This Breakthrough Fusion Technique May Be The Future Of Energy
This Breakthrough Fusion Technique May Be The Future Of Energy. The first 100 people to use code UNDECIDED at the link below will get 60% off of Incogni: incogni.com/undecided. Nuclear Fusion energy is basically just smashing things together to make energy. Grossly oversimplified? Yes, but still accurate. First Light Fusion in the UK has a unique approach to fusion energy that takes that “smashing things together” to another level. I had a chance to see their facility first hand and talk to them about their current progress, as well as what’s to come at their new demonstrator plant. Are privately funded companies, like First Light Fusion, the path towards our nuclear fusion energy future?
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Do you think First Light Fusion will lead the future of Fusion? The first 100 people to use code UNDECIDED at the link below will get 60% off of Incogni: incogni.com/undecided Watch my tour of the JET tokamak fusion reactor video, here: kzhead.info/sun/ktOpgcuDq3upeKs/bejne.html If you liked this, check out Why Salt Water may be the Future of Batteries kzhead.info/sun/qdFrmLKGeGaiqYU/bejne.html
Thanks for covering this project. I have been watching them for years. They do good science and engineering. Imagine this system, improved of course, driving a rail gun system that shot the "bullet" into the target and produced enough energy to drive not only the system, but an entire space ship. Suddenly you are looking at something like the tech described in The Expanse. Combined with solid state batteries/capacitors, you could have a very powerful power and drive system.
Regular viewer bro from india
You do realise that 2 dollars per joule is 5 orders of magnitude more expensive that current energy prices.
Ok mat so taking your investments in renewable energy I know one is supposed to be a 100th of the other but the graph just looks off
@@chrislambe400 "You do realise that 2 dollars per joule is 5 orders of magnitude more expensive that current energy prices." It is here on Earth, but not in space. Also, this research is so new.
Really fascinating seeing the inside of a fusion lab. Goes way over my head but still intrigued to see how we can use this scaled up.
Kinetic Fusion ... This has gotta be the most caveman techno idea I've seen in a while. Just crazy enough that it might work.
Probably won't, the rate of which it would need to fire those things would wear any barrel material possible. I think these star ups just suck in investor money and keep developing something impossible until the money runs out.
@@Nobody-Nowhere Actually, it's the only kind of fusion that has ever worked, it just requires the energy of a fission bomb to get going, which obviously defeats the point of fusion power.
Maybe they could use a Coil Gun (Different from a rail gun. Doesn't need barrel contact. Also looks like what they are already using) that incorporates a system which levitates and rotates the projectile so it stays aligned as it's fired at the target. That might get rid of the degredation issue...at the cost of the extra energy to levitate and spin it...
A balanced mix of insult and appreciation.. :) I am confused what it is 😂
No because you will always need more energy to push said projectile than what you get out. It is like saying it takes a 20lb sledgehammer to crack a nut but I will invent a 100g pin hammer with the same force to do the same job. Whatever way you look at it, the energy created by fusing a few atoms will never produce enough force to repeat it over and over again forever. We know how much force is needed to fuse said atoms and there is nothing on Earth that we can do to find a way of using less force to create that reaction. All it is doing is keeping a few well paid scientists in jobs. As long as they keep the notion of it being possible, the funding will keep flowing. If you was being paid 100k+ a year, would you stand up and say that it was impossible and stand to lose your lucrative career and annual salary? It is a grift.
I love that their initial inspiration was the pistol shrimp. It's so fascinating when we either derive inspiration from biology or find biological mechanisms more advanced than our current technology. Like how scientists are recreating the biology of gecko feet for adhesive technology.
We are highly advanced colony beings ourself so.m
@@s0ulshot ?
I saw about this concept a few years ago- and all I could think of as an engineer is how to you scale that up to fire the "gun" multiple times a second? And the one that I saw also needed a lot of clean up of the sabot that was carrying the fuel. I wish them luck, but similar to scaling up the firing rate of the laser system, fusion may be possible, but making power by doing it often enough- not so sure about it.
Indeed this is the reason any pulsed system utilizing destructable components is a deadend, simply manufacturing the targets which would need to contain tritium and theirfore be handled as high level nuclear fuel would never be cost effective and thats before we have to deal with the impossibility of cycling the machine fast enough to produce an apprciciable amount of power.
Have a look at ASML's EUV lithography machine. It basically fires tiny droplets of tin at the rate of 50,000 per second and hits each one with a laser to deform them so they are concave, followed by another laser to vaporise them to produce ultraviolet light. This sounds nuts but these machines are busy making high end IC's right now.
@@davidcolwill860 Yes, but all ASML need is an ingot of tin to throw into the melt once in a while and not specifically machined big aluminum parts for every shot.
First Light has potential advantages here. They believe they can create powerful enough implosions that they can fire once a minute. It's theoretically possible because they can deliver energy so cheaply that they can deliver a lot and make large individual shots If they can get such high energy from each shot they can be commercially relevant with $20 individual targets where lasers firing 10x a second are looking at 2 cent individual targets
@@Canucklug That may be the target, but when I run the math out trying to match an SMR, the reaction to output enough energy to make 300MW is the equivalent of more than a ton of TNT every min. Continuously. Not sure if that is an advantage or a massive engineering challenge.
I am thankful for smart people like this who are working to create cleaner energy for our planet! :)
This is where you are taken in by it all. If it takes a 20lb sledgehammer to crack a nut, a 100g pin hammer will never be able to break the same nut. This is what scientists are trying to do with fusion. They know exactly the force they need to fuse two atoms together and there is nothing on this Earth that will do it at a lower force. There is probably only one solution and that is to put something into space that could magnify the suns energy back to Earth to create that force needed. The extra energy released from fusing said atoms is never going to be enough to reproduce said force again. Just a constant flow of free energy magnified somehow will be able to create fusion constantly. If you could magnify said free energy you probably wouldn’t need fusion in the first place. It is a money roundabout keeping a bunch of scientists in well paid jobs. A bit like Astronomers are funded, but fusion scientists are being paid on the illusion that the physical impossible might one day happen.
Likewise, very smart people are really underappreciated. We take our technological world for granted, but if it were not for geniuses and thoughtful people, humanity would still be stuck in the Dark Ages. Edison gets all the credit for the lightbulb, but few people recognize those who discovered how to turn the lightbulb into the first transistors, they were the real geniuses...it was the dawn of the electronics age. Good thing there are many bright people out there in many different fields that are helping our species to advance further.
It is important to remember that there is no magic solution to our current crisis though. Fusion is not going to be more than a tiny niche before 2050 - if that - and we need to go fossil free at that date if we want to keep a human friendly climate. We need to bring our consumption down by a factor of four in the rich part of the world. Luckily tomorrow can be better than today for us all if we build to last and focus on living good lives.
For one tiny little projectile, if it takes a highly machined inch thick plate of aluminum which is destroyed after one shot, then the question of.. "then what?" seems pretty obvious. Keep in mind how much focus was put on well.. "focus", as in the shape of the destroyed part is integral to focusing the energy on the projectile to get it up to speed.
My senator tells me clean coal is the future so no need to waste money on this technology. No way he would lie or mislead his constituents…..
How are things in W. Virginia? : )
You forgot the sarcasm symbol: /s
It’s great to be American eh?
@@mauricegold9377 I so wish it was sarcasm. Heard those words in a town hall in 2020. Was talking about renewables but the clean coal part was a direct quote. I am so ashamed of our leaders.
The last prime minister of Australia showed up in Parliament with a piece of coal for a speech.
I just like to take a moment to see how much I love this channel and this group of highly intelligent open minded individuals. The discussions in the comment section in the ideas that float around are the type of thing that our government needs more of. I’m a huge component of alternative energies and ideas and unfortunately not enough of it is happening at the levels were some of these things can actually be implemented but I am glad that this community exists keep doing great things Matt.
To burst your bubble, every video from Matt is breakthrough. Yet none of the breakthrough effect any consumer product.
Fusion might never be possible, but all these experiments & efforts are a learning curve for humanity! So people saying that its a waste of time & energy are not right!🙂
As with all things fusion, I'll wait three decades to get excited about this video.
First Light’s biomimicry fusion is new and exciting and outside the “30 years away” history of fusion research. If what he says about tritium production is accurate and holds up at scale, then I actually have some hope for seeing fusion power in my lifetime. Thanks for the video!
It might not be 30 years away from net gain, but it is a long way away from commercially viable in its current firing system. Look at those firing discs - the projectile is literally coupled physically to a coil. That's not going to be easy to fix afterward or cheap to manufacture.
@@mnomadvfx you would literally need to reload and fire thousands of these every second to approach usable energy...it's just not viable design outside of a proof of contept, and I can't see how it could ever progress past that in this form.
The Pier... 'dis-apiered. I love it! Seriously, I still like the first fusion concept best that you discussed. I think it was called Halcyon or something like that. It didn't need tritium to get to fusion, just helium-3 and deuterium.
@@njones420 I think I misunderstood somewhere along the lines then! I thought the point of that firing mechanism was to trigger the reaction, and once the reaction was started it would be self sustaining? Maybe I'm confusing it with designs like the Tokamak where its plasma keeps it self sustaining once ignited, assuming the right conditions are met.
@@Oxygenep12if memory serves, in a previous interview they stated they'd need to fire one of these like every few seconds or minutes.
How do they recover energy from it? How long does it last? How long till the next shot? Matt this video leaves alot of questions hanging.
BS artists looking for investment.
I’m so glad you introduced me to that sponsor, you wouldn’t believe the number of promotional emails I get every day
Love the new filming you while you are filming someone else. It's adding more 'personality' to the documentaries, especially with your bright smile. Thanks for all your hard work Matt. I'm a computer science undergrad and your videos have always been a subject of discussion with my father, letting us enjoy some quality time discussing fun topics.
Glad you're enjoying these, thanks for sharing!
Great interview / video as always, Matt! I'm sure you're already back home and everything is done, but I hope you were able to stop by Tokamak Energy while on your whirlwind fusion tour in England - would love to see a tour from an outsider. The amount of fusion research and work coming from England is fantastic. Of all of the different approaches we just need one that produces a significant margin of net positive energy, is affordable, and scalable - meaning we need to try lots of different things even if they seem unlikely to work.
Never mind fusion. I want a Pistol Shrimp hot water on demand system.
Just dump some explosives in a steel container full of water lol
Shrimp Boil Hot Water Systems ©️
I love that you’re getting to go tour these facilities! Thanks for the great content!
Since most current tritium comes through the bombardment of deuterium with neutrons from another source, I’m surprised no one has thought of some sort of fission-fusion hybrid power system in which the neutrons from a fuel like uranium-233 produced from thorium bombard deuterium to make the tritium which then gets fed into a tokamak in order to produce power. The biggest benefit of this would be that the neutrons from the fusion are so high-energy that they allow the thorium waste to be recycled.
It's probably much easier to bombard Lithium with neutrons to produce Tritium, at least that is what the plan is for breeding tritium for Tokamak / Stellerator types of fusion reactors.
Ty
They actually have. There are theoretical designs for a fission-fusion power plant. It might be advantageous to seperate the fusion and fission infrastructure slightly for maintainabiltiy but yeah. It's a thing
yeah im super confused as well. Here in Canada the CANDU reactors actually produce tons of tritium waste that needs careful handling and storage before release back into the environment. So why can't they just partner up and ask for some tritium lol
The CANDU reactors produce about 1.5 Kg of tritium a year. Their stock of about 20Kg loses 1Kg a year from radioactive decay, so their net production is 0.5Kg. Relative to fusion requirements the stock is rather small.
Great series Matt, thank you for bringing these episodes out!
Glad you like them!
Matt! Great video, thanks for sharing! 🙂😎🤓
Really great series Matt. I hope you'll make more videos like this. All the best.
Great installment. Thanks.
Very exciting to see this technology progress! Great video
excellent as always, cant wait till next week.
Love your fusion videos, would love a dedicated series !
Thank you for all of your hard work.
Love their enthusiasm
Love your work! Keep us knowledgeable as we work towards the future!!!! 👍
Good to see you over here in the UK Matt!
So Cool! Thanks Matt.
Properly enjoyed this video. Thanks for delivering such good content.
Glad you enjoyed it!
It's really exciting to see where fusion is going.
Thank you for your videos
Excellent video
Great info thanks for what you do!
Glad it was helpful!
Love it! Thanks
Wow! What an awesome explanation. I don’t have an engineering or physics background but this was actually understandable. Super excited about the potential for fusion.
Continually interesting, informative, inspiring and necessary.
you're a breath of fresh air in a world gone crazy. tyvm
Very cool, can't wait to see what you have in store for us in the next one!
I'm American and hard wired for it. Hard to give up.
That teaser for the next video is very intriguing. I can't wait to see. 👍👍👍
This video reminded me of using a fire piston, using force and speed to create energy. Pretty amazing stuff!
some thoughts about this: - for hi-tech companies like this where the method is still in development and energy surplus from fusion is not guaranteed, how can they keep themselves afloat? are the auxilliary tech from the fusion program being marketed as a more direct and reliable source of funding? - In this kind of technology, how can fusion products be harnessed into useful energy? heat pump and turbines like usual or something more direct? - Is this similar to the one developed by Helion fusion?
Great Video!
Amazing approach to fusion
Thank you Matt
Thanks for watching!
Absolutely crazy!
I think it's cool. Thanks for doing what you do.
Great stuff Matt!
Glad you enjoyed it
Thanks Matt.
You bet! Thanks for watching, Ron.
Thank you!!!
Thanks for watching!
I love that you started with a gun and ended with a rail gun. Even if this doesn't end up as efficient as the tokamak it could be insanely effective at producing tritium.
I am only an electrician, you just exploded my mind, thx
The flash of light you sometimes see during a ballistic gelatin test is known as a sonoluminescent event. Sonoluminescence is the emission of short bursts of light from imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound. Put simply it is a collapsing air chamber that explodes due to a violent change in pressure. How does this occur in ballistic gelatin? As the bullet strikes the target it creates a gap of air inside of the gelatin. We often refer to this as the temporary caivty. Before the block collapses down to its original shape, the air is low pressure and low temperature. Sometimes these air bubbles can become trapped when their escape route
Well done on the thumbnail for this video. Looks really cool.
I'm glad you like it
Its kind poetical; humans first source of energy was created by smashing rocks together to create just enough heat for a spark. And now we smash together highly advanced materials to achieve the same on a much larger scale.
Fascinating! I'm also looking forward to your next video. Whatever will this novel use for fusion be that you're going to reveal?
Matt, you should also look at fusion-fission hybrid proposals wherein an energy negative fusion source is used to make neutrons that enhance a fission reaction for a net positive output. This has many possible advantages such as burning otherwise useless nuclear "waste" and has the advantage that the fusion source does not need to scale to the same size as a stand-alone net-positive tokamak would.
Finally, the answer to what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.
Most promising yet. Bravo FLF
FANTASTIC
As always, love the content. I think the approach is ingenious. I also really like the fact that they are trying to figure out how to make tritium while also producing energy. Self-sufficiency is a huge problem in the nuclear energy field.
They're not the only ones who are also working on the fuel problem.
Yeah it's really just a requirement for a working fusion power plant. The only source we currently have for Tritium is Fission power plants, which produce it by the milligrams. And half of it decays in 12 years.
@@iveharzing Fusionreactors Concepts like Tokamak or Stellarator aim to Produce the needed Tritium dringend the fusion Process. The blanket which is almost directly facing the plasma consists of Beryllium, a neutron multiplyer and Lithium-6. Due to the Produced neutron from the Reaction of Deuterium and Tritium it will Hit the Lithium-6 which is going to fission into Helium and Tritium. Through that the fuel Problem is theorecticly solved and just needs to be proven. So no fuel Problem for tritium and Deuterium
I thought that the Lithium fissioned into Hydrogen, which was then fused into Helium and produced the massive energy without producing as many neutrons. So yes, like an H-bomb. Some other company is working on a fusion reactor that uses Lithium instead of Deuterium and Tritium for that reason. Less neutron shielding required.
@@edeaglehouse2221 Lithium-6 fissions into 4He ( Helium) and Tritium ( 3H ). That produced Tritium can than be used for the fusion reaction with Deuterium
This is like the race to land a person on the moon…. only with private companies thrown into the mix. Awesome!
Keep up the awesome videos Matt!!!! (FIRST!!)
Yes, this is amazing technology 👏
It's interesting to see that projectile concept, but I don't see a path from there to continuous firing.
great video!
Thanks!
Wow, they've almost figured out a Mandelbrot set fractal curve, amazing.
Absolutely great content. 👍 thanks again, Matt Ferrell
Thanks for watching!
Thanks, Matt, for this coverage of First Light. Their technology is _unlikely to fail._ Gets my vote for _most likely to succeed._ They may not be first, they may not be last, but they are likely to arrive.
We live in such a beautiful age. Imagine one of the current frontiers of human technological advacement, fusion, is so complex and such a deep subject to study, research and develop. Yet, any random joe can learn all the general details about it just by watching Matt. Comes with funny dad jokes as well. Too late to conquer the world, too early to explore the universe. But just in time to live at the edge of singularity
This channel has increasingly become an infomercial for big-promising startups of dubious lifespan.
Good description of how they plan to achieve ignition but not a word on how the heat will be used (without destroying the machine) and how the Tritium will be collected. Those are the two obstacles to a successful machine.
Man, I love the stuff you guys cover. The news is so full of negative shit no matter where you go, so seeing humanity striving for stuff like fusion, plastic eating micro organisms, and more efficient renewable energy always makes my day.
Great Video, Just like the "original" Alternative energies (wind, solar, tidal, waves etc), Fusion has many paths, any or all of them maybe the future.
There's one Fusion effort I follow that doesn't get much press... LPPfusion. I like their approach because it's low on moving parts, is aneutronic (Doesn't produce long lasting radioactive materials), relatively compact, and doesn't involve making steam to run a steam turbine to make electricity. They use turbulence in the plasma flow to create the "pinch" and the result is a flash of X-rays and a charged ion beam. Simple metal foil wrapped around the device captures the X-rays and generates electrical current and the ion beam can be passed into an induction transformer to get electricity. Directly generating electricity like this means their system could be made quite small. I like that as a potential power source for space craft. I wonder if the ion beam could be used as a means of propulsion for a space craft as well. Basically all other fusion efforts... while using all sorts of novel ways to do the fusion... when you ask them "but how will you generate electricity from this?" they get a blank look for a few seconds and then say... use the heat to boil water to make steam and run that through a steam turbine. This is so disappointing to me. Even if LPPfusion doesn't work out... I like that they are breaking from the mold and want to hear about other fusion efforts that are also coming up with different methods for end goal of electricity generation.
I wasn’t expecting the shrimp. First thing I thought of was Little Boy. That was detonated with a projectile that ultimately achieved atomic fission. To see it coming back to firing something at something else in a finessed way, but achieving the atomic opposite? Very interesting.
Very interesting. Fusion is definitely the energy source of the future. Great video!
Fusion is the energy of the future...and it always will be.
@@russhamilton3800 👏👏
First Light Fusion opened the door with projectile fusion. We can go in via that door to an exciting new thinking... Projectile fusion is now a legitimate contender.
Although it might not seem logical, but despite their claims you can get more than 2 tritium from 1 neutron. The energy of the neutron is more important. There's ways to 'make' multiple 'slower' neutrons from a single 'fast' one. And they'll have a lot of engineering to do to avoid blowing up critical parts of their machine with each shot like they do now.
I can see that slogan on so many tee shirts, with the word FUSION made up of thousands of tiny iterations of the word "finesse" 🙂
The technological innovation we will experience by 2040 is what everyone dreamed would happen from 1980-2000. All those super advanced technologies that seemed like science fiction and even magic in the 1980's will be real and buyable by the public by then and society will be unrecognizable from today with only 10-20 years in the future going by. It's going to be a crazy time to believe alive we are on the brink or so many game changing innovations and technologies.
I can hardly imagine that they will reach net energy gain. A few numbers of the energy in the capacitors per shot and the expected thermal energy outcome would be great. And the image of thousands of destroyed plates and copper projectiles per day sounds strange to me.
How much energy goes into the production of just one of those plates vs how much energy (electricity) is generated from one of those targets? Not 'how much energy is produced from the fusion of one of the targets', but 'how much electricity is generated'.
I actually really liked Icognie, today sponsor, nice concept they have.
"Fusion: Smash it in the face with something MASSIVE!" is definitely a shirt worth buying.
There is a canadian fusion company (general fusion) that used a similar 'brute force' approche with gunpower. Design was different though. Their thing was a spherical cluster of gunpowder powered pistons. They stuck to their guns for a couples of years, ( ten maybe?) Then they switched to another kind of more mainstream fusion (tokamak? Not sure).
capacitors are great! we need to use them SO MUCH MORE in electric engineering for battery power and remote power.
How about using the design from nuclear bombs to propel the bullet? So a tiny conventional explosive mixture blows up, compresses a really tiny dose of Uranium/Plutonium to trigger nuclear fission that expanding propels the bullet to high speed that then hits the pellet and triggers nuclear fusion. This potentialy could reduce the size of the gun to a very small one. Of course now you need to provide exolosive materials and heavy nuclear fuel but it is just in tiny amounts. Also this can be a mass produced ball - core made of explosive, then nuclear coating, then 'bullet' coating - material that expands once fission hits it, and finally the most outer-layer the fusion material. Perhaps we could add the last layer - being the 'glass' thingy that keeps stuff together under high pressure until it blows up. This would be feasible only if the amount of uranium/plutonium for this to work would be so tiny that nuclear waste would be negligible or like 1/100 that of a nuclear fission power plant or something. So I don't know - after 10 years of operations we would get like just one barrell of the stuff. If this could be done then maybe we could make tiny balls (1mm or smaller) and put it into cars. Instead of ICE you would have IEEE - Internal Fission-Fusion Engine.
I have a tritium capsule implant in my hand. it glows in the dark. It's called the Firefly implant if you're wondering. It's no longer available because of issues with the glass breaking but I've had no issues with it.
the projectile fusion system reminds me of the way they portrayed fusion in the show "Expanse"
There is research on ‘low temperatures and pressures plasmas’, that would make these concepts more feasible.
If you walk the streets of London you wouldn’t assume that the UK will fail at this. You would be amazed that this project exists at all
The total amount of energy required to make the projectiles and fuel pellets, operate the launcher, maintain the reaction chamber vacuum, etc. likely exceeds the amount of energy generated. I cannot imagine any fusion technology that requires such fancy consumables achieving all-inclusive net-positive output.
The 50s had a golden age of nuclear innovations and futurism. I hope to live through a age of fusion that is more "Expanse/startrek" esq. And beautiful
But how will this operate consistently over time? Are they going to create some sort of magazine with the discs and operate it like a machine gun?
Love the channel. First.
10:17 I believe it has actually disap-pier-ed!
Great vid, totally right Matt, that "Fusion-smash it in the face with something massive!" should definitely be on a t-shirt. :)