pretty soon. Yeah, that's you know, around the corner. And then they're going to tweak it and play with it and gradually ramp it up over the next few years. And they're hoping to get you know, actual power generated by this thing around twenty thirty five.
Now that's assuming that it works. Is there anything still uncertain about the theory of it? Or do we know pretty well that it's going to work. It's just a matter of like the bolts, Well, the theorists are pretty confident. They think it's a pretty straight scale up and that if you build this thing and you do it correctly, it should really work. I mean, we've seen fusion happen. We know how to do it.
They've dealt with a lot of the issues of plasma instability. They think they know how to do that, how to manage the magnetic fields to suppress those instabilities. So they're pretty confident. On the other hand, you know, there's a lot of things that crop up for the first time in reality that you didn't expect when you're doing them on paper. They've done complicated simulations, et cetera. So they're pretty confident. But even if that's all correct, even if their theory is correct, and you build a thing and you turn it on and it generates power, there are still some problems that haven't even actually started to think about, Like what, well, you know, this thing is going to generate energy, but they haven't figured out how to capture that energy, Like, what are you going to do with that energy? Yeah, what what do you mean?
There's no plan for you know, actually taking the energy out. But because if you don't take the energy out, it's just going to explode. Isn't it or he don't. The energy a lot of is produced in the form of neutrons. So these neutrons are created and they fly out with a lot of energy, and neutrons again aren't captured by the plasma because they're not charged. And so the idea is figure out a way to capture these neutrons outside of the plasma and turn them into heat and then turn that heat into steam and turn that steam into electricity. But nobody's really figured out how to make.
That part work. And you know, neutrons are not great for you, Like, if you stand near a high energy source of neutrons, you'll basically get cancer very quickly. And neutrons will also make stuff radioactive. So if you just turn this thing on empower it without doing anything about the neutrons, it'll turn the entire reactor and building it's in radioactive pretty quickly, and not like good radioactive, but like activate it make it radioactive potentially for a long time.
So what's the plan, I mean, don't they figure that out before they turn it on?
Well, I think it's a two step plan. They're like, let's figure out how to make the energy and then we'll figure out how to capture it. But it's a bit of the oven Mits sort of situation. You want to make sure you know how to handle this thing before you build it. So they have a sketch of an idea. It's actually really clever if you surround this thing in blankets of lithium, then neutrons when they hit lithium, they capture the energy, they heat up, and you can you know, extract that energy through heat turn it into electricity. Plus, it turns the lithium blankets into exactly the kind of hydrogen you need to run as fuel for your reactor. So you need to turn lithium into basically deitorium or tritium, various isotopes of hydrogenlight what. So it's a nice little solution.
Sorry, let me get maybe a picture here. So we have this donut and it's really hot, and it's containing a magnetic bottle, and it's giving off huge, huge amounts of neutrons. But don't these neutrons and hit the walls of the container that it's holding and then destroy it or heat it up. Are you saying put the blankets of lithium before that or within that.
Well, they haven't made a whole lot of progress on this. A lot of these ideas are still sort of in early stages, and the element of the Eater program that was supposed to focus on exactly those questions hasn't received a whole lot of funding. They're really focusing just on generating the fusion and generating the energy, and so the folks I spoke to definitely acknowledge that this needs to be worked on more. But you're right, you can't put the lithium blankets directly inside or that get melted by the plasma, and so they'll be parts of the reactor which will be irradiated by the neutrons and that will need to be you know, eventually replaced. So that's what I was talking about. What I was saying, there is some waste generated by a fusion reactor. Essentially the reactor itself becomes irradiated and needs to be rebuilt and replaced. But if you put these lithium blankets around the reactor, it should capture that energy from the neutrons and create more fuel you need to fuel the reactor. So it's a nice little cycle if you can make it work. But this hasn't really been proved in practice at the level we would need to actually get energy electricity city out of eater.
WHOA, how do the neutrons create You said, it takes lithium and the lithium catches it, and then the lithium transforms into these heavy hydrogens.
Yeah, so lithium is not a very heavy element, and if you smash neutrons into it, then it cracks open and you can get hydrogens, and you can get deuteriums, you can get tritiums, and so it basically turns into the fuel you need to funnel back into the reactorting.
But then then don't you need more lithium? What if you're run out of lithium.
Yeah, essentially you need more lithium. But again, lithium is not that rare. It's atomic number three. But you know, these are the parts of this whole research program that are not as fleshed out as the rest of it. They're like, first, let's get Q of ten. Let's produce a huge hot, you know, nasty burning donut, and then we'll figure out how to use that donut to run your eyes out.
Let's make it huge what did you call it? Huge? Nasty burning donut? And then we'll figure out who knows.
That was the alternative name for this program. They went with eather instead.
They went the other way. They're like, how can we make this more appealing. Let's call it the thermonuclear Doughnut. Yeah, all right, Well, hopefully they'll figure it out. I mean, it seems like they're confident that it can be figured out and they just have to kind of put funding into it.
Yeah, they really do hope that it works, and the whole field is sort of like place their bet on this. There are other ways people are working on fusion. There are other devices like a stellar rader, which doesn't have a current of plasma, so it doesn't create its own magnetic field. You create the magnetic field from the outside. And it used to be that was essentially impossible to do because it was so complicated. But now with computer aided design, we can actually build the kind of crazy magnetic fields we need. So that's another area.
That's a different project called the Drinker Experiment.
And then there's the National Ignition Facility here in the US, which is using lasers to zap pellets of hydrogen and deterium to try to make fusion. But this one is sort of the biggest bet, and I really hope that it works and that it creates energy, and that it changes something about the nature of science. You know, I do particle physics, and we hope to learn about the nature of the universe, but there aren't really immediate practical applications. Here's one place where physics really can make a difference, I think in the whole history of humanity. You know, it can change our relationship with our environment.
Interesting, you're rooting for it because you feel like people will see science differently if we get it to work, Like science can be useful, right, a practical allow for your Netflix and podcasts.
Yeah, that's the one benefit. But also I just think there are a lot of folks out there that could really benefit from cheap energy. You know, if you have cheap energy, then a lot of other problems are solved, like fresh water. All you need to get fresh water is saltwater plus energy. So if energy is free or cheap, then all of a sudden, fresh water is not hard to get. And there are a lot of problems that are like that where the solutions are easy if energy is cheap, climate change, for example, and so a lot of problems could we could look at them very differently if energy becomes very cheap. And also, yes, it'd be nice to have a feather in the cap of physics.
Yeah, better life through physics, even if physicists don't have a life.
We're giving up ours for everybody Else's all right.
Well, we'll keep an eye out on this project and hopefully we'll hear good news in a few years from it. Yeah, that they can make it work.
Hopefully it'll make steady progress, and in twenty thirty five we will hear that they will have produced energy. So good luck eaters, and we hope that you make it work.
Yeah, good luck with that hot, burning, nasty donut.
Maybe that should be the name of the snack bar at the Eater Experiment.
Just don't eat it because there's neutras all over the place here. All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for listening, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jr. Hey Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth. You're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit US dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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