Inside America's largest magnetic fusion facility and the hunt for limitless energy

Рет қаралды 122,703

Күн бұрын

Fusion energy has long been hailed as the holy grail because of its potential for limitless amounts of clean energy. But that promise has trailed reality for decades, with billions of dollars in research leading to few breakthroughs. Now there’s optimism that is about to change, partly because of new startups funded by the likes of Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates.
Yahoo Finance went inside the country’s largest magnetic fusion facility for an exclusive look, to explore the challenges of bringing this technology to commercial use for the latest episode of NEXT.
“The race is on to actually see who can develop this and who can get it to the masses the fastest,” said David Callaway, former editor-in-chief of USA Today and founder of Callaway Climate Insights, a news and information service focused on the business of climate change.
The industry has now attracted more than $6 billion in funding to date, according to data from the Fusion Industry Association, with more than 40 startups aiming to become the first to commercialize nuclear fusion energy. The US government has set aside a record $1.48 billion for fusion research in the 2024 budget alone.
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Пікірлер: 160

@stevechance150 Ай бұрын

Scientists could discover how to make completely free energy, energy that costs the power plant nothing, and the local power company will still bill me $185 a month.

@gerbenkarman3372 Ай бұрын

You will always need a grid to transport that energy and someone that maintaince it

@nick_0 Ай бұрын

Nothing is free, power plants still need raw material, labor for oversight and maintenance, even if it’s done by robots there’s an upfront cost that requires payback, transportation, and even more associated costs. Maybe one day it’ll be cheap enough unlimited enough our taxes will essentially pay for it so no electricity bill, but we still technically pay for it regardless

@dodgygoose3054 Ай бұрын

You know that you can go with solar panels & battery storage today, be totally off grid with your own power supply. Yes it may cost you but you wont be paying someone else monthly and you'll be in charge of your own energy infrastructure.

@Beerbatter1962 Ай бұрын

They will also need to recover the billions and billions of dollars going into the research and development. Those investors will expect a return on their investment eventually.

@mnoun8871 Ай бұрын

Energy is a commodity like gold and diamonds regulated to spend more money in order to keep prices up

@xjohnny1000 Ай бұрын

$1.48 billion for fusion $108 billion for infrastructure $800 billion for military $870 billion for debt interest payments Fusion doesn't even register as an error bar in government spending.

@stevechance150 Ай бұрын

I thought Military spending was $850 Billion, with a 2028 target of hitting ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.

@chrisstevens2 Ай бұрын

Best energy solution in two words: Hamster Power!

@SisavatManthong-yb1yn Ай бұрын

Adults sites is cartoons? Nice to know

@user-qr7ee2cp4y 24 күн бұрын

Best solution is to use less.

@akshatdon4439 27 күн бұрын

Why upload on 1st April

@flotsamike Ай бұрын

I am speaking from ignorance but I still firmly believe that when they shut down the large magnetic lens fusion confinement experiment at Lawrence Livermore in 1989 it was a decision not to have fusion in our lifetime.

@frankcoffey Ай бұрын

Imagine if all the money spent on this had been put into solar, wind, and storage. We would already be getting all the energy from those projects. Power "plants" of all kinds take a lot of capital to build and don't generate any revenue until they are completely done. They are also centralized in a way that creates a single point of failure that is so important to the grid that it can bring down the entire grid. Even the wires connecting the plat to the grid are a point of failure. Distributed generation and storage is the correct way to design a grid.

@zvorenergy Ай бұрын

Also geothermal using the new plasma spalling drills and ocean platforms combining wave, wind and solar from unused oil platforms

@williamswiggart9782 Ай бұрын

Solar power is weak sauce compared to the alternatives.

@zvorenergy Ай бұрын

@@williamswiggart9782 on Earth yes. In space it's 24/7 and 1.37kw/m^2. If we were smart we'd stop throwing billions at fusion and generative AI and build NASA's Integrated Symmetrical Concentrator power satellite instead. But we're not.

@YellowRambler Ай бұрын

Failure point Extreme weather, no sun or wind doesn’t help either. There is more promising forms of energy production in both fission and fusion, but for some strange reason they can only recognise Uranium fuel pressurised water reactors from the Cold War era and Fusion TokaMac reactors?

@zvorenergy Ай бұрын

@@YellowRambler keep trying the same thing and expect different results.

@user-ih5dv2fj2f Ай бұрын

For more than 73 years, developers have not been able to make a commercial fusion reactor. And many people in the world know that these developers will not make a commercial fusion reactor for many more decades. Many tens of billions of dollars have been spent on fusion energy projects, and the costs will be no less in the future. All this money has been spent in vain, irrationally and without results, and in the future investments in fusion energy will be wasted, will be simply thrown away.

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

That is very small thinking. Decades and billions of dollars are nothing in the big picture. We'll figure it out....and then we'll figure out even richer sources of energy. Think centuries. Still almost no time at all.

@davidgrisez Ай бұрын

I am also one of those people who believe that practical nuclear fusion power will never be achieved.

@Justanurse357 Ай бұрын

If AI never played a part in its development I would of agreed with that. The scary thing is that super smart AGI computers will be developing and managing it😢

@DemPilafian 22 күн бұрын

Before the Wright Brothers, humans tried in vein to fly for centuries. They failed over and over and over again. Today, however, you can hop on an airplane a fly non-stop from Paris to Tokyo.

@theobserver9131 22 күн бұрын

@@DemPilafian ^that

@user-pg8qx1cy2o Ай бұрын

cool that it's only 35 years away

@DSAK55 Ай бұрын

always will be

@justinvt Ай бұрын

The people that make these jokes are the ones who haven't followed any of the science, and carry around pessimism and cynicism as a talisman the same way a shaman carries around a bundle of sage. Firstly, this is funny in the way "Take my wife...please" is funny, or "I just flew in from cleveland and boy, are my arms tired". It is bordering echolalia - "Someone who seemed smart made a joke when I was a child about fusion, and instead of learning more about fusion and following the technical evolution of modern labs, I will remember their joke and brandish it as surrogate for actual understanding. Most people are dumb, so they will not dispute that the "joke" and "understanding" are not of equal value. Certain technical people "come of age" and as a self-defense mechanism, they convince themselves that "I know the state of the art. No new technology will exist, because I know everything". It's the classical "End of History" syndrome. The thing is - there will always be more information in the future. And there will always new frameworks to view the universe through. Be creative. Don't hold onto 30 year old ideas. You're not doing yourself any favors.

@user-pg8qx1cy2o Ай бұрын

@@justinvt well let's talk in 35 years

@sarthaksahoo8329 Ай бұрын

Even after 35 years, then we will wait for another 35 years😅

@wrexchicane8259 24 күн бұрын

Also waiting for the flying car for all households.

@JibberJabJones 10 күн бұрын

did i miss the meeting where it was decided that marimba was the sound of tech innovation?

@jamescole3152 Ай бұрын

Resonance. Instead of a circular path of the plasma how about an expansion then contracting plasma? So the plasma collides in the center of the machine? Then find the resonant frequency of the plasma and keep pumping in energy.... Since this is probably how a fusion bomb works , I am guessing they use an explosion around the fusionable material to start the reaction, only here we don't have an explosion, just Resonance.

@raymondingram2539 15 күн бұрын

I don't think it's possible, the temperature they might be able to produce but the pressures needed to fuse atoms is enormous.

@pigeon_the_mighty 4 күн бұрын

good news, it is possible; the first tokamak was built in 1954

@raymondingram2539 4 күн бұрын

@@pigeon_the_mighty So it's been 70 years they have been trying and there not even close, there is no material on this planet that can handle those pressures.

@danielalexander799 18 күн бұрын

What about thermal pollution?

@DemPilafian 22 күн бұрын

Every 2 days the world buys over $1B of oil and gas from Russia. The $20B for ITER seems like a pittance. More funding does not automatically generate better results. However, we should increase funding wherever budget is the bottleneck.

@mickmccrohon 19 күн бұрын

Openstar Technologies, New Zealand. Who was the first to split the atom.

@ryanwatson3187 14 күн бұрын

What if you spin the magnetic to create a vortex.

@DjAmerillion 22 күн бұрын

It won't be ready in time. Plain and simple.

@FlameofDemocracy 10 күн бұрын

Hydrogen and energy capture would yield never ending loops, as sunlight is available daily. Think strategically.

@mnlala 14 күн бұрын

but if we used the best of the tech we have currently and we can not achieve more than 100% efficiency, what makes them think that its possible

@fine93 Ай бұрын

will the tribe allow itl?

@sunroad7228 Ай бұрын

“In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future” (2017).

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

Entropy is the rule. We are still small and young, and the universe is large..... there's a lot of energy out there. We still have quite a bit of time, if we get out of our womb, the earth.

@WALID-Al-Katah Ай бұрын

We need a fusion core

@leighedwards Ай бұрын

"energy without harmful carbon emissions without radioactive waste" - no CO2 yes, no radioactive waste is an outright lie. There is much less waste than from nuclear fission but Tokamak fusion reactors do become radioactive due to neutron activation and so this is simply not true! Aneutronic fusion can be largely free of radioactivity but the most widely used approaches - using magnetic confinement - do produce neutron activation and most will use tritium as fuel which is radioactive itself! Fortunately the waste has shorter half lives than fission waste.

@jakubkusmierczak695 26 күн бұрын

why they did not do that on small scale?

@prilep5 Ай бұрын

Problem with any energy production processes no matter what kind of fuel we use all suffer of low efficiency and even the final use ends up as heat dissipating in the atmosphere. Nobody is working on how to cool the atmosphere and the oceans that we all use as heat sink(dump)

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

This is true. Heat will be our largest "pollution" after we have "clean" energy. But you're wrong that nobody is thinking about that. Check out futurists and science fiction writers. Some brilliant and creative minds are thinking a LOT about that. I'm not sure there are viable solutions yet, but they ARE thinking about it. There has GOT to be a way to move heat from where we don't want it, to where it doesn't matter. Off world I would think. Maybe as simple as large mirrors?

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

Maybe also, we could get more work out of some of our waste heat, therefore reducing the need to make more of it.

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

Yeah, efficiency is one of our weakest points. Energy always devolves into heat, but we throw heat away like it's nothing. We could get so much work out of it before it dissapates into uselessness.

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

I wonder if we could pump heat back into the earths core. That might even be a good thing. As the earth cools, it loses its ability to produce our magnetic shield. Maybe we could make that process last longer. (thinking in absurdly long term).

@justinvt Ай бұрын

The earth radiates energy as a black body, and the atmosphere is constantly outgassing high energy gas molecules into interplantary space. Moderating albedo is a very effective means of controlling the rate at which this radiation occurs. Ultimately, all energy generation increases entropy, and there is an arrow of time, but this applies to every process that occurs everywhere always. We are billions of years away from that being a concern - we can use the rest of the universe as a landfill until then - at least in an abstract way. But we are literally THAT PROCESS - as we write these comments - we are informational artifacts (noise) that try to "solve" problems by turning structured matter into more noise, that we consider 'knowledge' , and in doing so, we permanently degrade the quality of resources available to us. Its not a problem to be "fixed" - it IS what existence is. The only way to reverse the process is to forget ... but this universe remembers, because causality is a thing here.

@bsmith4u2 Ай бұрын

It won't be for public consumption until they figure out a way to charge us double. Just like renewables bringing down the cost of electricity...Riiight!

@user-zt7gq5jy2j 22 күн бұрын

This has already been doneee, it’s all about perfect timing and them making profit off you

@VR_Wizard Ай бұрын

Nice pictures but no new information. Also repeating the "Laser fusion making more energy" headline without mentioning the laser energy demands was bad in the past and is still bad today.

@Ff95052 Ай бұрын

2nd law of thermodynamics shattered, right?

@user-mb1zv8dl8l 9 күн бұрын

Do you want draftsman?

@rikkoshop620 Ай бұрын

The only place you can build a star is in space. The major hiccup, the power you need to creat a gravity well. Take it to space for the first phase, because space is a natural gravity well, then all your focus can be on the science of the fusion reaction. Once you get that down, then bring it back to earth !!!

@Wriggs74 18 күн бұрын

Limitless energy has already been discovered, but oil generates more money. Once the oil runs out, an amazing discovery will happen. Hmmmm.

@Mando_Trucker 14 күн бұрын

What if it malfunctions and creates a black hole is the real question?

@tireballastserviceofflorid7771 8 күн бұрын

How many trillions of pounds of co2 were generated doing all these test? How many tons of coal and diesel used? And if it turns out not to work? Was that calculated in on the 12 year dooms day clock?

@aldrinspeck2724 Ай бұрын

another very complicated method of boiling water. where's my cold antimatter reactor?

@minwiralshamiri887 26 күн бұрын

Get it running Jennifer I know you have

@dionysus2006 Ай бұрын

The energy source of the future

@user-qr7ee2cp4y 24 күн бұрын

When will Americans learn to turn off a light?

@dibbolistening Ай бұрын

There is a sun for that

@YellowRambler Ай бұрын

There only one type of fusion? So basically you want to put ridiculously hot plasma in the middle of giant magnets that need to be ridiculously cold to operate. Alternative fusion needs more attention, it’s a safer bet then having everybody doing the same type of fusion.

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

🤣😂😅

@mnoun8871 Ай бұрын

There are so many trying to get the next best thing in energy generation when there's so much wasted energy never even harness by the energy generators of today It's like they want to waste energy easily captured by the established facilities Just look at a dam and the water run off that sprays out at enormous volume and speed Harness that energy instead of just letting it go to waste Oh look we spent another billion on something that might work, when there's plenty places that work innoficiantly and waste energy instead of harness it

@mnoun8871 Ай бұрын

Energy is a commodity like gold and diamonds regulated to spend more money in order to keep prices up

@SuperRip7 Ай бұрын

There is radioactivity waste in fusion.

@kenofken9458 23 күн бұрын

There is no long term high level waste.

@danniles5256 29 күн бұрын

Still 10 years away...lol.

@kenofken9458 23 күн бұрын

100 years. But still worth it.

@SamJameson-dk4eo 11 күн бұрын

They already found free energy and the US government ceased it. Few people tried to make it publuc but were silenced by the government. All died of health complications.

@BritishAnts 27 күн бұрын

Kids in Oxford UK been doing this for years! Americas a few years behind (so far) 😅

@Laminar-Flow 20 күн бұрын

Did they achieve net positive energy production for the first time in history?

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

Fusion is not limitless. It is vast but not infinite. There is a specific amount of hydrogen and helium available to us on earth, and there's quite a bit more of it in space, but it is not limitless. We used to think, and some people still think, that oil and coal was/is limitless. Look where that got us. We will just figure out more energy hungry activities. Then we're gonna have to deal with all the heat we produce.

@gordonepema722 23 күн бұрын

The One Solution that can provide unlimited energy for millions of years... There are no solutions, only tradeoffs (T Sowell). No one is talking tradeoffs. Such as the opportunity cost of blowing all this cash on fusion and climate change programs instead of on things that work.

@darrenoak7187 16 күн бұрын

If you create free energy in the uk. The goverment willl put a huge tax on it.

@asimkasir Ай бұрын

AI Unlimited Fuel...

@kirankumarsukumar Ай бұрын

fusion energy will be a game changer for AI. AI will be a game changer for fusion energy

@nhinged Ай бұрын

AI did solve a big issue in fusion recent

@effingsix3825 Ай бұрын

Let me guess. They’re trying to boil water, right?

@gillyrcgilmore3742 Ай бұрын

They will not succeed unless they use sacred geometry.

@zvorenergy Ай бұрын

😒the energy source of the future...and always will be

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

No, it won't. We will succeed with fusion, then we'll figure out more ways to use it, and it won't be enough, then something else will be "the energy source of the future".

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

....if we survive that long, which is not certain.

@zvorenergy Ай бұрын

@@theobserver9131 sure. World's best scientists spent billions upon billions decade after decade trying to squeeze a star into a bottle...but this time it's different...😂

@theobserver9131 Ай бұрын

@@zvorenergy sigh. little minds.

@_Chad_ThunderCock 8 күн бұрын

@@zvorenergythere is a reason it didn't work back in the 20th century. The technology back then simply wasn't ready, it's different now. We have key breakthrough technology to pull it off.

@bluemoon8498 Ай бұрын

If you cant maybe youve been doing it wrong.

@richardcampbell7255 Ай бұрын

Unlimited energy will be a total environment disaster. It will dramatically increase the amount of resources extracted and wasted on things people don’t need.

@Unpack 29 күн бұрын

why do we need this energy ??

@garyives1218 Ай бұрын

It's another rich man's racket. It will never gain useful efficiency. See: deuterium and tritium.

@LoveFactorySweatShop Ай бұрын

Ok. I saw it. And...?

@dodgygoose3054 Ай бұрын

Umm, we currently have hydro, wind & solar energy production no carbon output & constantly renewable doesn't cost billions, its already invented and it works.... but its so cheap & easy to install & run that corporations hate it as there's hardly any profit & basically no up keep.

@yvanlaprise3373 25 күн бұрын

Free energy is not real . THIS is only an investment . E what what . INVESTMENT IN FREE ENERGY . ahhh 🤣🤣🥰🥰🤪🤪🤪

@LuciFeric137 Ай бұрын

Hahahahaha. The hunt for scientist employment guarantees. What a colossal waste of tax dollars.

@LoveFactorySweatShop Ай бұрын

Yeah, send that money instead to the Saudis, like we always do.

@PD55_ Ай бұрын

Yes, AI requires limitless energy. Humanity is not a priority.

@GreedRuinsEverything Ай бұрын

Your self induced terror of things you don't understand is noted... and laughed at

@PD55_ Ай бұрын

exactly why you have become an indentured servant for life, trapped by personal and tax debts that can never be repaid@@GreedRuinsEverything

@DSAK55 Ай бұрын

LOL a joke

@royalsniper11 25 күн бұрын

Ha ha ha .. fusion .. will 1st break through by the chinese ......

@jizzer6969 22 күн бұрын

Fusion will never work here on earth. It only works in stars...

@HonchHeado 9 күн бұрын

Totally unneeded waste of time and money.

@eujebenqo6159 Ай бұрын

It is very funny to see this dreamers work for 70 years for a machine flawed by concept. NOT SELF SUSTAINED.

@LoveFactorySweatShop Ай бұрын

The field of AI research was invented in 1956. Imagine if all AI/ML researchers just gave up at Year 70.

@eujebenqo6159 Ай бұрын

@@LoveFactorySweatShop it takes about 98.86 per cent the mass of the SOLAR SYSTEM to sustain fusion. IT CANNOT BE SUSTAINED.

@eujebenqo6159 Ай бұрын

Inteligence doesn't require extraordinary physical condittions , it's in every living beeings head, fusion requires 98.86 the mass of the solar system , it is NOT SUSTAINABLE.

@LoveFactorySweatShop Ай бұрын

so regular ol' nuclear fission is inside human beings all along?