Fusion Energy: Hype or The Future?

my favorite part about generating electricity is that we're always just trying to find the most complicated and efficient way to boil water to turn a turbine.

"The power of the sun in the palm of my hands" Never thought that would become a reality.

"And yes, I finally made a video about fusion in this channel, ColdFusion" Another major milestone.

A couple of corrections: At 3:13 I said the processes the wrong way round. The FISSION part is only there to aid the FUSION part. And ICF is Inertial Confinement Fusion not Internal. Sorry about that.

While I'm optimistic that we have made big steps with fusion, things like Helion aren't all they're cracked up to be. There's a good response video by Improbable Matter which strongly suggests Helion are really over-selling themselves for investment and are banking on a less efficient reaction with big question marks over scalability and danger.

This sounds like it will take a century to become commercially viable.

I strongly recommend everybody to take a look at the video that Improbable Matter made in response to the Real Engineering one about Helion. He has worked in the field and can explain all the challenges of fusion in great detail. What happened on december 5th was historic, in the sense that is the first time we extract more energy that we put in without using an A-bomb as a trigger (we cannot ignore that we had been building fusion reactors that work as insteded since the 50's, they are just single-use only). But if we write down a list of the engineering problems we still have to manage that we don't know how to solve, it's amazing how astronomically far we are from a comercial fusion reactor. I'm sorry guys, but apparently we are going to get out of this energy-poverty well with fission, and the sooner we start the better...

"Before everyone celebrates, there's a lot to be done" is practically the motto of human scientific endeavour. 👍

I visited JET (Joint European Torus) in '96 at a physics tour in England among other things. We were shown the torus (Magnetic Confinement Fusion) and the facility. They told us that they had to phone the power-stations in advance in the area when an experiment was due or else the entire area (a small city and two or three suburbs) went without power. JET used that much power! And it's rather small in comparison to what it uses; kind of a small living room or an apartment with a single room. Edit: I forgot to say, that the power-stations was able to turn up to full power and THEN the experiment could take place without any bother.

If I'm not mistaken, the main source of Tritium is Fission Reactors. So, ironically, in order to scale up Fusion we may need to scale up the number of Fission Reactors, with all of the problems associated with that. Unless we can find a different isotope to use in the fusion we're going to need to have nuclear power in a lot more places. Apart from the dangers and mess they make, they are also very expensive, slow and complex to build.