"why weren't we pushing towards economic fusion and new materials and new methods of heat extraction and so forth because everybody knew Fusion was 40 years away and now it's four years away the follow..."

"let's start with a big question what is nuclear fusion is the underlying process that powers the universe so as the name implies it fuses together or brings together two different elements technically..."

"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 h..."

"what does that mean it's a millionth of a billionth of a meter okay incredibly small distances but because the distances are small and the particles have charge they want to push strongly apart namely..."

"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 yo..."

"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 we I I tend to think of humans as i..."

"another kind of intelligence yeah and that that intelligence will explain to us how silly we are there was an email thread going around the professors in my department already of uh so what is it goin..."

"with the internet and so on how the days were before and how did it worked before right yeah I mean Fusion will be because it's energy it's it's nature is that it will be um and anything that has to d..."

"another reason to start wars uh for instead of resources we've done a pretty good job of that over the course of our histories yeah uh so we talked about the forces of physics and again sticking to th..."

"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 t..."

"something like Fusion it's because that is a fundamental of nature like you can't beat that so of whatever you do if you're thinking about and why do I care about this well because Mass is like the fu..."

"it's cheap clean and safe I'll start with the easiest one cheap it is not cheap yet because it hasn't been made at a commercial scale right flies when you're having fun yes yeah yeah but yes not yet b..."

"it's also um it's not an intermittent renewable energy source like wind and solar so say but this is this makes it hard to understand so as you're saying the fuel is free why isn't the like why isn't ..."

"that sense clean because there's no there's no emissions of of carbon or pollutants that come directly from the combustion of the fuel itself and safe safe we're talking about very high temperatures y..."

"don't think of air really as there's atoms floating around us and there's a density because if I wave my hand I can feel the air pushing against my face that means we're in a fluid or a gas which is a..."

"um you know one of the ways that I explain this is that if you imagine a power plant that's like powering Cambridge Massachusetts like if you were to which you you wouldn't do this directly but if you..."

"the just to take a tan another tangent on tangent you're the director of mit's plasma science at Fusion Center uh we'll talk about maybe you can mention some interesting aspects of the history of the ..."

"just regular things that uh like equipment malfunctioning uh melting of equip like all this kind of stuff that yeah it has nothing to do with Fusion necessarily yeah I mean usually what we worry about..."

"like on a on a University campus University of Chicago campus the first sustained you know chain reaction was done underneath the squash court with a big blocks of graphite you know it was still don't..."

"weapon work how does a hydrogen bomb work asking for a friend yeah yeah so um at its heart what it how what you do is you very quickly put together enough of these materials that can undergo fission w..."

"when we got access to new kinds of energy sources but every time you get acts and typically what this meant was you get access to more intense energy right that's and that's what that was and so the a..."

"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..."

"role of plasma and 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 all children learn the three ..."

"things these atoms but atoms can actually themselves be um which are which are made of nuclei which contain the positive particles and the neutrons and then the electrons which are very very light ver..."

"and in fact our own Sun at the center of the sun is what clearly a plasma but actually the surface of the sun which is around 5500 Celsius is also a plasma because it's hot enough that is that in fact..."

"by Einstein and others at the beginning of the Browning motion all these kinds of things these are these were set um up at the beginning of the last century and it was really like this great Revelatio..."

"collision it just means that it's dictated by this Force which is being pushed between the charged particles is that the definition of a plasma is a is a medium in which the collective behavior is dom..."

"of energy then basically eventually they just they come up in a temperature and they become they they go up they go up to high temperature this turns out to be by the way extraordinarily small amounts..."

"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 cont..."

"concept as that so this is an important one so all Fusion must have confinement uh there's another more esoteric reason for this which is that people often confuse temperature and energy so what I mea..."

"is what it's going to take regardless of the confinement method these are this is the basic what it is actually Power Balance it just says oh there's a certain amount of heat coming in which is coming..."

"power plant would look like what does it visually look like does it does it look like like you said like purple plasma you know yeah actually it's it's invisible to the eye because it's so hot that it..."

"light basically and these are that's the um that's the that's what we can sense in the human Spectrum yeah I I remember reading on uh subreddit called shower thoughts uh which people should check out ..."

"color distinguishing right of something safe to ease not say whatever it would be uh I actually go back to this because it's something like that I tell all of my my students when I'm teaching um ioniz..."

"yeah and our ability cognitive ability to filter it all out and not it would not really overwhelm us actually if we could see all of it but my main point is it goes back to your thing about fire and s..."

"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 provided a starting amount of ene..."

"even break even break even and it's because you've gotten past the fact that this is Unity now at this point what is a fusion gain or as using the notation Q from the paper overview of the spark Tacom..."

"torch 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 a scientists is that it's clear that the the in that experiment that they actua..."

"this and what happens is the that energy is absorbed because it's it's in the solid phase of matter so it's absorbed really in the surface and then what happens is that when it's absorbed in something..."

"this rapidly that that Force like so rapidly compresses the fuel that what happens is that you're squeezing down on it and and and you know it's like what was the CBB that's bad actually B I should ha..."

"temperature so the the effect is like if you know the thing so adiabatic cooling were actually fairly familiar with if you take a spray can right and you push the button when it when it rapidly expand..."

"inertial Fusion so the idea behind a reactor is based on this kind of inertial uh uh confinement is that you would what have a new BB every like 10 times a second or something like and then there's so..."

"you know and hopefully we see experiments that keep climbing up towards higher and higher gain but then the whole fusion power plant is a totally different thing so it's not one it's not one BB and on..."

"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..."

"incredible stuff is there some sort of how do you feel seeing somebody else uh get a breakthrough and uh using a different technology is that exciting uh is this does the competitive fire uh get uh al..."

"this it's like it's pretty thrilling right so even even in proxy it's it's incredibly thrilling to see this it's not I don't know it's rivalry or jealousy it's like I can tell you already Fusion is re..."

"degrees and literally outside the sun it's essentially zero because it's vacuum of space how the hell does that do that it does that by and is out of through like why doesn't just leak all of its heat..."

"center well I I didn't mean on Earth I mean if you had to build like a second sun how did you do it you can't there's not enough hydrogen around yeah so the the limiting factor is the the just the hyd..."

"so in magnetic confinement we use another force of nature which is the electromagnetic force and that's very it's orders and Orders of magnitude stronger than the gravitational force and the key force..."

"and the other feature is that there is no Force so for those magnetic fields what are these things they're also invisible but you know if you think of a permanent magnets or your fridge magnet there a..."

"electric current which is going in a pattern around and around and around and what this does is it produces a magnetic field which goes through it by the laws of electromagnetism so that's what an ele..."

"so that's that's what it looks like 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 st..."

"typically is 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 th..."

"configured in such a way that it produces the desired magnetic fields around this so they precise does this have to be you were probably listening to our conversation with some of my colleagues yester..."

"really hard like we actually don't really know like what we're doing in this because everything was at low temperatures they couldn't get confinement it was interesting and then the the they Declassif..."

"and it seems to be working this is you know late 1960s and there was a uh there was a team that went from the United Kingdom's Fusion development lab and they brought this very fancy amazing new techn..."

"Plato science infusion center was was doing those things so anyway so back to this so why so yes tokamax have been have achieved the highest in magnetic Fusion by far like the the the best amounts of ..."

"um aspect to this it's like this is something that could change you know the future of humanity and its nature and its relationship with energy isn't this something that we should work on together rig..."

"um and but still like a desire to you know push down the stockpile of nuclear weapons and all that within that context there was um a very fairly significant historic event that at one of the the Reag..."

"eater 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 go..."

"it was a part of me starting to ask questions with my students I was like is there another way that we can get to this extremely worthwhile goal that maybe maybe it's not that that maybe it's not that..."

"at this with different levels of whatever you want to think about a technical schedule scientific risk which are Incorporated in them and that's going to give us a better chance of actually getting to..."

"um and we see um QP large order of 10 or something like this at that at that at that state is very important scientifically because this is basically matches what eater is looking to do the plasma is ..."

"operate basically for for magnetic Fusion like wow right but it's more than that and it's more than that it's because about who's building it and why and how it's being financed um so that scientific ..."

"whereas if you would do this in a normal wire like copper you basically make an enormous toaster oven that's consuming enormous amounts of power and getting hot which is the problem that was the techn..."

"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 becau..."

"the reason we're sort of doing it together so it's MIT and Commonwealth Fusion systems so what's what's interesting to say about financing and this seems like from a scientific perspective maybe not a..."

"and what is interesting about SpaceX was that it proved it's more than actually just financing it's really the purpose of the organization so the purpose of a gun and I'm not against Public Finance or..."

"same thing that that we think is going to happen in fuse that namely these this is a bootstrap effect that actually that when you start to push yourself to think about near-term commercialization it l..."

"about a 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 pro..."

"this we got a Lifeline we were able to go it was in this it was in this time scale that we basically came up with this idea it's like we should do this and in the end it was all of those the the peopl..."

"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 t..."

"because of the signs under underneath it of us of achieving the right conditions for the plasma basically is a is a is a yardstick that you have to put up against all of them what's encouraging that I..."

"as well too so what that means is that the way to to the the way to the to get the underlying physical state is so different among these different approaches what it lends itself to is does this mean ..."

"that probably there's the while the near-term focuses on electricity production there might even be different kinds of markets that actually make sense in some places less than others it comes to trad..."

"like a kilowatt a thousand Watts you know which is like a personal home like you know this is about a thousand dollars or your personal use of an energy of electricities but like a thousand Watts um t..."

"small to you know mid-sized City actually um so that is so that's sort of like a scale Challenge and in fact it's one of the reasons why in Commonwealth and another private sector ones like we they tr..."

"economic Advantage even if we're behind in sort of an assigned sense okay which is fine this is also what you get when you get a an explosion in in the private sector you basically are Distributing ri..."

"commercial unit it's called Arc which is actually the step forward after spark and that was the orig the origins of it so all the things that were other parts of the plan like spark and the magnet wer..."

"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 bec..."

"of the reasons for for this was also that it's interesting because when you come from like you're running a company it's it makes sense they're promoting their own product and their own Vision which t..."

"through those meetings and it's really important that we do those things but it's also but also then realizing setting up the realistic expectations of what we need to do you know we're not there like..."

"extraction and so forth because everybody knew Fusion was 40 years away and now it's four years away there is a history like you said 40 30 whatever that kind of old joke uh there's a history of fusio..."

"so that's one way to make it faster the other way to make it faster is modularize the problem or parse the problem so this is the other difficulty infusion is that it you know you tend to look at this..."

"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..."

"and it's through that learned experience I mean you know 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 the the high temperatur..."

"solving a problem and what I always in fact we just we recently just taught the the most recent you know I say I teach it I mean I I guide it actually the most recent version of this where they actual..."

"a big change yeah a big impact I I gotta ask you so it's uh it's a whole nother different conversation I'm sure to have but uh uh nuclear power as it currently stands so using uh fission uh is extreme..."

"forward to Fusion now I know there's you can say that you're not going to have the same kind of issues but it's possible that the same folks also said they're not going to be have those same kind of i..."

"don't bury those like put the bring these up front talk to people about them and make people realize that you're actually you know the way I would look is that you're making Fusion more economically a..."

"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 w..."

"tunneling has a limit as to what it can actually do so there there are people who are genuine you know that really want to see it make it but you know sort of goes to the extraordinary I mean we know ..."

"was interest him but it was like there's quantum physics like this explains this other disaster and then this other guy my hero Ernest Rutherford experimentalist did the most extraordinary experiment ..."

"and until and you talk about so how revealing is this is like this totally changes your idea of the universe because a nucleus is a very unintuitive non-intuitive thing it's like why is all the mass i..."

"functions and actually I think Rutherford is the one who's attributed at least that uh that quote that physics is the only real science everything else is stamp collecting right so uh there's I'm so h..."

"out like when my when when my godmother was born like none of this was in front of us right it's like we live in an amazing time it's like right like my grandfather you know plowed you know feels with..."

"yeah so what one of the fun you know on the on a weekend one I 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 desig..."

"Annihilation It's like Star Trek right absolutely your sense is that Interstellar travel will require fusion power oh it's it's almost even impossible with fusion power actually it's so hard it's so h..."

"interesting one they're super rare super rare and then of course the other part is that also just the other scary part of it which is if you look at the fairy paradoxes good good we got to this point ..."

"and that's only possible with the optimism hope and hard work yeah what uh easy question certainly easier than nuclear fusion what's the meaning of life why are we here 42 is it 42 no no um we already..."

"because we we try to we we basically try to turn off the belief valve right that humans just naturally have um so when it comes to these things like I can I can make my own comments to this is like pe..."

"motivation and and and needs to these somewhat you know empirical observations and in some sense the stories before we understand the real explanations the stories the myths uh Service as a as a good ..."

"reef I feel more awe than I could ever feel like in a 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 esca..."