The Challenges of Fusion Power Plants

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Fusion has one of its interesting limitations is that it's very hard almost at some point becomes physically impossible to actually make small power units. The National Academy's report put the benchmark as being around 50 million watts of electricity, which is like enough for a small to mid-sized city. So what I would say is that the next hurdle to really overcome is about making net electricity. We need to see a unit or several units, put using fusion in some way to put a meaningful amount of energy on the grid.

Dennis Whyte is a nuclear scientist at MIT and the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(05:54) – Nuclear fusion
(23:53) – e=mc^2
(38:20) – Fission vs fusion
(43:32) – Nuclear weapons
(47:19) – Plasma
(54:29) – Nuclear fusion reactor
(1:09:50) – 2022 nuclear fusion breakthrough explained
(1:30:27) – Magnetic confinement
(1:49:36) – ITER
(1:54:23) – SPARC
(2:08:23) – Future of fusion power
(2:16:55) – Engineering challenges
(2:35:36) – Nuclear disasters
(2:40:21) – Cold fusion
(2:54:36) – Kardashev scale
(3:04:00) – Advice for young people