#353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy - Transcripts

is a conversation with Dennis White, nuclear physicist at MIT and the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Rocket Money for helping you cancel on one of subscriptions, MasterClass for online education and InsideTracker for bio monitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Rocket Money, a personal finance app that finds and cancels unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending and helps you lower your bills all in one place. I use it especially to monitor my subscriptions.

What is nuclear fusion? Fusion is the underlying process that powers the universe. So as the name implies, it fuses together or brings together two different elements, technically nuclei, that come together and if you can push them together close enough that you can trigger essentially a reaction, what happens is that the element typically changes. So this means that you change from one element to another, the chemical element to another. Underlying what this means is that you change the nuclear structure, this rearrangement through equals MC squared releases large amounts of energy. So fusion is the fusing together of lighter elements into heavier elements. And when you go through it, you say, oh, look, so here were the initial elements, typically hydrogen, and they had a particular mass, rest mass, which means just the mass with no kinetic energy. And when you look at the product afterwards, it has less rest mass. And so you go, well, how is that possible? Because you have to keep mass, but mass and energy are the same thing, which is what E equals MC squared means. And the conversion of this comes into kinetic energy, namely energy that you can use in some way. And that's what happens in the center of stars.

life is viable in the universe. So fusion is happening in our sun.

And what are the elements? The elements are hydrogen that are coming together. It goes through a process, which is probably gets a little bit too detailed, but it's a somewhat complex catalyzed process that happens in the center of stars. But in the end, stars are big balls of hydrogen, which is the lightest, it's the simplest element, the lightest element, the most abundant element, most of the universe is hydrogen. And it's essentially a sequence through which these processes occur that you end up with helium. So those are the primary things. And the reason for this is because helium has features as a nucleus, like the interior part of the atom, that is extremely stable. And the reason for this is helium has two protons and two neutrons. These are the things that make up nuclei, that make up all of us along with electrons. And because it has two pairs, it's extremely stable. And for this reason, when you convert the hydrogen into helium, it just wants to stay helium and it wants to release kinetic energy. So stars are basically conversion engines of hydrogen into helium.

approximately, that's how long the fuel will last. But to do that kind of conversion,

you have to have extremely high temperatures. It is one of the criteria for doing this, but it's the easiest one to understand. And why is this? It's because effectively what this requires is that these hydrogen ions, or which is really the bare nucleus, so they have a positive charge. Everything has a positive charge of those ones, is that to get them to trigger this reaction, they must approach within distances which are like the size of the nucleus itself. Because the nature, in fact, what it's really using is something called the strong nuclear force. There's four fundamental forces in the universe. This is the strongest one. But it has a strange property is that it, while it's the strongest force by far, it only has impact over distances which are the size of a nucleus. So to get, let's just put that into, what does that mean? It's a millionth of a billionth of a meter, okay? Incredibly small distances.

of about 50 million degrees Celsius on Earth.

To perform fusion, fusion. To get enough fusion that you would be able to make, get energy gain out of it. So you can trigger fusion reactions at lower energy, they become almost vanishingly small

at lower temperatures than that. First of all, let me just link on some crazy ideas. So one, the strong force, just stepping out and looking at all the physics. Is it weird to you that there's these forces and they're very particular, like it operates at a very small distance and then gravity operates at a very large distance and they're all very specific and the standard model describes

three of those forces extremely well and there's. And this is one of them? Yeah, this is one of them.

And it's just all kind of works out. There's a big part of you that's an engineer. Did you step back and almost look

at the philosophy of physics? So it's interesting, because as a scientist, I see the universe through that lens of essentially the interesting things that we do are through the forces that are, get used around those. And everything works because of that. Richard Feiman had a hard to remember. He had Richard Feiman it's a little bit of a tangent, but he's never been on the podcast. He's never been on the podcast. He was unfortunately passed away. But one of like a, like a hero to almost all physicists and a part of it was because of what you said, he kind of looked through a different lens at these, what typically look like very dry, like equations and relationships. And he kind of, I think he brought out the wonder of it in some sense, right? For, for those, he posited what would be, if you could write down a single, not even really a sentence, but a single concept that was the most important thing scientifically that we, that we knew about that in other words, you had only one thing that you could transmit to like a future or past generation. It was very interesting. It was, um, so it's not what you think.

He's never been on the pod. So just atomic theory, basically. Yeah. By the 28. So one thing is to think about the number and the other is to start to to really ponder the fact that it all holds together yeah it all holds together and

you're actually that you're more of that than you are anything else yes exactly yeah no i mean there there are people who do study such things of the fact that if you look at the for example the ratios between those fundamental forces people have figured out oh if this ratio was different by some factor like a factor of two or something else like oh this would all like not work And I look, you look at the sun, right? It's like, so it turns out that there are key reactions that if they had slightly lower probability, no star would ever ignite. And then life wouldn't be possible.

It does seem like the universe set things up for us that it's possible to do some cool things, but it's challenging.

So that it keeps it fun for us. Yeah, yeah, that's the way I look at it. I mean, the multiverse model is an interesting one because there are quantum scientists who look at it and figure, oh, it's like, oh yeah. Like quantum science perhaps tells us that there are almost an infinite variety of other universes. But the way that it works probably is, it's almost like a form of natural selection. It's like, well, the universes that didn't have the correct or interesting relationships between these forces, nothing happens in them. So almost by definition, the fact that we're having this conversation means

that we're in one of the interesting ones by default. Yeah, one of the somewhat interesting, but there's probably super interesting ones where I tend to think of humans as incredible creatures. Our brain is an incredible computing device, but I think we're also extremely cognitively limited. I can imagine alien civilizations that are much, much, much, much more intelligent in ways we can't even comprehend in terms of their ability to construct models of the world,

to do physics, to do physics and mathematics. I would see it in a slightly different way. It's actually, it's because we have creatures that live with us on the earth that have cognition, right? That understand and move through their environment. But they actually see things in a way, or they sense things in a way which is so fundamentally different. It's really hard, like it's the problem is the translation, not necessarily intelligence. So it's the perception of the world. So I have a dog and when I go out and I see my dog, like smelling things, there's a realization that I have that he sees or senses the world in a way that I can never, like I can't understand it because I can't translate my way to this. We get little glimpses of this as humans though, by the way, because there are some parts of it, for example, optical information, which comes from light, is that now because we've developed the technology, we can actually see things. You know, I've had, I get this, you know, as one of my areas of research is spectroscopy. So this means the study of light, you know, and I get this quote unquote, see things or representations of them from, you know, the far infrared all the way to like hard, hard X-rays, which is several orders of magnitude of the light intensity, but our own human eyes, like see a teeny, teeny little sliver of this. So that even like bees, for example, see a different place than we do.

but it's like, those are already baffling in many ways, yeah. If we just focus in on the senses, there's already a lot of diversity, but there's probably things we're not even considering as possibilities. For example, whatever the heck consciousness is, could actually be a door into understanding some physical phenomenon. We're not, I haven't even begun understanding. So just like you said, spectroscopy, it could be a similar kind of spectrum for consciousness that we're just like, we're like these dumb descendants of apes walking around. It sure feels like something to experience the color red, but we don't have, it's the same as in the ancient times you experienced physics, you experienced light. It's like oh, it's bright, and you know. Yeah, and you construct kind of semi religious kind of

explanations. Yeah, semi religious kind of explanations. We might actually experience this faster than we thought we might be building another kind of intelligence. Yeah, and that intelligence will explain to us how silly we are, how silly we are. There was an email thread going around the professors in my department already of, so what is it going to look like to figure out if students have actually written their term papers or it's chat GPT. As usual, we tend to be empiricists in my field, so of course they were in there trying to figure out if it could answer questions for a qualifying exam to get into the PhD program at MIT. They didn't do that well at that point, but of course this is just

the beginning of it, so we have some interesting ones to go for. Eventually both the students and

the professors will be replaced by chat GPT and we'll sit on the beach and we'll sit on the beach. I really recommend, I don't know if you've ever seen them, it's called The Day the Universe Changed. This is James Burke. He's a science historian based in the UK. He had a fairly famous series on public television called Connections, I think it was, but the one that I really enjoyed was The Day the Universe Changed. The reason for the title of it was that the universe is what we know and perceive of it. When there's a fundamental insight as to something new, the universe for us changes. Of course, the universe from an objective point of view is the same as it was before, but for us it has changed. He walks through these moments of perception in the history of humanity that changed what we were. As I was thinking about coming to discuss this, people see fusion, it's still far away or it's been slow progress. When my godmother was born, people had no idea how stars worked. You talk about that day, that insight, the universe changed.

right? That was the 1930s. Was that a movie? Yeah. That was the 1930s. It seems like technology developing faster and faster and faster. I tend to think just like with chat GPT, I think this year it might be extremely interesting just with how rapid and how profitable the efforts in artificial intelligence are that just stuff will happen where our whole world is transformed like this. There's a shock and then the next day you kind of go on and you adjust immediately. You probably won't have a similar kind of thing with nuclear fusion with energy because there's there's probably going to be an opening ceremony and stuff, an announcement that take months. But with digital technology, you can just have immediate transformation of society and then it would be this gasp and then you kind of adjust like we always do. And then you don't even remember

just like with the internet and so on how the days worked before. And how it worked before, right? I mean fusion will be because it's energy, its nature is that it will be and anything that has to do with energy use tends to be a slower transition. But they're the most, I would argue, some of the most profound transitions that we make. I mean, the reason that we can live like this and sit in this building and have this podcast and people around the world is at its heart is energy use. And it's intense energy use that came from the evolution of starting to use intense energies at the beginning of the industrial revolution up to now. It's like, it's a bedrock actually of all of these, but it doesn't tend to come overnight.

Yeah. And some of the most important, some of the most amazing technology is one we don't notice, because we take it for granted, because it enables this whole thing.

Yeah, exactly, which is energy, which is amazing for how fundamental it is to our society and way of life is a very poorly understood concept, actually, just even energy itself, people confuse energy sources with energy storage, with energy transmission, these are different physical phenomena, which are very important. So for example, you know, you buy an electric car and you go, Oh, good. I have an emission free car. And, uh, ah, but it's like, so, so what, why do you say that? Well, it's cause if I draw the circle around the car, I have electricity and it doesn't admit any, anything. Okay. But you plug that into a grid where you follow that wire back, there could be a coal power plant or a gas power plant at the end of that, Oh, really mean, so this isn't like carbon free. Oh, and it's not their fault. It's just, you know, they don't, like the car isn't a source of energy. The underlying source of energy was the combustion of the fuel back somewhere.

Plus there's also a story of how the raw materials are mined in which parts of the world, uh, with sort of basic respect or, or a deep disrespect of human rights that happens in that money. So the whole supply chain, there's a story there that's deeper than just

the particular electric car with a circle around it. And the physics or the science of it too, is the energy use that it takes to do that digging up, which is also important and all that. Yeah. Anyway, so we wandered away from fusion, but yes, it's very important actually in the, in the context of this, just because, you know, those of us who work in, in fusion and these other kinds of, um, sort of disruptive energy technologies, it's, it's interesting. I do think about like, what would it, what does it going to mean to society to have an energy source that is like this, um, that, that would be like fusion, you know, which has, which has such completely different characteristics. You know, for example, you know, free, unlimited access to the fuel, but it has technology implications. So what does this mean geopolitically? What does it mean for how we, how we distribute wealth within our society? It's, it's, it's very difficult to know, but probably profound. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, it's a beautiful stroll. We're going to have to find another reason to start wars.

Um, first, instead of resources, we're going to, we've done a pretty

good job of that over the course of our history, the course of our history. So we talked about the forces of physics and again, sticking to the philosophical before we get to the specific technical stuff. E equals M C squared. You mentioned how amazing is that to you that energy and mass are the same. And what does that have to do with nuclear fusion?

So it has to do with everything we do. It's the fact that energy and mass are equivalent to do each other. They're just the way we usually comment to it is that they're just energy, just in different forms.

Can you intuitively understand that?

Yes, but it takes a long time. I, um, having for all, but usually often I've, I teach the, um, the inter introductory class for incoming nuclear engineers and, and so we put this up as an equation and we go through many, um, iterations of, of using this, uh, how you derive it, how you use it and so forth, and then you, usually in the final exam, I would give, uh, I would basically take all the equations that I've used before and I flip it around. I basically, instead of thinking about energy is equal to mass is sort of mass is equal to energy. And I asked the question a different way and usually what half the students don't get it, it takes a while to get that intuition. Yeah. Um, so, so in the end, it's interesting is that this is, is actually the source of all free energy, because that energy that we're talking about is kinetic energy, if it can be transformed from mass. So it turns out even, even though we, we used equals MC squared, this is burning coal and, and burning gas are, and burning wood is actually still equals MC squared. The problem is that you would never know this because the relative change in the mass is incredibly small, by the way, which comes back to fusion, which is that equals MC squared. Okay. So what does this mean? It tells you that the, the amount of energy that is liberated in a particular reaction, when you change mass has to, because C squared is, that's the speed of light squares, a large number. It's a very large number.

So is it is it correct to think of mass broadly as a kind of storage of energy? Yes You mentioned it's environmentally friendly. So Nuclear fusion is a source of energy. It's cheap clean safe So easy access to fuel and virtually unlimited supply no production of greenhouse gases little radioactive waste produced allegedly

Can you sort of elaborate why it's cheap clean and safe? Yes Mm-hmm. I'll start with the easiest one cheap It is not cheap yet because it hasn't been made at a commercial scale Ryan flies when you're having fun

Yes, Ryan flies when you're having yeah

But yes, not yet, but talk about actually we'll come back to that because it this is Cheaper or a more technically correct term that it's economic that it's economically interesting is is really the primary Challenge actually a fusion at this point

But I think we can get back to that. So what were the other ones you said so cheap we're actually when we're talking about cheap We're thinking like asymptotically like take it forward. Yeah several hundred years That's sort of because of how much availability there is of resources to use of the fuel you have the fuel

Yeah, we should separate those two the fuel will all the fuel is already cheap. It's basically free, right? Now what I mean by basically free, so if if we were to be using fusion fuel sources to power Your and it's like that's all we had was fusion power plants around and we were doing it the fuel cost per person or something Like 10 cents a year. It's like it's free. Okay This is why it's hard to in some ways I think it's hard to understand fusion because people see this and go oh if the fuel is free This means that energy source is free because we're used to energy sources like this So we, you know, we spend resources and drill to get gas or oil, or we chop wood or we make coal, we find coal or these things, right? So fusion, this is what makes fusion. And it's also, um, it's not an intermittent renewable energy source, like wind and solar. It's just like, but this is, this makes it hard to understand. So if you're saying the fuel is free, why isn't the, like, why isn't the energy source free and it's because of the necessary technologies, which must be applied to basically recreate the conditions which are in stars in the center of stars, in fact. So there's only one natural place in the universe that fusion re fusion energy occurs that's in the center of stars. So that's going to bring a price to it, depending on the cost and, sorry, the size and complexity, uh, of the technology that's needed to recreate those things.

And we'll talk about the details of the technologies and which we'll talk We'll talk about the details of the technologies and which parts might be expensive today

and which parts might be expensive in too many years. Today. Exactly. It will have a revolution, I'm certain of it. So about clean, so clean is at its heart, what it does is converts, it basically converts hydrogen into, it's heavier forms of hydrogen, the most predominant one that we use on Earth and converts it into helium and some other products, but primarily helium is the product that's left behind. So helium, safe, inert, gas, you know. In fact, that's actually what our sun is doing, it's eventually going to extinguish itself because it'll just make so much helium that it doesn't do that. So in that sense, clean because there's no, there's no emissions of carbon or pollutants that come directly from the combustion of the fuel itself.

And safe. Safe, yeah. We talk about very high temperature.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is also the counterintuitive thing. So I told you temperatures which like 50 million degrees or it actually tends to be more like about a hundred million degrees is really what we aim for. So how can a hundred million degrees be safe? And it's safe because it is, this is so much hotter than anything on Earth where everything on Earth is at around 300 Kelvin, you know, it's around a few tens of degrees Celsius. And what this means is that in order to get a medium to those temperatures, you have to completely isolate it from anything to do with terrestrial environment. It can have no contact like with anything on Earth basically. So this means what we, this is the technology that I just described is it fundamentally what it does is it takes this fuel and it isolates it from any terrestrial conditions so that it has no idea it's on Earth. It's not touching any object that's at room temperature. Including the walls of the containment. Even the, including the walls of the containment building or containment designs or even air or anything like this. So it's that part that makes it safe in this and there's actually another aspect to it, but that fundamental part makes it so safe.

but it's very tenuous. Including the walls of the containment.

Even the concluding and what matters from the engineering and safety point of view is the amount of energy which is stored per unit volume. Because this tells you about the scenarios and that's what you worry about because when those kinds of energies are released suddenly, it's like what would be the consequences, right? So the consequences of this are essentially zero

because that's less energy content than boiling water. Because of the low density?

Because of the low density. So if you take water is at about 100 million to a billion times more dense than this. So even though it's at much lower temperature, it's actually still, it has more energy content. So for this reason, one of the ways that I explained this is that if you imagine a power plant it's like powering Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like if you were to, which you, you wouldn't do this directly, but if you went like this on it, it actually extinguishes the fusion because it gets too cold immediately. Yeah. So that's the other one. And the other part is that it does not, and because it works by staying hot rather than a chain reaction, it can't run out of control. That's the other part of it. So by the way, this is what very much distinguishes it from fission. It's not a process that can run away from you because it's, it's basically thermally stable. What is thermostable mean here?

Oh, also, also, doesn't, it doesn't run away from you. It can't run away from you. How difficult is the control there to keep it at that?

It can't run away from it. It varies from concept to concept, but in generally, it's fairly easy to do that. And the easiest thing, it can't physically run away from you because the other part of it is that there's just at any given time, there's a very, very small amount of fuel available to fuse anyway. So this means that that's always intrinsically limited to this. So even if the power consumption of the device goes up, it just kind of burns itself out

immediately. Yeah. So just to take another tangent on a tangent, you're the director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. That's right. We'll talk about, maybe you can mention some interesting aspects of the history of the center in the broader history of MIT, maybe broader history of science and engineering in the history of human civilization, but also just the link on the safety aspect, you

know, tangent. That's right.

How do you prevent some of the amazing reactors that you're designing? How do you prevent from destroying all of human civilization in the process?

What's the safety protocols? What's the safety protocols? Fusion is interesting because it's not really directly weaponizable because what I mean by that is that you have to work very hard to make these conditions at which you can get energy gain from fusion. And this means that when we design these devices with respect to application in the energy field is that they, you know, while they will, because they're producing large amounts of power and they will have hot things inside of them, this means that they have like a level of industrial hazard, which is very similar to what you would have like in a chemical processing plant or anything like that. And any kind of energy plant actually has these as well too. But the underlying underneath it core technology, like can't be directly used in a nefarious way because of the power that's being emitted.

It just basically, well, if you try to do those things, typically it just stops working. So the safety concerns have to do with just regular things that like equipment malfunctioning, melting of like all this kind of stuff that has nothing to do with fusion necessarily.

Yeah. That has nothing to do with fusion necessarily. I mean, usually what we worry about is the viability because in the end we build pretty complex objects to realize these requirements. And so what we try really hard to do is like not damage those components, which, but those are things which are internal to the, to the fusion device. And this is not something that you would consider about, like it would, as you say, destroy human civilization because that release of energy is just inherently limited because of the fusion process. So it doesn't say that there's zero. So you asked about the other feature of it, that it's safe. So it is the process itself is intrinsically safe, but because it's a complex technology, you still have to take into amount consideration aspects of the safety. So it produces ionizing radiation instantaneously. So you have to take care of this, which means that you shield it, you think of like your dental x-rays or treatments for cancer and things like this. We always shield ourselves from this. So we get the beneficial effects, but we minimize the harmful effects of those.

So there are, there are all those aspects of it as well too. So we'll return to MIT's plasma science center, but let us linger on the destruction of human civilization, which brings us to the topic of nuclear fission. What is that?

So the, the process that is inside nuclear weapons and current nuclear power plants. So it relies on the same underlying physical principle, but it's exactly the opposite of which actually the names imply fusion means bringing things together. Fission means splitting things apart. So fission requires the heaviest instead of the lightest and the most unstable versus the most stable elements. So this tends to be uranium or plutonium, primarily uranium. So take uranium. So uranium 235 is one of the, this is one of the heaviest unstable elements. And what happens is that this is fission is triggered by the fact that one of these subatomic particles, the neutron, which has no electric charge, basically gets in proximity enough to this and triggers an instability effectively inside of this, what is teetering on the border of instability and basically splits it apart. And that's the fission, right? The fissioning. And so when that happens, because the products that are, it roughly splits in two, but it's not even that it's actually more complicated. It splits into this whole array of lighter elements and nuclei.

So that's how our fission power plant works. And so there's control of the chain reactions is extremely difficult and extremely important

for... It's very, very important. And when you intentionally design it, that it creates more than one fission reaction

per starting reaction, that it exponentiates away, which is what a nuclear weapon is. Yeah, so how does an atomic weapon work?

How does a hydrogen bomb work, asking for a friend? Yeah, so at its heart, what you do is you very quickly put together enough of these materials that can undergo fission with room temperature neutrons, and you put them together fast enough that what happens is that this process can essentially grow mathematically, like very fast. And so this releases large amounts of energy, so that's the underlying reason that it works. So you've heard of a fusion weapon. So this is interesting is that it is... But it's dislike fusion energy in the sense that what happens is that you're using fusion reactions, but it simply increases the gain actually of the weapon rather than... It's not a pure... At its heart, it's still a fission weapon. You're just using fusion reactions as a sort of intermediate catalyst basically to get even more energy out of it.

But it's not directly applicable to be used in an energy source. Does it terrify you just again to step back at the philosophical that humans have been able to use physics and engineering to create such powerful weapons?

I wouldn't say terrify. I mean, we should be... This is the progress of human... Every time that we've gotten access, you talk again, you know, the day the universe changed. Those really changed when we got access to new kinds of energy sources. But every time you get access... And typically what this meant was you get access to more intense energy, right? And that's what that was. And so the ability to move from burning wood to using coal to using gasoline and petrol, and then finally to use this is that both the potency and the consequences are elevated

around those things. It's just like you said, the way that fusion, nuclear fusion would change the world, I don't think unless we think really deeply we'll be able to anticipate some of the things we can create. There's going to be a lot of amazing stuff, but then that amazing stuff is going to enable more amazing stuff and more, unfortunately, or depending how you see on it, more powerful

weapons. Well, yeah, but see, that's the thing. Fusion breaks that trend in the following way. So one of them... So fusion doesn't work on a chain reaction. There's no chain reaction, zero. So this means it cannot physically exponentiate away on you because it works. But actually, this is why stars... By the way, we know this already, it's why stars are so stable, why most stars and suns are so stable. It's because they are regulated through their own temperature and their heating. Because what's happening is not that there's some probability of this exponentiating away, is that the energy that's being released by fusion basically is keeping the fire hot. And these tend to be, and when it comes down to thermodynamics and things like this, there's a reason, for example, it's pretty easy to keep a constant temperature like in an oven and things like this.

actually, the physical system just doesn't want to do that. There's no chain reaction. Zero. Yeah. We're going to have to look elsewhere for the weapons with which we fight World War III. Fair enough. So what is plasma that you may or may not have mentioned? You mentioned ions and electrons and so on. So what is plasma?

What is the role of plasma in nuclear fusion? So plasma is a phase of matter or state of matter. So unfortunately our schools don't, it's like, I'm not sure why this is the case, but all children learn the three phases of matter. So and what does this mean? So we'll take water as an example. So if it's cold, it's ice, it's in a solid phase. And then if you heat it up, it's the temperature that typically sets the phase, although it's not only temperature. So you heat it up and you go to a liquid and obviously it changes its physical properties because it can, you can pour it and so forth, right? And then if you heat this up enough, it turns into a gas and a gas behaves differently because there's a very sudden change in the density, actually that's what's happening. So it changes by about a factor of 10,000 in density from the, from the liquid phase into when you make it into steam and atmospheric pressure, all very good, except the problem

is they forgot like what happens if you just keep elevating the temperature. You don't want to give kids ideas, they're going to start experimenting and they're going

to start heating up the gas or heating up the gas. So you, um, it turns out that once you get above, it's approximately five or 10,000 degrees Celsius, then you hit a new phase of matter. And actually that's the phase of matter that is for all pretty much all the temperatures that are above that as well too. And so what does that mean? So it actually changes phase. There's a different state of matter. And the reason that it becomes a different state of matter is that it's hot enough that happens is that the atoms that make up, go back to Feynman, right? Everything's made up of these individual things, these atoms. But atoms can actually themselves be, which are made of nuclei, which contain the positive particles and the neutrons, and then the electrons, which are very, very light, very much less mass than the nucleus, and that surround this. This is what makes up an atom. So a plasma is what happens when you start pulling away enough of those electrons that they're free from the ions. So almost all the atoms that make us up in this water and all that, the electrons are in tightly bound states, and basically they're extremely stable.

What are some interesting ways that this force data matter is different than gas?

Let's go to how a gas works, right? So the reason a gas, and it goes back to Feynman's brilliance in saying that this is the most important concept. The reason actually solid, liquid and gas phases work is because the nature of the interaction between the atoms changes. And so in a gas, you can think of this as being this room and the things, although you can't see them, is that the molecules are flying around, but then with some frequency, they basically bounce into each other. And when they bounce into each other, they exchange momentum and energy around on this. And so it turns out that the probability and the distances and the scattering of those of what they do, it's those interactions that set the, about how a gas behaves. So what do you mean by this? So for example, if I take an imaginary test particle of some kind, like I spray something into the air, there's got a particular color. In fact, you can do it in liquids as well too. Like how it gradually will disperse away from you. This is fundamentally set because of the way that those particles are bouncing into each other. The probabilities of those, the particle bouncing.

Yeah.

Like what? That doesn't make any sense. When particles go faster, you think they would collide more often, but because the particles are interacting through interacting through their electric field, when they're going faster, they actually spend less time in the influential field of each other. And so they talk to each other less in an energy and momentum exchange point of view. Interesting. Just one of the count, one of the counterintuitive aspects of plasmas.

Which is probably very relevant for nuclear fusion. Yes, exactly. So if I can try to summarize what a nuclear fusion reactor is supposed to do. So you have,

what, a couple of elements? What are usually the elements? Yes, exactly. It's usually deuterium

and tritium, which are the heavy forms of hydrogen. You have those and you start heating it. And then as you start heating it, I forgot the temperature you said. About a 100 billion. No, first it becomes today.

Oh, first it becomes plasma, so about a 100 billion. Oh, first it becomes plasma. So it's a gas and then it turns into a plasma at about 10,000 degrees.

And then, so you have a bunch of electrons and ions flying around, and then you keep heating the thing. I guess as you heat the thing, the ions hit each other rarer and rarer. Yes. around and then you keep heating the thing and I guess as you heat the thing the ions hit each other rarer and rarer? Yes. So man that's not fun so you have to keep heating it such that you have to keep hitting into the probability of them colliding becomes reasonably high and so also on top of that and sorry to interrupt, you have to prevent them from hitting the walls of the reactor somehow.

Rare, high. And so you asked about the definitions of the requirements for fusion. So the most famous one or some sense, the most intuitive one is the temperature. And the reason for that is that you can make many, many kinds of plasmas that have zero fusion going on in them. And the reason for this is that the average so you can make a plasma at around 10,000. In fact, if you come by the way, you're welcome to come to our laboratory at the PSFC, I can show you a demonstration of a plasma that you can see with your eyes and this at about 10,000 degrees. And you can put your hand up beside it and all this, and it's like a nothing, there's zero fusion going on.

So you have… So what was the temperature of the plasma? About 10,000 degrees. You can stick your hand in?

About 10,000. Well, you can't stick your hand into it, but there's a glass tube, you can basically see this. Yeah. And you can put your hand on the glass tube because it's, what color is it purple? It's purple. Yeah. It is kind of beautiful. Plasmas are actually quite astonishing sometimes in their beauty. Actually, one of the most amazing forms of plasma is lightning, by the way, which is instantaneous form of plasma that exists on Earth, but immediately goes away because everything else around it is at room temperature. That's fascinating. Yeah. So there's different requirements in this.

distance squared. Oh no. So as they get closer, they're pushing harder and harder apart. What's

the color is it purple? Yeah. So then it gets a little bit more exotic, which maybe you'll like though, that it turns out that people understood this at the beginning of the age after Rutherford discovered the nucleus. It's like, oh yeah, it's like, how is this going to work, right? Because how do you get anything within these distances? It's going to require extraordinary energy. And it does. And in fact, when you look at those energies, they're very, very high. But it turns out quantum physics comes to the rescue because the particles aren't actually just particles. They're also waves. This is the point of quantum, right? You can treat them both as waves and as particles.

I mean, to use a physical analogy. Quantum tunneling is one of them. And that phenomena is important, is critical for the function of nuclear fusion.

Yes, for all kinds of fusion. So this is the reason why stars can work as well too. Like the stars would have to be much, much hotter actually to be able to, in fact, it's not clear that they would actually ignite, in fact, without this effect. So we get to that. So this is why there's another requirement. So you must make a plasma, but you also must get it very hot in order for the reactions to have a significant probability

to actually fuse. And it actually falls effectively almost to zero for lower temperatures as well too. So there's some nice equation that gets you to 50 million degrees. Or like you said, practically speaking, a hundred million.

Yeah, it's a really simple equation. It's the ideal gas law basically, almost. So in the end, you've got a certain number of particles, of these fusion particles in the plasma state, they're in the plasma state. There's a certain number of particles. And if the confinement is perfect, if you put in a certain content of energy, then basically, eventually they just, they come up in a temperature and they become, they go up to high temperature. This turns out to be, by the way, extraordinarily small amounts of energy. And you go, what? It's like, I'm getting something to like a hundred million degrees. That's going to take the biggest flame burner that I've ever seen. No. And the reason for this is it goes back to the energy content of this. So yeah, you have to, you have to get it to high average energy, but there's very, very few particles.

It's allowed to be low density and reactors. So you add them one at a time. Well, this is beautiful.

How do you get the gas cylinder from hitting the walls before? How do you get gas cylinder? Yeah. So now you've touched on the other necessary requirements. So it turns out it's not just temperature that's required, you must also confine it. So what does this mean?

Con ins and there's two types of confinement, as

you mentioned, the magnetic one, magnetic one, there's one we're called inertial as well too. But the general principle actually has nothing to do with, in particular, with what your what with the technology is that you use to confine it. It's because this goes back to the fact that the requirement in this is high temperature and thermal content. So it's like building a fire, man. And what this means is that, when you release the energy into this, or apply heat to this, if it just instantly leaks out, it can never get hot, right? So if you're familiar with this, it's like you've got something that you're trying to apply heat to, but you're just throwing the heat away very quickly. This is why we insulate homes, by the way, and things like this, right? It's like, you don't want the heat that's coming into this room to just immediately leave, you'll just start consuming infinite amounts of heat to try to keep it hot. So, in the end, this is one of the requirements. And it actually has a name. We call the energy confinement time. So, this means if you release a certain amount of energy into this fuel, kind of how long you sit there and you look at your watch, how long does it take for this energy to like leave the system?

Like, you know, what does it visually look like? Does it, does it look like, like you said, like purple plasma? Yeah, yeah.

Actually it's it's invisible to the eye because it's so hot that it's basically emitting light in frequencies that we can't detect. It's literal. It's invisible. In fact, light goes through it, visible light goes through it. So easy that if you were to look at it, what you would see in our own particular configuration what we make is in the end is a donut shaped, it's a vacuum vessel to keep the air out of it. And when you turn on the plasma, it gets so hot that most of it just disappears in the visible spectrum, you can't see anything. And there's very, very cold plasma, which is between 10 and 100,000 degrees, which is out in the very periphery of it, which is kind of, so the very cold plasma is allowed to interact with the, kind of has to interact with something eventually at the boundary of the vacuum vessel. And this kind of makes a little halo around it, and it glows this beautiful purple light, basically. And these are, that's the, that's

what we can sense in the human spectrum. I remember reading on a subreddit called ShowerThoughts, which people should check out. It's just fascinating philosophical ideas that strike you while you're in the shower. And one of them was, it's lucky that fire, when it burns, it communicates that it's hot using visible light. Otherwise humans would be screwed. I don't know if there's a deep, profound truth to that, but nevertheless, I did find it on ShowerThoughts subreddit.

Yes, actually, I do have the, this goes off in a bit of, you're right. This is actually, it's interesting because, you know, as a scientist, you also think about evolutionary functions and how we got, like, why do we have the senses that we do? It's an interesting question, right? Like, why can bees see an ultraviolet and we can't? Then you go, well, it's natural selection. For some reason, this wasn't really particularly important to us, right? Why can't we see in the infrared and other things can? It's like, yeah. It's a fascinating question, right? Obviously, there's some, there's some advantage that you have there that isn't there and even color distinguishing, right? Of something safe to ease, not safe, whatever it would be. I actually go back to this because it's something like, that I tell all of my students when I'm teaching ionizing radiation and radiological safety, whatever you say, there's a cultural concern or that when people hear the word radiation, like what does this mean?

every single room will have, have these people that could have these by our body. You mean the

10 to the 28 atoms. The 10 to the 10 to the 28 atoms, and they're coming in and they're interacting with those things. And those, particularly the ones where the light is at higher average energy per per light particle, those are the ones that can possibly have an effect on human health. So we, we, it's interesting humans and all animals have evolved on earth where we're immersed in that all the time. Yeah. There's natural source of

radiation all the time. Yet we have zero ability to detect it, like zero. Yeah. Yeah. And our ability, cognitive ability to filter it all out and not, it would probably, it would probably

overwhelm us actually, if we could see all of it. But my main point is, goes back to your thing about fire and self-protection. If, if these ionized, if ionizing radiation was such a critical aspect of the health of organisms on earth, we would almost certainly have evolved methods to

detect it. And we have none. And yes. The physical world that's all around us. Yes. You're blowing my mind Dr. Dennis White. Okay. Let's, so you have experience with magnetic confinement. You have experience with inertial confinement. Most of your work has been a magnetic confinement. Yeah. But let's sort of talk about the, the, the sexy recent thing for, for a bit of a time.

Can you explain this breakthrough that happened in December, magnetic confinement? Yeah. So it goes to the set of criteria that I talked about before about getting high energy gain. So in the end, what, what are we after in fusion is that we, we basically assemble this plasma fuel in some way and we provide it a starting amount of energy. Think of lighting the fire. And what you want to do is get back like significant excess gain from the fact that the fusion is, is making more, is releasing the energy. So it's, it's like the equivalent of like, we want to have a match, a small match, light a fire, and then the fire keeps us hot. It's like, this is very much like that. So as I said, we've, we've made many of the, and what do we mean by we, it's like the fusion community has pursued aspects of this through a variety of different confinement methodologies, is that the, the key part about what happens, what was the threshold we had never gotten over before was that if you only consider the plasma fuel, not that, not the total engineering system, but just the plasma fuel itself, we had not gotten to the point yet where basically the size of the match was, was smaller than the amount of energy that we got from the future.

Is there a good term for when the output is greater than the input?

Yes. Yes. There is, well, there's several special definitions of this. So one of them is that if you, if you like in a fire, if you light a match and you have it there and it's an infinitesimal amount of energy compared to what you're getting out of the fire, we call this ignition, which makes sense, right? This is like what our own son is as well too. So that was not ignition in that sense as well too. So what we call this is scientific. Well, the one that I just talked about, which is for some instance, when I get enough fusion energy released compared to the size of the match, we call this scientific breakeven. Breakeven. break even and it's because you've gotten past the fact that this is unity now at this point.

What is fusion gain or as using the notation Q from the paper overview of the Spark talk about before using just the same kind of term?

Actually, so the technical term is Q, capital Q.

People actually use Q.

We actually use capital Q or sometimes it's called Q sub P or something like this. Okay, so what it means is that it's in the plasma. So all we're considering is the energy balance or gain that comes from the plasma itself. We're not considering the technologies which are around it, which are providing the containment and so forth. So why the excitement? And so, well, because for one reason, it's a rather simple threshold to get over to understand that you're getting more energy out from the fusion, and even a theoretical sense than you were from the starting match.

So Q is taken. Do you mean conceptually simple?

It's conceptually simple that you get past one that everyone under, like when you're less than one, that's much less interesting than getting past one. So there's a really big threshold to get past. But it really is a scientific threshold because what QP actually denotes is the relative amount of self-heating that's happening in the plasma. So what I mean by this is that in the end, in these systems, and what you want is something that where the relative amount of heating, which is keeping the fuel hot, is dominated by from the fusion reactions themselves. And so it becomes, it's sort of like thinking like a bonfire is a lot more interesting physically than just holding a blowtorch to a wet log, right? There's a lot more dynamics. It's a lot more self-evolved and so forth. And what we're excited as as scientists is that it's clear that in that experiment, that they actually got to a point where the fusion reactions themselves were actually altering the state of the plasma. It's like, wow. I mean, we'd seen it in glimpses before in magnetic confinement at relatively small levels. But apparently, it seems like in this experiment, it's likely to be dominated by self seating. That's a very important, that's a very

sort of threshold to get past.

So that makes it a self-sustaining type of interaction? It's more self-sustaining. It's more self-referential system, in a sense. And it sort of self-evolves in a way. Again, it's not that it's going to evolve to a dangerous state, it's just that we want to see what happens when the fusion is the dominated heating source.

And we'll talk about that, but there's also another element, which is the inertial confinement. Laser-based inertial confinement is kind of a little bit of an underdog. So a lot of the broad nuclear fusion community has been focused on magnetic confinement. Can you explain just how laser-based inertial confinement works? So it says 192 laser beams were aligned on a deuterium, tritium DT target, smaller than a P. Yes. Or EB actually, yeah. Okay, well, you know it depends, not all Ps are made the same, but this is like throwing a perfect strike in baseball from a pitcher. This is like a journalist wrote this, I think. It's just like, no, it's not a journalist, it's DOE wrote this, a bar of energy.

Yeah, it could be, yeah. Or EB actually. Like energy. Wait, we try to use all these analogies...

This is like throwing a perfect strike in baseball from a pitcher's mount 350 miles away from the plate. There you go. Department of Energy. The United States Department of Energy wrote this. Can you explain what the laser is coming in?

What actually happens? Actually, there's usually mass confusion about this. So what's going on in this form of energy? So the fuel is delivered in a discrete, the fusion fuel, the deuterium and tritium is in a discrete spherical, it's more like a BB, let's call it a BB. So it's a small one. And all the fuel that you're going to try to burn is basically there. And it's about that size. So how are you going to get, and literally, it's like 20 degrees above absolute zero because the deuterium and tritium are kept in a liquid and solid state. So the fuel is injected not as a gas, but as a solid. It's actually, and these are particular experiments that can introduce one of these these, you know, these targets once per day, approximately something like that. Because it's very, it's very, it's a kind of amazing technology actually that I know some of the people that worked on this back in the day is they actually make these things at a BB size of this frozen fuel, it's actually at cryogenic temperatures. And they're almost like smooth to the atom level.

Oh wow. Yeah. So how do you make it so, how do you make it so fast?

This is why you use lasers because you're applying this energy in very, very short periods of time, like under a fraction of a billionth of a second. And so basically that, and then the force which is coming from this comes from the energy of the lasers, which, which is basically the rocket

action which does the compression. So is the force, so is the force is the inward facing force.

Is that, is that increasing the temperature? No exponential. No. is that exponential? You want to keep the fuel cold and then, and literally just ideally compress it. And then in something which is at the very center of that compressed sphere, because you've compressed it so rapidly, the laws of physics basically require for it to increase in temperature. So the effect is like, if you know the thing, so adiabatic cooling, we're actually fairly familiar with. If you take a spray can, right, and you push the button, when it, when it rapidly expands, it cools. This is the nature of a lot of cooling technology we use actually. Well, the opposite is true that if you would take all of those particles and jam them together very fast back in, they want to heat up. The effect is like, and that's what happens. And then what happens is you, you basically have this very cold compressed set of fusion fuel.

So the idea behind a reactor is based on this kind of initial confinement,

is that you would have a new BB every like 10 times a second or something like this.

and then there's some kind of, so there's a incredible device that you kind of implied that kind of has to create one of those BBs.

That kind of has to. So you have to make the BBs very fast. There's reports on this, but about what does it mean? The starting point is can you make this gain? So this was a scientific achievement primarily. And the rest is just engineering. No, no, no, the rest is incredibly complicated engineering. Well, in fact, there's still physics hurdles to overcome. So where does this come from? And it's actually because if you want to make an energy source out of this, this had a gain of around 1.5, that namely the fusion energy was approximately, was 1.5 times the laser input energy. Okay, this is a fairly significant threshold. However, from the science of what I just told you is that there's two fundamental efficiencies which come into it, which really come from physics, really.

out of this thing. And the rest is just engineering.

How do you convert that energy to electricity? So in the end, you have to basically convert it into heat in some way. So most of the, in the end what fusion makes mostly is very energetic particles from the fusion reaction. So you have to slow those down in some way and then make heat out of it. So basically the conversion of the kinetic energy of the particles into heating some engineered material

that's on the outside of this. And that's, from a physics perspective is a somewhat solved problem but from an engineering is still,

it's still, it's still, it's still. Yeah, physics, I can draw the, I can show you all the equations that tell you about how it slows down and converts kinetic energy into heat. And then what that heat means, you know, you can write out like an ideal thermal cycle, like a Carnot cycle. So the physics of that, yeah, great.

The integrated engineering of this is a whole other thing. I'll ask you to maybe talk about the differences between an inertial magnetic, but first we'll talk about magnetic. let me just linger on this breakthrough, you know, it's nice to have exciting things, but in a deep human sense, there's no competition in science and engineering. Well, like you said, we were broad. First of all, we are humanity altogether. And you talk about this, it's a bunch of countries collaborating, it's really exciting. There's a nuclear fusion community broadly. But then there's also MIT, there's colors and logos, and it's exciting. And there's a, you have friends and colleagues here that work extremely hard and done some incredible stuff. Is there some sort of, how do you feel seeing somebody else get a breakthrough in using a different technology? Is that exciting? Does the competitive fire get...

All of the above. I mean, the ignition. I have, so, you know, just to wave the flag a little bit. So, MIT was a central player in this accomplishment. Interesting, I would say it showed our two, some of our two best traits. So, one of them was that, like, how do you know that this happened? This measurement, right? So, one of the ways to do this is, if I told you is that in DT fusion, what it actually, the product that comes out is helium, we call it alpha, but it's helium, and a free neutron, right? So, the neutron contains 80% of the fusion, of the energy released by the fusion reaction. And it also, because it has lacked, it lacks a charge, it basically tends to just escape and go flying out. So, this is what we would use eventually for, that's mostly what fusion energy would be. But, so what my, my colleagues, my scientific colleagues at, at the plasma science infusion center built were extraordinary measurement tools of being able to see the exact details of not only the number of neutrons that were coming out, but actually what energy that they're at.

That's, that's, and then, but that's the fun, the ignition, you know, I have that's, that's, and then, but that's the fun, I mean, these are the are still the early steps. Maybe you can say the early leaps. So let's talk about the magnetic confinement, what is, how, how does a magnetic confinement work? What's the TACOMAC?

Yeah, how does it all work? So go back to that. So why inertial confinement works on the same principle that a star works. So like, what is the confinement mechanism in the star is gravity, Because its its own inertia of something, the size of the sun basically pushes literally a force by gravity against the center. So the center is very, very hot, 20 million degrees, and literally, outside the sun, it's essentially zero because it's a vacuum of space. How the hell does that do that? It does that by…and it's out of…like, why does it just leak all of its heat? It doesn't leak its heat because it's all held together by the fact that it can't escape because of its own gravity. So this is why the fusion happens in the center of the Sun. Like we think of the surface of the Sun as being hot. That's the coldest part of the star. So of our own Sun this is about 5500 degrees of beautiful symmetry by the way it's like so how do we know all this?

Is it possible as a small tangent to build an inertial confinement system like the Sun?

Is it possible to create a Sun? It is of course possible to make a Sun, although you do have stars, but it is not impossible on Earth because for the simple reason that it takes the gravitational force is extremely

weak and so it takes something like the size of a star to make fusion occur in the Sun. The gravitational force is... Well, I didn't mean on Earth.

I mean, if you had to build like a second Sun, how'd you do it? How'd you do it? You can't. There's not enough hydrogen around.

So the limiting factor is just the hydrogen.

Yeah. I mean, the forces and energy that it takes to assemble that is just mind boggling. So we would do that. To be continued. Yeah, to be continued. So what are we doing it with? So the one that I just described is like you say, so you have to replace this with some force which is better than that. And so what I mean by that, it's stronger than that. So what I talked about the laser fusion, this is coming from the force, which is enormous compared to gravity, like from the rocket action of pushing it together. So in magnetic confinement, we use another force of nature, which is the electromagnetic force and that's very... orders and orders of magnitude stronger than the gravitational force. And the key force that matters here is that if you have a charged particle, that namely it's a particle that has an electric, net electric charge, and it's in the proximity of a magnetic field, then there is a force which is exerted on that particle.

All right. So, we would do that, right? To be continued.

How do you create a strong magnetic field? Yeah.

Yeah. So...

With a giant magnet. Giant magnet. Yeah. So, it's basically true. Engineering is awesome. There's essentially two ways to create a magnet. So, one of them is that we're familiar with like fridge magnets and so forth. These are so-called permanent magnets. So, what it means is that within these, the atoms are arranged in a particular way that it produces the electrons basically arranged in a particular way that it produces a permanent magnetic field that is set by the material. So, those have a fundamental limitation how strong they can be and also tend to have this like circular shape like this. So, we don't use, you don't typically use those. So, what we use their so-called electromagnets and what is this?

Engineering is essentially speaking of giant magnets, MIT and Commonwealth fusion systems, CFS built a very large, high temperature, superconducting electromagnet that was ramped up to a field strength of 20 Tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created down on earth, um, because I enjoy this kind of thing. Can you please tell me about this magnet? Yeah, sure.

I enjoy this. Oh, it was, it's fun. Yeah. There's a lot to parse there. So maybe, uh, we, so we already explained an electromagnet, which in general is what you do is you take electric current and you force it to, to follow a pattern of some kind, typically like a circular pattern around and around and round around, it goes the more time, the more current and the more times it goes around the stronger the magnetic field that you it. And as I pointed out, it's like really important in magnetic confinement because it is the con, the force that's produced by that magnetic. In fact, technically it goes like the magnetic field squared because it's a pressure, which is actually being exerted on the plasma to keep it contained

or just, just so we know for a magnetic confinement, what is usually geometry of the magnet? What are we supposed to imagine?

The geometry, yeah, so the geometry is typically, what you do is you want to produce a magnetic field that loops back on itself and the reason for this was, goes down to the nature of the force that I described, which is that there's no containment or force along the direction of the magnetic field. So here's a magnetic field. In fact, what it's more technically or more graphically, what it's doing is that when the plasma is, here's plasma particles here, here's a magnetic field. What it does is it forces all of those, because of this, this Lorenz force, it makes all of those charged particles execute circular orbits around the magnetic field and they go around like this, but they stream freely along the magnetic field line. So this is why the nature of the containment is that if you can get that circle smaller and smaller, it stays further away from Earth, temperature materials. That's why the confinement gets better. But the problem is, is that because it freestreams along, so we just have a long straight magnetic field, okay, it'll just keep leaking out the ends like really fast. So you get rid of the ends. So you basically loop it back around. So what these look like are typically donut shaped or more technically toroidal shape, donut shaped things where this collection of magnetic fields loops back on itself. And it also for reasons which are more complicated to explain, basically it also twists, that also twists slowly around in this reaction as well too. So that's what it looks, like that's what the plasma looks, like because that's what the fuel looks like.

is more stringent, yeah. The configuration of the plasma, sorry. Are tokamaks by far more popular

for research and development currently than stellarators? Of the concepts which are there, the tokamak is by far the most mature in terms of its breadth of performance and thinking about how it would be applied in a fusion energy system. And the history of this was that many, in fact, you asked if we go back to the history of the plasma and fusion center. The history of fusion is that people, scientists had started to work on this in the 1950s. It was all hush hush and cold war and all that kind of stuff. And it's like they realized, holy cow, this is really hard. We actually don't really know what we're doing in this because everything was at low temperatures, they couldn't get confinement. It was interesting. And they declassified it and this is one of the few places that the West and the Soviet Union actually collaborated on was a science. Even during the cold war. Even during the middle of the cold war, it was really, and this actually perpetuates all the way till now for we can talk about the project that that is sort of captured in now. But, and the reason they declassified it is because like everything like kind of like sucked basically about trying to make this confinement in high temperature plasma.

They just didn't quite get over once. Even during the Cold War. So can we actually just linger on the collaboration across different nations? Just maybe looking at the philosophical aspect of this. Even in the Cold War, there's something hopeful to me besides the energy that these giant international projects are a really powerful way to ease some of the geopolitical tension, even military conflict across nations. There's a war in Ukraine and Russia. There's a brewing tension and conflict with China. Just the world is still seeking military conflict, cold or hot. What can you say about sort of the lessons of the 20th century in these giant projects

in their ability to ease some of this tension? So it's a great question. So as I said, there was a reason because it was so hard. That was one of the reasons they declassified it. And actually they started working together in some sense on it as well too. And I think it was really, there was a heuristic or altruistic aspect to this. It's like, this is something that could change the future of humanity and its nature and its relationship with energy. Isn't this something that we should work on together? Right, and that went along in those ones. And in particularly that any kind of place where you can actually have an open exchange of people who are sort of at the intellectual frontiers of your society, this is a good thing, right? Of being able to collaborate. I've had the, I mean, I have had an amazing career.

Can you actually link it, before we turn to the giant magnet and maybe even talk about Spark and all the amazing stuff going on at MIT? What is ITER? What is this international nuclear fusion mega project

being built in the South of France? So its scientific purpose is a worthy one that it's essentially an anti-fusion device. The thing that you want to see is more and more relative amounts of self-heating. And this is something that had not been seen, although we had made fusion reactions and we'd seen small amounts of the self-heating, we never got to a dominant, this actually goes to this QP business, okay? The goal of ITER, and it shifted around a little bit historically, but fairly quickly became, we want to get to a large amount of self-heating. So this is why it has, its primary feature is to get to QP of around 10. And through this, this is a way to study this plasma that has more higher levels of self-determination around on it. But it also has another feature, which was let's produce fusion power at a relevant scale. And actually they're linked together, which actually makes sense if you think about it, is that because the fusion power is the heating source itself, this means that they're linked together. And so ITER is projected to make about 500 million watts of fusion power. So this is a significant amount,

like this is what you would use for powering cities. So it's not just the research, they're really, it is the development of really trying to achieve scale here.

So self-heating and scale. Yeah, yes. So this meant then too, is the development of an industrial base that can actually produce the technologies like the electromagnets and so forth. And to do it with, it is a Tokamak, it is one of these, yes. But very interesting, it also revealed limitations of this as well too. Like what? Well, it's interesting is that it is clearly a, on paper and in fact, and in practice as well too, the world and very different political systems and you consider at least geopolitical or economic rivals or whatever you want to use it. Like working towards a common cause and one that we all think is worthy is very like, okay, that's very satisfying. But it's also interesting to see the limitations of this.

It's because, well, you've got seven chefs in the kitchen.

It is one of these, yes. So what is this meant in terms of the speed of the project and the ability to govern it and so forth? It's just been a challenge honestly around this. And this is, I mean, it's very hard technically what's occurring, but when you also introduce such levels of, I mean, this isn't just me saying it. There's like GOO reports from the US government and so forth. It's hard to like steer all of this around. And what that's tended to do is make it, it's not the fastest decision making process. My own personal view of it was, it was interesting because you asked, you said about the magnet and Commonwealth fusion systems. It was, I worked most of my career on ITER because when I came into the field in the early 1990s when I completed my PhD and started to work, this was one of the most, like you can't imagine being more excited about something like, we're going to change the world with this project. We're gonna do these things. And we just like port like an entire generation and afterwards as well too is just poured their imagination and their creativity about making this thing work. Very good.

of actually getting to the goal line. With that spirit, you're leading MIT's effort to design Spark, a compact high field DT burning tokamak. How does it work? What is it? What's the motivation? What's the design?

What are the ideas behind it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. At its heart, it's exactly the same concept as ITER. So it's basically a configuration of electromagnets. It's arranged in the shape of a donut. And within that, we will do the same thing that happens in all the other tokamaks and including an ITER and in this one. Is it namely you put in gas, make it into a plasma, you heat it up, it gets to about 100 million degrees. The differentiator in Spark is that we use the actual deuterium tritium fuel. And because of the access to very high magnetic fields, it's in a very compact space. It's very, very small. What do I mean by small? So it's 40 times smaller in volume than ITER.

So the same kind of design, but now using the superconducting magnets.

Yeah, and if in fact, if you look at, it's like it's, if you just expand the size of it, they're like, they look almost identical to each other because it's based on the, and actually that comes for a reason by the way, is that it also looks like a bigger version of the Tokamak that we ran at MIT for 20 years, where we established the scientific benefits in fact, of these higher magnetic fields. So that's the pathway that, so we say, so what does this mean? The context is different because it was made, because it's primarily being made by a private sector company spun out of MIT because the way that it raised money and the purpose of the entity which is there is to make commercial fusion power plants, not just to make a scientific experiment. This is actually why we have a partnership, right? Is that our purpose at MIT is not to commercialize directly, but boy, do we want to advance the technology and the science that comes along this and that's the reason we're sort of doing it together.

So it's MIT and Commonwealth fusion systems. So what's interesting to say about financing and this seems like from a scientific perspective, maybe not an interesting topic, but it's perhaps an extremely interesting topic. I mean, you can just look at the tension between SpaceX and NASA, for example. It's just clear that there's different financing mechanisms can actually significantly accelerate

the development of science and engineering. It's great that you brought that up. We use several historic analogs and one of them is around SpaceX, which is an appropriate one because space, you know, putting things into orbit has a minimum size to it and integrated technological complexity and budget and things like this. So, you know, our point when we were like talking about starting like a fusion commercialization, you know, company, people look at you like, isn't this still really just a science experiment, you know? But one of the things that we pointed to was SpaceX to say, well, tell me like 25 years ago, how many people would have voted that, you know, the leading entity on the planet to put things into orbit is a private company. People would have thought you were not so, right? It's like, and what is interesting about SpaceX is that it proved it's more than actually just financing. It's really the purpose of the organization. So the purpose of a, and I'm not against public finance or anything like that, but the purpose of a public entity like NASA correctly, you know, speaks to the political, because the cost comes from the political, you know, assembly that is there and I guess from us eventually as well too, but its purpose wasn't about like making a commercial product. It's about fundamental discovery and so forth, which is all, which is all really great. It's like, why did SpaceX, it's interesting, because why did SpaceX succeed so well is because the idea was, it's like the focus that comes in the idea that you're going to relentlessly like reduce cost and increase efficiency is a drive that comes from the commercial aspect of it, right? And this also then changes the people in the teams which are doing as well too.

which is very important. But there's also something about mechanism that creates culture. So giving power to like a young student, ambitious student to have a tremendous impact on the progress of nuclear fusion creates a culture that actually makes progress more aggressively. Like you said, when seven nations collaborate, it gives more incentive to the bureaucracy to slow things down, to kind of have, let's first have a discussion and certainly don't give voice to the young, ambitious minds that are really pushing stuff forward. And there's something about like the private sector that rewards, encourages, inspires young minds to say in the most beautiful of ways, FU to the, to the boss, to say like, we'll make it faster, we'll make it simpler, we'll make it better,

we'll make it cheaper. To the boss. And sometimes that brashness doesn't bear out. That's an aspect that you just take a different risk profile as well too. But you're right. It's this, you know, of the, I mean, it was interesting, our own trajectory at the fusion center was like, we were pushed into this place by necessity as well too, because I told you we have, and we had operated for a long time, a Tokamak on the MIT campus, achieve these world records like a hundred million degree plasma and stuff. It's like, wow, this is fantastic. But, you know, somewhat ironically, I have to say is that, it was like, oh, but we're not, this isn't the future of fusion anymore. Like we're not, we're just gonna stop with small projects cause it's too small, right? So we should need, we need to really move on to these much bigger projects, cause that's really the future of fusion. And so it was defunded. And this basically put at risk, like we were going to essentially lose MIT in the ecosystem, really a fusion, both from the research, but also clearly important from the educational part of it.

So, part gave a lifeline, a lifeline, gave fuel to the Fuzion at MIT,

that it continued. But a lifeline. A lifeline, gave fuel to the, the Fuzion at MIT that it continued. But it's way more than that. It wasn't just about like surviving for the sake of surviving, it was like, in the end for me, it became like this... I remember the moment, when you talk about these moments as a scientist. And we were just like, we were working so hard about figuring out like does this really with this really work like in his... it's complex. Like does the magnet work does the interaction with the plasma work? Does all these things work and it was just a grind push push push push and I remember the moment cuz I was sitting in my office and Brooklyn and there was just like I read like and I was in I don't know whatever the 20th or 40th slide or something into it and it was sort of that moment like it just came together and I like I got I couldn't even sit down, cause all it was just like, my wife was like, why are you walking around the apartment like this? Like I just couldn't, she, I said, it's going to work. Like, it's going to work, like holy.

Yeah, how do you make it work? So you mean like that magic realization that you can have this, uh, this modern, uh, Madden technology and you can actually, like why do we need to work with either we can do it

here? Yeah, but it's interesting that Eater is, um, that one, one of, one of the reasons that like, that we started with a group of six of us at MIT and then once we got some funding through the, through the establishment of the company, it became a slightly larger, but in the end we had a rather small team. Like this was like a team of, you know, order of like 20 to 25 people design Spark in like a, like about two years, right? How does that happen? Well, we're clever, but you have to give Eater it's due here as well too. That again, this is an aspect always of the bootstrap up. Like I go back to the human genome project. So modern day genomics would not be possible without the underlying basis that came from setting that up. It had to be there. It had to be curiosity driven. Public program is the same with Eater, but we, because we had the tools that were there to understand Eater, we also had the tools to understand Spark. So we, we parlayed those in an extremely powerful way to be able to tell us about what was going to happen.

So, you know, the natural question when people hear breakthrough with the, with the inertial confinement with the magnetic confinement is, so when will we have commercial reactors, power plants that are actually producing electricity? What's your sense looking out into the future? When do you think you can envision a future where we have actual electricity coming from nuclear fusion?

Partly driven by us, but in other places as well too. So there's the advent, what's, you know, what's so different now than three or four years ago, like we launched around four years ago, what's so different now is, is the advent of a very nascent, but seemingly robust, like commercial fusion endeavor. So it's not just Commonwealth fusion systems. There's something like 20 plus, you know, companies. There's a sector now. There's a sector. They actually, they actually have something called the fusion industry association, which is, if you viewers want to go see this, this describes the difference and they've got this plethora of approaches. Like I haven't even described all the approaches. I've basically described the main line approaches. approaches, you know, and they're all at varying degrees of technical and scientific maturity with very huge different, you know, balances between them. But what they share is that because they're going out and finding, getting funding from the private sector is that their stated goals are about getting fusion into place so that both it meets the investor's demands, which are interesting, right, and the timescales of that, but also it's like, well, there's going to, and why? It's because it's easy, there's going, there's this enormous push, driver about getting carbon free energy sources out into the market and whoever figures those out is going to be both very, it's going to be very important geopolitically, but also economically as well too.

But that's probably, I would suspect the biggest hurdle is to get to the first one. The work I've done, the work I continue to do with autonomous vehicles and semi-autonomous vehicles, there's an interesting parallel there where a bunch of companies announced a deadline for themselves in 2020, 21, 22, and only a small subset of those companies have actually really pushed that forward. There's Google with Waymo, or Alphabet rather, and then there's Tesla with semi-autonomous driving in their autopilot full-cell driving mode. And those are different approaches. So Tesla is achieving much, much higher scale, but the quality of the drive is semi-autonomous. I don't know if there's a metaphor or an analogy here. And then there's Waymo that's focusing on very specific cities, but achieving real full autonomy with actual passengers, but the scale is much smaller. So I wonder, just like you said, there'll be these kinds of similar kind of really hard

pushes here. Absolutely. And actually, this is why I'm encouraged about Fusion. So Fusion's still hard, let everyone be clear, because the science underneath it of achieving the right conditions for the plasma basically is a yardstick that you have to put up against all of them. What's encouraging that I see in this, and it's actually what happens when you sort of let loose the creativity of this, is maybe I'll go back to first principles. So Fusion is also a fairly strange... So if you think about building a coal plant, like burning wood and coal and gas is actually not that much different from each other, because they're kind of about the same physical conditions and you get the fuel and you light into the... Fusion is very... Remember I told you that there's this condition of the temperature, which is kind of universal. But if you take the density of the fuel between magnetic fusion and inertial fusion, they're different by about a factor of 10 billion. So this... And the density of the fuel really matters.

What do you see as the major engineering or general hurdles that are in the way? Yeah.

That are in the way. Yeah. Um, so the first one is just the cost of building a single unit. So fusion has, and it's actually interesting, you talked about the, about the different models that you have. So fusion has, um, one of its interesting limitations is that it's very hard, uh, almost at some point it becomes physically impossible to actually make small power units, like a kilowatt, 1,000 watts, you know, which is like a personal home, like, you know, there's about a thousand dollars or your personal use of energy, of electricians about like a thousand watts. Um, this is basically impossible in it for a single, you know, unit to to do this. So like you're not going to have a fusion like power plant like is your furnace and or your electric heater in your home. And the reason for this comes from the fact that fusion relies on it being it's not just that it's very hot it says that the fusion power is the heating source to keep it hot so if if you use if you go too small it basically just cannot keep it hot that's. So it's interesting is that this so this is one of the hard parts so this means that the individual units, you know, and it's, it varies from concept to concept, but the, the National Academies report that came out last year sort of put the, the benchmark as being like probably the minimum size looks like around 50 million watts of electricity, which is like enough for like a meat, like a small to, you know, mid-size city actually. Um, so that is, uh, so that's sort of like a scale challenge. And in fact, it's one of the reasons why in Commonwealth and in other private sector ones, like we, they try to push this down actually of trying to get to the, to these smaller units, just cause it reduces the cost of it. Um, then probably, um, obviously I would say it's an obvious one, like achieving the fusion state itself and high gain is, is a, is a hard

one, but we already talked about what kind of

hurdle, what kind of challenges that that's achieving the right temperature, density, and energy confinement time in the fuel itself, in the plasma itself. And so some of the, so some of the, the configurations which are being chosen have, are actually, uh, I have quite a ways to go. In fact, I've seen those, but what their, their consideration is, oh yes, but by our particular configuration, the engineering simplicity confers like an economic advantage, even if we're behind in a, in sort of a science sense. Okay. Which is fine. That's the, there's also what you get when you get an explosion in the private sector, you basically are distributing risks in different ways, right? Which makes sense. Um, all of that good, so what I would say is that the next hurdle to really overcome is, is about making net electricity. So like we need to see a unit or several units like put using fusion in some way to put a meaningful amount of energy on the grid, because this starts giving us real answers, um, as to like what this is going to look like. The full end to end. The full end to end thing. So Commonwealth's goal is that I'll, I'll just comment to Commonwealth cause I'll take some, you know, some, I guess some credit for this is that the, the origins of Commonwealth were in fact, in examining that, like we could see this new technology coming forward, this, this new superconducting material and the origins of our thought process were really around designing effectively the pilot plant or the commercial unit it's called arc, which is actually the, the step forward after spark.

so spark is the design of the Takama can arc is

the actual full intent thing is like a thing that actually puts that energy on the grid. So spark is named, you know, intentionally that it's like, it's on for a short period of time and it doesn't have a. a, it has, yeah, you know, it's the spark of the fusion, you know, revolution or something like that, I guess we could call it. Yeah, so those are, those are, so those are sort of the programmatic challenges of doing that. And, you know, it's interesting, you asked about, you talked about SpaceX. So what has evolved even in the last year or so was, in fact, in March of 2022, the White House announced that it was going to start a program that kind of looks like a SpaceX analogy that namely, wow, we've got these things in the private sector, we should leverage the private sector and the advantages of what they obtain. But also with the things like this is going to be hard and it's going to, it's going to take quite a bit of financing. So why don't we set up a program where we don't really get in the way of the private sector fusion companies, but we help them finance these difficult things, which is how SpaceX basically became successful through the COTS program. Fantastic. Right. And that's evolving as well too. So like the fusion ecosystem

is almost unrecognizable from where it was like five years ago around those things. How important is it for the heads of the companies that are working on nuclear fusion to have a Twitter account and to be quite, you said you don't use Twitter very much. I mean, there is some element to, and I don't think this should be discounted, whatever you think about figures like Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin or Elon Musk with SpaceX. There is a science communication, to put it in nice terms, that's kind of required to really educate the public and get everybody excited and sell the sexiness of it. I mean, just even the videos of SpaceX, just being able to kind of get everybody excited about going out to space once again. I mean, there's all kinds of different ways of doing that, but I guess most of the companies do well, you know, is to advertise

themselves, to really sell themselves. It is, yeah. Well, actually, I feel like one of the reasons I'm on this podcast, and so like I don't have an official role in the company. And one of the reasons for this was also that it's interesting because when you come from like you're running a company, it makes sense that they're promoting their own product and their own vision, which totally makes sense. But there's also a very important role for academics who have knowledge about what's going on, but are sufficiently distant from it that they're not fully only self-motivated just by their own projects or so forth. And for me, this is, I mean, we see particularly the problems of the distrust in technology, and then honestly, in the scientific community as well too, it will be one of the greatest tragedies, I would say, that if we go through all of this and almost pull off what looks like a miracle, like technological and scientific wise, which is to make a fusion power plant, and then nobody wants to use it because they feel that they don't trust the people who are doing it or the technology. So we have to get so far out ahead of this, like, so I give lots of public lectures or things like this of accessing a larger range of people. We're not trying to hide anything you can come and see, you know, come do tours of our laboratory. In fact, I want to set those up virtually as well too. You might look at our Plaza Size and Fusion Center YouTube channel, so we are reaching out through those meetings. And it's really important that we do those things. But it's also then realizing, setting up the realistic expectations of what we need to do.

So, like, a multidisciplinary team. Yeah, exactly. What's required, I mean, you've spoken about, you said that fusion is, quote, the most multidisciplinary field you can imagine.

Yes, yeah. Why is that? What are the differences? Yeah, exactly. What's required? Imagine. Well, because most of our discussion that we've had so far is really, like, a physics discussion, really. So, which don't, don't neglect physics at the origin of this. But already, we touched on plasma physics and nuclear physics, which are basically two, you know, somewhat overlapping independent disciplines. Then when it comes to the engineering, it's almost everything. So, why is this? Well, let's build an electromagnet together, okay?

away, which isn't new. There is a history, like you said, 40, 30, whatever, that kind of old joke. There's a history of fusion projects that, you know, are characterized by cost overruns and delays. Yeah. How do you avoid this? How do you minimize the chance of this?

Yeah, you have to build great teams is one of them. It tends to be that the smaller the, there's sort of an, like, I'm not an expert in this, but I've seen this enough integrated. Is there any equations? Yeah. Well, there's almost, there's, I've seen this from enough teams. Like, I've seen also the futility of lone geniuses trying to solve everything by themselves. Like, no. But also, organizations that have 10,000 people in them is just not, doesn't lend itself at all to innovation. So, like, one of our original sponsors and a good friend, Vinod Khosla, I don't know if you've ever talked to Vinod Khosla, he's a venture guy. He's got fantastic ideas about, like, the right sizes of teams and things that really innovate, right? And, and there is an optimum place in there is that you get enough cross discipline and ideas, but it doesn't become so overly bureaucratic that you can't execute on it. So, so one of the ways, and this was one of the challenges of fusion is that everything was leading towards, like, I have to have, like, enormously large, like, teams just to execute because of the scale of the project.

Is there any questions? Have you, by any chance, seen some of the application of artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning? A DeepMind has a nice paper, has a nice effort on basically using reinforcement learning for a learned control algorithm for controlling nuclear fusion. Do you find those kinds of, I guess you throw them under the umbrella of computational modeling,

do you find those interesting, promising directions? They're all interesting. So when people, you know, I'll pull back, maybe a natural question is like, why is it different in fusion? Like there's a long history to fusion, right? It was going on for, like I told you, like stories from the late 1960s, like what's different now, right? So I think from the technology point of view, there's two massive things which are different. So one of them, you know, I'll be parochial, it's the advent of this new superconducting materials because the most mature ways that we understand about how we're gonna get to fusion power plants are magnetic fusion. And by the fact that you've got access to something which like changes the economic equation by an over an order magnitude is just a totally, you know, and that wasn't that long ago, it was only September of 2021 that we actually demonstrated the technology. That changes the prospects there. And the other one is computing and it's across the whole spectrum. It's not just in control of the fusion device. It's actually in the, we actually use machine learning and things like this in the design of the magnet itself.

It's like, they're all interlinked to each other. Plus the modularization, like you said, and it's everything just kind of works together to make smaller teams more effective, move faster.

And it's actually, and it's through that learned experience. I mean, of the things that I'm the most proud of about what came out, in fact, the origins of thinking about how we would use the high temperature superconducting magnets came out of my design class at MIT. And in the design class, like one of the features that I kept, I mean, it was interesting, I actually learned, I really learned along with the students about this, but like this insistence on the features, like we can't have so many coupled integrated hard technology developments. Like we have to separate these somehow. So we worked and worked and worked at this. And in fact, that's what really, in my opinion, the greatest advantage of the arc design and built into the Commonwealth fusion system idea is like to parse out the problems. Like how can we attack these in parallel? Yeah, and so it really comes to, we talked about philosophy, it's like a design philosophy. Like how do you attack these kinds of problems?

And you do it like that. And also, like you mentioned offline that there's a power to, you know, as part of a class to design a nuclear fusion power plant. Well, then it is-

And then make it a reality. And I, well, it's a big power plant. Well, then it is- And then make it a reality. And it's hard to imagine a more powerful force than like 15 MIT PhD students, like working together towards solving a problem. And what I always, in fact, we just, we recently just taught the most recent, I say, I teach it, I mean, I guide it actually, the most recent version of this where they actually designed, based on this National Academies report, they actually designed like a pilot plant that has basis and similarities to what we had done before. But I kept wanting to like push the envelope and where they are. It's like the creativity and the energy that they bring to these things is kind of like, it keeps me going. Like I'm not gonna retire anytime soon when I keep seeing that kind of dedication and it's wonderful around on that. It almost, not to overuse or to paraphrase something, right? Which is that the famous quote by Margaret Mead, never doubt that a small group of dedicated persons will change the world.

Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. I mean, that's just such a powerful and inspiring thing for an individual. Find the right team, be part of that, and then you, yourself, your passion, your efforts could actually make a big change, a big impact. I gotta ask you, so it's a whole nother different conversation I'm sure to have, but nuclear power as it currently stands, so using fission is extremely safe despite public perception. It is the safest actually. So that's a whole nother conversation, but almost like a human bureaucratic physics engineering question of what lessons do you draw from the catastrophic events where the power plants did fail? So Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

Chernobyl, what lessons do you draw? It is, Three Mile Island wasn't really a disaster because nothing escaped from the thing, but Chernobyl and Fukushima were, had obvious consequences in the populations

and they live nearby. Chernobyl and Fuzi. What lesson do you draw from those that you can carry forward to fusion? Now I know there's, you can say that you're not gonna have the same kind of issues, but it's possible that the same folks also said they're not gonna be, have those same kind of issues. We humans, the human factor, we haven't talked about that one quite as much,

but it's still there. So to be clear, so fusion has the intrinsic safety with respect to, it can't run away. Those are physics bases. Technology and engineering bases of running a complex, again, anything that makes large amounts of power and heats things up has got intrinsic safety in it. And by the fact that we actually produce very energetic particles, this doesn't mean that there's no radiation involved in ionizing radiation to be more accurate. In fusion, it's just that it's in a very different order of magnitude, basically. So what are the lessons in fusion? So one of them is make sure that you're looking at aspects of the holistic, environmental, and societal footprint that the technology will have. As technologists, we tend not to focus on these, particularly in early stages of development. Like we just want something that works, right? But if we come with just something that works but doesn't actually satisfy the societal demands for safety and for disposal, I mean, we will have materials that we have to dispose of out of fusion. Just this is, but there's technological questions about what that looks like.

run out of control, essentially.

Human error can still happen with fusion-based reactors. Yeah, yeah. And that one, if human error occurs, then it just stops and this is done. And all of those things, this is the requirement of us as technologists and developers of this technology to not ignore that dimension, in fact, of the design. And that's why me personally, I'm actually pouring myself more and more into that area because this is going to be, I actually really think it is an aspect of the economic viability of fusion because it clearly differentiates ourselves and also sets us up to be about what we want fusion to be is that, again, on paper, fusion can supply all of our energy, like all of it. So this means I want it to be like, like really environmentally benign, but this takes engineering ingenuity, basically, to do that.

Let me ask you some wild out there questions. Sure.

So for- Yeah, sure. So for- We've been talking too much, you know. It's a-

Okay. It's a- Okay. Simple, practical things in everyday life. No, only revolutionizing the entire energy infrastructure of human civilization, yes. But, so cold fusion, this idea, this dream, this interesting physical goals seem to be impossible, but perhaps it's possible. Do you think it is possible? Do you think down the line somewhere in the far distance

it's possible to achieve fusion at a low temperature? Yeah, it's very, very, very unlikely. And this comes from, so this would require a pretty fundamental shift in our understanding of physics, as we know it now. And we know a heck of a lot about how nuclear reactions occur. But by the way, what's interesting is that there's, they actually have a different name for it. They call it leaner, like low energy nuclear reactions. But we do have low energy nuclear reactions. We know these, it's because these come from particularly the weak interaction, the weak force, nuclear force. And so it's, at this point, you know, as a scientist, you always keep yourself open because, but you also demand proof, right?

And that's the thing. It almost requires a breakdown on the theoretical physics side. So something, some deep understanding about quantum mechanics, something,

so the quantum tunneling, some weird. Yeah, and people have looked at that, but even like something like quantum tunneling has a limit as to what it can actually do. So there are people who are genuine, you know, that really want to see it make it, but, you know, sort of goes to the extort, I mean, we know fusion happens at these high energies. Like when we know it's extremely accurately, and I can show you a plot that shows that as you go to lower, lower energy, it basically becomes immeasurable. So if you're going down this other pathway, it means there's really a very different physical mechanism involved. So all I would say is that I, I actually poke in my head once in a while to see what's going on in that area. And as scientists, we should always try to make ourselves open. But in this one, it's like, but show me something that I can measure and that it's repeatable, and then it's going to take more extraordinary effort. And to date, this has not met that threshold,

in my opinion. So even more so than just mentioning, or in that question, thinking about people that are claiming to have achieved cold fusion, I'm more thinking even about people who are studying black holes, and they're basically trying to understand the function of, you know, theoretical physicists. They're doing the long haul, trying to investigate like, okay, what is happening at the singularity? What is this kind of trying to investigate holographic projections on a plate? These weird freaking things that are out there in the universe, and like somehow accidentally they start to figure out something weird. Weird, yeah. And then all of a sudden, There's weirdness all over the place already, yeah. Somehow that weirdness will, I think on a timescale probably of a hundred years or so, that weirdness will open. It just seems like nuclear fusion and black holes and all of this are too, they're next to our neighbors a little bit too much for like, you'll find something.

Interesting. Weird, yeah. And then all of a sudden, interesting. Well, let me tell you a story about this. Yes. It's a real story, yeah. So there are really, really clever scientists in the end of the late 1800s in the world. You talk about like James Clerk Maxwell and you talk about Lord Kelvin, and you talk about Lorentz actually, who named after these other ones and on and on and on and like Faraday, and they discovered electromagnetism, holy cow. And it's like, they figure out all these things. And yet there were these weird things going on that you couldn't quite figure out. It's like, what the heck is going on with this, right? But we teach this all the time in physics classes, right?

Mm-hmm, yeah. And then, you know, in dark energy and again, black holes are the window into this.

Well, well, then black holes, I mean, sometimes black holes are way better understood than those things as well too. So all it tells us is that we shouldn't have hubris about the ideas that we understand everything. And when we, you know, who knows what the next major intellectual insight will be about how the universe, you know, functions.

And actually, I think Rutherford is the one who's attributed at least that, that quote, that physics is the only real science, everything else is stamp collecting.

Right? So there's- I'm sorry, he's my hero, but I will slightly disagree with that. Yes.

Well, no offense to stamp collecting. That's very important too. But, you know, that you have to have humility about the kind of disciplines that make progress at every stage in science. Yeah, exactly. Physics did make a huge amount of progress in the 20th century, but it's possible that other disciplines start to step in.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but Rutherford couldn't imagine, like, mapping the human genome because we didn't even know about DNA.

Yeah, or computers, really. Or computers. He really probably didn't think deeply about computation.

I mean, who knows, it's like, here's a wild one. What if, like, the next great revelation to humanity about the universe is not done by the human mind?

That seems increasingly more likely. Likely, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you start to ask deep questions about what is the purpose of science. For example, if AI system will design a nuclear fusion reactor better than humans do, but we don't quite understand how it works, and the AI can't- we know that it works. We can test it very thoroughly, but we don't know exactly what the control mechanism is, maybe what the chemistry of the physics is. AI can't quite explain it, they just can't- It's impen-

More likely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's impenetrable to our consciousness, basically, trying to hold it all together, trying to- And then, okay, so now we're living in that world where many of the biggest discoveries are made by AI systems.

Yeah, yeah.

As if we weren't going big enough.

Yeah, I say, again, I'll point out, when my godmother was born, none of this was in front of us, right? It's like, we live in an amazing time. My grandfather plowed fields with a horse. I get to work on designing fusion reactors. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, pretty amazing time. But still, there's humans, so we'll see. We'll see if that's around 100 years. Maybe a bee, cyborgs and robots.

Oh, cyborgs and robots. I think we're pretty resilient, actually. Yeah, I know.

Yeah, I know. That's one lesson from life, is it finds a way. Let me ask you a bigger question, as if those weren't big enough. Let's look out, maybe a few hundred years, maybe a few thousand years out. There's something called the Kardashev Scale. It's a method of measuring civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it's able to use. So type 1 civilization, and this might be given all your work, is not no longer a scale that makes quite make sense. But it very much focuses on the source of fusion, natural source of fusion, which is for us, the sun. And type 1 civilizations are able to leverage, sort of collect all the energy that hits Earth. And then type 2 civilizations are the ones that are able to leverage the entirety of the energy that comes from the sun by maybe building something. Like a Dyson Spieger. So when will we reach type 1 status, is get to the level, which we're, I think, maybe a few orders of magnitude away from currently.

Like a Dyson Spieger. Oh, yeah. So one of the fun, you know, on a weekend when I sat down and figured out what would it mean for interstellar travel, like to have a DT fusion. In fact, one of the, I talked about my design class, one of my design classes was how you use essentially a special configuration of a fusion device for not only traveling to, but colonizing Mars. So if you talk about energy use being at the heart of civilizations, like, so what if you want to go to Mars not to just visit it, but actually like leave people there and make it something happen and these massive amounts of energy. So what would that look like? And it actually transforms how you're thinking about doing that as well too. Oh, yeah. So we do those kinds of fun. And actually it was a fairly quasi-realistic actually.

So do you think it'll be nuclear fusion that powers the civilization of Mars?

Well, what we considered was something, so it turns out that the thorium, which is a heavy element, so it's a so-called fertile element, that we know, we still know fairly little about the geology of Mars in a deep sense. And we know that there's a lot of this on the surface of Mars. So one of the things we considered was what would happen that it's basically a combination of a fusion device that actually makes fuel from the thorium. But the underlying energy one was fission itself as well too. So this is one of the examples of being, trying to be clever right around those things. Or what is it, you know, this also means it's like interstellar travel. It's like, oh yeah, that looks almost like impossible basically from an energy balance point of view. It's just like the energy required that you have to transport to get there. Almost the only things that would work are DT fusion and basically annihilation. It's like Star Trek, right? Your sense is that interstellar travel will require fusion power. Oh, it's almost even impossible with fusion power actually.

and it's like staggering, you know, periods of time. So I tend to believe that there's alien civilizations dispersed all throughout.

Yeah, but we might be totally isolated from them.

So you think we're not, there's none in this galaxy. So like, I guess, and the question I also have is what kind of, do you think they have nuclear fusion? And the question is like, is it all, is the physics all the same?

Because it all, is the physics all the same? Yeah. Oh, the physics is all the same. Yeah, right. So this is the, and this is the Fermi paradox. Like where the hell is everybody in the universe? Well, there's some soap, you know, the scariest one of those is that I would point out that there's been, you know, there's, you know, order of many tens of millions of species on the planet earth. And only one ever got to the point of sophisticated tool use that we could actually start essentially leveraging the power of what's in nature to our own will. Does this mean that basically this means, so almost, look, there is almost certainly life or DNA equivalents or whatever it would be somewhere. I mean, just because you just need a soup and you need energy and you get organics and whatever the equivalent of amino acids are. And, but, you know, most of the life on earth has been that those are still amazing, but it's still like, it's not very interesting. Are we, are we actually the accident of history?

like fireflies around the galaxy and you never, yeah, you know, super, super. Yeah. So basically it goes up, goes up, goes up and then explodes, destroys itself because of the

exponential, exponential. And when we say destroy ourselves, all we'd have to do is that we basically go, if humans are all left and we're still living on the planet and, but all we have to do is go to the technology of like, you know, 1800. Yeah. And we're invisible in the universe again. Yeah. So it was when I, when I listened to the, I thought I wanted to talk about this as well too, because it comes from, well, it comes from a science point of view actually of what it means. But also to me, it's like another compelling driver of telling us, it's like why we should try really hard not to screw this up. Like we're in this unique place of our ability to discover and to make it. And I just don't want to give up about thinking that we can get through.

Yeah, I tend to see that there's some kind of game theoretic force like with mutually assured destruction that ultimately in each human being, there's a desire to survive and a willingness to cooperate, to have compassion for each other in order to survive. And I think that, I mean, maybe not in humans, but I can imagine a nearly infinite number of species in which that overpowers any technological advancement that can destroy or rewind the species. So I think if humans fail, I hope they don't. I see a lot of evidence for them not, but it seems like somebody will survive. And there you start to ask questions about why, why we haven't met yet. Maybe it's just space is large.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, space is, it's, I think in logarithms and I can't even fathom you know, space. This is extraordinary, right? It's extraordinarily large. Yeah.

I mean, there's so many places on Earth. I just recently visited Paris for the first time. Yeah. And there's so many other places I haven't visited.

There's so many other places. Well, I like to, you know, it's interesting that we have this fascination with alien life. We have what is essentially alien life on Earth already. Like you think about the organisms that develop around deep sea like thermal vents. One of my favorite books of all time from Stephen Jay Gould. If you've never read that book, it kind of blows your mind. It's about the Cambrian explosion of life. And it's like, oh, you look at these things. And it's like, are the chance of us existing as a species? Like the genetic diversity was larger back then. You know, this is about 500 million years ago or something like that. It is a mind altering trip.

Plus the mind itself. Yeah. Is the kind of alien with almost a mystery to ourselves. We still don't understand it. The very mechanism that helps us explore the world is still a mystery. So that, like understanding that will also unlock, quite possibly unlock our ability to understand the world and maybe build machines that help us understand the world, build tools that. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it already has. I mean, our ability to understand the world is ridiculous almost actually. And post the bottom on TikTok. It's almost unbelievable where we've gotten all this too.

So what advice would you give to young folks or folks of all ages who are lost in this world looking for a way, looking for a career that they can be proud of or looking to have a life they can be proud of?

Yeah. Oh, the first thing I would say is don't give up. I get to see multiple sides of this. And, you know, there seems to be a level of despair in a young generation. It's like, you know, it's almost like the Monty Python skit. Like, I'm not dead yet, right? I mean, like, we're not there. We're in a place that, you know, don't say the world's gonna end in 300 days or something. It's not, okay. And what we mean by this is that we have a robust society that's figured out how to do like amazing things and we're gonna keep doing amazing things. But that shouldn't be complacency about what our future is and the future for their children as well too. And in the end, I mean, it's a very, it's a staggering legacy to think of what we've built up primarily by basically using carbon fuels.

I'm not dead yet, right? I mean, yeah. And that's only possible with optimism, hope, and hard work. Yeah. What an easy question, certainly easier than nuclear fusion. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? 42. Is it 42? No, no. We already discussed about the beauty of physics. There's almost a desire to ask a why question

about why the parameters have these values. No, no. Yeah, it's very tempting. Yeah, it's an interesting hole to go down as a scientist because we're a part of what people who aren't scientists have a hard time understanding what scientists do to themselves. And a great scientist does a very nonintuitive or nonhuman thing. What we do is we train ourselves to doubt ourselves like hell, like that's a great scientist. We doubt everything we see, we doubt everything that we think, because we basically try to turn off the belief valve, right? that humans just naturally have. So, when it comes to these things, like, I can make my own comments to this. It's like, personally, you see these things about the ratios of life. And I made a comment to it. I said, well, you know, a wrap my, some part of my brain that just goes, yeah, well, yeah, because we're the only interesting, you know, multiverse, because by definition, it has to look like this, you know?

And in some sense, the stories, before we understand the real explanations, the stories, the myths serve as a good approximation for the thing that we're yet to understand. Absolutely. And in that sense, you said the antithesis to sort of scientific doubt is having a faith in these stories. They're almost silly when looked at from a scientific perspective, but just even the feelings of, it seems that love is a fundamental fabric of human condition. And what the hell is that?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, actually, I mean- Why are we so connected to each other, you know?

Well, actually, I mean- Why are we so connected to each other, you know? I get, as a physicist, I go, it's, you know, this is a repeatable thing that's due to a set of synapses that fire in a particular pattern and all this. You know, that's kind of like,

okay, man, what a drag that is, right, to think of it. That's due to those that fired all this this way. And you can have an evolutionary biology explanation, but there's still a magic to it.

I mean, I see scientists, some of my colleagues, you know, do this as well, too. Like, where, what is spirituality compared to science and so forth? My own feeling in this is that, you know, as a scientist, because I've had the pleasure of being able to, like, both understand what my predecessors did, but I also had the privilege of being able to discover things, right, as a scientist. And I see that, and you just, in just the range of our conversations, like, that is my, in a weird way, it's the awe that comes from looking at that. That is, if you're not in awe of the universe and nature, you haven't been paying attention. I mean, my own personal feeling is that I feel, if I go snorkeling on a coral reef, I feel more awe than I could ever feel, like, in a church.

You kind of notice some kind of magic there.

There's something about the way the whole darn thing holds together that just sort of escapes your imagination. And that's, to me, this thing of, and then we have different words, we call them holistic or spiritual, the way that it all hangs together. In fact, one of the issues you asked about, like, what I think about, one of the craziest things that I think that how does it hold together is, like, our society. Like, how does, like, what? Like, how, because there's no way, like, you just think of the United States, there's 330 million people kind of working like this engine about going towards making all these things happen. But there's, like, no one in charge of this, really, right? How the heck does this happen? It's kind of like, it's... So these things, these are the kinds of things, mathematically and

organization wise that I think of just because they're sort of, they're awe inspiring. Yeah. And there's different ideas that we come up together and we share them. And then there's teams of people that share different ideas and those ideas compete. Like, the ideas themselves are these kinds of different organisms and ultimately somehow we build bridges and nuclear

reactors. And do those things. Well, I have to give a shout out to my daughter, by the way, she's an applied math major and she's amazing at math and over the break she was showing she's doing research and it's basically about how ideas and ethos are transmitted within a society. So she's building an applied math model that is explaining like, she was showing me in this like this simulation. She goes, oh, look, look at this. And I said, oh, oh, that's like how political parties like evolve, right? And even though it was a rather, you know, quote unquote,

simple math mathematical model, it wasn't really. It's like, oh, wow, amazing. Well, maybe she has a chance to derive mathematically the answer to the, what's the meaning of life? There we go. And maybe it is indeed 42. Well, Dennis, thank you so much for just doing, creating tools, creating systems, exploring this idea. That's one of the most amazing magical ideas in all of human endeavor, which is nuclear fusion.

I mean, that's so interesting. You know, it's almost like my, one of my lifelong goals is like to make it, it's like, it's not magic. It's like, it's boring as all. And this means we're using it

everywhere, right? Yeah. And the magic is then built on top of it. Well, thank you for everything you do. Thank you for talking to me. It's a huge honor. This was a fascinating and amazing conversation. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dennis White. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. There are two ways to live your life.