
Ignition: The quest for nuclear fusion
The Slow Newscast
00:00
Knuckles' Vision of the Future
From the early 60s Knuckles had his energy source in the form of lasers. And he said about imagining a machine that could bring this energy to bear on nuclear fuel with unimaginable pressure. Deuterium from seawater, tritium as a byproduct of the fusion process itself, negligible nuclear waste, limitless clean energy. But it was more than a dream. The calculations lower down are as impenetrable as Stephen Hawking's calculations on black holes. For, and I quote, Fermi degenerate electrons in white dwarf cores - or non- Maxwellian linearly coupled calculations.
Transcript
Play full episode