The Difference Between Fusion and Fission

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Fission works by the fact that when that fission occurs, it actually produces free neutrons. Free neutrons can trigger other fission reactions if there's other uranium nearby or fissile materials. The first sustained chain reaction was done underneath a squash court with big blocks of graphite. So at its heart, what you do is you very quickly put together enough of these materials that can undergo fission with room temperature neutrons. And so this process can essentially grow mathematically like very fast and so this releases large amounts of energy. That's how our fission power plan works. We're just using fusion reactions as an intermediate catalyst to basically to get even more energy out of it

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