How do we achieve nuclear fusion in the laboratory? What are some experiments that are trying to achieve fusion power generation? Why is it so difficult? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO GENERATED)

Nuclear fusion was supposed to be a dream come true. As soon as we discovered that you could smash little atoms together to make bigger atoms and release a bit of energy in the process, scientists around the world realized the implications of this new bit of physics knowledge. Some wanted to turn it into weapons. And some wanted to turn it into clean, efficient, nearly inexhaustible energy for electricity, for our homes, for our businesses, for spaceflight, for everything. But it turns out that fusion power is hard.

Really hard. Really complicated. Full of unexpected pitfalls and unrealized traps. We've been trying to build fusion generators for 3 quarters of a century. And in all honesty, as we'll see in this episode, we've made a lot of progress.

But, you know, not just a lot. That's not a big enough word. We've made enormous groundbreaking horizon expanding progress, but we're not quite there yet. Fusion power has been one of those things that's been only 20 years away for about 50 years now. But I'm not giving up on fusion power.

I'm actually very hopeful about this and we're going to see why. Because the most frustrating slash enticing thing about fusion power in that combination of frustration and enticement is very common in the sciences. It's part of what keeps us up at night and gets us motivated in the morning. The most frustrating slash enticing thing about fusion power is it is that it's not impossible. At least there is no principle or law of physics that when you when you turn the crank on the equations and you spit out the math it comes out with thou shall not have fusion power.

That that doesn't exist. Everything we know about fusion power in the generation of electricity through the fusion process is allowed by everything we know about physics. It's not forbidden in the this universe. That means it's a possibility. But it also means that the engineering challenges are mountainous.

How do I know that physics power is not forbidden by our universe? Because physics. That's why. We have the basics of nuclear fusion down and we have for a very very long time and it all comes down to e equals mc squared. Energy and mass are actually equal to each other.

The c squared that's the speed of light squared. That's just a conversion factor that just tells you how much energy is in a bit of mass and vice versa. You can ignore that. The basic of the equation is e equals m. Energy equals mass.

Energy is mass. Mass is energy. These are two sides of the exact same coin. These are 2 manifestations of the same phenomena. And when you take 2 light nuclei, say a couple hydrogen together, you add up their masses.

Masses equal to that of 2 hydrogen. Not that complex of a calculation. And then you smash them together, you fuse them together to create helium. The helium is just a tiny bit lighter than 2 hydrogens. Just the way the protons and neutrons interact with each other, the nature of the strong force.

So you know, we've gotten into that before the but the end result, the empirical fact, even if you knew nothing about the strong nuclear force, or the existence of protons and neutrons. As long as you knew about hydrogen and helium and you can smash them together you'd have a in that you'd have a little bit of mass left over that means you have a little bit of energy left over because mass and energy are the same thing. The challenge with nuclear fusion and why it doesn't happen all the time is that atomic nuclei really, really, really hate each other. Like, they just can't stand each other. And it's pure electrostatic forces.

It's the electric force. You've got neutrons which are electrically neutral. But then in these in these nuclei, in these atoms, you also have protons which are positively charged and they're they're just not gonna get close to each other. That's it. So it's nearly impossible to bring them close enough together that the strong force kicks in and binds them together despite their mutual hatred of each other.

What kind of sword does save this is quantum tunneling? Your atomic nuclei are made of protons and neutrons. These are subatomic particles. These are quantum particles. Quantum particles.

You never know exactly where they're gonna be the next time you go looking for them. You think you put them down. You say you're just gonna stay here. Like it's like telling a 2 year old to just sit. When you go off like the chances of you coming back in the 2 year old still being in the chair is staring at nothing is very small.

You tell a proton look you're going to be inside of this hydrogen nucleus and you're not going anywhere. And then you turn around to look. You do something. You do sandwich. You you you run an experiment, and then you come back and the protons not there anymore.

That's quantum tunneling. So 2 light nuclei, 2 light atoms, they can really, really hate each other, but sometimes quantum mechanics like tricks them into a relationship. It's like the ultimate quantum catfishing exercise here. All of a sudden they're in this bound relationship with each other and they're in a new atom. Now they're in helium when they thought they were in hydrogen before.

It's quantum mechanics. It doesn't make it easy. You still have to get these atomic nuclei really close together and they need to spend a lot of time together and then the quantum tunneling trick can kick in but just doesn't make it as impossible. It just makes it merely difficult but it happens in nature. That's another reason why I know for sure that nuclear fusion is allowed by physics because it happens.

It's called the sun in every single star. It's one of the first realizations we made once we figured out e equals mc squared. With less than a year there is a proposal, maybe this is what powers stars. It's all driven by immense gravitational pressure. We're talking a 1000000000 atmospheres here in the core of the sun.

Tens of 1,000,000 of degrees Kelvin. That's the conditions you need to overcome these barriers to get light elements like hydrogen to glue together to form helium and release a little bit of energy. It's what's powered the sun for 4 and a half 1000000000 years and will power the sun for another 4 and a half 1000000000 years But it's possible. It's allowed. It happens on the daily.

In fact, our days are because of nuclear fusion. Without nuclear fusion there wouldn't be dailies. So the challenge of homegrown nuclear fusion isn't do we need to come up with new physics. No. The physics is is there.

No. It's just the minor engineering challenge of recreating the conditions of the core of the sun. You know no big deal. Right? But even here it's possible.

In fact we used to do it all the time but not in a fun way. The first atomic bombs were fission bombs. This is the opposite process where you split a heavy nucleus, a heavy atom into 2 lighter ones, and again there's a release of energy. There's less mass involved at the end of the day, so there's a release of energy. Big boom.

But more advanced, more powerful bombs quickly came around, and these were based on fusion. In fact, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever dead detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of somewhere between 50 85 megatons was a fusion bomb. And that was in the 19 sixties. And to make a fusion bomb work how like, how do you recreate the conditions of the Sun inside of a small metal container? Well the trick was to have 2 bombs for the price of 1.

You start with a fission bomb that releases an enormous amount of energy and heat, but then you trap it in a vessel instead of just like going blammo and and blowing up a city or something. You contain it in the vessel and then all that pressure, all that intensity gets directed inwards on another fusion target. That target gets squeezed, undergoes fusion, and releases its own energy. And then you let that blow up. Fusion powered bombs are much more powerful than the fission bombs first developed during World War 2.

So okay. We can recreate the conditions of the core of the sun. We have the technology. We have the capability to do it. It's within our powers of sophistication right here on the surface of the earth.

But for only very brief moments of time and for the purposes of mass destruction. But hey at least it shows that we have the technological chops to pull it off in principle. Fusion power is not impossible. We can observe it in nature and we can make bombs. But how do we turn that into electricity?

And this is the big challenge. Because yeah you can you can blow something up. That's very brief and very intense. That is the opposite of what you need to generate electricity. You need controlled measured.

You need to be able to turn it off if you want or turn it up if you need to. You need to extract energy from it. You need to extract it and turn it into electricity. We figured this out with fission process. We have nuclear power plants where we let highly radioactive elements decay.

That releases heat. The heat is used to heat up water which turns into steam. We turn the steam to run a turbine to generate electricity. Nuclear fission nuclear plants are just very advanced steam engines. We figured that out.

Downsides to that include Well, for 1, we're dealing with highly dangerous, highly radioactive substances, which are very deadly dangerous to mine, transport, use, and then dispose of. It's a problem we haven't really solved. And 2 fission processes are once you get going you just go. Boom boom boom boom boom. They can very quickly run out of control and so the challenge in nuclear fission power plant design is how to keep a lid on the chain reaction so it doesn't go out of control and so you can keep keep it going without the whole thing turning into a giant bomb.

Fusion doesn't have those challenges. Fusion deals with hydrogen helium. Oh, dangerous high hydrogen. Like, it's just hydrogen. And then with fusion, you can turn it on when you want and turn it off when you're done.

There's no chain reaction. You have to keep work going in. To keep the fusion reaction going and then when you're done if you're like oh no, my reactors malfunctioning. Okay, I'll just turn it off. And then the fusion reaction stops and then that's it and then the byproduct of fusion reaction is like helium lithium maybe boron.

Easy stuff. So the promises the potential is there but the reality has not met it because we can do fusion. We can perform fusion for very brief moments of time but we don't know how to turn this into the generation of continuous supply of electricity. How do you turn a bomb into a power plant? This is where we've had decades of research with a lot of promise and a lot of potential and a lot of progress but not a lot of, performance.

Sorry, I tried to find another p word to make it all alliterative. That's the best one I could find. Maybe I should have said patreon and said that's patreon.com/pmsutter. It's how you can support this show and I truly do appreciate every contribution that comes in and hey, through the end of March, anyone who subscribes at the $25 and up level, even for just 1 month, you'll get a free copy, autograph copy of my book Rescuing Science Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt that is hitting bookstores on March 5th, but you can get an autograph copy if you contribute to Patreon. You only have to do it for 1 month and you can drop it.

It's fine. I just want to get the books out there. That's patreon.com/pmsutter. I really appreciate it. When I was drafting this episode, I almost started to really dig into the past.

The history of fusion research, the stops and starts, the interesting designs, the experiments. But as I was putting it together I decided I wanted this to be more future focused. Let's let's look let's not dwell on the past and the previous attempts to gain fusion power. Let's focus on the today and the tomorrow. Where are we with fusion power right now and when can we achieve it?

There are a few different versions out there to achieve fusion power with well over a 100 major and minor experimental attempts. Thankfully, we can help organize our thinking about all these experiments through 2 broad categories. The first category of nuclear fusion attempts, laboratory attempts to recreate the conditions of the sun, is something called inertial confinement, which is a big fancy physics jargon word for getting squeezed a lot. If you've ever been in a elevator and it's a little uncomfortable and then stops on another floor and then 2 more people get in and you have to really shuffle and you're trying your best not to touch anybody else, but you can't help it and you can feel their breath and you're just all standing there awkwardly and the temperature's rising in the elevator. If you've ever fell to that kind of claustrophobic, tight elevator experience, you are experiencing inertial confinement.

We've achieved inertial confinement before. This is what powers our thermonuclear weapons. You let off a giant bomb inside of a sealed container and then it directs all the energy of that bomb inwards which is enough to squeeze on a tiny little pellet of fuel and trigger nuclear fusion. We need to take a quick break, folks, and mention that this show is sponsored by BetterHelp. And the theme of today is all about collaboration.

It's all about relationships. Some of the most powerful satisfying relationships I've ever had in my life are ones with my mentors, with my colleagues who become my friends, and collaboration is the key to success in the sciences. Nobody works alone to generate scientific results. It's just how it is. You have to collaborate in order to succeed, and these relationships take a lot of work.

The more work you put into a relationship, the more you get out of it. You don't just get to free load in a relationship unless that relationship is with cheese, but that's a different topic. And therapy can help with relationships. It can help you identify where you need to put in the work in order to get a fruitful, useful, compelling, powerful, beautiful relationship. If you're thinking of starting therapy, why don't you try BetterHelp?

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That's betterhelphelp.com/spaceman. In less, destructively aimed attempts at inertial confinement, we use everybody's favorite device, which is giant lasers. This is showcased by the Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility, in which you take literally a bunch of lasers and then you go get some more and then you grab your buddy's lasers and then you keep going until you run out of room for lasers in your building. The National Ignition Facility has a total of 192 lasers and these are each individually among the most powerful lasers in the world and then you amplify them using the power of science. That's a whole other episode.

I'd love to get into like laser science and amplification and how it all works. Feel free to ask And then you take all these lasers and you point them all, 192 of them, all amplified at a target the size of a pencil eraser. That's quite a tight elevator ride. Now, these lasers are made of photons. Photons carry energy and momentum.

So what happens is that the outer layers of a pellet, the target, explode because they're being hit by a 192 super powerful lasers. So that kind of no choice here. They explode. Some of that explosive energy goes outwards, and it's lost. You don't get to use it.

But some of that explosion energy travels inwards, deeper into the pellet, almost like a shockwave, like and the shockwave goes inwards into the pellet, and that triggers the interior of the pellet, this interior of the pencil eraser to reach 100,000,000,000 atmospheres and the temperatures of a 180,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which, as you might have imagined, triggers nuclear fusion. That releases an enormous amount of energy. The pellet disintegrates, and then you're done. And then you start again with a new pellet. Boom.

Pop. Repeat. And it works. The National Ignition Facility is the first ever fusion experiment to achieve more energy coming out of the fusion reaction than going into it. I need to qualify that statement which I will in a bit.

There was a recent experiment where they delivered 2 mega joules of energy onto the pellet and received 3.15 mega joules back. That's that's energy. More energy out than in. And, this is one of the biggest challenges that we'll see again and again with fusion research is that fission reactions. The nuclear power that we already have, it can just go.

You just kick start it, and then it just goes on its own, and then you have to put in a bunch of work to moderate it and keep it under control. With fusion, you have to keep working at it, which is good. That's much safer, but it makes it harder because you have to keep putting energy, and you have to keep this material really really squeezed together nice and tight in order to achieve fusion, and then once the fusion is happening it's releasing energy. So you have to fight against that, and you have to keep it going. The sun does this through gravity.

Bombs don't do it because they they go off once and then they're done. And so this is the big challenge with power generation for new through nuclear fusion. The good news another piece of good news with the National Ignition Facility is that it's almost guaranteed to never stop funding. It started out in the nineties as a pure fusion research experiment. Just, hey, we're gonna explore the nature of fusion.

But then in 1996, there was the test ban treaty where we don't aren't allowed to test nuclear weapons anymore. But then the federal government is faced with these conflicting priorities. We can't test nuclear weapons anymore, but we like to keep the nuclear weapons that we have and we'd like to build some new ones, but we can't. How do we know that they work? How do we maintain them?

How do we make sure that if if you know, the worst happens and we launch these things they actually do what they're supposed to do? And so, a lot of the national ignition facilities work now is actually in not necessarily recreating the conditions of the sun for fusion power, but recreating the conditions of the interior of a nuclear bomb for defense. It allows us to test nuclear weapons without testing nuclear weapons. And it is what it is. The good news on that, is that we get to keep maintaining fusion research.

But that's inertial confinement. The other major strategy for achieving nuclear fusion is magnetic confinement. Magnetic confinement you ever, like, forget to buy new toothpaste? And then you're at the very very end of your existing toothpaste and you're squeezing that tube with every fiber of your being, that's magnetic confinement but, with magnets. There have been a different many different approaches throughout history with cool names, stellarator, z pinch, magnetic mirror.

The strategy used today has of course the best name tokamak. Tokamak's, the basic idea is you take a bunch of hydrogen gas used to get in a big metal donut. Then you heat the thing up which turns the hydrogen gas into a plasma. So now you have a bunch of hydrogen plasma in a donut. Plasma does not really like being in one place and so it tries to expand.

It wants to stop being inside the donut. So, you wrap your metal doughnut in electrical wires, and then you turn the juice on. This makes a huge magnetic field that is, once again, in the shape of a doughnut. And this magnetic field keeps the hydrogen plasma inside. Then you really crank the juice up, which amplifies the magnetic fields, which puts the squeeze on the hydrogen plasma.

You ever play with one of those finger traps where you put 2 fingers, in on each side and then you pull and it just squeezes as it pulls. It's like that but with magnetic fields. Magnetic fields are super cool as we've discussed routinely on this show. Here they are leading the way to a new generation of safe efficient inexhaustible energy. I told you magnetic fields were important.

So you use these magnetic fields to squeeze the life out of this plasma. Fusion happens, releases energy. The energy gets absorbed by the walls of the metal donut which you use to heat up steam and drive a turbine making electricity. That's the big idea, at least. The big challenge here is have you ever tried to squeeze toothpaste?

And you squeeze as hard as you can and a little little drop of toothpaste comes out and just enough to get on the toothbrush. But then you reach to grab your toothbrush and you let up on your hand a little bit. You're squeezing just just the right way and that little bit of toothpaste goes back into the bottle, into the tube. It's like that. It's not like that at all but it's a fun metaphor to think about.

It's like squeezing jello. Like this this plasma that's being squeezed doesn't like being squeezed and it becomes very unstable. It's like squeezing a tube of toothpaste at a 1000000 degrees. It's extremely difficult to sustain a smooth and calm fusion reaction because you're squeezing this hydrogen, squeezing it, squeezing it, squeezing it, and then it starts to get really unstable. And if if, like, a little pocket gets too dense and that triggers a shockwave, then it just spoils the whole fusion reaction.

So the name of the game here in magnetic confinement is to squeeze the fuel, like the hydrogen gas, the plasma, as much as you can to achieve fusion but keeping everything under control and constantly responding to it, changing the strength of the magnetic field here and there as you're going so that there are no imperfections. So it just sustains itself. Where we are right now, the world's largest nuclear fusion experiment called ITER I t e r is currently under construction. The goal of this design and this is based off of decades of designs of using tokamaks. Making them bigger with every step of the way.

We have not achieved like more energy out than in with any of these magnetic confinement designs. Eider hopes to change that. Hopes to use 300 megawatts of electrical power to cause the plasma to absorb 50 megawatts of power. There's a lot of losses, electrical losses in this process. But then the hydrogen plasma will absorb the 50 megawatts of power, fuse and release 500 megawatts of heat.

Not for long, the goal the design goal of ITER is to run this for, like, 10 minutes at a time. Like I said, it's currently under construction. Decades of work leading up to this and sophisticated computer modeling to help us understand how to wrangle these tangled donuts of plasma. It's an experiment to try to see if we can achieve nuclear fusion for for 10 minutes and and get useful energy out of it. Those are the 2 main branches.

There are a bunch of sign side branches. There's all the crazy town stuff, bubble nucleation, cold fusion. This stuff is, oh yeah, I've designed this tabletop experiment where we can get nuclear fusion. Yeah, that's that's largely junk and you don't need to worry about it too much. If you see it in the news, just ignore it.

It's every 6 months to a year. There's a new story about, tabletop nuclear fusion. We figured it out. No. We didn't.

Move on. I'm willing to be surprised, but it will be a surprise. That's where we are. Those are the 2 big contenders. We've got the National Ignition Facility and we've got ITER.

But there's some some bad news. Despite all these great achievements, we're not quite there yet. To show you how far we still have to come, I have to talk about a certain word. And you know how much I secretly love a good jargon word. The the word here is break even.

And, that's the key metric for measuring the success of all these nuclear reactors. It takes a lot of power to run a fusion reaction. We have to squeeze material in a way it doesn't want to be squeezed. That takes energy. And at the same time we need to use that squeezing to generate fusion, to generate heat, to generate electricity.

And the National Ignition Facility has made a huge breakthrough. They have achieved breakeven but there are different kinds of breakeven. We need to be careful about what they mean. There's one kind of breakeven that's called like scientific breakeven where the energy out through the fusion process is more than the energy in on your target fuel. But, not all of the, you know, energy that you have in your building that you're using to run your fancy equipment is going to make it to the fuel.

You know, you draw in electricity say to run these giant lasers. Those giant lasers heat up. They lose energy. It's costly to to keep them going. By the time the laser is actually on shining on the target, that's much less energy than what you put in in the first place, and that's a different kind of break even called engineering break even.

This is when the energy out through a fusion is equal to or greater than the energy used in electricity to power the holding facility in the first place. Nobody has achieved engineering breakeven. The National Ignition Facility, less than 1% of the electrical energy used to power the facility actually ended up on the target in the form of laser hitting it. Most of it was wasted. So yeah, what came out through fusion energy out of that pellet after it got slammed by all those lasers released more energy than it got in but that's still only like 1% of all the energy used to power the lasers in the first place.

Eider hopes to change that. Eider hopes to achieve engineering breakeven where you add up the all the energy used in electricity to run your tokamak and it generates more energy than that. That's the goal at least for 10 minutes at a time. There's one last break even called economic break even where the electricity sold on the market is enough to pay back the cost of building and running the reactor in the first place. Like can this be a commercial enterprise and investment?

We're going to lay up you know half a $1,000,000,000 right now to build a power plant and in 10 years selling electricity on the open market you know we'll get that investment back and then some. That's economic breakeven. Decades ago many openly wondered if scientific breakeven, the simplest kind of breakeven, was even possible after all the disappointments of the past few decades but now we know it is possible thanks to the national ignition facility and not nothing. And I need to emphasize that nothing we are doing right now is actually going to be a working electrical power plant. National Ignition Facility know, for all the hype, well deserved scientific break even is a huge deal.

This is something that for decades people openly wondered if it was impossible. It's not impossible. It's possible. That pellet that they put was the size of an eraser head but not actually made out of eraser material. Had to be so perfectly precisely machined had to be perfectly symmetrical so it didn't blow up in the wrong direction and spoil the fusion reaction was expensive to build and make and it did generate electricity.

What? 3 and a half megajoules. Typical market for electrical rates, you know, 3 megajoules of electricity that would cost you about 5¢ and that pellet cost about $100,000 to make. And less than 1% of all the electrical energy used to power the lasers in the first place even ended up on the target. The n I f is not designed to be a power plant.

It's to help us understand fusion reactions. It's still worthwhile but just not economic worthwhile. ITER hopes to achieve engineering breakeven. It's not going to be hooked up to the electrical grid. It's going to generate heat, but that heat is not going to drive steam to run a turbine.

It's an experiment, not a power plant. And the sad news is it's been delayed for over a decade. It's in serious trouble because of mismanagement, cost overruns. It's actually in really, really bad shape. And it's actually tough to talk about.

The difficult situation that Aider is in. Feel free to dig in on your own. I don't want to go too much into in this episode on it. It's a it's a definite it's a case of poor management confusing deadlines over promises funding your whims going in and out. And it's in it's in bad shape.

It's it's actually questionable if we'll ever build the thing. I think we will but it's going to take a while. This seems depressing. You know our one instrument that has achieved scientific break even costs an absurd amount of money to generate 5¢ worth of electricity. And a future power plant is likely not going to be based on giant lasers and little bits of pellets it will likely be something like a tokamak design with a donut shaped plasma being squeezed by magnetic fields but our biggest experiment of that that is supposed to achieve engineering break even where it actually generates more energy than it the device consumes is is mired in mismanagement overruns stalled delayed progress.

But I'm not calling it curtains on nuclear fusion power just yet. There are so many benefits. Like I said, it's clean. You can just shut it off. There are a lot of non dangerous radioactive fuel sources to use.

It can be the the power of the future. But where do we go from here? Hey, folks. We're gonna take another quick break because I need to mention that this episode is presented by Chemists in the Kitchen by LabX, a YouTube video series spotlighting the power of chemistry and how science and food can bring people together. And yes, both can.

In each episode, real scientists walk you through things like, are you ready for this? I'm not making it up. How to make your own cheese at home. I have tried that before and it was a total failure. So I am going to watch this episode so I can do it right.

The chemistry behind souffles, methods for botanical infusions, the formula for perfect deep fried chicken, and much more. It's a love letter to science, to cooking, to individuality with some great tips on how you can apply real scientific principles to your everyday cooking. Plus, it's just a lot of fun. It is an amazing series. I checked it out.

It's so much fun to watch. Season 3 is airing right now, and you can catch up with every episode for free on YouTube by searching chemists in the kitchen or by going to youtube.com/labxnas. I can't say for certain when, if ever, we'll achieve sustainable fusion power. But if I had to make some bets, I think I could. Here are my odds constructed entirely unscientifically because I'm just making it up, but here they are.

I will justify them, but but here are the odds. I think that there is a 10% chance of achieving engineering break even. You know, first designs on a potential operating fusion power plant within the next 20 years. 10% chance. I give it a 50% chance for it to happen within the next 100 years.

I give it a 30% chance to happen within the next 100 years after that. So basically a 90% chance of us achieving nuclear fusion power like actually generating electricity within the next 2 centuries. And then a small 10 percent outside chance of it never happening. Where am I getting these numbers? Besides a SWAG, you know, a scientific wild analytical guess hear me out.

I do have a madness to my method. Fusion power is what I like to call a generational challenge or a century level challenge. These are big projects that take more than 1 generation to achieve And humanity has done it before. Massive irrigation projects, cathedral building, the development of steam engines and road networks. These are all generational challenges where, where one generation starts a project and then a future generation finishes it.

And I believe fusion power sits in that category of generational work where one generation gets us started on the road. We're in one generation where we feel like we're in the middle of the road. We're making some progress. We're learning some things, but it probably won't be our generation to complete it. Now it is possible for us as humans to turn generational challenges, century level challenges into short term challenges and solve them very quickly.

It takes 2 things. 1, we need to pour an enormous amount of resources into it. People, time, investment, care, attention, focus. And we need to get really lucky with the right people, the right leadership, the right talent, the right know how, working on that project so that the giant investment actually goes somewhere useful, and generates something in a short amount of time. 2 recent examples I can think of are the moonshot initiative and the Manhattan project.

I believe both of these were generational level problems and challenges, but got compressed through a combination of enormous, ridiculous, unsustainable resources, and the right people at the right time to deploy those resources and get it done. There are plenty of counter examples in recent history where we have spent enormous gobs of money and got nothing for it which is why the luck matters. When we discovered the possibility and potential of fusion energy and we had the opportunity to spend a century's worth of time and money and focus and care in the direction of nuclear research we had a choice between bombs and power plants And we chose bombs. So when the fusion power plant line of research didn't make as quick a progress, and why would it? Because it wasn't given century level investment, starting in the 19 fifties it just kind of petered out in pots de l'ong.

Which means that fusion research has been relegated to the same priority level of most other lines of scientific research which is not much priority at all frankly and that means it will take a long time it will take roughly a century. Compared to other scientific breakthroughs and the progress of science progress in science is not rapid as we've seen before. My favorite example is the century long debate about the existence of the atom. The century it took to fully flesh out electricity and magnetism. We're still working on quantum mechanics a 100 years later trying to understand if we fully grasp that theory the way we think we do.

Century level challenges are common in the sciences and fusion research is one of them. Many challenges just take time and people and you can compress that or try to and get lucky and get something out in less than a century, but otherwise you're just gonna have to wait roughly a century. We've been doing it for 3 quarters of a century now. So that's why we might be just 20, 25 years out. We might be a 100 years out.

We might be 200 years out. I mean, as long as we continue to invest in it, I'm fairly certain that we will figure out all the engineering riddles and make it stick. But there's a chance that humanity moves on to other goals in the fusion research train just said, you know, if we figure out huge advancements in solar power, wind power, then we just don't need fusion power anymore. And that's why there's a small chance it will never work. We never devote the right people or the right resources to it.

And it trickles along. We learn a lot about fusion processes and the strong nuclear force and and how atoms work, but we don't turn that into a power plant. Not because of any prohibition from physics, but from the lack of will. But I believe we can do it. I do believe we can make fusion power happen.

We'll take our time with this and we'll get it right and it will be awesome. Thank you to Isabella V on email, Richard K on Patreon, Genevieve M on Patreon, Jared M on email, Manasa a on email, Joshua m on email, and Anthony p on email, and Taylor k on email for all the questions that led to today's episode. And, of course, thank you to all my Patreon contributors. That's patreon.com/pmsetter. Remember, $25 and up through the end of March.

Even if it's just one time, I will send you an autograph copy of Rescuing Science, Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt, my new book. My top patreon contributors this month who are all getting free books, Justin g, Chris l, Barbara k, Alberto m, Duncan, m, Corey, d, Nyla, John s, Joshua, Scott m, Rob h, Lewis m, John w, Alexis, Aaron j, Gilbert m, and Valerie h. Please keep the questions coming. It's askaspaceman@gmail.com or my website, ask a spaceman.com. Please keep sharing the episode, telling your friends about it.

Drop some reviews on iTunes. It really helps the visibility of the show. Keep those questions coming, please. I love them. And I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.

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