The Science Behind Inertial Fusion

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The effect is like if you know the thing, so adiabatic cooling we're actually fairly familiar with. You want to keep the fuel cold and then just literally just ideally compress it. And then in something which is at the very center of that compressed sphere, because you've compressed it so rapidly the laws of physics basically require for it to increase in temperature. So this was very exciting because what they had done was it's clear that they propagated this, they got this what they call a hotspot. The science behind inertial fusion.

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