Are we gonna actually make fusion? We're gonna make fusion! Are we gonna make fusion?! We're
NOT gonna make fusion… but we're close to making fusion! Two fusion plants in Europe did weird new
things in February and like a hot gas i am so excited first the Joint European Torus or JET
was able to sustain fusion for five seconds five seconds that might seem short but in fusion time
it is ages then on the same day crazily the variable configuration tokamak in Switzerland
used Google's DeepMind AI to help the plasma stick in their fusion reactor and it did things
that human brains would never have even thought to try! Together, these favorable fusion findings
are making the future look freaking fulgent but what does it all mean?! Don't worry I got you fam.
Hey there nerdfam, oh my god we're back! Hey, I missed you! Being a Dad is great.
Thank you for the support during my paternity leave. I took some of the time to build this
new studio (I hope you love it) but now we have a new video because there was a... fusion update!
The old joke about fusion is that it's always 30 years away and it might still be 30 years
away but it's worth the wait because now we are getting close but before we get too far let's
explain what fusion is and if you know what this is already just you know next chapter
nuclear energy comes in two flavors fission and fusion fission is what nuclear plants do today
all over the world you take big bulky heavy atoms like uranium you smash them and so you can create
smaller lighter atoms but those lighter atoms are radioactive and in the process you release heat
but it gets really messy and the whole point is to generate heat to turn a turbine fission is this
fusion takes hydrogen the lightest element we know of and smooshes it together with
another bit of hydrogen until it makes helium and releases heat that way it's
fusion is the pinnacle of energy generation as far as we know until we can pull energy from like
another dimension or something fusion is the goal you would think that this would be easy if we can
break atoms apart why can't we just smoosh them together but it requires a lot of heat energy and
pressure and nuclear energy and nuclear studies they're almost 100 years old but we ain't got it
yet these two advances bring us a bit closer to fusion success one of the best ways we have right
now to make fusion a reality is a talkamac reactor it's like um how do i explain hang on it's a donut
it's like it's like a it's like a donut of magnetic fields there's one magnetic field
running around the outside of the tacomac this way and then another one going through the middle this
way and inside the donut is a superheated plasma of heavy hydrogen fuel as the plasma heats it
wants to flex and wiggle which in a fusion plant by the way would cause a catastrophic failure
that would happen oh no i got powdered sugar all over me
with my museopony it's like the worst thing
okay so a third magnetic field is involved to help shape that hot plasma ring and remember
that for a second because it's important to one of these two discoveries once it gets hot enough the
hydrogen inside of that tacomax starts to fuse it essentially just runs into each other and smooshes
together making helium and releasing heat the fusion from the plasma then generates that power
and keeps the plant going mechanical power plants all use turbines to generate electricity we have
to find ways to turn a magnet and a coiled wire to make power electricity wind and water use wind and
water to turn turbines but everybody else uses steam coal oil natural gas they all burn stuff
to make steam geothermal takes heat from the earth to make steam and nuclear fission and fusion make
it from nuclear interactions but now that you know how fusion does its thing hopefully you can really
appreciate these two new breakthroughs first the joint european taurus or jet was able to sustain
fusion for five seconds with plasma 10 times hotter than the center of the sun it's literally
the hottest place in our solar system when it's on it set a new world record they generated 59
megajoules or 11 megawatts of power averaged over 5 seconds that's enough to run 7 000 doughnut
fryers yum we need to maintain fusion for long periods of time in order to be able to actually
make it a practical energy source right and to be able to maintain it for a long period of time
not only involves keeping it on but it also involves keeping that plasma bubble within
the donut for as long as possible as safely as possible remember the third magnetic field thing
though that i told you to remember the one around the outside it's called the control field and it
keeps the superheated plasma spinning and fusing within the donut reactor so it doesn't contact the
walls and end up with a catastrophic failure the second fusion story comes in there the plasma used
in a fusion plant is actually not hydrogen it's heavy hydrogen it's essentially hydrogen with
an extra neutron however once it's heated up the electron flies away so now it's positively charged
meaning you can use a magnet to move it around that's why there's all these magnetic coils within
a fusion plant the vct tacomac in switzerland has 19 magnetic coils holding that plasma
and originally each one had its own algorithm reacting to the wiggly plasma inside the reactor
which doesn't really make sense right 19 different computers all trying to react locally to what was
going on in the plasma isn't as efficient as one big computer but they didn't have one big computer
but you know who does exactly so what they did is they wired all of those different algorithmic
magnets into alphabet's deep mind ai which is fancy words for they taught the algorithms to
react and control to the plasma now i'm no expert but in simple terms essentially they used to have
one algorithm that would change the field in response to what the plasma was doing locally
just at that one spot around the donut now they're sort of zooming out they're tying all of those
together and trying to make the machine understand the goal rather than the task at least that's how
i read it let me break it down a little further ais like this are trained by people think of it
like when you tell your phone who someone is in the photo that you're looking at it uses that
data to guess that person's face in other photos the more sample photos you give it the better it
will do at guessing the future people this is my friend ben that's also my friend ben and this is
him without a beard and this is him with a beard and this is him in sunglasses and this is him in
a red shirt and that's him in a blue shirt the same thing happened here they showed the machine
a big data set essentially how they wanted the plasma to be shaped the successes they had had
and then the magnetic fields were kind of just given over to the machine the plasma would wiggle
around trying to escape the magnetic field and the ai computer would learn to hold it better
and better and eventually it could even maintain two separate plasma rings within the reactor which
they never had done before imagine if the computer got so good that it could recognize ben's face in
the dark in the background with or without a beard no matter what he was wearing even if the pick was
super blurry and that is the example that we're thinking of with the future of fusion imagine
after years of trying and training what will this be able to do because if this is the first step
it's only going to get better from here hopefully but you know hopefully the extra wild thing here
is that neither jet nor the vct that did these experiments are power plants they're just
experimental facilities that's how bad humans want fusion they're trying to build things that just
test if it works a bigger more advanced and more powerful tokamak called eater is
under construction in france they're claiming that if it works they'll put in 50 megawatts
and get out 500 megawatts that's enough to power every donut shop in the world
maybe we'll see if they successfully try it out for the first time in 2025. and unlike in the
past scientists today have a little more heat under their butts to get this done literally
planetary heat the ipcc just released a climate impact report that basically says
shit's bad like not inevitable destruction of everything tomorrow bad but like not that many
more tomorrows if we do nothing and it's getting worse faster than we thought we need less air
pollution like now less co2 and methane in the air because those greenhouse gases are going to kill
us the best way to do that is to transition from burning dead biomatter for fuel into
absorbing it from heat generated by solar fission or fusion hydro and wind also great remember we're
just turning turbines when it comes to generating energy nuclear has the highest energy unit
per low pollution unit calculation it generates the most energy with the least pollution
coal babies love to talk about how much punch and power is in fossil fuels and sure there is
a lot of power contained within hydrocarbon chains but a fusion ratio is about 4 million
times more energetic than the chemical reaction of oil gas or coal let me put it in a different
perspective the power of a fusion plant might only take a few hundred kilograms of fuel a year to run
a coal plant on the other hand needs 2.7 billion kilograms like a few hundred kilograms per minute
right now it is cheaper to dig up biomatter and burn it i'll give you that but it's temporary
because fusion uses a fuel that's more abundant cheaper and easier to get this australia uh wait
no not australia just the seawater regular old seawater well actually it's deuterium
with fusion that gallon of seawater could power a car for nearly a year and that's because
one-five-thousandth of every gallon of seawater is deuterium it's everywhere even if we went through
all the water in the world we would still only have used 1 5 000th of all the sea water out there
fusion is ridiculously powerful clean and efficient it's also extremely difficult
to achieve which is why these breakthroughs are such a big deal and if coveted 19 has taught us
anything a motivated populist and political class can accomplish a lot of science in a
really short time so maybe we should start with fusion in the end if we can get fusion to work
we're going to have a cleaner more abundant energy future and you won't have to feel bad
at all about plugging in your car or turning on your television any time of day or night
because it'll be powered the same way as the sun and all the other stars in the sky by squishing
two little atoms together to paraphrase arthur c clarke making super clean energy using a donut
shaped mini sun run by an ai would definitely be technology that is indistinguishable from magic
honestly if we can get fusion to work we're like well on our way to becoming a type one
civilization check out this video here if you haven't seen it already if you liked
this video you're gonna love that one thank you so much to my patrons who stuck around even
though i wasn't making videos for the past couple months i'm really just so appreciative so thank
you so much thanks again for sticking around during my break and i'll see you in the future