Did we do it? Kinda... Are we close at least? Maybe? Interested in what I do? Join my newsletter in the description!

I think it's great that instead of Fusion being perpetually 30 years away, it's now only perpetually 10 years away. That's progress!

I always love when "The history of mankind is a history of heating up water" comes true.

Innovation is always a good thing even if the product doesn't end up being commercially viable. We (as a species) generally learn a lot from it (the innovative process) and often products, and technologies we never even thought of, get derived from it. Always good to see people trying to push the limits of our understanding.

The potential to end scarcity, excluding engineered scarcity, that this represents makes my heart sing with hope for our species.

When I was 14 years old, I developed a railgun for exposcience, I won my local hometown exposcience fair, but then I lost at the state level, because the university teachers said rail guns are weapons and weapons shouldn't be part of exposcience. I talked about creating something similar to the large hadron collider, but with railguns and a solid projectile to achieve fusion. It's absolutely crazy to me, that more than 12 years later they're basically doing JUST THAT. That's life in a nutshell.

Imagine telling a romantic era steam engine engineer that there might be made a steam engine heated not by coal or oil but by the same process as in stars. Would be a pretty fascinating sci-fi novel idea.

This seems like a brilliant idea. They've got around all the worst technical complications by default and made a low-tech fusion process conceivable. A quite remarkable achievement.

This would be SO cool if it worked and became commercially available. High hopes and best wishes to the team building this.

My high school physics class was one of many that made a field trip to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory for some kind of science day in 1969. I recall sitting in the Laboratory main auditorium (which was filled with high school students - had to be about 600 students and teachers there) listening to science lectures, one of which was given by a Dr. James Tuck who was introduced as Friar Tuck of Sherwood Forest for reasons I will explain in a moment. We later toured some of the research areas, including a kind of shabby appendage to the Laboratory's administration building (called the Sherwood building, or Sherwood forest) where Dr. Tuck showed us a demonstration of a metal wrench held in the magnetic field of one of the magnets, and a neat little demo of what happens to an aluminum foil cylinder when compressed in a zeta pinch. His claim was that the amount of energy released when the capacitor bank actually fired was enough to power the entire US for some very short amount of time - perhaps a microsecond. He proudly concluded that commercial energy from nuclear fusion was just 30 years over the horizon. I graduated from high school, went to college, and started working at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (in 1975, I think) on a geothermal energy project. Time passed, and I went to graduate school, got my PhD, and returned to the by now renamed Los Alamos National Laboratory to work on a variety of energy and environmental projects until my retirement in 2004. At the time of my retirement, commercial energy from nuclear fusion was just 30 years in the future with laser fusion being the current leader. Or perhaps, it was closer if Pons and Fleischmann were correct. Now, nearly 20 years after retirement, and after a huge expenditure on a variety of fusion energy projects, ITER is just 30 years from commercialization of nuclear fusion. In my recollection, commercial energy from nuclear fusion has been just 30 years over the horizon for about 55 years. The work described in this video is the best idea I have seen in a long time for making fusion energy a commercial reality.

BFG makes a lot of sense to develop the fuel delivery device. These "big guns" are common tools used by physicists to study high stress/pressure states of matter. I worked with one in college at our physics department.

When you ask some questions you are supposed to answer them later on in your video by the way. So when asking : "what's actually going on here?",this should NOT be followed by a generic sales pitch of this company; rather you should be mentioning pros AND cons of their approach focusing on numbers,hard data. We have non here other than some nice renders, so to answer the question you asked next(and did not answer as well) "is this a breakthrough, or blowing the horn to attract more funding?", it is certaintly the latter. Buzz words like BFG(...) and "1000 times cheaper in some areas sure sound like blowing the horn.

I think this is really exciting and promising. I heard about this breakthrough listening to the SGU podcast but having your visuals and explanation really helps to illustrate the process. 👍🏼

The fact that we see commercial interest in developing fusion technologies, instead of just scientific interest, leads me to believe that we have finally crossed that "fusion is petpetually 30 years away" line. 10 years seems too optimistic to me still, but I'd love to be proved wrong.

50 years ago I was reading stories about commercial fusion being 30 years away. And every so often since then I've read about breakthroughs that will revolutionize the process and it's still at least 30 years away. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying.

you covered this very well, one part that i didn't expect to be covered was why this wasn't done before, i think its common for these types of videos to not include that, and your left just thinking everyone else is an idiot for not thinking of the idea, but there were actual reasons why this couldn't work that they overcame. i just wanted to highlight that specifically but really it was all amazing

We have been only 10 years away from fusion for the last 40 years or so. But this concept seems simple enough and it has gotten me really excited.

Everything I read/watch about First Light seems pragmatic and well thought out. Best of luck to them!

The important aspect to achieve fusion make up the fusion energy gain factor: sufficient temperature, density and duration. So far, all these values have been achieved individually, but getting all three together has been so far challenging.

Kudos Dr. Miles!! Absolutely outstanding video! Intelligently reported and genuinely provocative!! Truly the best scientific report to date.

That was really well explained and very interesting. Not a subject I have ever looked into. Well done

I'm fairly certain the "F" in "BFG" doesn't stand for "Friendly". See the Wikipedia article ""BFG (Weapon)" for an explanation of what the BFG acronym actually stands for. And props to the scientists for using a Doom reference!

A fission reactor also uses a “simple” steam (turbine) generator to generate electricity from the heat

Thank you for this video! I'm really impressed, both by this First Light Fusion company and by your channel. I'm so glad KZfaq recommended it to me.

One part of the interviews video reminds me to the phased array interference effect. They put a bubble that gets compressed by the effect generated sorrounding shokwave. Fascinating approach! I think that the one of the most difficult part to is how did they managed to have such a cavity or container shape to achieve that interacction. Turbulence physic maths are really hard, aren'y they? I think that even if they are successful having fusion, they are missing efficience when it comes to take advantage of the enormous cuantity of energy generated. This part isn't easy, perhaps the most difficultouse part of the system...

The change in approach is hopeful. Most large fusion research projects are pass/fail: they either will work or they won't, with very little ability to optimize, and the engineering required makes it very risky and expensive to actually attempt. But with pressure being dependent on optimization of the fuel cell, First Light will be able to employ the try-fail-learn-try approach, which almost always works, eventually.

Good News is it brings more diverse experience on the focus. Could result in other interactive designs. It flexes the work and can open more options that yet may rise beyond hypotheses. Very good. Wonderfully presented. I appreciate knowing more about it. Certainly appreciate those on the project you have described.

Nice. On one of B1M's latest videos they showed us the fusion reactor they are building in France at the moment, the size of it was ridiculous. They said they'll be able to trigger a fusion reaction but we're still some 20 years away being able to build something that could harness the power produced and meter it out accordingly. When (if) that happens we enter a new era!

Thank the algorithm I found your channel/video, and found your approach comprehendible and clear, and engaging and focused. Thank you I've subscribed because of it. Fascinating topic.

The most incredible thing about Nuclear Fusion is it is ALWAYS 10 years away. It breaks the space time continuum. Great video though!

These guys are increadibly intelligent and it's a pretty friggen awesome approach to fusion that I rank as my #2 favorite so far. My favorite approach is sustained high voltage electrical discharge in plasma. You get electric double layers that form in high energy electric discharges, if you maintain the discharge you can create and hold stable double layer structures. A double layer is such that one gas in the plasma might be 230K but the other can be 10MK, both gases seperated by the electromagnetic structure of the double layer. The pressure and energy held in the double layer can reach the thresholds necessary for fusion. It's similar to the tokamak but approached form a different angle.

In the long run , humankind has only two ways how to generate enough energy for its needs. 1. Nuclear fusion 2. Solar panels in space + microwave transmission to Earth. Renewables, as we know them today, will never be the answer to all energy needs. This research is highly appreciated and should be given top priority 👍

Dr Miles, this was excellent content. Please do a series on the various fusion approaches and who the players are. Also, links for further reading would be much appreciated. I’d like to geek out on fusion.

I really like the liquid lithium "shower" as the heat collector.

I remember a lot of excitement around fusion 40 years ago--around the early 80s. It was going to be ready ten years down the road, maybe 20 tops. Don't get me wrong--I really, REALLY want these guys to succeed, but I'll remain skeptical for now.

At this point in life i very much regret not going more towards the sciences. Imagine being given the opportunity to name an insane gun of sorts, and just remembering all the fun times had in a game you love. It's worth it, just for that. I applaud those who named the Big "Friendly" Gun.

This is such a well put together video. Great content, thank you!

Finally someone who explains why it's different to the existing approaches! I read so many articles that just said "this is a breakthrough" but didn't say how or why. On another note, interesting that the footage is from CGTN, I guess the Chinese are looking to build their own version.

Godspeed to this awesome break thru..Like hereing a "Transistors Radio"... for the first time...55 years ago..

I am a PhD student at UKAEA. I don't work exactly on fusion. I work on an upcoming project named CHIMERA for CCFE. My work is mostly related to machine learning and multiphysics simulation. For those who don't know the aim is to commercialize fusion till 2040.

I worked at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. I started in 1979 and they said 20 years and we'll have fusion! Tokamaks are very complex reactors! Our process is very slow, good luck guys!

Reminder: photovoltaic effect (solar power) was discovered in 1839 and relatively recently has become cheaper than other options. Fusion development is doing okay in comparison (considering how long it takes to design, test, build and crunch numbers on new/more efficient fusion producers).

I was already having a blast when the BFG label came in.

Great video and the best explanation of fusion I've ever seen. Thank you!

LIF-devices using targets and hohlraums of expensive heavy metals turn the targets into crud inside the chamber, that they can then recycle. These metals aren't going to be significantly affected unless they have strong neutron absorption (which you might want if you are doing combined fission and fusion, e.g. using depleted uranium in targets). With a plastic target like this, the target stops being plastic and becomes some mixture like simple hydrocarbons (e.g. methane), water, hydrogen and tar. Turning this back into a target is not as easy as turning a metal back into a target. Instead you're taking maybe 5 g of hydrocarbons per kWh and turning it into 3g of plastic per kWh and turning that into some useless non-recyclable mixture of carcinogens (AKA tar). The gold they are using in targets at NIF is a stopgap; this is not intended for commercial use; they are more a nuclear weapons research facility that is only doing some fusion research for fun and to attract funding as a side project; where there mainstay is to explore the state equation of plutonium and other such fun stuffs.

I like that fusion energy is getting closer and it's exciting, I'm just a little disappointed that the energy capture is still "heat water for spinning"

How much energy does this thing deliver per target vs the total amount of energy needed to produce all of the consumables including support infrastructure (gain) is always the killer question for projects aiming for commercial viability. Whatever the "unfair metrics" may be, power plants still need to be substantially net-positive from cradle to grave to be viable.

Excellently presented! Thanks for sharing.

Every time I watch Fusion breakthrough videos, it always seems to turn out to be con fusion. Well, you got my click. Good luck UK and Dr. Miles.

Nicely explained. After decades of watching scientists seemingly bang their heads against walls in terms of the difficulties encountered with other approaches this is much more encouraging, hence exciting, than I expected. Too early to say I suspect but one thing that I would be interested in is, if/when it gets to a commercial application, how small (physically) could it scale down to? Small and very small modular reactors are getting quite a lot of attention in the fission world hence my interest in whether this could ultimately, if the basic concept does make it through to commercially viable units, have the potential for small modular setups as well.

This does sound very promising, the simplicity is a huge plus.

Great informative video. Thank you for sharing this information. It gives me hope that viable fusion energy production is something that I will live to see in my lifetime.

Thank you for explaining!

Fusion isn't *finally* ten years away. Fusion has been ten years away since I first learned about it in junior high 40 years ago. We ought to collect enough fusion fuel in one place until the mass starts to fuse because of gravity. We could then setup collectors to capture the power coming from this big mass. I think I just invented the sun and solar panels.

I think it was Isaac Arthur that once argued that we can achieve fusionpower TODAY if we really wanted too. all we had to do is dig out a huge hole in the ground, reinforce it with strong meter thick materials and concrete, fill it up with water, and detonate fusion bombs in it. hook up a steam turbine to an output pipe at the top and you got fusion power.

I remember a family day tour of the Shiva-Nova laser fusion reactor at the Lawrence Livermore Lab. They had achieved fusion but required much more energy input than was output. 12 huge parallel lasers in one room all coming into a sphere in another room. The computers were PDP 11s. This was in the early 70s.

A business model without a fesible technology is pointless. I'd like to hear more about the energy win of their current lab prototypes.

Once we are able to create reactions that can produce more energy than they require, the real trick is going to be extracting that energy. However the goal is noble and if achieved puts humanity on a completely different level.

Great video. Very informative. Thank you!

That was very interesting, and to think the idea came about because of a little shrimps extraordinary ability to focus energy to achieve what it needs, you've just got to marvel at what nature produces ;-)

I have heard so many stories about how fusion is just around the corner... I am glad with current technology we can achieve our goals of massively reduced CO2 levels while keeping and improving our standard of living...

I love to hear alternative approaches to fusion than the classic tokamak ones which are somehow based on the brute force!

Just how long does the target sustain its fusion reaction after it is hit by the rail gun ? Does the sustainable time depend on the quantity of the target material ? Hope someone here could enlighten.

It’s good to hear someone say 10 years, I think that was a first for me!

Something I hope they've calculated is the energy cost of producing the target cube. Since they're planning on shooting one every 5 seconds they would need to be made every 5 seconds in another machine for cheaper than the output. I'm concerned that balance hasn't been figured out yet.

The challenge with Fusion is that you actually need to _exceed_ the conditions of a star. Our sun, for all the great Heat and Pressure at its core, still only has an average energy output equivalent to the human body. Power plants on earth require a MUCH higher power density.

great summary -thanks!

Thank you for the clear and tight presentation! I was not clear on what the projectile and target are made out of, and why and how exactly the shock waves were produced... or how the new target was put in place every 5 seconds.. hm still want more info...

But this method does require a big supply chain just to make the impactor is it?

Awesome that the projectile was inspired by shrimps!? And it would be called a 'pistol' shrimp

I really enjoyed the clear concise presentation of your video. Thank you. ]

Very clear and lucid explanation. I enjoyed it.

Are we 10 years away? Probably not. But maybe we're finally closer than 30. Once we see a working demo that delivers more energy than it takes, we'll be at or under 10 years away.

how are they going to remove all the copper ? they are firing it in at roughly a cubic centimeter a minute, that is a cubic meter every 16 hours. that is a lot of copper (now coverd in liquid lithium? ) or (as molten metals are powerful solvents, a sort of lithium bronze ?)

Sounds like a brilliant approach to the problem of Fusion. I like SImple and I like the Fusion of Natures unique abilities in causing the projectile speeds.

Awesome, informative and concise 👍🏻 nice vid my friend… to fusion 🚀

Fusion reactors which we try to construct are either deuterium/deuterium or tritium/deuterium based. Both of them release energy primary as stream of neutrons which by definition is radiation. Produced free neutrons carry much larger energies than ones produced in fission of U235. Most of the those free neutrons are captured by lithium and turned to heat, but part of them passes trough and permanently damages everything they touch. Making everything both radioactive and, with time, unusable. If reachable - fusion has its virtues, but not the ones of one of "cheap energy" and "completely radioactive free". Also definition of "base load" is not "the current electric grid". That is blatant false to a point that I doubt author's understanding of terms presented.

I know it's early stages but OMG am I so happy that we are trying to go more simplistic, rather than, the world's largest magnets, powered by 2 hydro dams to run 30 seconds of immense electricity just to power those magnets and lasers and they have to create the gases to create the plasma which they said also has a cost, THEN even if that does produce NET energy, HOW DO we store all of that energy for use!!!??? It just seems so overly complicated and energy taxing that I really really really find this approach just fresh to even consider and to realize that "Hey maybe their are really really smart people out there that also think the current attempt to net fusion isn't efficient for energy production." ~those magnetic plasma chambers are good for research purposes tho.. surely they could be good test tools...

As soon as he said BFG, my mind took me back to my Quake days.

Excellent video, very well explained, thank you.

Of course, not only does the reactor need to produce energy in excess of the input to cause the reaction, but also in excess of the energy requirement for producing the fuel, operating the entire facility, and delivering the energy, otherwise the system is a net loss

The magnetic confinement inside a fusion reactor is not to squeeze atoms together (they operate at quite low pressure, from near vacuum to only a few atmospheres of pressure), but to keep the hot plasma from touching the walls so it doesn't cool down. We can never reproduce the pressure inside stars, but may be able to get around it by making the plasma much hotter then in stars.

Well delivered video. Gets my subscription and share!

Much better explained than other videos

How much energy does it take to power the railguns and manufacturing the precision ammo, compared to output levels?

Huh, firing a projectile super fast into some fuel. Would have thought it would have come from the US😜

Great work buddy.. :)

Another exceptional video. I really enjoyed it.

The problem with fusion using any kind of manufactured targets is the cost and repeat rate required. If they're only do one shot every 5 seconds and they want to get a reasonable amount of energy out of the process, let's say 100 MWe (a very small powerplant), that means 300 MWth, which means 1.5 GJ/shot, which is 360 kg TNT equivalent. That's not all blast (and neither is TNT...) but it's a lot of blast; way too much for comfort. So the conclusion then is that targets need to be smaller and they need to repeat this ~10 times per second. And then you're running into the opposite type of problem, each blast generates too little energy to pay for itself unless the targets are incredibly cheap. At 10 times per second and 100 MWe that's 3 kWh per target; each precision manufactured target containing carefully measured and handled deuterium and radioactive tritium has to cost

I mean, they probably only tell the shareholders and public that it's called the "Big Friendly Gun", The engineers will be doom fans

10 years? I've been hearing that for 50 years. I'll believe it when I see it.

"big friendly gun" sold me

I don't trust bussines people at this technical level if they don't released peer reviewed papers. It sounds like a scam. Also, no gunpowder is able to achieve that high speed. The railgun aproach is even worst because they want to accelerate a ball of copper weighting half a gram or more to 20-30km/s in JUST 5 milimeters! That would involve a huge burst of energy probably similar to the largest lasers available today, a far from cheap process! Either this is a scam or your information is way off! Either they detail it on a scientific paper or I keep my word its a scam!

We need to develop liquid fueled nuclear fission, i.e. molten salt reactors. They could be configured to burn nuclear "waste" given their much higher theoretical efficiency compared to solid fuel; and given their low pressure, high temperature operation, they allow for much more diverse applications and inherent safety compared to light water. It's not the "holy grail" of fusion, but it's a radical step forward that isn't getting the attention it deserves.

This is incredibly clever!

I gave up on speculating if fusion will be a thing sooner or later. Now I just take the approach that it will happen when it happens and it will be worth the wait.

I believe that an all of the above strategy works best. While we may never achieve working commercial fusion, advances coming out of research in the area are paying for itself in applications in other areas. For example the AI research coming out of predicting plasma turbulence and magnetic field abnormalities is also very useful for other fields in which rapid real-time AI results are required. But there is no fundamental reason that fusion cannot work. While it is true that the boffins doing the research are constantly predicting a working reactor in 20 or 30 years, it is also true that nothing has been discovered in all this time that indicates that eventually, we will not succeed. Imagine if we were trying to make a perpetual motion machine, or a faster than light engine, or something else that we have real reasons to believe are simply impossible. The fact of the matter is that mankind will eventually be able to produce fusion reactions with a total output of the power plant having a Q > 1. In other words, we will eventually succeed in the scientific parts of this question. The real problem is that we have no similar assurance that this will ever be able to be done economically. For example, lets say we have a power plant that generates a ridiculous amount of power that is completely free. But the nature of the reaction means the thing has to be shut down every few weeks and rebuilt at a 100 million dollars a whack cost. The first plants will be exactly like that, mark my words. It will take us a while before we figure out a mechanism to generate fusion energy without eating the power plant every few weeks or months. The neutron flux will be incredible no matter what reaction you use. And neutrons are bad for structural steel. They get absorbed and change the metal and create defects.

This and NIF feel like they're a bit overcomplicated when it comes to the fuelling process; I mean you have to make *a lot* of individual components to a high standard of precision to run this machine, for, say, one day (that's 17,280 shots every 24 hours, assuming one shot every five seconds, so that's 17280 impactors and 17280 fuel capsules(?) per day!) whereas tokamaks like ITER plan to use comparatively simple solid D-T fuel pellets through extrusion which are then just fired into the plasma to keep it running.

Just like a Kickstarter project ! We can only wish it can happen!

This is what should have been invested in by the government here in the UK for years.