How Do Plasmas Work?

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In a gas, you can think of this as being this room and the things that you can't see them, is that the molecules are flying around. But then with some frequency, they basically bounce into each other. And so it turns out that the probability and the distances and the scattering of those of what they do, it's those interactions that set the, about how a gas behaves. In plasmas however, because the particles have electric charge, this means that they can push against each other without actually being in close proximity to each other. Which is probably very relevant for nuclear 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