00:00 is a very exciting subject that you're going to be talking with me about today.
00:03 China has made an artificial sun.
00:06 Yes. I'm just like, I thought we had a sun already.
00:10 I didn't know we needed a new sun, but I guess it's cool to have one because of all the solar implications.
00:15 Right. Yeah. It's always good to have a spare of anything, I guess.
00:18 Sure. Sure.
00:20 So like the artificial sun is kind of China's buzzword for it, but it's actually a bit more of a mouthful.
00:27 What this thing stands for, it's called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak.
00:33 It's a type of nuclear fusion reactor.
00:35 It's not the first of its kind, but the reason why it's been making headlines last week and this week as well,
00:41 is it was able to maintain a temperature of one hundred and fifty eight million degrees Fahrenheit,
00:45 which is around five times as hot as the sun for one thousand and fifty six seconds,
00:51 around just over 17 minutes, I believe.
00:53 It smashed previous records.
00:56 So hotter than the sun.
00:57 Hotter than the sun.
00:59 It needs to be hotter than the sun.
01:01 Like we'll probably go into those reasons in a second, but it needs to be that hot.
01:05 Really what it is is just like this big kind of like coils of plasma inside a donut shaped
01:11 like reactor that's being contained by magnets,
01:15 which hopefully one day we'll be able to make energy from.
01:19 But this is very early stages right now.
01:21 That's so exciting.
01:23 So what is the difference between fission and fusion?
01:28 Because I hear these two terms a lot and I'm not really a physics expert,
01:31 but it's all very important stuff for keeping everybody alive, right?
01:35 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
01:36 Well, actually, one can one is quite good at also endangering life, too.
01:40 So fission is the one that I'm referring to here.
01:43 Fission is when we have like a load of very heavy kind of like elements like plutonium,
01:49 like uranium, we fire a neutron into them and it splits them apart.
01:53 And that splitting apart also releases a lot of energy.
01:56 Now, we use that in nuclear reactors to make energy.
02:00 We've also used it in the past in like bombs and nuclear bombs and thermonuclear
02:04 bombs to cause immense devastation.
02:07 But either way you look at it, fission is the splitting of the atom.
02:11 Now, fusion is something that we haven't ever been able to achieve in terms of like
02:16 producing enough energy to be worth doing it yet.
02:19 But it's the thing inside like stars.
02:21 Like so fusion is the thing that happens inside the hearts of stars under immense
02:26 pressure and like high temperatures.
02:29 You get smaller elements like hydrogen that can form together to make heavier
02:34 elements, helium and release energy as a consequence.
02:37 Now, the reason why that's way more exciting than fission is fission produces a
02:41 load of dangerous, like radioactive waste and byproducts and stuff.
02:44 Fusion doesn't. And fusion is also produces a lot more energy if you're able to get
02:49 it going right. So that's the difference between the two.
02:52 Now, the more important question is, is that how does the fusion reactors work?
02:58 Because like this is the actual thing that's happening here, right?
03:01 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So on Earth, we're not really able to kind of like create the
03:07 pressures that you would see at the heart of the sun.
03:09 You need so much mass like squished together into doing that.
03:12 What we can do is we can make things very, very hot.
03:14 In fact, we can make them way hotter than the sun.
03:17 So what we do is we get all of this like plasma.
03:20 We stick it inside a fusion reactor.
03:22 We heat it up with magnets sending a current around it sometimes.
03:25 That's one of the common ways.
03:27 You can also use lasers to heat it up as well.
03:29 But I think the kind of the kind of most common and most popular method right now is
03:34 with magnets. You heat that plasma up so much until like what is inside that plasma
03:40 tends to be isotopes of hydrogen combined together, release energy.
03:44 And that's how we're able to do it.
03:46 The only problem right now and we're kind of I imagine we're going to get onto this,
03:51 but like the only problem we have right now is we put a load of energy in to make that
03:55 happen. We can't get as much out.
03:57 So we're not actually making energy on this thing.
03:58 Oh, goodness. So what are their plans for this?
04:02 I guess it's to build bigger and bigger reactors, get more and more plasma inside,
04:09 heat it up to hotter temperatures and find better ways to heat it up.
04:14 So they're just trying to make the whole thing way more efficient, like in every way
04:17 that you can look at it, but also just expand the base of like how much plasma you can
04:22 have at these temperatures and then like just iterate and hope that that improves
04:27 enough for us to have a good energy source because we can make fusion happen.
04:31 Like fusion is a thing that we can do.
04:33 It's just about the energy kind of optimization of it that we're really stuck on
04:36 right now. I mean, you know, efficiency is helpful.
04:40 And and how does this compare to the other reactors that they've been having so far?
04:44 So the East reactor is the most promising of the ones that we've seen.
04:48 But then you could probably say that at any point in history, right?
04:50 Like the current reactor is the most prominent, like promising one that looks like.
04:54 But it's also there is a really big reactor that's coming into play.
04:58 It should be coming online in a few years.
05:01 It's called the ITER reactor.
05:03 They're building it at the moment in Marseille in France.
05:05 And it's an international collaboration.
05:08 So every state in the European Union, the UK, Switzerland, China, India and the US as
05:14 well. So all of these like all of these states are getting together to build this one
05:18 reactor. It's going to be the biggest one there is.
05:20 And they're hoping, especially using this data from East, that they can make this
05:25 process more and more efficient.
05:28 But I can't say and I don't think anyone else really can either when it will become
05:32 efficient. There's like a common joke among people who are into fusion, that fusion
05:37 energy is only 30 years away and always will be.
05:39 Like it's the idea that as advancements increase, we realize how much more we have to
05:45 learn before we can do it. But there's a load of promising kind of movements in this
05:49 field. So it's exciting in that way.
05:50 And this artificial sun that's hotter than the sun feels like it's like stepping
05:55 stones to get there, right?
05:56 Yeah, exactly.
05:58 Exactly. So any fusion reactor does need to be hotter than the sun to work because it
06:02 doesn't have those pressures.
06:04 But the fact that they're able to make this thing last as long as it did, they also
06:08 like they also broke another record with it back in May of last year.
06:12 It ran for 101 seconds at 216 million Fahrenheit, which is like it's
06:19 it's like the hottest that we've ever been able to make anything.
06:22 And the core of the actual sun, by contrast, reaches temperatures of around 27 million
06:27 Fahrenheit. So we're doing good at heating things up.
06:30 We just need to find a way to get the energy out of that.
06:33 Goodness, goodness.
06:34 It's getting me all hot flashes just thinking about it.
06:36 Well, this is very exciting news, Ben.
06:39 I can't wait to see what more comes of it.
06:40 Yeah, me too. I'll be following it keenly.
06:42 All right. We'll look forward to that.
06:44 Thanks again.
06:45 OK, thank you.
06:47 Thank you.
06:48 And.
06:49 And.
06:50 And.
06:51 And.
06:52 And.
06:53 And.
06:54 And.
06:55 And.
06:56 And.
06:57 (heart beating)
06:59 (whooshing)
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