David Kirtley: evaluation

Transcript context

…So high level, what are the different ways to build a nuclear fusion power plant? Can you explain what a tokamak is, what a stellarator is, and what’s the linear approach that Helion is using? There are a number of ways to do fusion. Fundamentally, in all fusion approaches, you’re trying to do the same physical process, which is take these lightweight isotopes, heat them up so that they can move at high velocity—over 100 million degrees—bring enough of them together. We call it density. Enough of them together in a certain volume so that you have reactions happening at a higher rate, and keep them together long enough that they are able to collide into each other and do fusion and release energy. That’s the fundamental core. Now, how you do that, how you bring those particles together, how you hold them together long enough, there’s a wide range of technologies that, as humans, we’ve been exploring since the 1950s. And I think about several main categories. If you look at the fusion funding out there, government funding in the world, private funding actually has quite a different profile, which is an interesting thing to talk about. But in public funding, in federal funding in the United States, there are two mainline programs called inertial fusion and magnetic fusion. In inertial fusion, what you’re trying to do is bring together and push together by a variety of physical means, those particles. You push them together. The most common is called laser inertial fusion. Our colleagues at the National Ignition Facility did this really well and made world records in the last few years for being able to demonstrate you can do this and do it at scale. Where you take very high power lasers and pulse them together to combine them to do fusion for a pulse, for a very short period of time: nanoseconds, billionths of a second. The other extreme, and you mentioned tokamaks and stellarators. Stellarators are actually my favorite, so we’ll talk about those. As a graduate student in fusion, the stellarator is the first thing you learn about. Because there’s a mathematical solution for a stellarator that solves perfectly. And you can write it out and you can solve it, and analytically, it’s very simple. Building one is very hard. It’s taken humanity a number of decades to be able to build stellarators, and we can do it now with the Wendelstein 7-X that came online in the last few years, being the premier stellarator in the world. I should say, all the different ways to do fusion all just look so badass in terms of engineering. Creating this containment, extremely high temperature, high density. Everything’s moving super fast. Everything is happening super fast. It’s just fascinating that humans are able to do it. Like, there are certain things, accelerators are that a little bit, but this is even cooler because you’re generating energy that can power humanity with this machine. Anyway, can you just speak a little bit more to the inertial and the magnetic fusion systems?…

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