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A light, informative, inspiring podcast all about the field of fusion energy research as seen through the eyes of PhD students from the Fusion CDT! Refresh your knowledge with our first four ‘introductory’ episodes, wet your whistle on the second spotlight set or quench your thirst listening to our chats about the questions and answers (and where they come from) of fusion energy and plasma physics.
Our first set (after introducing a few of us in our pilot recording!) offers a whistle-stop tour of nuclear fusion and relates that to the world of fusion energy; the big projects, the research strands, other uses of our work and how it’s all going anyway.
Don’t worry if it feels like a rush of headlines just now – we’ll be coming back to everything mentioned and much more as future topics in episodes to cover as many aspects of and ideas in fusion energy and plasma physics as we can think of!
The next 5 start to focus the mind, presenting a series of spotlights on fusion energy research themes. We look in particular at the work of the Fusion Centre for Doctoral Training and our key national lab partners.
These taken together give you the background, the rest are conversations in no particular order about the questions raised in the first few episodes and many more besides!
The Fusion Centre for Doctoral Training (Fusion CDT) is a long term set of PhD programmes to train the next generation of fusion scientists in the UK, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for which we’re very grateful!
Our office building is called Genesis.
The ITER project, described in a few lines.
JET is located at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) in Oxfordshire, UK.
Gorilla drinks 5 litres of undiluted squash.
Into this glass we poured everything we know about nuclear physics – the processes and demands of nuclear fusion in nature. Barely enough for a meniscus, so we did some reading to top it up. Then we talked about the sun and the destruction of our galaxy. We’re ‘glass half full’ people deep down.
Coulomb force and the strong nuclear force graph – The attractive force between two protons due to the strong nuclear force is only large when they are very close together. Beyond a few femtometers (14 zeros after the decimal point) the strong force is rather weak. The Coulomb force is the attraction/repulsion between two charged objects, for the Sun we are only interested in the repulsion of this force as we are looking at two protons (positively charged) fusing together.
With both of these forces plotted over the distance between our two protons we can see that unless they are very close the Coulomb force will repel them apart. To get close enough to fuse requires collisions with a huge amount of energy, which most protons in the (pretty hot) Sun do not have!
Fusion in the sun – Most particles in the sun don’t have enough energy to overcome the Coulomb energy barrier and fuse, however they can quantum tunnel through this energy barrier and cause a fusion reaction. Without quantum tunneling stars the size of the Sun would not be able to support fusion reactions so you wouldn’t be here reading this!
In 4 billion years the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy. We will have to move planets to see this however, as in 3.75 billion years the Sun will have become so hot that the Earth’s surface will no longer support water. So that’s all good then.
Galaxy collision video – From a simulation by NASA.
We stirred into this glass all the extra bits of garnish that make nuclear physics knowledge useful! We get strict about criteria and chat about the bottom line(s) for harnessing the energy. How are we going to boil our seawater? Tea tastes better from a glass anyway I’m told.
Andrew, Bhavin, Charlie, Joe, Phil, Will.
This figure shows the triple product for 3 different fusion reactions, Deuterium with Tritium, itself and Helium-3. The blue DT curve goes lowest, meaning that a DT plasma is the easiest with which to fulfil Lawson’s criterion.
Will may have said 10^20 but obviously he meant 21.
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Ok this one’s a tall glass so we’re continuing where we left off – talking about the serious side of working with nuclear things. How we’re going to meet the criteria we were talking, including shortcuts. We close these intros with a number of ‘promising’ tangents to tease future episodes for you!
Tritium is pricey – in fact the most expensive thing per weight in the world – we would need to develop a market for it!
We teased a HUGE issue in energy right now as the Energy Transition gets into gear. We will be coming back to it but to prime you for the coming changes read this take.
Our launch party (coinciding with British Science Week 2018) included this episode recorded in front of a live public audience. We discuss 30 years of fusion progress – the things we’ve learned, the hiccoughs, the tangents and whether ‘why is it 30 years away?’ is a good question. Join the crowd!
While Bhav’s doing yet another cake analogy why not read this review of the materials science challenge posed by fusion and think about applying to the Fusion CDT one day (other materials science doctoral programmes are available)! It’s a huge team effort!
Fusion triple product vs Moore’s law from 1960 to 2005, along with particle accelerator energy. Moore’s law – number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. Basically, you know how fast computers got better? Fusion progress is faster than that.
So how far from success? Check out this tweet.
OK, so, bottom line time, what sort of spin offs have we got? This page is part of a big list put together by Eurofusion (sort of a European Space Agency for fusion) and goes into the mobile comms links but there’s a bunch of alternative applications for the knowledge we’ve gained!
Philosophy of space video for anyone else who twitched at Will’s comment!
Nuclear binding energy graph and a good explanation of how it works!
If you want more of Andrew’s science-in-society worldview watch Neil Degrasse Tyson. You wont regret it.
Fusion in the news (NEVER read the headlines about fusion).
Brush up on the Lorentz force on a charged particle moving in a magnetic field.
The original Spitzer paper proposing Stellerators in which he mathematically ‘shows’ that tokamaks must be unstable. Experimentalists 1 – Theorists 0. This round anyway.
Stopping a runaway horse – dont say we’re not doing practical consumer advice.
… & her name is Ksenia Alexandrovna Razumova – a great name. Andrew apologises to Ksenia and the team for letting them down with his inability to remember basic Russian naming convention.
When Andrew says that inside a tokamak is a vacuum – clearly that’s not true while the plasma (fuel) is in there too. It is true, though, that the gas fuel is an order of magnitude less dense than air.
and if you want to get a summary of all these issues, including a comparison to stellerators then this fabulous review paper just came out.
So what is inertia for a start?
Quenching steel. You can find your own videos of swords being made!
The damage done to a lattice can be significant before it (mostly) reforms. This is what we want to model/ measure accurately!
If you like you radiation doses quantified more rigorously than bananas I love this graph… from the banana equivalent dose wiki!
We’ve done some amazing things with superconducting (low temperature, zero resistance) magnets which we’ll be coming back to..
Non-equilibrium plasma makes up nearly all the matter we can see!
Sooo many applications, all relying on synergy (correctly used!) between chemical and physical processes. We already use plasma loads in chip manufacturing, therapeutic uses are being developed fast and we look forward to ever more agricultural and technological applications.
This time Will, Charlie, Kate and new-comer Chris M have gathered to talk about this year’s Nobel Prize Winner: Chirped Pulse Amplification. We break down exactly what this technological breakthrough was and why it was so important. Then we look to the future to consider what might be the next big step in high power laser science.
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