Nuclear Fusion Reactors - What Are the Requirements?

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At 10,000 degrees there's almost no probability of the fusion reactions occurring. This is because while the charged particles can hit into each other, they're pushing harder and harder apart. It turns out quantum physics comes to the rescue because the particles aren't actually just particles. They're also waves. You can treat them both as waves and as particles. And it turns out if they get in close enough proximity to each other, then the particle pops through an effect called tunneling. By the way, talk about do you have a hard time conceptualizing this? This is like throwing a ping pong ball at a piece of paper and then every 100 of them show up on the other side

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