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Like, Swaley, do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate it. I've seen him, and I'm like, "Man, I still got so much more to do." Like, "Friends." He's got like 30 albums.
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Listen to drink champs from the Black Effect podcast network on the iHeart Radio App. Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It just came out. Jamie, what did you just do?
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I've never told this story. This must have been tucked deep deep in the Jeremy Linfile. My name is MC Jin, excited to tell you about laugh, but not least. I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times.
“These will be conversations that remind us all life is hard.”
laugh harder. Listen to laugh but not least with MC Jin on the iHeart Radio App Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey everybody, I'm back. I first heard about Ider, which is the nuclear fusion reactor
being built in Europe from a new Yorker article called "Star in a Bottle" by Rafi Kachadurian. And if you find this episode of "Float Your Boat" I highly recommend reading that article too. The whole idea of what they're trying to do
which is to contain plasma that crazy intense fourth state of matter that the sun and lightning are made up of into a chamber here on Earth where it has no business being really, really caught my attention.
And if they can do it, extremely cheap, abundant,
climate-friendly energy will be unlocked for all and who knows what will follow after that. The Ider group was shooting for 2025 to start but recently changed their date to 2034. You can pass the time while you wait
by enjoying this episode. - Welcome to "Stuff You Should Know." From howstuffworks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, this childhood.
“We took a prank, there's Jerry, these barrel laughs.”
And this is stuff you should know. - To give us the old quick start. - Yep. - Like, I don't want to hear any more impressing record. - Yeah, she knows it shuts me up.
- Great, at least cuts off whatever conversation I'm chiding her with. - It was great, I'm telling you, if we could release the 20 seconds before each show as its own show.
- Yeah. - It would be terrible. - Yeah, no one would care. - No. We'd think it was fun, everybody else would be like,
you added this out for a reason. - Yup. - So Chuck, how you doing? - Great. Have you ever been to Ason ProVance?
Frost? - No. Is that a place? - Yeah, no, I haven't. - It is a rustic little town in ProVance.
And it is strangely, maybe even ironically, in the non-Hipster use, but in the actual, yeah, it's a real word. - Definition of the word. - Nah. Also, site to one of the most futuristic,
engineering projects humanity's ever undertaken. - Me, weren't me, it's a sound it makes. - Oh, I thought you were mocking me. - No, no, no. - We're being thrilled by the thought of this thing.
- No, it is kind of funny that this thing's in a sleepy little town. It's like a hamlet, maybe even. - Certain in Switzerland, that's not in the city. Is it, no, you can't build these in cities. That's why they're in sleepy towns.
- Exactly, 'cause no one knows they're being poisoned. - Yeah, and you can push the mayor around pretty easy. - Exactly. - This thing is called iter, iter, iter, which is an acronym for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
- That's right. - Which really gets the point across. - Did you know the word acronym is an acronym? (chuckles) - That's not true.
- Okay, I just want to see how long you are trying to sort it out in your head. - I want to keep going. - I know what it means, 30 seconds, maybe. - That would've been a great joke.
Okay, I just kept it going, like, I'm not gonna tell you. - I would've been, it would've, maybe 15 seconds, 'cause you would've got that much more. - Sure. - So, I wouldn't have looked it up,
I would've figured it out myself. Anyway, iter is this a colossal engineering project. Somebody compared it to the pyramids at Giza. - Oh, wow. - Yeah, that's exciting stuff, sure.
The thing is, it's a nuclear fusion reactor,
and it's the culmination of decades of attempts to create a nuclear fusion reactor. - Yes. - 'Cause we've got a fission down,
“and we'll talk about the difference in a minute.”
- Yeah. - But fusion has been very elusive, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the Iter project. - Yeah. - Because the thing is going to cost
an approximately $50 billion when it's completed,
$50 billion dollars, they started in 1993, they're hoping to turn on the switch in 2020, but it's looking like 2023 or 2024. And it won't be starting to produce anything until the 2004 it is at the earliest.
So what's the point? I'll tell you the point, yeah. If we can figure out nuclear fusion chucking, the worlds, literally, the world's energy problems, will be solved for millennia.
- Yeah. If we can just figure this out, we will have a almost no radio activity nuclear option. - Yeah. - Almost limitless fuel supply. - Yeah.
- Totally green, clean, no pollution, no greenhouse emissions. - Right, and with plenty of energy to spare. - Yeah.
“- Using the already extant infrastructure”
we have to supply power. Like you don't have to completely rebuild everything. You can just, to the electrical cables outside. It'll be the exact same thing. Yeah, you can just go to a nuclear fusion reactor
and press the button that says fusion and it'll all of a sudden join atoms instead of split them. - Exactly. - Exactly. - That's what the difference is.
With fusion, you're splitting atoms and you're gaining energy from that. With fusion, you're smacking them together. - Yeah. - And you're gaining even more energy
because you're exploiting a different fundamental force. - Yeah, and that was being coi, clearly there is no button because we would've pushed it a long time ago. - Yeah.
- And when I say no pollution and no greenhouse emissions before the pedantic among you right in, we know that just even shipping something from here to there causes pollution and greenhouse emissions. - Good, good.
- But we're talking about the output of the reactor itself is very green.
“- So if you want to know all about iter,”
well, we're gonna talk about it here there because it just can't talk about nuclear fusion reactors and not mention iter. But if you want to know a lot about iter, there is a really great article called
"A Star in a Bottle" and it's by a person named Morothy Kachadurian, or Durian, and it was written in the New Yorker, not too long ago. - Yeah.
- And man, it is every detail you want to know about the Iter Project written really well. And it's long, but it's totally worth the read. - Yeah, it's all over the news lately and for good reason, you said a lot of energy.
And have a stat, gonna throw back to the old days here. Per kilogram of fuel, if we're talking fusion and fission. - Lay it on me. - Fusion produces four times more energy than fission. - I saw seven.
- It's probably one of the things or it's like four to five to ten or something. - Right.
- I found four times, and ten million times more than coal.
- Yeah. - Ten million times, the energy is coal. - Yeah. - And that's with equal fuel per kilogram of fuel. - Right.
- It's just, I mean, it is the future. - Yeah, and you can say, well, that's great 'cause we want 18 million times the amount of power that coal provides. You can say, whoa, they're buddy.
You can also bring it backwards because you can supply an awful lot of power then with a lot less fuel. - Yeah. - Like the advantage of nuclear fusion
or mind boggling and very few downsides which we'll get to, of course. - Yeah, I mean, like really genuinely, it's not just like some, like, here's all the great stuff about it and just don't pay attention
to all these, like really horrible asses. - Yes. - Like there really aren't too many downsides. So the downside is we are at this moment incapable of successfully creating
a commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor. That's right. But we've got an understanding of what the challenges are ahead of us. Thanks to the last 50 or so years
of really, really, really smart physicists working on the problem of nuclear fusion. And the great inspiration for nuclear fusion is the Sun. The Sun and all stars like it are enormous
immense nuclear fusion reactors. So if you are building a nuclear fusion reactor here on Earth, you're essentially creating a star and that is a very difficult thing to do it turns out. - Yeah, the Sun creates, and now we talked about the Sun
and our very famous episode on the Sun.
The Sun creates 620 million metric tons.
It fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen
At its core every second.
So every second at the Sun's core,
it produces enough power to light up New York City for 100 years. New York City every second. And that's the Sun. And all we wanna do is do the same thing
on a much smaller scale. - Great.
“- I think the guy, there's his kid who built one”
and his garage and he said he wanted to press all this head talk. He wanted to create a star in a box, is what he called it. - Yeah, I've seen it like this New Yorker called it a star in a bottle. - Yeah, this kid's name is Taylor Wilson.
And he's a nuclear physicist and he's like 16. - Wow. - And he created the house there. - Yeah, he created a successful one. And the key though is not to be able to create the fusion,
the key is to be able to harness enough plasma which we'll get to at a high enough temperature and density for there to be a net power gain. - Right, you can create fusion. But in order to get out more than you're putting in
is the only thing that matters 'cause what you wanna do is create electricity. - Exactly, there's two huge challenges right now to nuclear fusion. We pretty much understand it enough to start it going
and get energy from it.
The problem is, is material science
isn't at a point where it can build a containment vessel to really house a thermonuclear reactor. - Yeah.
“- And then the other big obstacle is like you said,”
"Net energy gain." Like if you're putting in as much or more energy than you're getting out of your nuclear reactor, then you're wasting energy and it's the opposite of what you're supposed to be doing.
- Yeah, they're not just trying to impress people with their science knowledge. - No, but up to the trying to create energy. Up to now though, Chuck, like every single thermonuclear reactor that's ever been built has just been impressing people
with knowledge. - Sure. - They haven't gotten any energy out of a single thermonuclear fusion reactor. - Oh, see, I have that they have right now
they're up to like 10 presently, they're at 10 megawatts. - Was that right? - Yeah. - And that's more than they put into it. - A net gain of 10 megawatts currently.
- Everything I saw was when we turned this thing on, it should have a net gain. - Yeah. - But I didn't see that they've actually done it. - Yeah, 10 megawatts now and it is gonna produce
500 megawatts once it's fully operational. - Right. So the next challenge then is this. If we're already getting a net energy gain out of it, then that means that the net energy gain
is it's not sustainable. Like you said, you wanna keep the thing going so you don't have to keep starting from scratch to power it up.
You want it to basically be self-sustaining.
- Yeah. - So you just have to add a little more fuel to the dream. - So let's talk about the history of fusion reactors, Chuck. - Yeah, it kind of goes back to this guy.
Name Lyman Spitzer. He's a 36 year old Princeton astrophysicist and this is in the 1950s. And he was recruited to work on the H bomb. And one out and got a copy of a paper
that was released from Germany, I think, right? - No, I think. - Argentina. - Argentina. - Oh Argentina?
- Yeah, they announced that they had that wrong. They had successfully built a fusion reactor. - Right. So he gets this paper, goes on a ski trip. Starts thinking about how he can do this.
Takes a little break from his job building the H bomb and figures out, I think it's possible if we can harness this plasma, I guess we should just go ahead and define what plasma is since we keep saying it. - Well, there's the normal three energy states
that we're familiar with water, solid and gas. Liquid solid and gas, right? - Right. - There's a fourth one, it's plasma. And plasma is basically like an energetic gas
where the temperatures are so high that whatever atoms you put into it, the electrons are stripped off and allowed to move around freely. - Basically the surface of the sun is plasma.
“That's what plasma is, it's a gas, it's a roiling gas.”
It's really hard to control and is really unpredictable. - Which is when you see the sun like that rippling, wavy looking thing, that's plasma. - Right, and the reason the sun manages to stay together is because it is enormously massive
and has a ton of gravity at its core. - Yeah, we don't have that advantage here on Earth. - We don't, so we try to make up for that by increasing the temperature, that's right. And he was on to a way back then in the 1950s,
if we can just harness this, if we can just get it hot enough. And he created a tabletop device called the Stellarator. And it was in a figure eight position. It was a pipe and a figure eight. And this would keep things from banging into walls
theoretically. - Yeah. - And he was on to something because, well, we'll get to Lockheed later but they're using a similar device now, a figure eight.
- Oh, yeah?
- Yeah, we didn't realize that was a figure eight.
It is, which is weird because what they eventually found out was that a donut shape was really the key to get that net gain. - So the reason that they found out that a donut shape worked
“was because in the, I think the late 50s,”
the U.S. had run up against the wall, they're saying, like, okay, we've got this but we can't control the plasma because think about it, what you're trying to do is create a star inside something. But it can't touch any of the vessel that it's in
or else it'll just completely erupt it, right? Yeah, they compared it to holding jelly and rubber bands. - Right, it was just, like, you can't, they couldn't figure out how to control the plasma. - Yeah.
- So when the U.S. ran up against this wall, they said, hey, rest of the world,
we're gonna declassify what Lyman Spitzer has been doing.
- Help us out. - And, like, we'll share if you guys share when it turns out that the Russians had already come up against this problem and licked it, they figured out that if you put the thing in it,
what's called a toroidal shape, a donut shape. Using electro magnets, you can tame the plasma essentially. And the donut shape itself was pretty ingenious, but the real stroke of genius was by running electro magnets in rings around the donut.
So it's like, you have a donut, and you put a bunch of earrings around it, right? And those are electro magnets, so you're creating an electro magnetic force field, which contains the plasma. But then you also put an electro magnetic force field
in the middle of the plasma. So not only does it heat it up to the temperatures you want, it also stabilizes it further. So the Russians are invented what they call the talk a Mac, which is this donut shape, nuclear fusion reactor
that basically became the standard for the next 50 years or so.
- Yeah, you basically could achieve a really dense, super hot plasma, and we'll get into temperatures and stuff in a bit. But since we can't create that kind of pressure that they have in the sun, due to their gravity,
their gravity, the sun's gravity. You know, the sun, all those people. - Yeah. - Like you said, we had to make up for it here on Earth with temperatures.
- Right, because apparently, if you are in the middle of a nuclear reactor, a nuclear fusion reactor, you're going to find that the temperatures inside are about six times hotter than the core of the sun. Not even the services on the core of the sun.
And the reason why it has to be so much hotter is because, like you said, we can't replicate that density. - Yeah. - We can get to those temperatures that we need, but we can't get to the density.
So we have to make up for it. So we'll talk about kind of the physics of what's going on here
“and why you have to have high temperatures and what we're”
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(upbeat music) - So Chuck, we're talking about nuclear fusion. And it's actually surprisingly understandable at its most basic core. Yeah, you're fusing atoms.
It's not the hardest thing in the world to wrap your head around.
- Yeah, so with fission, we're splitting atoms. You're taking an atom and you're splitting its nuclei apart. You're splitting the neutrons and the protons apart from one another. And when you do that, one of the four fundamental forces,
electromagnetic force pushes them away and you get this burst of energy.
“- Yeah, with fusion, you're taking nuclei from different atoms.”
You're taking protons and neutrons and you're smashing them together. And when you do that, you're unleashing what's called the strong force, which appropriately enough is stronger than electromagnetic force,
which is why nuclear fusion yields more energy than nuclear fission. - Yeah, Einstein himself said, you know, each time you smash these things together, you're gonna lose a little bit of mass.
And that little bit of mass is a ton of energy as it turns out. - That's right, the famous E equals MC squared. - Yeah, and I don't think he realized in 1905 or maybe Einstein did. - Einstein probably did.
- Yeah, Einstein probably did. - I would guess he did.
- Yeah, so the problem is, even though it is very easy
to smash some protons together, there is a tremendous amount of resistance to that smashing together. They don't want to smash together. - No, because it's just like if you take a magnet,
two magnets. And you put the positive poles toward one another. They repel one another, right? - Yeah. - Same thing, that's the same principle
on an atomic level two. If you take protons, which are positively charged particles and try to put them together, they repel one another. And the closer you get them together, the stronger the repellent force is,
the electromagnetic force, right? But, if you can get them close enough, the electromagnetic force is overcome by that strong force. The strong nuclear force, and they become bound together.
Because the strong force is that one of those four fundamental forces of the universe, and that is the force that keeps atoms together. And that is that force is stronger than the force that repels like charged particles.
- Yeah, and when you talk about close, they need to be within one times 10 to the negative 15 meters of one another. - Right, so that is use. - If you indulge me?
- Sure, you're gonna read a bunch of zeros. - Yeah. - It's point zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one meters apart.
“- Right, that's how close they have to be.”
- That's right, to get them to accept one another and to fuse. - Right. - I think, I have a theory that if they're not fusing because they think they're gonna be made into a bomb, and if we told them that when we're creating energy,
they might be more willing to fuse together. - Yeah, because protons are peace next, everybody knows that. - Sure. - So, when they do fuse together, right,
when you do cross that threshold and the strong force takes over and over comes the electromagnetic force. Like we said, a tremendous amount of energy is released. And it's released in part in the form of neutrinos,
neutrons, right, which are, right, neutral particles, which suddenly start carrying a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. So let's say you have one atom, you got another atom, and they're both like,
I'm not getting close to you, we're not gonna get to, okay, we got together. - Yes. - That force, that mass that's displaced is transferred through the neutron
that gets kicked off of the atom, right? - Yeah. - And it's carried out. Now, a neutron doesn't have any kind of positive or negative charge, it's neutral, it's a neutron, yeah.
Which means that it can pass through the very electromagnetic fields that are keeping this plasma where this reaction is taking place together. Once that happens, Chuck, it can go out to what's called a blanket wall in a thermonuclear reactor,
warm it, and then that heat is transferred into a water cooling system. The water's warmed up, turns steam, which generates a, I guess moves the turbine, and then all of a sudden the turbine's producing electricity.
- Yeah, it's funny how it just gets so complex,
All you're still trying to do is create steam.
- Yeah, it's like turning a turbine.
“- It's like cooking the ISS up to a horse, right?”
- Yeah. - Move it over there. - So there are a few types of fusion reactions. The ultimate goal right now, what we can do on a small scale is what's called a
deuterium, tritium reaction, yeah. That's the one that we can currently achieve. That's one atom of deuterium and one atom of tritium, combining deformed a helium for atom and a neutron. - Yeah.
- The ultimate goal, I mean, that's good, and that'll create a lot of energy, but there are a few downsides. Tritium is radioactive for one. - You have to mine it from lithium.
- Yeah, and lithium's fairly rare. - Sure. The ultimate goal is to reach deuterium, deuterium reactions, which is two deuterium atoms,
combining deformed that helium three and a neutron,
and you can get that from the sea water. It's abundant, almost limitless, and I couldn't find this, but I think clean water can be a residual effect of this. - Am I wrong?
- I don't know if it's, well, you're probably not injecting water, but to get the deuterium, I mean,
“desalination plants are the key to the future”
as far as supplying the world with fresh water. - Yeah, I thought it saw somewhere where it was an actual byproduct, but yeah, but then I couldn't find it, so I'm not sure if that's right or not.
- You know what, you just jog my memory. I feel like in a hydrogen-powered car, water is one of the byproducts. - So maybe so. - Yeah.
- All right, don't go up me on that though. - For the very least, it's a great way to create energy. - Right, and what, you also can get tridium from helium, I believe.
So even now, with the deuterium tridium reactions that we're working on, there's already, there's a work around, you know? Like you can create a thermonuclear reactor that's a breeding reactor
to where the byproduct helium can be used to harvest more of the fuel you're using tridium. - Yeah, don't we run in low on helium? - We are, which is like, remember when we were talking about the dergable, the zeppelin?
- Which one was it? - Well, how blimp's work? - Yeah, and then a long time ago we did one on the Mars turbine. - Yeah, Mars turbine works.
- Yeah, but yes, there's very clearly a helium shortage in the idea that we're just using it for party balloons, rather than this, yeah, is scary. - Yeah, and don't be confused if we say things like deuterium
and it sounds super complex. All that is hydrogen with an extra neutron. - Yeah, it's a nice atop. - Yeah, so there's three isotopes of hydrogen. And they're all still the same element.
They're all still hydrogen, but they have different configurations as far as their neutrons go. So proteum is a hydrogen isotope with one proton and no neutrons, deuterium is a hydrogen isotope with one proton and one neutron and tridium
is a hydrogen isotope with one proton and two neutrons. And like you said, tridium is radioactive, but the beauty of it is you need very, very, very little of it to fuel a nuclear fusion reactor and it becomes a stable helium, a non-radioactive helium
in the reactor. So you don't have this leftover radioactive fuel.
“- Yeah, I think they said there's a equivalent”
of the radiation we just see every day and walking around on the street, right? - Yes, the background radiation, I believe. I saw that too. The thing is is the parts to the nuclear reactor,
themselves will become irradiated over time. Apparently though compared to the kind of radio activity that's generated from nuclear vision, this stuff you could just disassemble and bury in the desert for 100 years, go back and dig back up
and it'll be totally inactivated. So it's the stuff that is radioactive is extraordinarily manageable. - Yeah, it is, and like I said, we don't wanna make it sound like this is perfect.
There is, they do predict the short to medium term radioactive waste problem. And they say that's due to activation of the structural materials, right? - The actual thermo nuclear device itself.
- Yeah, and while you don't need much tridium, even a few grams of tridium is problematic. But hopefully, you know, there's no accident. Although they say accidents with these, if you just turn the power off, it stops everything.
- Yeah. - It's not like a chain reaction can occur like a vision reactor. - And there's not a doubt of your control. - There's not a meltdown, which also, if you want
to know more about that, go listen to our how nuclear meltdown's work episode. That was pretty good. We really sit right after Fukushima. - Yeah. - But it applies to all fission reactors.
- That's right.
- So the goal is ultimately,
do-terium, do-terium reactions, where your pair sounds to come together. It does. And the reason why is, again, it's abundant fuel. You can get it from desalinating sea water.
Then, secondly, it's not radioactive at any point.
So it wouldn't make the thermo nuclear reactor itself radioactive. - That's right.
“- The reason why we're not doing that already”
is because we can't achieve the temperatures necessary. - That's right. Which leads us to the two big stumbling blocks. Everyone knows this is a great idea. There's no one out there saying,
"Oh, I don't know about this fusion thing." Creating a star in a box sounds kind of weird.
The problem is the barriers that we have here on planet Earth,
which is one temperature into pressure. We have achieved the temperature, which is the requirements is 100 million Kelvin. Like you said, that's about six times hotter than the sun's core, which is pretty intense.
And the other is pressure. Like we said, we need to get them within, I'm not gonna make you read all those zeros again. But smash them that close in order to fuse. And since we don't have that kind of mass and gravity
that the sun does, there are a few pretty genius ways that we're working around that. - Yeah, there's basically two, as it stands. And then the Lockheed Martin one, which a lot of people are skeptical about, we should say,
it's kind of a variation on one theme. But there's basically there's two ways that we've figured out to create nuclear fusion reactors so far. One is using magnetic confinement.
And the other is using inertial confinement. So magnetic confinement uses that talk-a-mac technology. - Yeah, it's sort of like Surn, you know, it's using magnets to create pressure. I guess in Surn's case, we're using it to create speed.
But in this case, it's to create pressure. - Right, so what you're doing is you have a, you have this donut shape chamber and that's your reaction chamber. And then again, rings around the donut
that go around the inside and outside of the donut. I know I'm kind of imagining wonderful donuts - We're doing homework sums in here. They create electromagnetic fields.
“Now, remember, this plasma is hydrogen gas”
that's been heated up to a temperature so hot that the electrons just float off and move around freely. - Yes. - And because of this higher temperature, these particles have become really, really energized.
So they're moving and bouncing all over the place and the pressure's building up. But because electrons are negatively charged and because protons are positively charged, if you use alternating electromagnetic fields,
you can contain this plasma so that it's a incredibly hot gas that's six times hotter than the core of the sun can be contained within the electromagnetic fields. - That's right.
And we talked about power and power out. You need about 70 megawatts of power to create this, to start this fusion reaction, but you're gonna yield about 500 megawatts. - That's the iter project I believe.
- Yeah, that's the iter and that's only a 300 to 500 second reaction. But like we said earlier, the eventual goal is that it's sustaining itself, - Right.
- Which is just a beautiful concept. - Yeah.
So basically what they do is they have the gas
is injected into the chamber, the hydrogen gas. And then there's the electromagnetic fields that are holding the plasma in place. But then remember, we said the Russians figured out that if you put an electromagnetic field
in the middle of the whole thing, it will stabilize that plasma, but it also heats it up. So it serves as double purpose. And then just to add a little extra temperature
they shoot it with microwaves and some other stuff. - Yeah. - And then heat it up and then as the plasma goes crazy and all the fusion energies released, the neutrons move their way outside
of the electromagnetic field into the blanket, which they heat up and the heat energy is transferred to power that turbine that's where I move the horse down the lane. And it's just creating steam.
“- Yeah and that's like that's what iter is doing right now.”
That's what they're trying to prove. And then also as iter spending billions and billions and billions of dollars in running into tons of delays, it's an amazing project.
Lockheed Martin basically just came out and said,
oh by the way, this thing that you're trying to do that's gonna be a hundred feet tall and require staggering amounts of energy and money, we're doing one that puts out the same amount of energy as yours, but it's a tenth of the size,
which means it's almost out of the gate commercially viable. - Yeah, that is their skunk works division of Lockheed and they announced this three days ago here in mid-October and they've gotten a lot of blowback from the scientific community 'cause they wouldn't release data.
- They don't have data. They said it's a high beta device right now and kind of shut out the scientific community as far as questions go and every scientist that I saw interviewed for this said,
yeah, they're trying to get some attention
To get some partners to join in.
- Well yeah, plus it makes you wanna run out
“and buy Lockheed Martin stock because if one company”
can figure out how to create a thermonuclear fusion reactor here on Earth that's scalable, that fits in a truck. - Yeah, that person would be very wealthy. - Yeah, so it's a dubious claim, but they're working toward a good thing
and not like poopoing the whole thing. But until they have hard data and like some proof, then I think the scientific community has got their arms folded right now. - Yeah, and I mean, they have released some details.
It's just not detailed enough for a scientist. It's detailed enough for aviation week. - I bought it. - Yeah, they wrote an article on it.
And basically what the guy they interviewed was saying
was that over a item, they have a low beta ratio, which is the amount of electromagnetism that you need compared to the amount of plasma you can put into the chamber. - Yeah, so there's like 5% plasma to 95% electromagnetivity or electromagnetism, just to keep this plasma thing
from just blowing up, because that can happen. - Sure. - They might not melt down, but if everything went wrong, the whole thing could blow up.
“- Well, and you know what an atomic bomb is,”
it's a fusion reaction. - Right, and this is a lot of those, I'll put together in 100 foot tower. This guy was saying that the beta ratio for their machine is like 100%.
So what he was saying is they figured out a way, and again, it's not very detailed, but they figured out a way to contain the plasma, but in a way that also allows it to expand. - Yeah.
- Because if you think about it, the more plasma there is,
the more hydrogen atoms there are, the more hydrogen atoms, more isotopes there are, the more nuclear fusion reactions are events, you can have the more energy you can yield, right? - Yeah.
- So they're saying they figured out how to contain the plasma, but again, like you said, the scientific community is really skeptical because they think it's just a PR slime. - Well, I think they made the mistake by saying they invented a magicometer
to make it all happen, and don't ask about it. - Yeah, right. - I did see though that where Lockheed was using the figure eight, the stellar eight, or configuration. - Yeah.
- And I think that's true. I tried to found a couple of more sources that were kind of vague about it,
“and I think the details on it are just vague period,”
but I don't know why they would have been in the donut shape that figure eight was, you know, 1950's technology that's sort of been disproven. - Well, supposedly their whole jam was that the even in the donut, in the Takamak,
this donut shaped reactor, plasma has a tendency to just move around and make it to way out. Like it's still not fully contained,
and they're using something basically mirrors
to catch the plasma that's getting out and moving it to parts of the electromagnetic field that are less dense, so there's a bunch of protons in this part of the field that field is being strained, but then maybe there's not that many protons over here,
so they use mirrors to direct the protons to the low density area, I'll keep it all even. - Of the field, yeah, to even the whole thing out, which makes sense, but again, if you're not releasing data, don't expect the scientific community to buy it.
- You got that right. - So there's another way to build a thermonuclear reactor that's currently being worked on, too, and we'll talk about that right after this. ♪ Stuff is true ♪
- Hey, I'm Hoda Kattby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kattby, together. We're gonna have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Mann shared
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the most part of the question, I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kattby on the I-Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- June is black music month, and on the drink champs podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture. Like Swaley, do you realize how legendary you are? - I appreciate it. I've seen it, but I'm like,
"Man, I still got so much more to do." Like Prince, he's got like 30 albums. We've got like five right now. That's the rate we gotta be going. - Yeah, that's a good attitude.
You also hear stories from industry legends and hip-hop pioneers, like Fab5 Freddy. - I directed when Naz is their early video. - Which one? - One love.
- Wow. - I literally filmed in his apartment in Queens bridge. His mom's been still up in that apartment. Naz was just beginning to take off. His pop shoes to live near me in Harlem.
His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff, and he made a young prodigy. No matter the era, drink chance brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to drink chance from the black effect podcast
network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. (upbeat music) - Mainstream media is full of cruel depictions
Of the unhoused stories that shane,
m blame, and paint the unhoused as a monolith.
“We the unhoused is the podcast that's changing that.”
Tom Deohenderson, creator, and host, and for years I've created a space where the unhoused and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed on house parents, immigrants,
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Toon in this week for my interview with Dr. Jill Wichord, a street doctor, turned in slow answer, who's worked with the unhoused community as made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to We the Unhoused on the iHeart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. ♪ Stuff is true love ♪ - So, buddy, magnetic confinement is pretty neat. And we talked about that, and that's understandable and I love it, I wanna date it.
But internal confinement, I wanna marry because it has lasers. At the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, they are actually using laser beams. They have a device called the NIF device,
where they focus 1952 laser beams on a single point, and a 10-meter diameter target chamber called a hall realm. That's gotta be German. And basically inside that target chamber, they have a little tiny pea-sized pellet of deteriorium tridium,
and a little plastic cylinder. It's funny that it can be plastic somehow. - Yeah, you think it would introduce like impurities or something into it. - Yeah, or it would need to be like iron,
or something, I don't know, it just seems unstable.
But that is 1.8 million joules of power
from these lasers that's gonna heat the cylinder up, generate some x-rays, and then that radiation will convert that pellet into plasma and compress it. So again, they're creating plasma, but instead of smashing it together with magnets,
they're super heating it with lasers. - So that's your, your money's on that one. I just think it's neat 'cause I like lasers. - But that's your preference of the two. - Yes, well actually, what's everyone works
is gonna be my preference. Okay. (laughs) And that one all yields 50 to 100 times more energy, more energy out than energy put in. - I got you.
- So that's a good goal. - So yeah, I guess basically the whole point of magnetic confinement is that if you can do without electromagnes, you're, you have a more simple and elegant - I mean, internal confinement or inertial.
“- Yeah, that's what I mean, inertial confinement.”
Basically, the whole thing just happens so fast, you don't even need these magnets to confine plasma because you're not creating the sustained ignition, right? - Yeah, I might have said internal confinement before, by the way.
- It's inertial. - Yeah, no. - That's all right. - So what about cold fusion buddy? That was all the rage I remember back in the '80s.
- Yeah, because in 1989, some researchers said that they successfully created nuclear fusion using just room temperature stuff, like palladium. They took palladium and banana peels and beer cans. Pretty much heavy water, which had a deuterium in it,
and they put the whole thing together and created nuclear fusion without the high temperatures into the name cold fusion. And if you can get around these high temperatures, then you work out the whole material science problem, right?
And if you work out the whole material science problem, then this is a desirable thing that have cold fusion.
The problem is a lot of scientists try to replicate
these guys' findings and weren't able to. So basically, they were kicked of the curb.
“- So does that mean, has cold fusion been abandoned?”
Or are people still trying to get on that train? - No, in 2005, some UCLA researchers basically said, we think we might have this thing down. And they did, that's something called pyroelectric crystal fusion.
- Pyroelectric fusion. - These are crystal. - Yeah, well, basically, it's the same result. They do what would be called cold fusion. The problem is, it has a negative energy yield.
You have to put in a lot more energy than you get out of it. - Right, well, that's no good. - No. - It seems like they are making head-away more
than Lockheed despite their claim. They are being, like we said, it's in Europe. And it's being financed by a bunch of different countries. The U.S. is in, but they're kicking in,
I think the least amount, only about 17 million euros
last year, of course, we contributed to dollars, but they're giving it to us in euros. - Right. - I think the EU spends the most about 80 million
South Korea and China kicked in about 20 and 19 million
respectively each.
And I saw earlier where Russia was involved,
but then I didn't see what they had contributed financially. - Yeah, they did. - Are they still, all right, well, maybe they're just, we're writing a chip for them for later. They'll just pay us back.
But it is a very expensive prospect. And you need countries getting together for something like this is not the kind of thing that the U.S. can take on on their own. I guess, unless you're lucky, Martin.
- Right. - And you don't have to prove your data. - Right. So this nuclear fusion will see what happens. - Yeah, you got anything else?
- Man, no, I just say everybody should go read a star in a bottle on the New Yorker. It's really, really good. - Yeah, it's pretty neat. There, you can also go to Instructables
“if you want to build a nuclear fusion reactor”
in your garage. You can do so. You're not gonna create energy 'cause like we said, you're gonna be putting more than you get out.
But there are instructions in that kid, did it? His is a little more advanced than the Instructables one, obviously. But yeah, the 16 year old kid. - Yeah, he's amazing.
'Cause his was legit. He's done more than that, too. His TED Talk was pretty impressive, cool. He's like working on with home and security already for various projects that have nothing to do with this.
- Yeah, sure. - Well, if you want to learn more about nuclear fusion, you can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. And check before we do listener mail,
I wanna give a shout out to our Kiva team. - Yeah, for those of you who don't know, we did a podcast many years back on micro-lending. And Kiva, kiva.org is a organization where you can loan entrepreneurs
and, well, used to be just developing countries. Now, you can do it here in North America as well. $20 at a time that you can get paid back for. You can get your money back, if you're not happy. Or you can just keep re-loaning that money
and it helps them get their small business going. And we started Kiva team many years ago, and it is killing it. So you got some stats for us? - So basically, as of October 19th,
we have loaned, our team has loaned $2.7 million. - Two people in developing countries. - Nice. - And in the U.S. here there. And the big one is, we've exceeded 100,000 loans by our team.
Our team only has 8,079 members. So to all 8,079 of you guys, thank you. Way to go, congratulations.
- Yes, and thanks as always to Glenn and Sonia,
our Defacto Kiva, what would you call them? Presidents, presidents. - Presidents of the stuff you should know, team?
“- Yep, captains of the stuff you should know, team?”
- No, presidents. - Okay, presidents, presidents. Presidents, glints like yes, president. - Yeah, they've been really like keeping that going for us. - Yeah, and when you know, sometimes we'll forget
and Glenn will not just hate guys. Remember the Kiva team we should mention it. - Right, so the next goal we have is for $3 million in loans and we're on our way to it. So come join us.
We don't begrudge people who are late to the party. Just go to kiva.org/teams/stuffyshadowing. And you can sign up. - That's right. - So now it's time for Listener Mill, right?
(bell ringing) - Indeed, sir. I'm gonna call this a skywriting follow up from Australia. Hey guys, recently listened to how skywriting works and it reminded me of something.
Although this may not be suitable for Listener Mill, which I disagree actually 'cause I'm reading it. - Clearly. - I was maybe eight or nine when a few friends and I were out on the street playing
“and doing things at nine-year-old would do.”
It's so awkward to say that. - So you're not replacing something right there? - No. - Ah, why? - They were just doing nine-year-old things.
- Okay. Good clean fun. - We looked up and saw a plane starting to skywrite and we're instantly intrigued what was being written. They started with an H and then an O. This went on for maybe 20 minutes
until finally the word "hudders" was gorehaled across the sky. I'll be at backwards. So I guess they had the hudders restaurant, chicken wing chain in Australia.
- I guess they're rich kid. - Yeah, really immature and rich kid. - Yeah, or that. My brain couldn't comprehend how this person managed to screw up writing a word backwards.
The best reason my childish brain could come is that skywriting took place somewhere between us and a group of people that it was initially intended for that I just thought it was written up
and downwards rather than across the sky
until now I'd never understood or bothered to learn
why it was like that. So thank you for keeping the podcast great. Now let me figure that out, that is from Marlin. Oh boy, "Hapurachichi", "Hapurachichi". Nice, have you ever seen a word like that?
"Hapurachichi", "Hapurachichi", "Marlin"
from Sydney, Australia.
Man, thanks a lot, Marlin, H.
And that's Marlin with an A even. Oh yeah, Marlin, huh? Well, thanks a lot, Marlin. We're going to say like that, sure. If you have an awesome last name
and want to share it with us, you can tweet to us at S.Y.S.K Podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com/suffusionow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.
And as always, join us at our home-on-the-web stuff.
You should know.com. For more on this, and thousands of other topics, visit Howstuffworks.com. (upbeat music)
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- June is Black music month, and on the drink champs podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture.
“Like, Swaley, do you realize how legendary you are?”
- I appreciate it. I've been seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got so much more to do. Like, friends, he's got like 30 albums. We've got like five right now.
That's the rate we've got to be going. - Yeah, that's a good attitude. - No matter the era, drink champs brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to drink champs from the Black Effect podcast network
on the iHeart Radio app.
“Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.”
It just came out. - Jamie, what did you just do? You just sit yourself up for the earlier.
- I've never heard you tell this story.
- I've never told this story. - This must've been tucked deep deep in the Jeremy Linfile. - My name is MC Jin, excited to tell you about laugh, but not least.
I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times. These will be conversations that remind us all, life is hard, laugh harder. Listen to laugh but not least with MC Jin
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