What Is Energy Containment Time?

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The requirement in this is high temperature and thermal content. So it's like building the fire. And when you get it hot enough, the fusion reaction happening so rapidly that it starts overcoming the rate which is leaking heat to the outside world. In our own sun, we don't have anything plugged into it; it just keeps itself hot through its own reactions. That's what we've actually achieved in a laboratory here at MIT. When it ran, it's optimum configuration was 100 million degrees but wasn't sufficient for net energy gain. We were getting high net energy gain, but it was making fusion reactions much faster than expected.

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