David Kirtley: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I like the analogy of the match and the campfire, and I hear that a lot in fusion. Where a lot of what steady fusion, think a stellarator or a Tokamak, is attempting to do is take a little bit of fuel, that match, and then add heat to ignite that match, and then put it with enough fuel and in the right conditions and hold onto it for a long time that it grows into a campfire. Even if they do a good job, a bonfire. It’s creating a tremendous amount of energy in that steady system. Burning fuel in the same place, generating some ash, generating a lot of heat in that reaction. And in a traditional Tokamak or a stellarator, that’s a lot of what you’re doing, is you’re holding onto the heat as much as possible to keep that reaction going. And the optimal fuel is called deuterium and tritium, where you have deuterium, which is a heavy isotope of hydrogen where you have an extra neutron, and tritium is a very rare form of hydrogen that’s an unstable form. It’s so rare it’s hard to get. Where it has two neutrons and a proton, and when you fuse those together at very high temperatures, at very high densities or high enough densities and very high temperatures, they make helium, which is a charged particle, which stays inside the campfire, inside the Tokamak, continuing to heat it and stoke the flames, and it makes a neutron which leaves the system because it’s uncharged. It has no charge, and in that system, it’s actually ideal. It’s really great because in a campfire, you have this reaction going and you want to get the energy out of it. You want to use it, and you don’t want to just burn up all the fuel and do nothing. That’s not really valuable. What’s really valuable is to stand next to the campfire and get the heat, get what comes off of it. And then use that in a traditional fusion system to boil water, to heat the water, and then at 30, 35% efficiency, then convert that through a steam turbine into a cooling tower, and cool off the fuel and extract electricity. And we know steam turbines. Coal plants do this. Nuclear fission reactors do this. And so we know how to do that, and that’s the traditional way of doing it. But I think there are other ways to do it with a pulsed magnetic system. There’s one more thing you get to do, because you have this high beta where there’s an electric field and an electromagnetic force that’s now compressing the fusion fuel. It’s increasing in temperature. It’s getting hotter. It’s increasing in temperature. Density fusion is happening. New fusion particles are being born, and those particles are not just stoking the flame. They’re not just holding on to the campfire like in the Tokamak, but they’re doing another thing which is really powerful, which is they’re pushing back on the magnetic field. just stoking the flame. They’re not just holding on to the campfire like in the Tokamak, but they’re doing another thing which is really powerful, which is they’re pushing back on the magnetic field. They’re applying a pressure. That pressure induces a current. We can extract that electrical current. But it takes you into another direction, so your analogy of the campfire now breaks down, because now the campfire is expanding. It’s pushing back on something, and so now it’s the analogy of the piston engine… …As you move from the match, the campfire, to now pistons. And so in a piston engine, you use the motion of the piston, the pressure on it, and the motion of it to do something useful. And in a piston engine, it’s to turn a crankshaft and run wheels, or maybe even a piston engine to turn a crankshaft and run a generator and make electricity. And in fact, you can do it pretty high efficiency. …and a generator using that method, using the expansion of that piston. What we do is use the expansion of the magnetic field to extract that electricity, and we believe you can do it with much, much higher efficiencies. In fact, there’s been theoretical papers that show not 30% to 35% efficiency, like a steam turbine can do, but 80% efficiency, 85% efficiency, extracting much more of the energy of the fuel in that process. Can you actually just take a tiny tangent… …On the word “efficiency” here? So, you said 30%, so it’s inefficient. Is that efficiency measure how much of the energy is actually converted to electricity?…

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