Fusion energy and why it is important to chase the impossible | Melanie Windridge | TEDxWarwick

[logoslive]

Great talk, very clear. I hope companies and governments decide to fund more research into this type of energy. Cleaner and more efficient than anything we've ever had. The world needs this now, not in 30 years.

[willis]

She does a good job of sending the right signals to the target audience. This is a hard topic to pick the right level of detail for because the nitty gritty details matter. If someone asks "why not yet" you could tell them about two dozen computational models constantly being refined or you could throw up a triple product that must be accepted at face value and say "no money for machines and low cost HTS lets us make this number bigger now".


The real lesson that people should be taught from fusion talks is to not make judgments about whether or not fusion is viable when they barely understand mass-energy equivalence. The experts who have dedicated their life to this field don't know the answer. It seems like a strong "yes" at this point but the questions of economics and engineering are still very far up in the air. ITER has already handled a large number of the engineering tasks. Even if tokamak is never steady state the work of the ITER team will be very useful going forward. All we need to do is make one at a reasonable price. Will that take another $50 billion of research? Probably. That's 1/20 of what the US spends on energy a year. At this point keeping it funded is a worthwhile thing to do.

[mr.nne]

All the required technologies have already been developed, but by military & defence sector, civilian institutes are still years/decades behind. But hope before 2050 it will be developed by civilians. She will be a good teacher; if she ever teach.

[aigslmnop]

16:21 iter will be coupled to a turbo-electric power generator but when you mentioned hydrogen economy general atomics commissioned a presentation about thermochemical cycles for it and liquid metal mhd generators can operate on the coolant from iter conceivably while the fuel cell runs in tandem ☀️💧⚡

[keithj]

MIT is doing something similar, see SPARC/ARC. So the Gov (Darpa?) withdrew funding from the MIT fusion effort, they only support big projects ITER / NIF with money. This needs to change. Sooner smaller cheaper. See YBCO and commercial superconductors. The forth power gains from field strength, that's out biggest advantage. Power on the grid by late 20's is starting to look like a feasible goal. We are so close now.

[PattayaPhysics]

Can you please confirm the current Q total for this project?

[Youbetternowatchthis]

What is all that nonsense about this violating any laws of thermodynamics???
The basic concept is simple. And not only that, the concept is proven by nature already. And has been for billions of years. A fusion reaction fueled by what is basically just plain old hydrogen.

I loved this talk and I wish them all the best. I hope a major breakthrough will occur soon. Because there is no doubt in my mind that it will occur one day.

[annagodislove]

Definitely we need to think small and many. Sort of like our mitochondria, small but many. Perhaps our future of energy will come as computer are able to create smaller and smaller machines.

[wiros]

She said something about not being able to use copper for the magnetic field, but I have to ask, what is probably obvious- why cant you use regular permanent magnets? Are they not strong enough? Is it becuase they would heat up, destroying the magnet?

[tullochgorum]

As an interested observer, it does seem as though smaller high temperature superconductors are the most promising way to go. But she's being wildly optimistic here. According to the recently retired director of Jet, we still don't even know what we don't know - he expects that many more obstacles will emerge as the technology develops. Meanwhile we're 60 years in with $1 trillion invested and we haven't seen a single kilowatt produced. What is clear is that fusion is, by some orders of magnitude, the most challenging energy technology being researched, requiring exotic materials and technologies. Judging by the history of fission, a much simpler technology, it clearly isn't going to be cheap whatever her unnamed "studies" suggest. So at the very least we need to ensure that fusion doesn't gobble up the lion's share of research funding, and that we are driving forwards with less speculative technologies what will deliver actual energy output sooner and cheaper.

[indiansrus]

I agree. With fission technology to attain 10 terawatts of energy that the world would need in the year 2100, we'd need 10, 000 Chernobyl-sized nuclear stations AND we would
run out of URANIUM in less than 15 years. So what is the solution that is also safer? FUSION ENERGY.

[bronzedivision]

Fission already does everything Fusion only promises to do and will quite possibly never accomplish.

[AlexiLaiho]

i understand why people are pursuing fusion but we should really just make our fission plants capable of entirely using their fuel. it solves both problems with nuclear fission.
we can in fact pursue both paths, but we should focus on moving our society towards good nuclear tech as a solution to climate change, because fusion will not be here in time to do that.

[ramonmarrero]

You need about 100 to 200 million degree centigrate in a plasma sorrounded by a magnetic field. If something get wrong you have a small star exploding in the earth. This safety problem can cost the entire life. Is a challenge to keep it safe. I hope we can do it safely.

[LilRedRasta]

She's hotter than any fusion reaction.

[chiraggupta]

She is going to be famous in future and people from future are going to come here check her Ted video when she will achieve fusion

[Dazzer]

Small, big, whatever, until they can actually demonstrate any format producing net gain, it's all just a pipe dream!

[Gizemci]

Okey here.
Remedy for culomb neutron.
The problem is not heat and coulomb.
God damn it.
Send neutrons to the center.
The reaction finds the right neutron and the reaction begins.
You see the neutron as the problem.
Not like that.
My problem was a remedy for me.
Yunus Emre

[mr.j_krr_]

she is beautiful, the smile is also. nice talk indeed.

[bobc]

Research into fusion should continue but we don't have the luxury to wait for it.. We need an alternative to fossil fuels in the next 5 years. I'd like to see a Manhattan style push for the development of liquid fueled reactors, they can be much safer, less expensive to build, create much more energy with much less waste than solid fuel reactors. most of the research was done in the late 60's, we have to pick up where they left off and carry the ball the rest of the way.