Gadgetory

so guys we are here on location at general fusion where they are attempting to build the world's first commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant and it might not look like much but the only way that the technology inside could be any more space-age would be if I was actually shooting on the moon today so why don't we go take a look after I tell you about tunnel bear tunnel bear makes really simple easy to use VPN applications so you can enjoy a more open Internet check them out at tunnel bear comm /l tt so what exactly is nuclear fusion well on an atomic level basically you take a couple of hydrogen atoms get them up to a really high temperature and then you like smash them together once they're fused you'll be left with a helium atom I'm Stephen today so cuz one proton plus 1 proton equals 2 protons and you'll get some energy or rather you'll get a lot of energy like like 10 times what you'd get from a nuclear fission reaction like the ones that power traditional nuclear plant so that all sounds super cool already and we haven't even gotten to the best part yet nuclear fusion works around the clock unlike solar or wind and it's a hundred percent clean and safe the reaction is actually incapable of causing a meltdown or other radioactive incident and as much as this might look like some kind of I you know death ray the only direct byproducts our helium like for party balloons and energy so no depleted uranium seeping into the environment for thousands of years no greenhouse gas emissions and get this the fuel for it is practically free you input deuterium a hydrogen isotope that you can extract from ordinary seawater with a centrifuge oh that's awful well and lithium and some critics might point out that these materials particularly lithium are not technically renewable but at least for heavy water the reaction uses so little of it and there's enough sitting around that by the time you run out the Sun will have enveloped the earth anyway so yeah I think we are probably good there well ok then Linus if it's a great why is fusion power taking so long ah I'm glad you asked while the fundamental principles have been reasonably well understood for decades Engineering and science required to build something practical in the real world are well in scientific terms a total to get right in order for nuclear fusion to occur between two hydrogen atoms they need to be heated up to a hundred and fifty million degrees Celsius that's about ten times hotter than the center of the Sun and you've got to do that efficiently no one's gonna buy a fusion power plant that consumes more power than it outputs duh so then how would you get something bad hot well you could use a device called a tokamak to make a plasma doughnut and then manipulate it with liquid helium cooled magnets sounds promising you could take a see here peppercorn sized piece of frozen deuterium and then bombard it from all sides at exactly the same time with what is quite literally the world's most powerful laser effectively blowing up the outside compressing the inside enough to start the reaction and both of those methods have actually succeeded at using nuclear fusion to get close to producing more power than they consumed but the problem is that via both of those methods it is extremely difficult to actually harness the power to generate electricity ah I'm gonna do that again general fusions approach is kind of like a hybrid of the other two and it operates kind of like a super high-tech diesel engine so first they use one of these guys to create a five million degree ball of plasma then they rapidly compress it with steam-powered Pistons the pressure from which heats it to a hundred and fifty million degrees at that point the deuterium kind of ignites releasing energy and if all this sounds difficult don't worry in real life it is way harder this is general fusions last generation large-scale plasma injector where they prototype their process of creating a plasma of sufficient quality that it can survive for long enough for the Pistons in the compression chamber to fully compress it so during a cycle these valves right up here will inject just 2 milligrams of deuterium evenly into the chamber which goes all the way around in a ring then 1 million amps at 15,000 volts so this is about the same as your average lightning bolt goes across the electrical feed right here and strips the electrons off the deuterium creating a ball of plasma these particles then spin around the ball of plasma wrapping it in its own magnetic field creating an insulating layer around the plasma to give it a longer lifespan from there these big electromagnets here will push the ball of plasma out the front of the injector into the compression chamber which would be under this part right over here now the rest of this guy which is actually about the front 2/3 is just for data collection every test that they run generates about a gigabyte of data and even after a hundred and fifty thousand experiments there is still work to do I guess that's why general fusion is so open about showing off their work because even if you stole all the drawings and built yourself one of these machines there are literally hundreds of thousands of variables to tune for plasma quality so you'd basically have built yourself a multi-million dollar paperweight on the subject of millions of dollars much of the research is actually done on smaller less expensive little injector prototypes like Spectre here these guys only take a couple of months to create instead of years and they give the team valuable insight in between larger projects mind you even this kind of thing does not come easy every aspect of this research is complex and expensive like okay here how do you know if your plasma is at five million degrees you can't just stick a cave probe in it ah so it turns out you have to shine a super-strong laser through the plasma and then measure the small bit of light that is deflected by the plasma and this is only about one in every quadrillion photons that you've pumped in that get turned into some kind of useful signal so interpreting that data is quite literally the full-time job of Bill here who has a PhD from the University of Maryland and that is just one example but they are making progress inside this cage is the largest and most powerful plasma injector in the world it's the latest generation of the one that we looked at earlier and they're running tests on it every day in hopes of using a similar model to create a fusion demonstration plant in as little as four to five years so unlike the other one this guy is actually hooked up do you see all these containers around me these are capacitor banks so when all of them are operating they'll be capable of 20 gigawatts of power that's enough to send 16.5 DeLoreans back in time simultaneously the problem though is that when you're unleashing a lightning bolt worth of power you throw out a ton of electronic interference it's such a big problem that all of the sensor data has to be transmitted through fiber optic cables to a nearby Faraday cage full of general fusions own custom-made digitizer boards they ended up designing their own because create an electronics engineering department was cheaper than buying gear like this off the shelf now general fusion weren't the first ones to come up with the idea of smashing plasma but the US Naval Research Lab zhe's incredibly named Project Linus ended up getting abandoned back in the 1970s because there were a couple of problems they just couldn't overcome behind me is a couple of solutions this is general fusions piston-driven compression chamber proof of concept now the real one would have many more Pistons but the operating principle would be similar every piston would push down simultaneously with the tolerance of about 10 microseconds injecting liquid metal stored in the Pistons and in the 1000 rpm spinning grid on the inside and that metal would squeeze the plasma bubble that would be injected from the top now the timing for all of this has to be so precise because much like squeezing a water balloon in your hands if you don't compress it evenly then it'll kind of splurt out or break apart and that would cause a misfire assuming everything goes right though and the simulations say it should the fuel ignites fusion occurs and that liquid metal gets heated to about 600 degrees Celsius after which it gets circulated through insulated pipes by a magneto hydrodynamics to a traditional steam turbine power generator just like what you would find at a coal or a natural gas power plant today which should make general fusions solution sort of a drop-in upgrade for an existing facility now fun fact it is not a perpetual motion machine because it does require a constant supply of fuel but some of the steam that gets generated is actually going to be used to actuate the Pistons keeping the cycle going general fusion hopes that once they reach production they'll be able to run one of these reactions every second generating about a hundred to 200 megawatts of power about the sweet spot for replacing existing coal power plants in developed countries and not so much that it would blow up the power distribution systems in developing countries the market where the most new power generation will have to happen in the coming years now none of this is a sure thing I mean nothing in life is but if general fusion and its investors which includes Jeff Bezos apparently by the way can stay on course then the future looks really bright not just for their company but also for the world speaking of companies with Bright Futures are you finding as a freelancer or small-business owner that the thing holding you back is spending your time on complicated accounting software instead of just doing your work well fresh books is the solution you're looking for it's a simple way to be more productive more organized and get paid 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