Is There a Good Threshold for When the Output Is Greater Than the Input?

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Fusion gain or as using the notation Q from the paper overview of the Spark talk about before. What I mean by this is that in these systems, in what you, what you want is something that where the relative amount of heating, which is keeping the fuel hot is dominated by from the fusion reactions themselves. And so it's sort of like thinking like a bonfire is a lot more interesting physically than just holding a blowtorch to a wet log. It's a lot more self-evolved and so forth. That makes it a self-sustaining type of. system, in a sense. Again, it's not that it's going to evolve to a dangerous state

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