Name: Fusion Power Explained – Future or Failure
Uploaded: 2017-03-26T03:30:07.000Z
Duration: 6 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The fundamental currency of our Universe is energy.

and there are not enough batteries to store sunlight for cloudy days yet.

And yet, the Sun seems to have virtually limitless, free energy.

Is there a way we could build a sun on Earth?

The Sun shines beacuse of nuclear fusion.

In a nutshell - fusion is a thermonuclear process,

meaning that the ingredients have to be incredibly hot, so hot,

that the atoms are stripped of their electrons,

making a plasma where nuclei and electrons

Since nuclei are all positively charged, they repell each other.

the particles have to be going very, very fast.

In this context, very fast means very hot:

They are so massive, that the pressure in their cores

generates the heat to squeeze the nuclei together

creating heavier nuclei and releasing energy in the process.

On Earth, it's not feasible to use this brute-force method

So if we want to build a reactor that generates energy from fusion,

To date, scientists have invented two ways of making plasmas

The first type of reactor uses a magnetic field

to squeeze a plasma in a donut-shaped chamber

These magnetic confinement reactors, such as the ITER reactor in France,

use superconducting electromagnets cooled with liquid helium

to within a few degrees of absolute zero.

Meaning they host some of the biggest temperature gradients in the known Universe.

The second type, called inertial confinement,

briefly making the fuel hot and dense enough to fuse.

one of the most powerful lasers in the world

at the National Ignition Facility in the US.

These experiments and others like them around the world

Scientists are still developing the technology.

right now, it costs more energy to do the experiment

It might just be impossible to make a viable fusion reactor on Earth.

But, if it gets there it will be so efficient,

could be used to produce as much energy as burning a barrel of oil,

This is because fusion reactors would use hydrogen or helium as fuel,

specific isotopes with extra neutrons, called deuterium and tritium,

Deuterium is stable and can be found in abundance in sea water,

It's radioactive and there may only be twenty kilograms

of it in the world, mostly in nuclear warheads

So, we may need another fusion body for deuterium instead of tritium.

Helium-3, an isotope of helium, might be a great substitute.

the solar wind may have built up huge deposits

Instead of making helium-3, we can mine it.

If we can sift the lunar dust for helium,

we'd have enough fuel to power the entire world

One more argument for establishing a moon base,

Okay, maybe you think building a mini sun

But they'd actually be much safer than most other types of power plant.

A fusion reactor is not like a nuclear plant

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Fusion Power Explained – Future or Failure

process

incredibly

tricky

strike