WEEKEND EDITION- Fusion Energy Breakthrough and Deadly Consequences of Bodybuilding

Published Dec 18, 2022, 10:13 PM

This is a compilation of some of the most compelling stories of the week.

Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez, and every week I explore the top stories making waves in the news and some that are just playing interesting. I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who know the story and bring you news without the noise so you can make an informed decision. You can catch a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday. That's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition, I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from the week. This past week, we learned about a significant breakthrough when it comes to fusion energy, something that could one day provide us with unlimited clean power. We saw researchers at the National Ignition Facility that we're able to achieve what it's called ignition, getting more energy out of a reaction than what they put in. The team fired hundred and ninety two laser beams at a small fuel pellet and it produced a small amount of net gain energy. This is an important step in proof of concept, but still a long way from being a commercially viable energy source. For more on this fusion energy breakthrough, will speak to Ifon Senior correspondent Advox this goal post here. It's called ignition, and as you described, it's basically where the amount of energy that they impart to start the reaction is less than the energy that they actually get out, and that means that now the reaction is actually worthwhile, that you can get a net energy gain an increase here, and then from there you could use that access energy potentially to boil water to make steam to run a turbine and thereby generate electricity. This is something, as you noted, that scientists have been at for decades, since at least the nineteen fifties, and they've been making incremental progress over at this over time, but it's been frustrating. It's been slow, and for fusion science in particular, it's been hard for them to get consistent budgets to do this, and so they've seen funding cuts in the past and that's also slowed the research. But now finally they've gotten to this point where after this incremental progress, they've been able to cross this specifics finish line, which is an important step forward because it's a proof of concept. It shows that it is in fact possible to get more energy out then in and if we were to keep out this even further. Eventually, at some point in the future, you could build a power plant around this. Now there's a ton of stuff that goes into it. Let's talk about the specific experiment where we did get that net energy gain, and then we'll talk about a lot of the stuff behind it, because it's also very important. So what they did there was fire a hundred and ninety two laser beams at this tiny fuel pellet, and they produced They put in about two mega jewels of energy in, they got about three mega jewels out. I think overall. They said it is about one point five net gain that they got. Described that to me, tell us what it means. So gain is the factor of how much more out than in you get. A gain of one is is would be a break even. Basically you you have a net zero impact and anything more than one is a net increase. And so with this particular experiment, as you noted, it reached a gain of one point five. You know, this is an important proof of concept. It has never been done anywhere before in a laboratory, and you know, this is a huge step forward that you know previously, the last big enough that they had out of myth they were about seventy of the way there, so they had a gain of zero point seven roughly, and so being able to go at to reach one, and go beyond one, that's a huge step forward. However, in order to make this practical and useful, you need to get a lot more energy out of the fusion reaction, because you know, you have to actually run the generators, and you also have to overcome the amount of energy you need from the power grid to run all these lasers. The specific way that they measured this, remember, is the amount of laser energy hitting the fuel pellet. There's a lot of energy that's lost in the process after the lasers are actually first built up, charged up, and then fired at this it's a very inefficient process right now, and so you would need to generate drastically more energy out of this process, maybe a gain of a lot of hundred in order to break even in terms of the energy that we use overall. And so there's a much further goal post in order to make this much more practical. Where only a tiny fraction of the way there on that front, but from a technical perspective, you know, this is still qualitatively a huge step forward, and that's important to know. Right, As you mentioned, it's kind of a proof of concept and we know now that it can be done. But yeah, so much more needs to be done to actually really clear the energy that we're actually using for all of this. Tell me a little bit about nuclear fusion in general, because we've been able to do this. Uh, there's other terms that have been thrown out there too, like nuclear fission, which is another thing that we do that we already do. There's a difference between them. The nuclear fusion, which is what we're talking about right now, this is where there's not as much nuclear waste attached to it. That's why they say this is a potential for a big clean energy source. Right. The nuclear energy that most people are familiar with that's more commonly used is nuclear fission. That's where you take big atoms like uranium and split them apart. The downside of that, of course, is that those atoms, when they're split apart, become nuclear waste and that can stay hazardous for thousands of years, and so you need a place to put them and also requires a lot of expensive fuel to begin with. You need to generate and produce in mind and extract all those heavy isotopes U is sort of the opposite approach. Rather than taking big atoms and splitting them apart, you're taking tiny atoms and smashing them together. The outside of fusion is that the fuel is derived from hydrogen. You can get this hydrogen these isodose hydrogen from water from seawater, and so our planet is covered with water. There's potentially a lot of fuel that we could potentially very easily extract in order to do these fusion reactions. And then after you run the reaction, the net product is helium and gas that you know is useful for a lot of other things as well, and so there's very minimal waste in terms of nuclear hazardous material that you would have to worry about for thousands of years. And there's no greenhouse gases either. And if you were to get this working, you know, on paper, you know, you could get potentially gobs of baseload energy basically energy that you can have on demand constantly, twenty four hours a day, without producing any of the hazardous stuff that we're all worried about. And so there's two ways, two main approaches to doing this nuclear fusion. The one that we're talking about right now, through the n i F obviously is compressing this tiny pellet of fuel with these powerful lasers. The other one is to heat up temp too hotter than the Sun and use magnets to contain some of that energy. This is also being worked on in in another location through with another organization. Right, so there's groups all over the world working on these two main approaches and they're using flight variations on them. So yeah, what NIF is doing is what's called inertial confinement fusion. Basically, you take a point and you try to smush it down into an even smaller point and contain all those high energy atoms and um, you know, protons in a very small space. With what the other approaches, magnetic fusion, you basically use a giant metal donut and you heat up the fuel so hot that it becomes this new state of matter called plasma and it gets too extremely hot temperatures hotter than the Sun. When they operate, there's the hottest objects of the Solar system. And in order to contain then object that hot, you know, you can't even use a material, you can't use a substance. You have to use powerful magnetic speel and so there are some experiments now underway. There are tacomas this, so that's what these devices are called here in the United States, like at Princeton Laboratory, at M I T and a few other places. And then there's a big experiment that's being built right now in France which is going to be the largest tacomac built and the most powerful one. And so it uses magnets that are powerful enough to lift aircraft carriers out of the water in order to contain these kinds of forces. But it's still under construction and it will be a few years before it gets operational. This is exciting stuff. It is a breakthrough. I did want to talk about the limitations and the next steps for the future, right, because there's a lot that has to be done to really make this viable for commercial use and really start powering stuff life and the country and in the world. So there's a lot of limitations. So one with the system itself, right, the lasers are based off of older technology. Those can be upgraded. That's one of the main things that really needs to be done. It seems like overall what they have now proves that it works, we have to kind of go back to scratch and rebuild the whole thing to make this work for the future. That's right, you know, MISS is the National Emission Facility. It's a it's a research laboratory. It's not a power plant. It's not meant to produce energy. It's a mainly meant to produce just to test this concept. And so there's a lot of inefficiencies here that could be corrected over time with you know, iterating and like developed and engineering, but you know that have to be done now at this point. We need more efficient lasers, as you highlighted. You know, the lasers at this lab are built on N level technology. We have much more efficient and more powerful lasers that we could be using now. The design of the fuel pellet, for instance, needs to be optimized further. You know, they did received reach that energy positive, but they didn't burn anywhere close to all the fuel that was available, so there was a lot that actually went to waste. And so we need to better optimize the way that we use fuel. And this facility, you know, is only able to produce a handful of these laser shots in a given week. We need to be able to produce something like ten to thirty per second in order to generate a viable nuclear reactor around this, and so certainly the stuff that they're doing now is new, it's experimental, but it needs to be done at a much larger, much faster scale, and that's the next challenge going forward. Your fun senior correspondent at Box, thank you very much for joining us. My pleasure, thanks for having me finally for this week a look into the hyper competitive world of bodybuilding and the extremes it takes to get those outrageous physiques. There's hours and hours of training, strict diets, and then there are the drugs, steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. It's leaving athletes with irreparable damage to their bodies, with some having heart problems, needing kidney transplants, and worst case death. For more on how the extreme sport of bodybuilding is pushing some to the edge, will speak to Jen Abelson, investigative reporter at The Washington Post. I knew very little about the bodybuilding world before I joined this investigation, and it began out of a tip from a colleague's father. Um was very involved in the bodybuilding world, as though he had helped was involved in making pumping iron back in the seventies and sort of had gotten a tip after his father died about some some really um you know, potentially devastating allegations about the world. And so we sort of launched into this investigation, um in two different areas, looking at um the sexual sexual exploitation of women. In my area focused on looking at the health risks to athletes, and so that is the area that I sort of really dug into, and it was really eye opening to really understand the intimate details of what these athletes do in order to be prepared to compete. Yeah, and that health aspect that obviously super interesting. I mean, it gets to the point that some of these athletes are dying because of the supplements, these steroids, all the things that they're taking to prepare for competitions and to get those physiques. You know, there's so many You have a lot of examples in your piece on this where there are signs that these athletes are going through I'm experiencing cramping, I'm you know, i haven't had a drink of water in hours. But still they push forward and you know, with the help and encouragement of their coaches, which is another whole angle to this they're really doing a lot of damage to their bodies in a lot of cases. Yeah, I think one of the things that really struck us is just the way is in which is really distinct from other professional sports, in that at the when they are ready to compete, when they're going to get on stage and be judged, it is when they are at their weakest and most fragile state um that they have been you know, depleting, dehydrating themselves. They're incredibly lean. When we first started looking into this, you know, there was a lot of focus on and talk around just steroids, but it's so much more than the steroids they're doing. There's this whole host in cocktail of dangerous performance enhancing drugs. They're using fat burners that are really meant as medication for horses. They're using um, you know, underground sometimes unknown substances from labs online or labs, and you know that they're finding things from China, and it's um really left athletes in a fairly vulnerable position. In addition to the steroids and the drugs and the supplements, it's like the severe dieting and the diuretics and the training hours of cardio a day Yeah, the diuretics is an interesting part of it too, because you know, they're taking this to remove water so their muscles look quote unquote dry, more defined. And I mean that's one of the biggest health problems that people get left with kidney issues because you're just depleting your body of liquids. Yeah, we've seen some, um, you know a number of athletes over the year who have suffered severe kidney problems, have had kidney transplants, sometimes multiple kidney transplants, and athletes have died because of diuretic overdose as well. There was an athlete in two thousand thirteen. Her name was Terry Harris. She was had two days after competing in her first professional bodybuilding show in Tampa, Florida. She went into cardiac arrest um on a stair master and the corner you know, said an electrolyte disturbance could not be ruled out. She was having severe cramping before the show. Um. And there was another athlete that we talked to, Jody angel Um, who's still alive, but she's thirty one, she's a single mom. She's but she's facing a lifetime of kidney issues and her doctors have told her that she's going to need a transplant. Talk to me a little bit about the coaches and their involvement in all of this, because in a lot of times they're pushing the athletes to obviously pushed their bodies to the limit, but they're also giving them the access to the the steroids and and other things that they're giving them the dosage that they should be taking. A lot of times they're not necessarily licensed for that. You know, they're just coaches. Maybe they've done it in the past for themselves, and so they're just giving them a lot of advice and and really pushing them to keep on track to a lot of these programs. Yeah, I think what's really interesting is there's just a whole various levels of accountability. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, these these athletes are saying, you know, I took the drugs. I personally am responsible for what I put in my body. However, I will tell you that I was relying on people who I thought were experts. I was paying them for advice on what I need to do to win, and what they're being told to do by these coaches and by the judges who are ultimately rewarding them is that they're being advised to take you know, stacking on so many different steroids, stacking on various performance enhancing drugs and diuretics and UM, fat burners and and so, and we've seen both. You know, these people often do not have any sort of formal training, do not have medical licenses, their supply in their clients in some cases with illegal stero steroids or bat burners, they're they're giving them detailed plans of how much. We saw Daniel Alexander, his coach, in the days before he was UM he died of SARA induced cardiomyopathy, Like he was being told to increase his doses of windstraw, which is a powerful steroid, and and other other steroids that he was taking and UM. It's just when you see this, it's like a laundry list of drugs. These people are being told to take UM and sometimes are being advised not to seek medical care. Daniel Alexander is one of those cases where he was concerned about seeking medical care because he was worried that it was going to ruin his physique, that he would end up getting filled and pumped with fluid. Because like we've been talking about it's all about coming and dry and to find and he was worried he wouldn't be that way if he went and sought medical care, and ultimately it was a it was a fatal decision. He ended up dying that overnight. He's such an interesting case. So he died at age thirty. Daniel Alexander, And you know, throughout this investigation you were able to access a lot of tech messages and emails and for Daniel and a lot of other of these athletes too, they have some similar cases. But Daniel texted a friend who worked as a nurse practitioner and said, five percent body fat right now. Lots of stems have a very irregular heartbeat for over an hour, becoming painful, still hard to breathe worry, like should I be worried? And you know a lot of times you know you're going contrary to what your own body is telling you. Just reading that that sounds super worrisome. But as you mentioned, he didn't want to go to the doctor, get liquids and ruin what he had been preparing for. Yeah, I think there's someone described them as contest blenders, which I think is a good way to think about it that they are so focused on winning, so focused on showing up in a certain condition. They've spent a lot of time, they spent a lot of money. These are very expensive sports to compete in, the getting all of these drugs and supplements, and they just are willing to do these People talk about describing it sometimes as an addiction that they're willing to do whatever writ takes in order to win. It becomes an addiction to see how far they can take their body to an extreme, and I think they sometimes lose sight of like what is the you know, a potentially life threatening emergency that's happening with their bodies. Now, body building has been around for a long time, and you know, the eighties and the nineties was a big hey day for this, and you know, there was a lot of steroid use, a lot of diuretics obviously back then. To what has change or what is stayed the same since that time, what we've been hearing from the athletes and coaches and judges is that over time there has really been this push to an extreme that the bodies. And there's a great story today by my colleagues that looks at the science behind what bodybuilders are doing your their bodies and you just see them getting bigger and more massive and trying to build be as lean as possible, and so, you know, physiques. There was a story today was talking about how Arnold would not be able to win with his condition. Arnold Schwarzenegger would not have been able to win, you know, the Olympia their bodybuilding competitions with the physique he showed up in you know, back decades ago and so it in people have described it to me as like a freak show. And and coaches when they brag about their athletes online. There was a coach, Shelby Starns who um was very well known for working with female athletes and especially the women the bodybuilding division, which is like the largest, most extreme of the sport that goes from bikini to bodybuilding, and he compliments his athletes online as freak, freak show, freak zoid and that that is the direction in which the sport in some instances has gone. Yeah. He worked with Jody Angle, who you mentioned earlier, who possibly facing kidney transplants and just long term damage from the programs that she was set in. What do we know or what have we heard from the governing bodies for these competitions. You may mention in the article how they don't really test a lot of the athletes for some of these substances. What has their reaction been to all of this? In the US, the two largest body building federations, it's the National Physique Committee run the amateur and the Inner i FBB PRO is the the professional division, and they do not do any kind of routine drug testing at all. There it's not considered a drug tested league. There are certain shows, you know, certain show promoters may advertise and and promote individual quote unquote natural shows where they do test, sometimes by polygraph or sometimes by urine, but by far and away that that is not the regular at these shows that they are not subjected to any of it. So they have essentially opted out of of of knowing what their athletes are doing in order to show up on stage. UM there's another major body building federation UM that's based in Spain that they say that they do drug testing. However, they were recently sanctioned by the World Anti Doping Agency for failing to UM, you know, spend enough money on testing and for failing to do effective testing. So and I think there's other places around the world where it's it's sort of the people are looking the other way and kind of turning a blind eye. And so it is. It is as as Luke Sando's mother, um lu Sando is an athlete from the United Kingdom who died thirty one, and she said to us, you know, she said, it's an absolute free for all. There's just real destruction and devastation and destroyed lives. And I think describing as an absolute free fall for all is something I've heard from other people as well. Jen Abelson, investigative reporter at The Washington Post, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. That's it for this weekend. Be sure to check out The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday. Join us on social media at Daily Dive pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast on Facebook. Leave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell us the stories that you're interested in. Although The Daily Dive and I Heart Radio or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. This episode of The Daily Dive has been engineered by Tony Sarentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this was your Daily Dive weekend edition