Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, I noticed a trend recently that kind of
Speaker 1: worries me. Oh, what's that? I feel like people are
Speaker 1: using the word laser to make things sound more signs.
Speaker 1: You mean, like laser vision correction. I actually think that's legit,
Speaker 1: isn't it? Well, to be honest, I've been doing this,
Speaker 1: I think since the seventies. But the deal I saw
Speaker 1: something that said quit smoking with lasers. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: about that. What are they zapping exactly? Maybe they zap
Speaker 1: you every time you smoke a cigarette ouch, or maybe
Speaker 1: they just zap your wallet. That wouldn't really stop you
Speaker 1: from smoking, though, wouldn't You wouldn't have any more money
Speaker 1: to buy cigarettes, but then your wallet would be smoking.
Speaker 1: Hi am or handmade cartoonists and the co author of
Speaker 1: Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm
Speaker 1: a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and
Speaker 1: I've never purposely zapped myself with a laser. Oh, but
Speaker 1: you've done it accidentally. I try to talk about that.
Speaker 1: What are you trying to do with a laser? I mean,
Speaker 1: you are a particle physicist, so I wouldn't put it
Speaker 1: past you to you know between around with giant lasers.
Speaker 1: Lasers are a low energy man for me, Lasers like whatever,
Speaker 1: what I guess nice to a particle collider, a laser
Speaker 1: is what like a tiny little you know, baby gun
Speaker 1: pew pew pew. You're like, give me the giant death
Speaker 1: star ray. But a laser beam is going at the
Speaker 1: speed of light. That's faster than what your gun is doing.
Speaker 1: At the large hadron collider, That's true. My accelerated protons
Speaker 1: would lose a race to lasers. Son, you know, high
Speaker 1: new and gunfight. You know, the guy with the laser
Speaker 1: would get to you first. He would fry me one
Speaker 1: bill a second before I zapp his brain with the
Speaker 1: proton beam. Yeah, they would have time to, you know,
Speaker 1: get out of the way. I don't think physics is
Speaker 1: nearly as exciting as you'd like to imagine. Well, you
Speaker 1: don't know my imagination, Daniel. Isn't it always high noon
Speaker 1: at the larger patron collider? This collidering big enough for
Speaker 1: the two of us. But anyways, welcome to our podcast
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio in which we try to zapp your brain
Speaker 1: with all of the amazing and incredible things going on
Speaker 1: in our universe. We heat up your cerebellum a little
Speaker 1: bit by talking about all the incredible mysteries about the
Speaker 1: nature of the universe, how it works, how it came together,
Speaker 1: how we can harness what we've learned to improve our
Speaker 1: everyday lives. Yeah, because it's a big universe and there's
Speaker 1: a lot going on in it. There are things out
Speaker 1: there exploding, sucking stuff into black holes, and also fusing together,
Speaker 1: taking lots of material out there in space and smushing
Speaker 1: them all together to make something new. Because the universe
Speaker 1: is not static, it's incredible. It's dynamic, it's chaotic. There
Speaker 1: are powerful things going on in the hearts of stars
Speaker 1: and the collisions of neutron stars, and mysterious things happening
Speaker 1: in the centers of black holes. And by understanding how
Speaker 1: those things work, we cannot just reveal the true nature
Speaker 1: of space and time and the universe itself, we can
Speaker 1: hope to better our lives down here on Earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if anything at all, it's entertaining, sort of like
Speaker 1: a big battle in a Star Wars movie with lots
Speaker 1: of lasers. It is pretty fun to watch stars collide
Speaker 1: and imagine what else you could smush together. But as
Speaker 1: you said, it's interesting to understand things about the universe
Speaker 1: and know more about that because sometimes we can use
Speaker 1: that knowledge for our benefit. We can use it to
Speaker 1: create better medical devices and new procedures and better devices
Speaker 1: for our phones, and also maybe even in the future,
Speaker 1: solve all of our energy needs. That's right. Physics and
Speaker 1: particle physics is not just about abstract understanding of the
Speaker 1: nature of the universe, although that is a lot of fun,
Speaker 1: it also gives us the power to solve real world problems,
Speaker 1: and by understanding how energy flows in the rest of
Speaker 1: the universe, we can try to learn how to better
Speaker 1: harness and tap into it here on Earth. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I guess humans, you know, use up a lot of energy.
Speaker 1: You know, we need to charge up our phones, we
Speaker 1: need to heat our bodies up in the winter, and
Speaker 1: so we consume a lot of energy. But so far,
Speaker 1: most of the energy we use sort of comes from
Speaker 1: pretty sloppy methods. That's right. Most of the energy produced
Speaker 1: in the universe is via fusion, squeezing together protons at
Speaker 1: the hearts of sun to release a little bit of
Speaker 1: energy as they become heavier. Elements, but down here on
Speaker 1: Earth were mostly doing other stuff like burning fossil fuels
Speaker 1: or or capturing the Sun's rays. We haven't yet managed
Speaker 1: to take advantage of the most common, the most prolific,
Speaker 1: the most amazing process out there. Yeah, it seems like
Speaker 1: we sort of use mostly chemistry for energy here down
Speaker 1: on Earth. You know, we combine moll kulls or break
Speaker 1: apart giant long molecules, and it seems like the universe
Speaker 1: has have a better idea for maybe a cleaner idea
Speaker 1: for how to create or release energy, and it's happening
Speaker 1: all the time in the sun, for example. Many of
Speaker 1: our techniques have advantages, but all of them have disadvantages.
Speaker 1: You know, renewable energy is wonderful, but it's not always
Speaker 1: easy to predict when the sun will shine or when
Speaker 1: the wind will blow. Even things like fission based nuclear
Speaker 1: power that we've talked about recently on the podcast can
Speaker 1: produce a lot of really toxic nuclear waste. So fusion
Speaker 1: is always been something we've hoped for, something we've strived
Speaker 1: for as an energy source of the future, but for
Speaker 1: a long time it's remains stubbornly in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's an almost very elegant way of getting energy, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you just take two basic protons s mush them together
Speaker 1: and you get a slightly bigger atom. And it seems
Speaker 1: like a pretty clean way to get energy. It is,
Speaker 1: and the fuel that's required, it's not something complicated and
Speaker 1: nasty like uranium or even thorium you have to dig
Speaker 1: up from the Earth's crust. Protons are literally everywhere. It's
Speaker 1: the most common thing in the universe, so we're not
Speaker 1: going to run out of protons for fuel for fusion,
Speaker 1: and hardly produces any waste because the byproducts are also
Speaker 1: light elements, which are not dangerous. So there are so
Speaker 1: many advantages, so many reasons to hope that we might
Speaker 1: get fusion to work. It could basically make energy free.
Speaker 1: Imagine how our society would be transformed if energy cost
Speaker 1: literally nothing. Yeah, but as you said, fusion is hard
Speaker 1: to do. I mean, it's done at the center of
Speaker 1: the Sun, but that's hard to replicate here on Earth.
Speaker 1: But there is a sort of relatively new way to
Speaker 1: create fusion, an idea that's been around for a while
Speaker 1: that has been making a lot of progress lately. You're
Speaker 1: probably familiar with our attempts to replicate fusion by replicating
Speaker 1: the conditions at the heart of the sun, heating things
Speaker 1: up and storing them in magnetic bottles, for example. But
Speaker 1: that's not the only way to do fusion. We can
Speaker 1: also take advantage of lasers. So today on the podcast,
Speaker 1: we'll be tackling the question what is laser fusion and
Speaker 1: are you sure that's the way to pronounce it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I know, right, it's two s. Is it should be
Speaker 1: laser fuse fusion. That sounds like a French thie restaurant
Speaker 1: where they what they cook your food with lasers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's new fusion cuisine with lasers and they lace it
Speaker 1: with thie basil. That sounds pretty good. Actually, yeah, I know. Alright,
Speaker 1: Suddenly I'm like Mayne, I'll go get some tie for lunch.
Speaker 1: I love when our jokes on the podcast are actually
Speaker 1: seriously good business ideas. Somebody out there, I hope is
Speaker 1: taking it. I'm not sure restaurants are great business ideas,
Speaker 1: but maybe one with lasers is maybe we should just
Speaker 1: have a food truck, right, Let's have a Daniel and Horror. Hey,
Speaker 1: explain the universe food truck where we try out all
Speaker 1: of these things is an experiment coming soon to a
Speaker 1: university near you. Mostly we just sell bananas, you know,
Speaker 1: every day. This special is something different, you know, black
Speaker 1: hole donuts, or we can use lasers to write the
Speaker 1: podcast logo on the banana skin. Oh interesting, So the
Speaker 1: bananas are lazed with lasers, lazier bananas and then it
Speaker 1: gets peeled also by lasers. Or just your graduated grand
Speaker 1: students have plenty to do when not putting them to
Speaker 1: work in the food truck. You gotta you gotta pay
Speaker 1: them somehow, physics paying the bills. That's true. Maybe a
Speaker 1: food truck will raise more money than my latest grand
Speaker 1: application to the National Science Foundation. Actually, you know, the
Speaker 1: National Science Foundation requires an outreach component. Maybe I should
Speaker 1: propose a physics based food truck as a way to
Speaker 1: reach the public. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go. But
Speaker 1: this is an interesting technique and maybe the way of
Speaker 1: the future. This idea of creating fusion with lasers. This
Speaker 1: is an idea that's been around for a little while, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this idea has been around almost as long as the
Speaker 1: other ideas for fusion. Back in the days when people
Speaker 1: were still really not sure how we could achieve the
Speaker 1: conditions necessary to squeeze protons together and release their nuclear energy.
Speaker 1: And I remember when I first heard about it, I thought,
Speaker 1: that's crazy, that will never work. That's just like throwing
Speaker 1: lasers at the problem to try to solve it. Isn't
Speaker 1: throwing lasers at the problem basically physics. I mean, did
Speaker 1: you use lasers for everything? I can't seem to fall
Speaker 1: asleep at night? Have you tried lasers that it works
Speaker 1: in every situation? I mean, like most physics experiments use lasers, right,
Speaker 1: My goo uses lasers. All these experiments use lasers. Right.
Speaker 1: Lasers are very cool. They're very clean. They're single frequency
Speaker 1: source of photons that are all in phase and highly collimated.
Speaker 1: So they're very powerful because they'd let you touch something
Speaker 1: really basic about the universe, right, which is that the
Speaker 1: speed of light is a constant. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: pure and clean and simple in that way. And also
Speaker 1: people like them. They're cool, and so it's a nice
Speaker 1: thing to write in your grand proposal. That doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: mean that it solves every problem. Like you know, are
Speaker 1: your kids fighting? Not? Lasers are the answer, but they
Speaker 1: could be. Have you tried just give a couple of
Speaker 1: laser guns and they'll be quiet and entertained for hours,
Speaker 1: that's right. And when you smell charred flesh, maybe you
Speaker 1: know you've gone too far. Well, little powered lasers of course,
Speaker 1: right right, we'll try that in your kids first. But
Speaker 1: it is an intriguing idea, and that one that's been
Speaker 1: around for a while and one that maybe people will
Speaker 1: be surprised to learn is happening right here in the
Speaker 1: US in California. That's right. We are the world leader
Speaker 1: in zapping stuff with enormous big lasers. How american is that?
Speaker 1: But you can't have anybody else be the world leader
Speaker 1: of laser snapping. There'll be a national security risk, that's true.
Speaker 1: And actually these huge lasers are not just for studying fusion,
Speaker 1: are also for making sure that our nuclear weapons are
Speaker 1: not degrading as they sit on the stockpile. All right,
Speaker 1: we'll get into that. But as usually, we were wondering
Speaker 1: how many people out there had heard of laser fusion
Speaker 1: or knew how it works. So thanks very much to
Speaker 1: everybody who volunteers to answer these silly questions over the podcast.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of fun for us and very helpful
Speaker 1: for the listeners to hear what other people are thinking
Speaker 1: and if you'd like to participate, please don't be shy.
Speaker 1: Just right to us. Two questions at Daniel and Jorge
Speaker 1: dot com. We'd love to hear from you. Think about
Speaker 1: it for a second. How do you think laser fusion worked?
Speaker 1: Here's what people had to say. As I understand that
Speaker 1: laser is light amplification by stimulated emicious radiation, So I
Speaker 1: suppose that laser fusion can either amplify the laser further
Speaker 1: or somehow produce energy similar to solar power. I heard
Speaker 1: about this some lab achieved what was it, some benchmark
Speaker 1: recently with laser fusion, and it was all over this
Speaker 1: science news. Laser fusion is when several lasers are all
Speaker 1: pointed at one small spot containing the hydrogen itoms in
Speaker 1: that spot and heating them up. The heat causes the
Speaker 1: hydrogen atoms to move faster and faster, and they eventually
Speaker 1: crash into each other, merging, creating helium and fusion. Laser
Speaker 1: fusion is the fusion that is being done that just
Speaker 1: achieved a new energy level, and the laser provides the
Speaker 1: energy to help cause the hydrogen items atoms to bond
Speaker 1: together to form the helium. I have never heard of
Speaker 1: laser fusion. But if I were to guess, I would
Speaker 1: guess it's something where you can focus enough lasers um
Speaker 1: and get the conditions just right to meet the starting
Speaker 1: conditions of nuclear fusion, and then from there it's kind
Speaker 1: of a self sustaining process. I have no idea laser fusion.
Speaker 1: Probably the research this type of fusion for or future
Speaker 1: clean energy. Alright, a lot of great answers like the
Speaker 1: one that said it's fusion with lasers basically, and it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not wrong, right, Nobody thought it was a tie
Speaker 1: basil restaurant. That's surprising. That means it's a great idea
Speaker 1: that oh yeah, nobody's had this idea yet. It's fresh
Speaker 1: fresh laser fusion cuisine. Even better, organic fresh laser fusion cuisine. Yes,
Speaker 1: lasers to table. That's a very common thing people want.
Speaker 1: If he's ask something with a laser, is it still organic? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know where did the energy that power the
Speaker 1: laser come from. Interesting from a free range horse on
Speaker 1: a treadmill. Maybe that's still organic. Free range horse a treadmill,
Speaker 1: that's your most organic source of energy, A free range
Speaker 1: horse from the treadmille brain storm I'm just bit balling here. Yes,
Speaker 1: in that case, it's an organic laser to table restaurant.
Speaker 1: Yeah all right, yeah, yeah, maybe ethnically questionable unless I
Speaker 1: guess the horse likes to work out on a treadmill
Speaker 1: and all the servers have very long beards that are
Speaker 1: elegantly trimmed with our new laser beard trimming technique. But
Speaker 1: then how do you power that laser? More horses? More?
Speaker 1: We need more horses, man, this this business idea is
Speaker 1: getting more complicated by the second. Maybe we should stick
Speaker 1: to our core competencies. I think we just need more
Speaker 1: layers to the spreadsheet. That's always the answer. I see
Speaker 1: more spreadsheets. Yes, yes, that's always the answer. But anyways,
Speaker 1: a lot of people seem to have no idea how
Speaker 1: this works, and some people had not even heard of
Speaker 1: the idea of laser fusion. I guess it hasn't been
Speaker 1: on the headlines a lot. Yeah, it doesn't seem to
Speaker 1: be as popular an idea as the other forms of fusion.
Speaker 1: And that's why I thought it'd be fun to dig
Speaker 1: into and to share people the basic ideas, the challenges,
Speaker 1: and the potential future. All right, well, you talked a
Speaker 1: little bit about what a laser is. So now let's
Speaker 1: um start at the basics and talk about what fusion is.
Speaker 1: So the basics of fusion are fairly simple. You start
Speaker 1: with two light elements like hydrogen. Take two protons for example.
Speaker 1: Those are just the nuclei of the hydrogen atom, and
Speaker 1: squeeze them together. Now, protons are positively charged, right, they
Speaker 1: had the same positive electric charge, which means they will
Speaker 1: repel each other the way to electrons would, and so
Speaker 1: it's not easy to squeeze them together. But if you
Speaker 1: squeeze them together close enough, then that repulsive charge gets
Speaker 1: overwhelmed by a new attractive force. The strong force, which
Speaker 1: only operates over these very short distances. Now pulls these
Speaker 1: protons together and squeezes them together to make a nucleus,
Speaker 1: bonds them together into something new. So now you get helium,
Speaker 1: and in the process you also release some energy. The
Speaker 1: state of two protons being bound together into a nucleus
Speaker 1: is lower energy than the protons flying around free m
Speaker 1: It's interesting to think that, you know, there's all this
Speaker 1: hydrogen out there in space, floating around here on Earth.
Speaker 1: There's hydrogen in the air and and and all that,
Speaker 1: and it has the potential to fuse together, Like it
Speaker 1: could at any moment fuse together and release a huge
Speaker 1: amount of energy. But it doesn't because, as you said,
Speaker 1: there's the electromagnetic force, which kind of keeps everything from
Speaker 1: squeezing together, keeps everything apart. Yeah, the strong force is
Speaker 1: so much more powerful than the electromagnetic force, but it
Speaker 1: typically only operates over very short distances or reasons that
Speaker 1: we talked about in some of our episodes about gluons
Speaker 1: and why quarks can't be alone. But if you get
Speaker 1: those protons close enough, then the gluons that are inside
Speaker 1: each of them start to talk to each other, and
Speaker 1: then they realize, hey, we actually do like to hang
Speaker 1: out next to each other. But it only happens when
Speaker 1: the protons really get squeezed together, Otherwise they repel each
Speaker 1: other and they never get close enough to discover this
Speaker 1: amazing potential they have. Yeah, it's like the strong force
Speaker 1: is super super duper strong, but it has a very
Speaker 1: short range, Like it only kicks in when the two
Speaker 1: protons are super duper close to each other. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's worth thinking for a moment about like why nuclei
Speaker 1: stick together at all? Right, Why, for example, can you
Speaker 1: have a lead nucleus with so many positive protons in it,
Speaker 1: what's holding it together? And it should be blown apart
Speaker 1: by the electromagnetic repulsive forces. And the answer is, while
Speaker 1: you can think of a nucleus as a bunch of protons,
Speaker 1: really those protons are talking to each other. The boundary
Speaker 1: between the protons is a little bit fuzzy. Each proton
Speaker 1: technically has no overall color charge from the strong force,
Speaker 1: but in reality it does leak out a little bit
Speaker 1: and that's enough to hold them together. So you can
Speaker 1: sort of think of a nucleus is like a really
Speaker 1: large bound state of all the quarks and protons inside,
Speaker 1: sort of grouped into protons, but that boundary becomes a
Speaker 1: little bit fuzzy once they're inside the nucleus. It's a
Speaker 1: little bit like your kids, you know, they always run
Speaker 1: away when you try to hug him. They're repelled by
Speaker 1: you once you hug him. Once they get close enough,
Speaker 1: you can grab him in your arms and then hug
Speaker 1: him and then they hug you back. Right, Yeah, sort
Speaker 1: of like that. And there's also an analogy in chemistry, right,
Speaker 1: like hydrogen and oxygen or independent atoms. But if you
Speaker 1: bring them close enough together you can form a new
Speaker 1: state water. And the boundary between the hydrogen the oxygen
Speaker 1: atom is a little bit fuzzy because now, for example,
Speaker 1: they're sharing an electron, and that's what a chemical bond is.
Speaker 1: Right here, in the case of the inside of the nucleus,
Speaker 1: we're talking about not a chemical bond, but a bond
Speaker 1: from the strong force. But still they're exchanging gluons, so
Speaker 1: the overlap between the protons is a little bit less crisp.
Speaker 1: And so that's what fusion is, is getting the protons
Speaker 1: close enough to take advantage of that and at least
Speaker 1: some of the energy that they otherwise have. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then this happens in stars all the time. That's
Speaker 1: what powers are a son. It's also what happens in
Speaker 1: nuclear bombs. Yeah, it happens in stars naturally. And that's
Speaker 1: for example, where all the heavy elements are made, the helium,
Speaker 1: the neon, the carbon, the oxygen. All this happens through
Speaker 1: steady progressions of fusion. You confuse more than just hydrogen.
Speaker 1: You confuse helium together, you confuse carbon together. You confuse
Speaker 1: things all the way up to iron. And as you said,
Speaker 1: we have replicated this process here on Earth we understand
Speaker 1: the physics of it. It's at the heart of our
Speaker 1: nuclear web. Yeah, and you know, one thing that I've
Speaker 1: never really repped my head around is the the idea
Speaker 1: of where does this energy come from? Like when you
Speaker 1: smosh two protons together, I know that um the end
Speaker 1: result has a lower energy state and so therefore energy
Speaker 1: has to be released. Where where does this energy actually
Speaker 1: come from? So it's like two hydrogen atoms are repelling
Speaker 1: each other by the electromagnete force, but once they get
Speaker 1: close enough to each other, the strong force grabs them
Speaker 1: and squishes them together. But where does the energy come from?
Speaker 1: Their energy comes from the original arrangement of the protons
Speaker 1: as separate objects. It costs more energy to build two
Speaker 1: separate protons than to build a pair of protons together
Speaker 1: into a nucleus. And you might think like, well, why
Speaker 1: is that. Let's just due to the complicated nature of
Speaker 1: the nuclear interaction. You can think about it sort of
Speaker 1: the other way, Like if you have a helium nucleus,
Speaker 1: which is like two protons stuck together, it costs energy
Speaker 1: to break them apart, to take them apart into separate protons.
Speaker 1: So reversing that taking two separate protons and turning them
Speaker 1: into a helium nucleus that releases that energy. Core idea
Speaker 1: there the is that it's just a lower energy state,
Speaker 1: and that's just due to the way that the quarks
Speaker 1: and the blue ones like to arrange themselves. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: know it sort of makes sense logically, but I still
Speaker 1: sort of wonder where the energy comes from, Like it
Speaker 1: just comes out of where, like what's getting transformed into
Speaker 1: energy or like photons that come out the original energy
Speaker 1: comes from the Big Bang, which is where these protons
Speaker 1: were ford You know, think about these protons is like
Speaker 1: a type bundle of springs. They have all this energy
Speaker 1: stored in them. Where does that energy come from? Well,
Speaker 1: whatever process made those protons in the very early universe
Speaker 1: be remember protons last basically forever those protons are flying around.
Speaker 1: They have that energy already inside them. And then you
Speaker 1: give them this option when they can relax a little bit.
Speaker 1: They can like let one of those springs go and
Speaker 1: hang out with one of their buddies and together it
Speaker 1: takes less energy for them to be in a stable state.
Speaker 1: So they can relax some of those springs and release
Speaker 1: that energy. In terms of very high energy neutrons which
Speaker 1: fly out during the fusion process. Oh. Interesting, that's a
Speaker 1: good way to put it. Yeah, Like at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the universe, protons were made with like maybe three
Speaker 1: springs holding them together. But once they meet up with
Speaker 1: another proton and they get close and they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: we only need you know, four between us or three
Speaker 1: between us. Let's throw away all these other springs and
Speaker 1: that's where the energy comes from. Yeah, we're releasing the
Speaker 1: energy of the Big Bang. That's a pretty cool way
Speaker 1: to put it. Yeah. And the sun that's pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like every time you walk outside and you get bathed
Speaker 1: by sunlight, part of that was that all came from
Speaker 1: the Big Bang. It's so much more efficient than the
Speaker 1: chemical processes that we usually rely on. Like, if you
Speaker 1: had a gram of fuel and you could efficiently use
Speaker 1: it for fusion, it would release as much energy as
Speaker 1: eighty thousand tons of oil. It's just mind boggling how
Speaker 1: much more energy is released in fusion than in burning oil.
Speaker 1: Whoa you mean, like a gram of hydrogen has as
Speaker 1: much energy as eighty tons of oil. Eighty thousand tons
Speaker 1: of oil eight Wow, And it's like freely available here
Speaker 1: on Earth, right Hydrogen is pretty easy to get relatively
Speaker 1: Hygroen is everywhere. It's in water, so you can just
Speaker 1: like takes sea water and split it up and you
Speaker 1: get hydrogen. I mean that takes a little bit of
Speaker 1: energy in order to do that, but the energy released
Speaker 1: from the hydrogen when you use it infusion is much
Speaker 1: much more When technical detail is that the most efficient
Speaker 1: fusion comes not from the kind of hydrogen that we
Speaker 1: find in our water, but comes from hydrogen isotopes like
Speaker 1: deuterium and tritium. We find that still here on Earth
Speaker 1: in terms of heavy water. But it's a bit of
Speaker 1: an overstatement to say you just like take a cup
Speaker 1: of sea water and all of that is fuel. But
Speaker 1: you can still find heavy water here on Earth to
Speaker 1: use for fuel infusion. Right, you have to do something
Speaker 1: to it, but at the end you sort of get
Speaker 1: enough energy to do that and also get energy to
Speaker 1: power your phone. All right, well, let's get into a
Speaker 1: little bit of the details of how fusion works and
Speaker 1: how you can use lasers to make it happen. But
Speaker 1: first let's take a quick break. Right, we are fusing
Speaker 1: to get other ideas here, we're having a mind meld.
Speaker 1: We are releasing a lot of energy and knowledge talking
Speaker 1: about fusion and how we could maybe do it with
Speaker 1: lasers because that would be I guess cool. It would
Speaker 1: be pretty cool. Anything with lasers is fun. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it'd be nice to have a laser fusion source at
Speaker 1: the back of your laser based restaurant and barber shop.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you have lasers anyway, you might as
Speaker 1: well have like multiple businesses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you
Speaker 1: could uh, I don't know, they do a nice light
Speaker 1: show in the sky with your meal. Alright. We talked
Speaker 1: about how to make fusion happen. You're smushing together protons
Speaker 1: close enough that the strong force takes over, squeezes them together,
Speaker 1: releases all out of that pent up energy they don't
Speaker 1: need anymore. And that's the energy we get it from fusion.
Speaker 1: And that sounds awesome and great, and because hydrogen is
Speaker 1: relatively easy to get here on Earth, but it's it's
Speaker 1: hard because it's hard to squish them together that much. Right,
Speaker 1: You need to get them close in order to make
Speaker 1: it work. It's sort of like a really hard hole
Speaker 1: in mini golf. You need to roll the ball like
Speaker 1: up an incline. If you get it close enough, it'll
Speaker 1: fall in the hole. But if you just missed by
Speaker 1: a little bit, it's going to roll off in the
Speaker 1: wrong direction. So you gotta get these protons to shoot
Speaker 1: like right at each other really high speeds for this
Speaker 1: to happen. Otherwise they're just going to veer off in
Speaker 1: another direction. Wait what what what mini golf? What you mean? Like, um,
Speaker 1: it's hard to get them to smooth because they are
Speaker 1: being repelled by the electromenamtic force. And even if they're
Speaker 1: on a collection course with each other, the two protons,
Speaker 1: and they're even off by a little bit, then that
Speaker 1: electromagnetic force is gonna basically get worse and repel them
Speaker 1: right and veer them off course. In order to make
Speaker 1: it happen, you have to get really close, just like
Speaker 1: you've got to get the ball basically into the hole
Speaker 1: before you get any points anywhere, not exactly run on target,
Speaker 1: it's just going to roll right off. Imagine like a
Speaker 1: mini golf hole where the hole is at the top
Speaker 1: of a volcano. Whoa like a literal volcano, like a
Speaker 1: mini golf volcano. You know, like the paper michee covered
Speaker 1: in ast turf, and it's like allow, that'd be a
Speaker 1: really hard minigolf hole if you put it at the
Speaker 1: top of a volcano and you have to shoot it
Speaker 1: from the bottom or you have to climb up either
Speaker 1: one sounds difficult, but I guess it's sort of like
Speaker 1: putting two magnets together, right, Like, if you take two
Speaker 1: magnets and point them in the you know, the two
Speaker 1: plus sides together, it's really hard to like, you know,
Speaker 1: get them to touch right exactly, because the forces keep
Speaker 1: trying to like move into the side. They certainly do. Now,
Speaker 1: imagine that if you force them really close together, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden they stepped together and heat it up.
Speaker 1: That would be pretty incredible, But only when you really
Speaker 1: got them next to each other. So that's what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. And in order to make this happen, order
Speaker 1: to make protons fused together, you've got to get them
Speaker 1: close to each other. And to do that, essentially, you
Speaker 1: need to get them going fast enough, and you have
Speaker 1: to get them very close together, right, And in the
Speaker 1: sun that happens because of just the amazing gravity and
Speaker 1: the amazing pressure and density that's inside of the sun, right,
Speaker 1: that's right. The way fusion scientists think about it is
Speaker 1: that you need temperature, then city and time and stars
Speaker 1: solve this problem using gravitational confinement. They basically make a
Speaker 1: well in space itself and squeeze all that stuff into it,
Speaker 1: and then fusion happens. Because you've got lots of time
Speaker 1: and loss of density and really high temperatures. The temperatures
Speaker 1: were talking about are like a hundred million degrees kelvin
Speaker 1: is what's necessary to get these protons to fuse right
Speaker 1: and density. You need enough of them flying around that
Speaker 1: fast so that every once in a while some of
Speaker 1: them like crash head on right and fuse together. For example,
Speaker 1: there is gas in the universe that's a very high temperature,
Speaker 1: very low density, like the gas between galaxies can be
Speaker 1: at millions or tens or hundreds of millions of degrees kelvin,
Speaker 1: but it's very very dilute. So you're not going to
Speaker 1: get fusion there because protons aren't close enough together. They
Speaker 1: need to be crowded together and fast in order to
Speaker 1: get fusion to happen right, And then you need time,
Speaker 1: I guess also, because you know, these things don't happen
Speaker 1: all the time, even if they are going fast, and
Speaker 1: even if there are a lot of them, they still
Speaker 1: sort of miss each other or veer off core Earth.
Speaker 1: You need time for the for that one head on
Speaker 1: collision to happen every once in a while, right, And
Speaker 1: the goal, of course, is that you get fusion started,
Speaker 1: and then the energy released by the fusion spreads out
Speaker 1: and causes more fusion. And this is what physicists call ignition.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like when you start a campfire. You
Speaker 1: don't need to continuously start the campfire all evening. You
Speaker 1: can sit back and relax because the bit that you
Speaker 1: started ignites the next bit, which ignites the next bit,
Speaker 1: which ignites the next bit. It's a chain reaction. We
Speaker 1: want to get that same process started in a fusion reactor,
Speaker 1: for example, so you can switch it on by pouring
Speaker 1: in some energy, but then the energy released from the
Speaker 1: fusion maintains itself, right, And so that's in the Sun
Speaker 1: and then in here on Earth. We've try to sort
Speaker 1: of replicate or make those conditions happen, not with gravity,
Speaker 1: because we don't have the gravity of the Sun, but
Speaker 1: they try to do it with magnets, basically like a
Speaker 1: magnetic bottle. So this strategy, which is pretty widely known,
Speaker 1: it is called magnetic confinement fusion and the idea here
Speaker 1: is to get a long time is to build a plasma,
Speaker 1: making it really really hot, to start with a gas
Speaker 1: of hydrogen heated up, and then keep it confined for
Speaker 1: a long time using a magnetic bottle. Because remember that
Speaker 1: a plasma is charged particles. These are protons, so they
Speaker 1: have a charge, so we can bend their path using
Speaker 1: a magnet. We can they make a particle go around
Speaker 1: in a circle. That's what we do with a large
Speaker 1: hadron collider. We bend the path of particles using magnets,
Speaker 1: so without ever touching them directly. Because the plasma is
Speaker 1: super hot, you can try to keep a plasma contained
Speaker 1: by using magnets to sort of like make a current
Speaker 1: go around in a circle. Yeah, and there are active
Speaker 1: projects right there are. There's a big one in Europe
Speaker 1: called Eater. We've talked about that on the podcast, where
Speaker 1: they build basically these giant magnetic bottle and they are
Speaker 1: trying to get fusion going and they've come pretty close
Speaker 1: to right. There's a long series of these experiments. They're
Speaker 1: generally called tocamax, and there's sort of like a doughnut
Speaker 1: and you have like a tube of plasma flowing around
Speaker 1: inside of them. It's very challenging because plasma is very unstable.
Speaker 1: It's very hard to keep it flowing in a tube.
Speaker 1: It likes to break out and going crazy direct actions
Speaker 1: and interact with itself very powerfully because these are a
Speaker 1: lot of positively charged particles. So it's very challenging. But
Speaker 1: they are building Eater in France and they hope that
Speaker 1: when it's finished it will achieve fusion and actually create energy.
Speaker 1: But it's you know, it's a decades long project and
Speaker 1: it seems like it's always two decades away. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: been two decades away for like three decades, right, So
Speaker 1: that's one way to achieve fusion. And it's hard because
Speaker 1: you're basically trying to create a son and then contain
Speaker 1: it in a bottle, which is gonna probably try to
Speaker 1: melt your bottle kind of. Yeah. So you're constantly battling
Speaker 1: keeping the plasma stable, trying to keep it going for
Speaker 1: long enough that you can get ignition and then take
Speaker 1: advantage of that and burn this thing over and over
Speaker 1: and over again, keep putting in fuel to your hot
Speaker 1: plasma so you can keep extracting energy. It's really hard, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so physicists I guess to hedge their beds have
Speaker 1: been trying another way to create fusion using lasers, all
Speaker 1: sort of at the same time. Right, these are two
Speaker 1: parallel paths of research, two totally different communities of folks
Speaker 1: with different expertise. And so this path using lasers takes
Speaker 1: a different approach to confinement. Instead of trying to heat
Speaker 1: a plasma and keep it confined for a long time,
Speaker 1: they take a different approach, and they say, we don't
Speaker 1: care about how long it's confined for. Let's just try
Speaker 1: to get fusion to happen really really fast by getting
Speaker 1: our fuel to be super duper dense. So this is
Speaker 1: called inertial confinement fusion. It's like, let's try to squeeze
Speaker 1: our fuel down and get fusion to happen sort of
Speaker 1: before it can blow itself up. Interesting, and I guess
Speaker 1: more philosophically, to like the ones with magnets, you're basically
Speaker 1: trying to create a son, like an ongoing sun burning sun.
Speaker 1: But with these laser fusions, it's sort of a different philosophy.
Speaker 1: It's more like a conveyor belt sun, or like if
Speaker 1: you take a son and you string it out into
Speaker 1: a long sort of line right exactly. You would start
Speaker 1: with like a pellet and you can use lasers and
Speaker 1: heat it and create fusion, and then you can use
Speaker 1: up that pellet and then you'd start again from scratch.
Speaker 1: So as you say, the plasma approach is like let's
Speaker 1: have a continuously burning plow when we can just chuck
Speaker 1: in more fuel like a campfire that lasts all night.
Speaker 1: This is more like setting off a series of small
Speaker 1: bombs to keep yourself warm, or like more like bullets right,
Speaker 1: look more like a machine gun kind of exactly. But
Speaker 1: you know, if you can get enough energy out of
Speaker 1: these fuel pellets and do this rapidly, then potentially that
Speaker 1: could work. All right, Well, let's step people through this here.
Speaker 1: So the ideas to use lasers to create fusion and
Speaker 1: you do it by using pellets. So talk to us
Speaker 1: about this. These pellets, like what are they? What are
Speaker 1: they made out of? So they're made out of the
Speaker 1: fuel you would need for fusion, you know, like hydrogen
Speaker 1: in its various isotopes, So they're like ices of deuterium
Speaker 1: and tritium. Those are isotopes of hydrogen with extra neutrons,
Speaker 1: and these are the fuels that fuse best and release
Speaker 1: the best energy. We're talking about really really small drops.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't be imagining like some guy shoveling a huge
Speaker 1: fuel pellet in or something. These things wait like milligrams, right,
Speaker 1: so like ten milligram hydrogen pellets, and they're they're like
Speaker 1: little tiny ones, right, like maybe like sinally the size
Speaker 1: of a babe right there are millimeters wide. They're really
Speaker 1: really small already, And the reason you don't make them
Speaker 1: bigger is that it's much more difficult to make it
Speaker 1: bigger to heat it up and have it be stable.
Speaker 1: Because what you're looking to happen is sort of similar
Speaker 1: to what happens in a hydrogen bomb, is that you
Speaker 1: want to compress the fuel. So you have this fuel
Speaker 1: is hydrogen in this deterium ice, and what you want
Speaker 1: instead of keeping it hot for a long time is
Speaker 1: you want to compress it to incredible densities, because fusion
Speaker 1: happens much more rapidly as density goes up, Like big
Speaker 1: stars out there in the universe have more dense cores,
Speaker 1: which is why they get hotter and fusion happens more rapidly.
Speaker 1: The idea is to somehow compress this pellet to make
Speaker 1: it really dense at the core, so the fusion is
Speaker 1: easier to happen and happens more quickly. Right, Well, maybe
Speaker 1: take a step back here, and you said it's made
Speaker 1: out of frozen hydrogen or of heavy water. What does
Speaker 1: that mean You actually have to make like little ice pellets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have little ice pellets because hydrogen by itself at
Speaker 1: room temperature is just a gas. So you need to
Speaker 1: cool this down. So you start with deuterium and treatium ices, right,
Speaker 1: and so like, yeah, this little frozen pellet of fuel
Speaker 1: at the heart of this enormous facility that's like the
Speaker 1: size of a football field. That's going to zap it
Speaker 1: with lasers, right, Because I guess liquid hydrogen maybe people
Speaker 1: have thought about, but I guess if you keep cooling,
Speaker 1: hydrogen will turn into ice. Yeah, everything in the universe
Speaker 1: eventually will cool down into a solid form, including hydrogen.
Speaker 1: And how do you make these little tiny ice hydrogen pellets?
Speaker 1: You just order them on Amazon like everything else. Oh yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: do you buy the molds. I guess you have to
Speaker 1: buy the molds first. You know, there's a whole industry
Speaker 1: now in making these things. It's really complicated, and you
Speaker 1: have to be really precise about it, because you want
Speaker 1: a very very smooth surface so that when things started
Speaker 1: happen simultaneously everywhere. So it's very high technology industry, and
Speaker 1: it's not something that happens for lots of other reasons.
Speaker 1: So they have to develop this kind of technology specifically
Speaker 1: for this industry. Makes it extra challenging. What's the name
Speaker 1: of that ice cream that comes in like little tiny
Speaker 1: pellets dipping dots, dipping dots? There you go, Is it
Speaker 1: like dipping dots. Yes, Yes, it's just like dipping dots, exactly.
Speaker 1: They're basically fusion dots, right. I always wonder how they
Speaker 1: make those, Maybe use the same technology, it's the same factory, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: They taste a little kunchier sometimes, you know, and sometimes
Speaker 1: they mix it up and they actually again like chocolate
Speaker 1: chip hydrogen fuel, you know, and that's a big disaster.
Speaker 1: They're cleaning that out for weeks. They taste delicious, but
Speaker 1: they're a little explosive, I guess. So the idea is
Speaker 1: that you have these pellets of fuel and I guess,
Speaker 1: you know, just like anything else, if you squeeze it enough,
Speaker 1: things will start to fuse together inside of it and
Speaker 1: so the question is how do you squeeze it. I
Speaker 1: guess enough so that you get fusion, right, because you
Speaker 1: can't just like smash it with the hammer because that
Speaker 1: will just flatten it. You want to squeeze it from
Speaker 1: all directions. Yeah, So the idea is that use zapp
Speaker 1: its simultaneously in all directions using a laser, which turns
Speaker 1: the outer layer of this fuel pellet into a plasma
Speaker 1: that blows out, of course because it's a plasma, but
Speaker 1: it also blows in simultaneously and compresses the your or
Speaker 1: of the pellet. Again, this is the same basic principle
Speaker 1: of how a hydrogen bomb works. How do you achieve
Speaker 1: fusion at the core of a hydrogen bomb is that
Speaker 1: you surround it with a fission bomb, which goes off
Speaker 1: and compresses the fuel to cause fusion. So that's the
Speaker 1: same thing that's happening here, except we're not using fission
Speaker 1: bombs to start this. We're just using lasers to heat
Speaker 1: the outer shell, which heats up and explodes and compresses
Speaker 1: the inner part of the fuel pellet. Right, And I
Speaker 1: think the idea is that you shoot this little pellet
Speaker 1: with a laser from all directions or at least like
Speaker 1: six six or seven dement directions right, like, you have
Speaker 1: giant lasers pointing at it from different directions like up
Speaker 1: and down, left and right, you know, a little bit
Speaker 1: of at an angle here and there, and so it's
Speaker 1: basically getting squished together by all these lasers down to
Speaker 1: even smaller side. The lasers themselves are not doing the compression.
Speaker 1: They're heating up the outer layer, and that rapid expansion
Speaker 1: of that outer layer is then triggering the compression. And
Speaker 1: in the most modern facilities they have like a hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety two lasers, which is pretty awesome. A hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety two lasers, which makes me wonder like about
Speaker 1: the design process with somebody like, no, we want a
Speaker 1: thousand twenty four lasers, let's go with four thousand lasers.
Speaker 1: And they had some compromise that got them down. May
Speaker 1: they aim for a two hundred, but they run out
Speaker 1: of money at the very last moment. But the idea
Speaker 1: is to get this thing heated up on the outside
Speaker 1: so it compresses it very rapidly. And this compression happens
Speaker 1: in like, you know, tens of nanoseconds in order to
Speaker 1: trigger this. And when it's happening. It's a shock wave
Speaker 1: that's going in, sort of like in a supernova. You know,
Speaker 1: you have a shock wave going in that's compressing the core,
Speaker 1: and the velocity of this stuff is like three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty kilometers per second compression waves towards the core
Speaker 1: of this pellet, right right, But I think you skipped
Speaker 1: a step. Okay, So, um, you have this pellet, you
Speaker 1: shoot it with lasers, and if you just shoot it
Speaker 1: with lasers, it'll just heat up. But I think the
Speaker 1: idea is that you code the pellets with another material.
Speaker 1: You code it with various types of material that trigger
Speaker 1: this implosion. It can be like a plastic coating or
Speaker 1: other kinds of things. You just need something which is
Speaker 1: going to heat up enough and expand rapidly so that
Speaker 1: it compresses the internal core of the pellet. What if
Speaker 1: you don't code it, like what if the lasers just
Speaker 1: hit the hydrogen directly, the frozen hydrogen directly? What happens.
Speaker 1: One of the major challenges here is to get a
Speaker 1: smooth compression, like you're only going to get fusion and
Speaker 1: very high pressures if it's being squeezed simultaneously from all
Speaker 1: sides and so a lot of the research they do
Speaker 1: is to find the best material which heats up sort
Speaker 1: of smoothly and expands smoothly in order to get that compression.
Speaker 1: And that's why they prefer plastics, for example, instead of
Speaker 1: just more hydrogen, because it tends to have this property
Speaker 1: to remove instabilities. A lot of times, actually they have
Speaker 1: another step between the laser and the fuel pellet because
Speaker 1: they don't want the lasers touching the fuel pellet directly
Speaker 1: because it tends to cause hotspots, which then cause instabilities.
Speaker 1: So sometimes they surround the pellet with like a gold tube,
Speaker 1: and the lasers hit the gold tube. The gold tube
Speaker 1: then heats up and bathes the pellet in very powerful
Speaker 1: X rays because of its high temper and then not
Speaker 1: triggers the expansion of the outer core, which then triggers
Speaker 1: the collapse, which then gets you the fusion I see.
Speaker 1: So the pellets are really sort of more like Eminem's
Speaker 1: kind of right. It's like there's a core of a
Speaker 1: hydrogen field, but then there's a coating of something else,
Speaker 1: like a hard coating of of something else, and that's
Speaker 1: what the lasers hit and actually um basically like burn
Speaker 1: up right ignite. Yeah, there's direct to drive laser fusion
Speaker 1: where it directly hits the outer layer, and then there's
Speaker 1: the indirect where you put it in like a little
Speaker 1: gold tube and you hit the tube itself and then
Speaker 1: the X rays from that tube hit the outer layer.
Speaker 1: So there's two different varieties of laser fusion there. And
Speaker 1: so the idea is that the lasers basically make the
Speaker 1: candy shell explode, right, because you got all this energy
Speaker 1: hitting in the candy layer explodes and then that explosion
Speaker 1: basically comprises the chocolate enough to that then get fusion. Yes,
Speaker 1: And the ideas that it happened so rapidly that the
Speaker 1: chocolate doesn't have a chance to blow up, that it
Speaker 1: fuses before it blows up. What do you mean, like
Speaker 1: it fuses and then it doesn't blow up then, or
Speaker 1: what it fuses and it blows up, But the fusion
Speaker 1: happens faster than the blowing up. If the material is
Speaker 1: dense enough, then fusion happens much more rapidly. You can
Speaker 1: get the whole pellette to have a little self sustaining
Speaker 1: reaction that lasts like a hundred trillions of a second
Speaker 1: and get fusion to happen before it has time to
Speaker 1: sort of blow itself up. Because remember, not only does
Speaker 1: fusion happen more rapidly when the fuel is dense, but
Speaker 1: also compressed fuel. Much more dense fuel means that it
Speaker 1: keeps the fusion energy inside. If you have like a
Speaker 1: little bit of fusion starting at the center and the
Speaker 1: fuel around it is very, very dense, it's going to
Speaker 1: absorb that energy and lead to more fusion rather than
Speaker 1: letting that energy leak out. Oh, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 1: You're saying, we zapped with the laser, we kick start diffusion,
Speaker 1: But then you want it to sort of create a
Speaker 1: chain reaction inside of the eminem before I guess the
Speaker 1: eminem breaks apart. It's gonna blow up for sure. Like
Speaker 1: that's definitely the end game. You're gonna be left with
Speaker 1: a little smoking pile of ash. But you wanted to
Speaker 1: fuse before it blows up, or you want to fuse
Speaker 1: as much of the fuel as possible, right, because that's
Speaker 1: kind of what could happen if you if you don't
Speaker 1: get a chain reaction, is you'll just get a little
Speaker 1: bit in the middle of fusing, and then that will
Speaker 1: blow the rest of the fuel away without igniting or
Speaker 1: fusing together. You want like the little bit of fusion
Speaker 1: to ignite more fusion for the rest of the fuel
Speaker 1: before it all sort of blows apart, exactly. And so
Speaker 1: the key there is high density, because high density means
Speaker 1: fusion happens more rapidly and more energy is devoted to
Speaker 1: making more fusion. So it's that density that they think
Speaker 1: will lead to the ignition because otherwise you could just
Speaker 1: heat up a pellet of lower density, but as you say,
Speaker 1: it would just blow itself up before it fuses. So
Speaker 1: you get that condition going that chain reaction. You really
Speaker 1: need the very high density, but you don't need it
Speaker 1: for very long. So that's the idea behind inertial confinement.
Speaker 1: Instead of long time confinement like you have in plasmas,
Speaker 1: you have short time but high density confinement. I guess
Speaker 1: you're saying that the aminem is big enough and heavy
Speaker 1: enough that there is time for the chain reaction to
Speaker 1: form before it all breaks apart, exactly. But this whole
Speaker 1: thing happens in like hundreds of nanoseconds, right, I see,
Speaker 1: So by time you mean like a few not a seconds,
Speaker 1: By a long time you mean a few nine a seconds,
Speaker 1: But you achieve incredible density. You know, this stuff goes
Speaker 1: from like the density of water to like a hundred
Speaker 1: times and the dense is lead, all in a very
Speaker 1: short amount of time. You mean, like when the outer
Speaker 1: candy shell explodes and compresses the chocolate down, it's like
Speaker 1: super compresses it. Yeah, it's super chocolate. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: laser chocolate will cure your smoking addiction, and then you
Speaker 1: need to be zapped in a different place to cure
Speaker 1: your chocolate addiction. Yeah, I think that. I think they
Speaker 1: have that in plastic surgery. Yes, all right, well that's
Speaker 1: the basics of how laser fusion works. Let's get into
Speaker 1: how well it actually works and have people actually created
Speaker 1: this on Earth? But first let's take another quick break.
Speaker 1: All right, we're talking about Eminem's. I guess that's the
Speaker 1: future of energy on our not that you do they
Speaker 1: have to beat green Eminem's or can they be any color?
Speaker 1: Does the color of the laser fusion pellets matter? Can
Speaker 1: you write that in your writer contract? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: that that's a topic for the future. It's not yet
Speaker 1: something that they have explored the flavor of these pellets,
Speaker 1: but you know, maybe your future dipping dots laser fusion
Speaker 1: crossover restaurant research topic will explore that, oh, that would
Speaker 1: be the perfect dessert for our laser fusion restaurant dipping dots.
Speaker 1: But then we bring lasers to your table and zap them,
Speaker 1: zap them in your in your mouth, table side lasing.
Speaker 1: That sounds fantastic. But these are pretty impressive facilities, the
Speaker 1: ones that try to do this, right, because I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a tiny two millimeter pellet, but you can imagine
Speaker 1: like a tiny little ball surrounded by basically like a
Speaker 1: giant warehouse of lasers, right, because you need not just
Speaker 1: like one laser, you need a hundred and nine two
Speaker 1: lasers pointed at this one little tiny pellet. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the leading facility for doing this is in California at
Speaker 1: Lawrence Livermore National Labs. It's called the National Ignition Facility
Speaker 1: or NIFF, and they started building and turned it on
Speaker 1: two thousand nine. And as you said, it's enormous. This
Speaker 1: thing is like the size of a football field, filled
Speaker 1: with all the optics and the chambers you need to
Speaker 1: make very high powered lasers, and a lot of them. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I've been there. I got a tour of
Speaker 1: it one time, Oh did you stick your head in
Speaker 1: the beam? I did, Yes, that is where I get
Speaker 1: all my superpowers. So you weren't nearly as funny before
Speaker 1: that trip, and but now laser funny. But if you're curious, Actually,
Speaker 1: an interesting fact is that they use this facility in
Speaker 1: the movie Star Trek, you know, like the reboot by J. J. Abrahms,
Speaker 1: and when Scotty's down in the engine room and he's say,
Speaker 1: she kind of take anymore, Captain, they actually filmed it
Speaker 1: or they feeled a replica of it. And if I
Speaker 1: have no idea, that's awesome when science makes a cameo
Speaker 1: in science fiction. So check that and I guess. But
Speaker 1: we talked about how fusion works and how laser fusion works,
Speaker 1: and basically you need to zap these little fuel pellets
Speaker 1: so that they implode and then that creates fusion. But
Speaker 1: I guess my question is how do you make it sustainable?
Speaker 1: You know, like give you zab one pellet, the pellet explodes,
Speaker 1: and then how do you harness that energy. That's a
Speaker 1: really hard problem and not something that's been worked on
Speaker 1: very well. That's also true for other kinds of fusion.
Speaker 1: Remember for magnetic confinement fusion, the energy comes out as
Speaker 1: very high speed neutrons, and that's difficult because neutrons are
Speaker 1: not charged, and so capturing the energy from high speed
Speaker 1: neutrons is tricky. They have these techniques to like surround
Speaker 1: it with these lipium blankets that can absorb the neutrons
Speaker 1: and turn into other more accessible forms of energy. The
Speaker 1: same problem exists here for inertial confinement fusion is that
Speaker 1: the energy comes out in the form of high speed neutrons,
Speaker 1: which has to be somehow captured. For a long time,
Speaker 1: the fusion community has sort of seen that. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: that's a downstream engineering problem. Will produce the energy in
Speaker 1: terms of neutrons, and then somebody will figure out how
Speaker 1: to take advantage of it. Yeah, just a small problem
Speaker 1: of how do you how do you capture a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 1: The other problem, of course with neutrons is that if
Speaker 1: you don't capture them, they make your whole facility radioactive, right,
Speaker 1: because high speed neutrons will trigger radioactive decay and lots
Speaker 1: of stuff, and so you're basically blowing up a neutron
Speaker 1: bomb at the heart of your very expensive, very delicate facility.
Speaker 1: I think the idea for these laser fusion reactors. Is
Speaker 1: that not that you suggest that you use have one
Speaker 1: little pellet, but it's like you have a stream of
Speaker 1: pellets right Like it's almost like an assembly line of pellets,
Speaker 1: and the pellets are moving along in the line, and
Speaker 1: then one of them gets in the you know, the
Speaker 1: center of all these lasers, explodes, and then it moves on,
Speaker 1: and then the next one comes in, moves into the
Speaker 1: middle of the lasers, explodes, and so on. It's on
Speaker 1: almost like if you like a conveyor line, right like
Speaker 1: a factory reactor. Yeah, the idea in the future, if
Speaker 1: we prove that this works and figure out how to
Speaker 1: make it viable, is to have like several pellets per second.
Speaker 1: The good news is that these pellets don't take very
Speaker 1: long diffuse and blow up release their energy, So on principle,
Speaker 1: you could do a lot of them over time and
Speaker 1: produce enough energy to be useful. Is sort of the
Speaker 1: hope and the dream making that actually work has a
Speaker 1: lot of technical issues. Wait, wait, several pellets per second,
Speaker 1: Like you're shooting a machine gun of these pellets and
Speaker 1: they're flying through the middle of the lasers, exploding, and
Speaker 1: then somehow you're capturing that energy. Yeah, so far our
Speaker 1: facilities are like you set up one pellet, you spend
Speaker 1: days tweaking it. Everybody gets set up SIPs her coffee boom,
Speaker 1: you do an experiment, you analyze it for weeks or months, right,
Speaker 1: But the dream is to make it reproducible, to make
Speaker 1: it straightforward, so you could do several per second. Wow.
Speaker 1: And so the idea isn't you have the stream of
Speaker 1: pellets going into the middle of the lasers and somehow
Speaker 1: it releases all this energy and you're capturing somehow that
Speaker 1: energy because the energy comes out as photons or neutrons.
Speaker 1: What the energy comes at as high speed neutrons. When
Speaker 1: you fuse two protons together, you get helium, but you
Speaker 1: also get neutrons leaving with a lot of energy, and
Speaker 1: so you have to capture those neutrons and steal their
Speaker 1: energy somehow, which is tricky. And you don't also want
Speaker 1: those neutrons to interfere with your lasers or the other
Speaker 1: targets or anything else. And so it's not a small
Speaker 1: problem to solve. But you know, we still haven't figured
Speaker 1: out how to actually make fusion work and these things,
Speaker 1: and so we're not even really there yet. Boy, it
Speaker 1: seems like a big part of it, and you know,
Speaker 1: it sounds like something you might want to be thinking about.
Speaker 1: Right now. People are thinking about it, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's not as sexy a question, and it's not the
Speaker 1: first question. It's that question number four. You gotta answer
Speaker 1: all the questions to make fusion work and to make
Speaker 1: it viable and to you know, get to your final
Speaker 1: goal of providing cheap or free energy for humanity. But
Speaker 1: we're not even there yet. We're still working on question
Speaker 1: number one. All right, Well, so then where are we
Speaker 1: on question number one? Have we achieved fusion and how
Speaker 1: big of a deal was it? So NIFF turned on
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine, and they have achieved fusion.
Speaker 1: Like they have pellets and they have lasers and they
Speaker 1: have zapped it and there has been fusion. There has
Speaker 1: been energy produced in that reaction. They have gotten energy
Speaker 1: out of those pellets. I mean, they produced the energy.
Speaker 1: Didn't like use it to charge their phone or anything,
Speaker 1: but fusion has occurred at the heart of those pellets.
Speaker 1: So they put a pellet in the middle of the lasers.
Speaker 1: It exploded, The eminem exploded. So that's it, right, wouldn't
Speaker 1: that mean that you you get they could get it working,
Speaker 1: So early on they achieved getting some energy out, and
Speaker 1: then in two thousand and thirteen it was very exciting
Speaker 1: because they got more energy out of the fusion than
Speaker 1: went into the fuel. So they're like bathing this fuel
Speaker 1: pellet in these X rays from this gold tube that's
Speaker 1: being zapped by the lasers, right, And how you determine
Speaker 1: whether it's a success depends a lot on how you're
Speaker 1: doing the accounting. So the energy that comes out of
Speaker 1: the pellet was more than the energy that went into
Speaker 1: the pellet, and that's good news. It's like you started
Speaker 1: a fire. You released some energy. But there's a huge
Speaker 1: amount of energy that went into the whole process that
Speaker 1: was sort of lost along the way that isn't being
Speaker 1: accounted for, you know, So they haven't reached break even
Speaker 1: where they're getting more energy out of the whole process
Speaker 1: than they put into the whole process. For example, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of energy that went into the gold that
Speaker 1: never made it into the pellet, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of energy in the laser losses and amplifying these lasers
Speaker 1: is very very inefficient. So in two thirteen they reached
Speaker 1: a milestone of sorts in that they got more energy
Speaker 1: out of the pellet than they put into the pellet.
Speaker 1: They didn't get more energy out of the pellet than
Speaker 1: they put into the whole process, right, because you also
Speaker 1: have to account for making that coffee for the physicists too, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's the energy that goes in. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: you know, and all the dipping dots and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all that desserts too. I mean that all count. But
Speaker 1: I think maybe what's confusing is that this idea that
Speaker 1: you're not getting enough energy out of it. And I
Speaker 1: think it goes back to this idea of like how
Speaker 1: much of the eminem are you actually burning up? I
Speaker 1: think it's what you're saying, Like they can shoot the
Speaker 1: pellets with laser and you can get fusion to happen
Speaker 1: in the middle, But maybe the fusion isn't sustained enough
Speaker 1: to fuse the whole eminem out. Maybe we all need
Speaker 1: to open in the middle fuses and then the whole
Speaker 1: thing breaks apart, in which case you don't get as
Speaker 1: much energy as you could. Exactly, And what they're trying
Speaker 1: to do is make the fusion happen a little bit
Speaker 1: longer inside to use more of the fuel to release
Speaker 1: more of that energy. And so then they spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time tweaking it and trying to improve it.
Speaker 1: You know, they change like the material of the container,
Speaker 1: this hygrogen deterium container with change to diamond in order
Speaker 1: to increase the absorbency of the secondary X rays created
Speaker 1: by this laser burst. They also did all sorts of
Speaker 1: other stuff like smoothing the surface of the fuel capsule,
Speaker 1: shrinking the holes in the capsule where they injected, shrinking
Speaker 1: the holes in the gold cylinder that's surround the capsule
Speaker 1: to reduce energy loss, making the laser pulse last a
Speaker 1: little bit longer. They spent years tweaking it, and then
Speaker 1: in two thousand and twenty one they got a big
Speaker 1: increase in the energy output, so it's much more than
Speaker 1: they had in two thousand and thirteen, and they reached
Speaker 1: up to seventy percent of the break even point, meaning
Speaker 1: now the energy that's coming out of this little pellet
Speaker 1: is seventy of all the energy that was required to
Speaker 1: run the whole process, including you know, powering the lasers
Speaker 1: and the energy lost due to X rays that wins
Speaker 1: somewhere else right, because I guess the goal is to
Speaker 1: basically burn up the entire eminem, right, like use up
Speaker 1: all the chocolate and the fuel pellet, Like, do you
Speaker 1: have a sense of how much of it we've been
Speaker 1: able to get into fusion or is it still only
Speaker 1: a little bit in the middle, or have we sort
Speaker 1: of maybe are getting close to using up the whole eminem.
Speaker 1: We're not getting close to using up the whole eminem.
Speaker 1: Even these successful chain reactions is still pretty short lived. There,
Speaker 1: like a hundred trillions of a second, and we get
Speaker 1: them to go a little bit longer, we'd be able
Speaker 1: to burn more of the fuel. They think that there's
Speaker 1: a much higher potential. In principle, you could make this
Speaker 1: implosion happen the same way all the way around the capsule,
Speaker 1: and you get higher densities, you get faster fusion, you
Speaker 1: get to burn more of the stuff. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of really small details, these technical hiccups that have
Speaker 1: prevented them from reaching like the maximum power output, which
Speaker 1: they think is probably a lot higher than what they've
Speaker 1: achieved so far. I see there's like even a little
Speaker 1: imperfection in the pellet, or if maybe one of the
Speaker 1: lasers is a little bit stronger or off by a
Speaker 1: little bit. You're saying, like the pellet doesn't compress evenly,
Speaker 1: like squeezes more on one side, which then I imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, squeezes things out the other end, and so
Speaker 1: you don't get this like perfect little compressed ball that's
Speaker 1: that's ideal for fusion. Yeah, and it's hard to know
Speaker 1: exactly what's going to work because now we're talking about
Speaker 1: very high speed, very high temperature, very high pressure conditions.
Speaker 1: They're difficult for us to solve like with our equations,
Speaker 1: and also very challenging for us to solve with our
Speaker 1: computers to like model what should work. You might imagine,
Speaker 1: why don't the physicists just figure out what the best
Speaker 1: arrangement is and do that, And we don't know how
Speaker 1: to figure that out, and so we just have to
Speaker 1: sort of like tinker and explore and to figure out
Speaker 1: what might work. So they have these very high speed
Speaker 1: cameras they used to take pictures of these pellets as
Speaker 1: they're imploding, trying to figure out exactly what happened. It's
Speaker 1: a real forefront of research to try to understand high temperature,
Speaker 1: high pressure conditions. And when you say break even point.
Speaker 1: I think what you mean is, like, you know, once
Speaker 1: a pellet explodes, it releases certain amount of energy, but
Speaker 1: it took a certain amount maybe a more energy to
Speaker 1: squeeze that pellet, you know, to power all those lasers,
Speaker 1: to create the pellets, to set it up, and so
Speaker 1: that even if the pelletics fuses and explodes, it doesn't
Speaker 1: release as much energy as it took to actually get
Speaker 1: it to fuse. Right Exactly, if you want to run
Speaker 1: a power plant, you wanted to produce energy, right, not
Speaker 1: cost energy. And so if it takes more energy to
Speaker 1: run your power plant then it's producing then you're not
Speaker 1: going to make any money. You're not gonna help anybody.
Speaker 1: And so right now what they're doing is trying to
Speaker 1: push that output up. And you know there at sev
Speaker 1: of break even point, which also doesn't even really account
Speaker 1: for all of the upstream details of how you power
Speaker 1: all of these lasers and everything. So sometimes this accounting
Speaker 1: can even be a little bit too optimistic, But I
Speaker 1: guess the main point is that the energy is there,
Speaker 1: right like in even in these like two millimeter pellets
Speaker 1: of how digen fuel, there's you know, eighty thousand tons
Speaker 1: of oil worth of energy, right, and so like, it's
Speaker 1: definitely possible in theory that if you if you get
Speaker 1: to release all of the energy inside of these tiny
Speaker 1: little pellets, you would have way more energy than what
Speaker 1: you need to heat up the pellet. Absolutely, the energy
Speaker 1: is there. They think that they need a factor of
Speaker 1: ten or more improvement in performance to approach like economically
Speaker 1: feasible conditions. And that's not even without solving the problem
Speaker 1: of like how you do this multiple times per second
Speaker 1: and how you get the energy out just in terms
Speaker 1: of like theoretical production of the energy. But you're right,
Speaker 1: it's there, it's harnessed. It's inside these pellets, and you
Speaker 1: know it's inside me and you, like all the atoms
Speaker 1: in our bodies have all of this energy stored inside
Speaker 1: their protons. It's just a question of harnessing it, of
Speaker 1: creating the right conditions forcing the universe to release all
Speaker 1: of that energy. Yeah, no, I know my body is
Speaker 1: full of von ms on any given day. If only
Speaker 1: I could harness that energy for good And another challenges
Speaker 1: you have to make these pellets right, and these pellets
Speaker 1: can't be super duper expensive if you're gonna use many
Speaker 1: of them. Per second. So people have done calculations to
Speaker 1: suggest that like each pellet can cost more than a
Speaker 1: few cents. Otherwise the electricity that comes out would be
Speaker 1: much more expensive than like solar power. And so to
Speaker 1: keep it economical, you need to find a way to
Speaker 1: manufacture these like heavy water pellets that are perfectly smooth
Speaker 1: for less than ten cents a pop. How much should
Speaker 1: they cost now? Probably thousands of dollars kind of right,
Speaker 1: because it's still in the research phase. Yeah, well, you know,
Speaker 1: they spend billions on this facility. I don't know how
Speaker 1: many pellets they've made, but it's not a nice number.
Speaker 1: But I guess if it does show that you can
Speaker 1: get more energy out of it, and it does replace
Speaker 1: all of our you know, oil and solar and wind,
Speaker 1: then it would be a huge industry and probably they
Speaker 1: would be mass producing these pellets like crazy, exactly, And
Speaker 1: nobody's really working on figuring out how to make that
Speaker 1: cheap yet, as you say, if there really was an
Speaker 1: energy opportunity here, there'd be a huge market and a
Speaker 1: lot of effort there, and I'm sure people could figure
Speaker 1: it out because hey, there's lots of smart engineers out there,
Speaker 1: ones that haven't had their head zapped by a big laser,
Speaker 1: for example. Maybe they should and they would figure it out.
Speaker 1: That's been the problem the whole time. Yeah, yeah, Do
Speaker 1: you need those ideas diffuse together in your head, you know,
Speaker 1: and then to leak out of a little hole in
Speaker 1: the back of your head made by the Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that people can make use of it, you know. But
Speaker 1: you can always plug it up with a little eminem
Speaker 1: al Right, Well that's laser fusion. I guess it's a
Speaker 1: work in progress. You know. It seems super duper difficult
Speaker 1: and maybe even impossible, but hey, if you get it working,
Speaker 1: you could solve all of our energy needs for eternity basically, right,
Speaker 1: or at least until hydrogen runs out in the universe
Speaker 1: it does end. For a while, maybe twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: it seemed really promising and really exciting and like we
Speaker 1: might really make this work. The fact that it hasn't
Speaker 1: achieved the success that people hoped has put a little
Speaker 1: bit of damper on the enthusiasm for this. But there's
Speaker 1: still lots of people out there who think that it's
Speaker 1: the right way forward. I see people are getting a
Speaker 1: little miffed at their expectations have been zapped. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: that the dreams are growing up in smoke. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: zapping their enthusiasm. But good luck to them, and and
Speaker 1: please keep on working on it because you know the
Speaker 1: world needs a cleaner and better source of fuel. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, we can't sort of keep burning up stuff
Speaker 1: and in ruining our environment. It's absolutely vital. Let we
Speaker 1: figure that out, all right. Well, we hope that zapped
Speaker 1: your curiosity and you learn more about an interesting idea
Speaker 1: for the future. And maybe some of you listening could
Speaker 1: be the engineers to the scientists that figure out how
Speaker 1: to make all of this work. Please get to it.
Speaker 1: That's right. There's plenty of mysteries out there for you
Speaker 1: to solve and plenty of impacts for you to make.
Speaker 1: You hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See
Speaker 1: you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
Speaker 1: and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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