David Kirtley: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, so the moment we start running out of hydrogen and helium, that means we’re doing some pretty incredible things with our technology. And then that technology is probably going to allow us to propagate out into the universe and then discover other sources, because you can also get it on other planets. Whatever planets have water, it looks more and more likely like a lot of them do. What an incredible future, just out into the cosmos, nuclear power plants everywhere. Okay, so to linger on some of the technical stuff, you said strong nuclear force. So how exactly is the energy created? How does the E=MC²—the M—go to the E in fusion? So in fusion, you take these lightweight isotopes like hydrogen and deuterium, and as you combine them and get these molecules closer and closer together, some really interesting fundamental physics happens. First, these atomic nuclei are charged. They have an electric charge, and like charges repel. I think everybody is familiar with that, where you take two positive charges and you try to push them together, and the electromagnetic force between them repels them. So you have a force that’s actually pushing against them. In fusion, you work to get your fuel very hot, very, very high temperatures—100 million degree temperatures. And temperature really is kinetic energy; it’s motion, it’s velocity. So these particles are moving so fast that even though they’re coming together and there’s this repulsive electromagnetic force, they can still come close enough that another force comes into play, which is the strong force. Once you get within a very close distance, on the order of the scale of those nuclei themselves—of those atomic nuclei, the tiniest thing you could imagine, and probably way smaller than that—these particles then are attracted to each other, and they combine and fuse together. At that point, you create heavier atomic nuclei that have a slightly less mass, slightly less total mass in the system, and that mass equals MC² as energy. So extremely high temperature, extremely high speed. Maybe that’s one of the other differences also with fusion and fission, is just the amount of temperature required for the reactions. Is that accurate to say?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.