Fusion Energy: Hype or The Future?

In this episode we take a look at the good the bad and the ugly of fusion energy. Is it as promised? And if not, what are the major issues?

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Producer: Dagogo Altraide
Editor: Tanzim Uddin
Animator: @ThenWhatHappens

[ColdFusion]

A couple of corrections:
At 3:13 I said the processes the wrong way round. The FISSION part is only there to aid the FUSION part. And ICF is Inertial Confinement Fusion not Internal. Sorry about that.

[dotspacedot]

my favorite part about generating electricity is that we're always just trying to find the most complicated and efficient way to boil water to turn a turbine.

[robinrolandtumambing]

"And yes, I finally made a video about fusion in this channel, ColdFusion"

Another major milestone.

[vipondiu]

I strongly recommend everybody to take a look at the video that Improbable Matter made in response to the Real Engineering one about Helion. He has worked in the field and can explain all the challenges of fusion in great detail.
What happened on december 5th was historic, in the sense that is the first time we extract more energy that we put in without using an A-bomb as a trigger (we cannot ignore that we had been building fusion reactors that work as insteded since the 50's, they are just single-use only). But if we write down a list of the engineering problems we still have to manage that we don't know how to solve, it's amazing how astronomically far we are from a comercial fusion reactor. I'm sorry guys, but apparently we are going to get out of this energy-poverty well with fission, and the sooner we start the better...

[bad_money]

"The power of the sun in the palm of my hands" Never thought that would become a reality.

[LizardSpork]

"Before everyone celebrates, there's a lot to be done" is practically the motto of human scientific endeavour. 👍

[purpleguy]

While I'm optimistic that we have made big steps with fusion, things like Helion aren't all they're cracked up to be. There's a good response video by Improbable Matter which strongly suggests Helion are really over-selling themselves for investment and are banking on a less efficient reaction with big question marks over scalability and danger.

[nanorider]

I visited JET (Joint European Torus) in '96 at a physics tour in England among other things. We were shown the torus (Magnetic Confinement Fusion) and the facility. They told us that they had to phone the power-stations in advance in the area when an experiment was due or else the entire area (a small city and two or three suburbs) went without power. JET used that much power! And it's rather small in comparison to what it uses; kind of a small living room or an apartment with a single room.

Edit: I forgot to say, that the power-stations was able to turn up to full power and THEN the experiment could take place without any bother.

[Pushing_Pixels]

If I'm not mistaken, the main source of Tritium is Fission Reactors. So, ironically, in order to scale up Fusion we may need to scale up the number of Fission Reactors, with all of the problems associated with that. Unless we can find a different isotope to use in the fusion we're going to need to have nuclear power in a lot more places. Apart from the dangers and mess they make, they are also very expensive, slow and complex to build.

[linkinboi]

ColdFusion has finally made a video on Fusion. And I remember the days when the channel was called "ColdFustion". Makes me feel a bit old. 😁

[danielhenderson]

Great video Dagogo as always, thank you! btw, you mixed up the fusion/fission relationship - the initial fission reaction powers the fusion reaction which is the majority of the explosive power.

[AbuAfakski]

Fusion is the energy of the future… and always will be

[loggedinasguest]

4:10 Essentially fusion is just two nuclei falling for each other then giving off that spark. Ah yes it's chemistry at peak performance...

[StaticCollapse]

Pretty sure they did end up putting more energy into it, id suggest you look further into it

[MrBenMcLean]

This sounds like it will take a century to become commercially viable.

[southparkgdp]

If you ignore the fact that they actually put more energy in than they got out of it, they got more energy out of it than they put into it.

[TheFakeyCakeMaker]

Hello Dagogo! Love from A Briton and Nigerian living in Germany. We love your channel and all you do. Proud of you keep it up.

[fbot]

4:13 “The electrons say sayounara” with the most chill voice 😂

[grcfalcon]

The energy needed to power the lasers was 300 MegaJoules. They gained only 1 MegaJoule from the whole process. So we are minus 299 MJ. We have a long way of optimization in front of us.

[ronjon]

The simulation of the ignition laser is amazing, and getting all those split beams to converge at a point is mind blowing. I know the work is hard, days are long, and it’s not all fun and games, but the people working there must get amazing satisfaction.