Hey Simon, great Video. Can you make a Nato video

#Simonisacoward Simple Simon is a Pie Man, trying to sell us crap each day. Hiding in the corner like Little Jack Horner, trying to keep the world's war at bay. When found in the dark his only remark: 'The Russians might take my pie away'!!

@@Zach-ku6eu The Squarespace headquarter is in New York...

Call me in 29 years.... I'm just sayin'.

@@Zach-ku6eu what are you going on about mate? Gotta chill on that crack it aint good for you

The biggest manufacturing challenge is making the massive magnets and the absolutely massive vacuum vessel

@@rileymannion5301 From what I read it's actually the protection of the inside against radiation that's the biggest issue. (the tiles that you can see on the photos)

@@Robbedem so partly the pressure vessel too because it's the final biosheild before being outside the reactor

@@rileymannion5301 They’re being made for ITER no problem, apart from taking forever. It’s ridiculously hard to put together and zero fault-tolerant.

Never heard this analogy before, but I like it.

It's so fun to be involved in incredible stuff. Even in the background as support. It's just so interesting. Glad you got that experience!

@@Lessk69 You’re completely right. I miss that aspect of that job. I was involved in The Elephant Odyssey enclosure at the San Diego Zoo around 2007. I was on site when the elephants were unloaded into the new enclosure that we spent 2 years building. I got to work with the military and go on carriers, work on submarine piers, Sea World, Legoland, Birch Aquarium, NOAA, Salk Institute, all were customers. But I HATED the “salesman” part of it. I work with cancer patients now. So I still have a very rewarding job. But damn I miss some of the cool stuff I used to get to see and do. Not many people get to see a lot of the things I did.

The war will slow the building of ITER due to the huge Russian contribution that'll grind to a halt as a result of the war.

recently, nasa talking about fusion power in solid metal, erbium lattice saturated w/ deuterium (hydrogen isotope). then shoot w/ gamma rays, cuasing deuteriun to fuse. hydrogen 1b x more dense than magentic confinement in tokamack. small pkg designed to be carried in rocket n power space probe.

Feels me with hope that we’re getting close to “the future”.

This don't seem like a comment a 11 year old would make lmao good try tho

Good bot

Mmmmm Donuts

Truly.

Curing cancer? Alzheimers? Parkinson's?

Absolutely, of all the things we are funding right now nothing deserves a Manhattan Project / Moon Shot budget like developing sustainable fusion energy production and figuring out how to ditch the turbine fairy.

Unicorns dancing in the streets are more likely......but folks can dream if they wish.

@@bernardfender5147 The achievment of practically harnessing Fusion would likely help aid in many future endevours.

Oh boy... Well at least we have the giant fusion reactor in the sky......

People say dumb things all the time. Man-made fusion reactors are a reality, just not any that are commercially viable.

And now it's a reality.

All of my favourite stuff sounds cool as fuck

😆

Nuclear fission aircraft were scrapped for spewing radiation I thought?

@@Ben-li9zb partially, there was a multitude of reasons the project was cancelled. One being having a nuclear reactor involved in a plane crash is bad, if that plane is carrying high explosives that's extra bad.

The old Dawson Forrest site it really creepy and the rumors surrounding it are equally creepy.

True.

There must be a team! I am finding it hard to make one short, informative and funny video per week!! 😭

Also where Kirk died in the JJ Abrams Star Treks. That was the engine room.

Came to say pretty much the same thing. Throwing the "Q" term around can be very misleading especially in pop science.

Unfortunately there is monkey business surrounding this.

A CCGT is about 60% efficent... can be psushed to 65% with circulating gas. A plasma injector can be up to 75% efficent. So you really just need a Q of just over 2 to gain energy... of cause it would be fairy expensive.

did you watch sabine hossenfelder as well?

@@matsv201 You need the total energy output to be greater than ALL of the energy required to run the entire system. Q=1 just equals power out is the same as input power to the plasma field. This does not take into account all the other systems (pumps, compressors, cooling systems, etc., etc.) required for it to operate. it is not an insignificant amount of power.

I am sure the pilots were happy about that because they weren’t sure they were going to survive the test. Their plane fell 1 kilometer before it regained control as the result of the blast.

Not really, tsar bomba full yield is impractical and doesn't even currently exist. Russia's heated up version of small pox is FAR more terrifying

Another fun fact castle bravo designed with a 6 kilo ton blast in mind it actually got 14 kilo ton blast , just incase you weren’t actually scared of these loco mothers yet

@@angryatheist do you mean megatons?

@@Ben-li9zb 😂 yeah me mean big boom 💥

@Gerald H I think I heard 10, but that is in the same ball park depending on the operational assumptions. However, that would be (energy out)/(TOTAL energy in), not just the fusion energy Q.

why it will never happen or at best a stupidly expensive centralised nonsense machine beloved by large companies for its infinite funding opportunities

Currently, a ball lightning energy source produces Q=8.6. China has acquired the technology. It will be used in military and space exploration projects. It is called the QUANTUUM DRAGON project. It can be made in a small cheap household version. So far it has been scaled up to 3 MW max. We quickly told the CIA scientists ( because they are the best) who reviewed the project documentation and found it to be along the same lines as their own research.

@@zoltanpecsek4373 what the hell have you been smoking or injecting ?

@@psycronizer I hate drugs. I am a highly trained technical visionary who is a specialist in space-time technology. I make my living by being able to remotely detect what's in a place (CRV Cooordinata Remote Viewing). Every country has such experts to help the police and the secret service. In our country, it's the industrial companies that are helped by the psychics. Our Chinese colleagues are at the top professionally, because they also take the documents by telekinesis. But to answer your question specifically. Create an email account for file exchange and I will send you the materials.

#Simonisacoward Simple Simon is a Pie Man, trying to sell us crap each day. Hiding in the corner like Little Jack Horner, trying to keep the world's war at bay. When found in the dark his only remark: 'The Russians might take my pie away'!!

@@Zach-ku6eu Please stop scamming us with your dumb poem.

Agreed. Seems like the best way forward...

@@TheFuriousFuturist Actually that was a satirical comment meaning we will probably never have it. “People have been saying, ‘Fusion is 30 years away-and always will be’” was said by University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park and printed in BusinessWeek in 1990

As a plasma physicist Q is not a metric I'd use for public communications, it often gives a completely irrelevant standard for experiments and facilities. The role of ITER is to get more out of the plasma than we put in, not the facility as a whole. This is an important step to study how various plasma properties scale with size. STEP and DEMO however are planned to actually put a small amount of net electric on the grid, they'll have turbines and everything, the reason why its a small amount is because the grid would very much rather not have an experimental reactor pumping out large amounts of power that could suddenly and without warning be cut off. The Sabine Hofstadter video that I'm pretty sure taught the general public about the Q metric completely failed to contextualise the intent of the experiments and built a false narrative around ITER being some sort of scam

@@idoltrash2353 Yeah, there's a lot of context here. And I don't mean to imply any sort of intentional scam! Just that looking at Q getting closer to 1, doesn't by itself that we've solved all the problems. But as long as Simon is going to talk about Q as a metric, noting its issues seems natural.

@@joshuazelinsky5213 yeah absolutely, Q is actually relatively easy to solve when you take out all the rest. You just make the reactor really big, the Soviets solved that one way back. The current issues are mainly around the stability of the plasma, how we handle the heat exhaust and a type of disruption called an ELM (essentially where pressure in the plasma grows too large in certain regions and the plasma spits out a load of energy). I appreciate that these are topics that are harder to talk about but yeah Simons video would have been better to leave Q alone and instead talk about how these various experiments plan to reconcile the current challenges in fusion.

Indeed, that also doesn't cover total plant power consumption, and the greater challenge of converting heat to energy, which is never perfect.

@@idoltrash2353 I think it's a little unfair to characterize Sabine Hossenfelder's video (watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY) in that way. She quotes Phillip Ball's article in the Guardian which says (regarding ITER): _"It hopes to conduct its first experimental runs in 2025, and eventually produce 500 megawatts (MW) of power_ - _10 times as much_ _*as needed to operate it.*_" and it's ironically that sort of twisted b.s. being communicated to the public that Sabine is trying to unravel in her video. The references in the video's description are very thorough, and if you're interested, I highly recommend checking them out. She isn't saying anything about ITER itself, rather.. she is calling out the *_MEDIA'S_* often incorrect (through ignorance) and sometimes maliciously misleading (for money via clicks etc.) The overarching goal being the improvement of scientific communication to the public, which starts with the acknowledgment that it *_needs_* to be improved. At 4:02 into the video, Sabine says: "The confusion, which you find in pretty much all *_popular science writing_* about nuclear fusion, is that the energy gain which they quote is that for the energy that goes into the plasma and comes out of the plasma. In the technical literature, this quantity is normally not just called "Q", but more specifically, "Q_plasma". This is not the ratio of the *_entire energy_* that comes out of the fusion reactor over that which goes into the reactor, which we can call "Q_total". If you want to build a power plant, and that’s what we’re after in the end, it’s the Q_total that matters, not the Q_plasma." As Jason Cassibry said in a comment on the video: _"As someone who has worked in fusion for 20 years, this is a well done video!_ _There is a growing community of scientists and engineers working on magneto -_ _inertial_ _fusion and high field magnetically confined systems which combine attributes of ITER and NIF into smaller,_ _more affordable experiments._ _As we continue to make strides in these areas,_ _I promise to be mindful of the misleading nature of Qplasma and do my little part in reducing the confusion around the topic._ _All the best to you Sabine,_ _-J"_ At the end of the day, Qplasma is not the Q value that matters. It's Qtotal. Regardless of how little power is required to generate and stabilize the Qplasma, until that Qtotal provides for a positive net gain, we aren't there yet. It's not ITER, or fusion reactors that she is talking about. Sabine is a _"Science Communicator"_ .. and it's the abuse of "Q" in ways that confuses laypeople that she's addressing: _"How can such a confusion even happen?_ _I mean, this isn’t rocket science._ _The total energy that goes into the reactor is more than the energy that goes into the plasma._ _And yet,_ *_science writers and journalists_* constantly get this wrong._ _They get the most basic fact wrong on a matter that affects tens of billions of research funding..."_ Which, ya know, is kind of important! And although this abuse is mainly generated by media, there *ARE* Scientists and Engineers who absolutely *_HAVE_* intentionally created confusion around Q, and misled people about ITER's ability to produce more overall energy than what is put into the system. They are also presented in the video, and it is *THOSE* people that you should really be concerned about. Maybe as an actual plasma physicist, you saw the video from a perspective that was a little skewed, because it's sort of weird how you are complaining about it, when she is trying to clear up the exact problem you laid out: _"As a plasma physicist Q is not a metric I'd use for public communications, it often gives a completely irrelevant standard for experiments and facilities."_

😂😂😂 - you unleashed the power of the Sun where the sun don't shine....

Second this

Never heard of it. Sounds interesting.

You should hit up Bright Sun Films, this sounds exactly like the kind of thing he would be all over

It was misleading and not really a leap forward, just another way to do what had been done before. Fusion was obtained for a billionth of a second that technically produced a tad more energy than was put into it, but it was not ignition and it was not claimed to be ignition. We already know that Fusion can produce energy, we have always known it, and have been able to obtain fusion, but the problem is creating ignition which has never been done and probably will never be. We have fusion bombs already that produce massive amounts of energy but even that is not true ignition. It is all wishful thinking. Fission is child's play compared to Fusion.

I agree with you. I saw General Fusion use water hammer effect to get extremely high pressure and temperature needed for creating fusion (they use liquid metal instead of water). And I see recently they updated their water hammer device to make it compact and more effective, they already decided to create fusion demonstration equipment by 2025.

@@simonsong1743 it will fail, they simply cannot get confinement, not with that system. extracting energy from that setup would also be a nightmare.

That is how it workes when goverment is set to burn your money with out making any usefull

#Simonisacoward Simple Simon is a Pie Man, trying to sell us crap each day. Hiding in the corner like Little Jack Horner, trying to keep the world's war at bay. When found in the dark his only remark: 'The Russians might take my pie away'!!

#Simonisacoward Simple Simon is a Pie Man, trying to sell us crap each day. Hiding in the corner like Little Jack Horner, trying to keep the world's war at bay. When found in the dark his only remark: 'The Russians might take my pie away'!!

One day they'll be right....

Fusion is the power of the future, and always will be.

Let me guess, fusion is a mere 30 years off?

Big facts, hopefully its signs of things to come!

@@1pcfred lol, how did you come up with that "joke", it was hilarious!

That was my first thought as well but at least progress is being made. Some of us might even live long enough to see it happen. Maybe.

Nuclear fusion power used to be 30 years away. 70 years later and it is only 20 years away!

Fusion has been systematically underfunded.

The fact that there are now (plans for) privately funded fusion reactors takes it out of the realm of science experiments, but into actual practical use. THAT is the major step it needed. In ten years from now fusion energy will be the only energy plants planned for future use in the rich parts of the world. Replacing all the coal, gas, biomass and fission plants will take way more time than that though.

There’s not general agreement. No one in Europe thinks 20 years for commercial fusion. The EU itself doesn’t expect that for another 60 or so.

Its strange that goverment keep staling it.. almost like they was payed of to do so.. Right.. they actually where.. at least in belgium

Why will it `definitely happen ` present fusion is absolutely nothing but a proof of concept experiment with actual economic power production is `practically ` impossible as all the engineers working on it other than the salesmen will say so . !

@@MyKharli Because this isn't a thing where it's based on some hypothetical unproven physics guess like String Theory or something.. This is just an engineering challenge. We know the amount of energy fusion can yield. You say the engineers working on it say it is practically impossible, but I've heard the exact opposite. Indeed, if one thinks it's impossible, why would one still be working on it? They'd go get some other job where they could get the job satisfaction of not wasting their time. Engineers, especially the ones good enough to be working on fusion, are in demand. What I hear when engineers and physicists are interviewed from these projects is that they universally say approximately what I said, with just more optimism or pessimism on the time frame based on their individual perspective. This isn't a scam like perpetual motion machines or 'cold fusion'. The science is clear. And the progress in terms of energy output has grown steadily and rapidly over time. What's needed are the incremental breakthroughs in design and materials and such. MIT just had a breakthrough of an electromagnet that works effectively at much higher temperatures, allowing smaller Tokamaks to be constructed, which means cheaper and faster iterations in testing designs. It's those kinds of incremental advances that we need to take fusion from 'Laboratory success' to 'practical commercial success'. The only question is - How Long? And that's the riddle. The optimists are at 25-30 years, the pessimists say another 100. I'm betting somewhere between that. The 'salesmen' that you deride are the people promising fusion in 5-15 years. That's what I was talking about in my original post. Lockheed's Skunkworks had a press conference awhile back ... maybe a decade ago, where they promised a working fusion design that could fit in the back of a pickup truck and be commercially viable....and they promised it in 5 years. THAT was salesman B.S. And most people said as much at the time, myself included.

@@brianmulholland2467 Yes everything's an `engineering challenge ` but some things are ridiculous ! Look we live on a water planet yet two billion people do not have access to safe water ..you think thats an `engineering challenge` . What i am saying just because something is possible its clear most possible things will not happen . MIT was backing hyperloop so i wouldnt quote them ..facepalm .

@@brianmulholland2467 Don't listen to Peter. he's one of those "let's take up a few million acres for solar and windmill instead of using common sense" hypocrites........aka an AOC lover

@@MyKharli Clean water isn't an engineering challenge, not primarily. It's PRIMARILY a political challenge. Most places without clean water are suffering a lack of a wide array of things due to corruption, history, geography and such. But if you have the polity that encourages development and growth, you can overcome your geography....with some exceptions. Political dysfunction is the root of the problem, not a lack of human ingenuity. This isn't fusion. The hyperloop was, IMHO, always a bad idea because it was a solution in search of a problem. Ie, supply in search of demand. No one wanted it, much like the current CA high speed rail disaster where vasts sums of money have been spent to connect a couple small towns together with high speed rail...none of which anyone wants to go to. This is a problem most mass transit, especially rail, faces in the US where cars and roads are plentiful and cheap. Fusion isn't that either. We WANT abundant, reliable. clean energy. I suppose if I were in search of a historical metaphor, I might say the atomic bomb was a good one. Not a perfect metaphor, but good enough. Before the Manhattan Project, Einstein and some other scientists were well aware of the potential of splitting atoms to release HUGE amounts of energy. But they couldn't just build one. There was alot of ENGINEERING to do to get a workable design. That understates things, but the point is that we knew the potential of it...and the HUGENESS of that potential created powerful incentives. It was going to happen eventually because it was TOO BIG, and TOO IMPACTFUL. Whether the US did it or someone else years or decades later...it was going to happen. I think that's a good metaphor for fusion. The economic and sociological impact of fusion will BLOW AWAY existing energy technologies once we get it 'right'. The energy yield of fusion is so monumental that even tiny efficiency gains create huge jumps in output. Saying we're at a q of 0.7 as Simon pointed out makes it sound like each increase is small, but the amount of energy each tenth of a decimal point creates is MASSIVE. Each efficiency gain by solar adds a few watts of energy....with fusion, every incremental gain will be gigantic. It's one of the most worthwhile pursuits of modern science, exceeding even things like mapping the human genome. But hey, you disagree. So be it.

#Simonisacoward Simple Simon is a Pie Man, trying to sell us crap each day. Hiding in the corner like Little Jack Horner, trying to keep the world's war at bay. When found in the dark his only remark: 'The Russians might take my pie away'!!

*The Californian lab

#Simonisacoward Simple Simon is a Pie Man, trying to sell us crap each day. Hiding in the corner like Little Jack Horner, trying to keep the world's war at bay. When found in the dark his only remark: 'The Russians might take my pie away'!!

The Carnot Cycle is believed to be the most thermodynamic efficient heat engine allowed by physics. It's no black hole generator, but its what we have.

@@dongiovanni4331 The Carnot Cycle is theoretical and relies on non existent materials to eliminate friction. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e7KCZKupmdfdnaM.html

I'm pretty sure those PV Cells would be incinerated lol

My solar panels are fusion/fission hybrid powered.

Yes, they have been saying that since the 1950s.

Why waste time talking about a scam run by a couple of frauds, who (mistakenly) considered themselves the smartest guys in the room?

@@thomashiggins9320 Why not? It did make news, and just as one scam in Argentina caused research in Fusion, didn’t this other one cause research in the Cold Fusion?

In a week this comment will still be funny in a week.

Lightbridge baby

Stay salty!

Fusion have been deriblitly stalled by policymaker geting kickback from cng companies (and no, its not a theory, it was proven a week ago.. strangly the media didnt report about it

@@matsv201 if you can build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. No one can stop that from happening either. Not a theory.

Probobly by a bradley turbinen or thermo vhemical splitting. Steam turbines is not efficent in that temperature range

Metal blanket around the torus is heated by neutrons, passes heat to a coolant circuit, which raises steam for steam turbines.

The heights of most of our grand achievements today stand on the shoulders of those that came before us. Ad infinitum

Pay for it out of your kwn pocket bloke. $60-100k car with only a five year life expectancy? Do It Right?!

@@Zach-ku6eu because 5 years is any different to what we have in ICE now? Lol And yeah I will pay for it. My F150 was not cheap either.

dinosaur liquid lmao that's hilarious (im stealing it) but more acurately it'd be tree and plants and other vegetation liquid since it comes mostly from forests and stuff millions of years ago

The same way you can tolerate hot air on your skin, but not water of the same temperature. The plasma has very low density, it’s a low vacuum at room temperature. Extracting the helium, the hot ashes of the fusion reaction, is a challenge though.