I, V, M. So, I wish you would use my voice completely like the Indian public budget. And I like the Indian public, I got it back. I don't know, there's a moment of blind panic, I thought I'd got it, but luckily that was not the case.
It's just my voice that I got. And yeah, I'm glad that it's stronger than ever. Yes. But yeah, the voice has been written to the country.
So Marin, what are we talking about today? I was very surprised that you were interested in football and we were talking about the Korean player who's been sitting at the Premier League. That's not what we're talking about. That's not quite it.
But yeah, it's almost as bright as Doming Song, who's a big favorite of my son. He is a big fan of us, Tottenham, sorry, Tottenham Arts first. He will completely kill me if I say it out. So he forces me to watch, I watch all the gold that I think of that.
And he's always sort of in some kind of rapture when the Korean song is playing. But this one is actually a slightly, slightly hotter. It reached 100 million degrees for 20 seconds. And it was all in the news a few weeks ago in middle of the same world.
And actually if you think about it, it's a huge deal. So we're just going to look at what all this really is in today's podcast. And so the first thing is, what is fusion? How hot is 100 million?
What is 100 million? Can you sort of, is it hotter than your stout op? Yeah, it is hotter than your stout op. And many more important questions come out of this.
So I really didn't know any of it. So I had to sort of figure it around. And first question is what is the Korean artificial sun? And it's full Christian name as Chuck Westside is the K-Star fusion reactor.
And it's even fuller Christian name is the Korean superconducting, Tokamak Advanced Research Reactor. That's what it stands for. That's better. Otherwise this K-Star exists in chamber also.
Yeah, K-Star totally. 2021 definitely doesn't look like any better than 2020. With apologies, please continue that. So why is it a big deal and why is it in the news?
Is it sustained a fusion reaction for 20 seconds? That is significantly longer than the attention span of my kids and I dare say this. That is surprising. And it's really long in the fusion industry.
And number two is that I achieved a temperature of 100 million degrees, which is way hotter than the sun, even the sun. So sun is about 15 million degrees right in the center. And this thing is like, you know, several times hotter. OK.
So this is an outcome of the thing that they were trying to do, or the conditions required to actually make this. This is an outcome of what they do. So what they do as far as I can tell is they first create a plasma. So a plasma is created.
If you see electrical welders, you know, the spark that he creates. And that is a plasma action. So that's really hot. And the electrical arc that flies through the air that really reaches a very high temperature.
It's not 10,000 days, something like 7 or 8,000 degrees, not 100 million. So that's a temperature. The atoms just get sort of all the temperature that they start acting like. Yeah.
And who can blame them? This is not having their sort of innovations completely. And then you can find this. You make a lot of this.
So the weather makes a very little bit of this, you know, to melt iron and sort of, whatever he's writing. This thing becomes, you know, they create a lot more of this gas. And once that is created, they try to pack it together using, because plasma is now electrically because all the electrons to perfect, all the, all that is left of the gas are the nuclei. And without the electrons, the nuclei are charged.
It's like when your wife goes to a mica for the holiday and suddenly you've got all kinds of undesirable friends milling around it all. That kind of stuff happens. And a magnetic field is, you know, is placed, which pushes them really close together. And when that happens, they sort of repel because they're all same charge.
They sort of repel each other. That is a static propulsion. But once that is overcome, the magnetic field is strong enough to make the individual atoms overcome that repulsion. And they get in diffuse together.
And when that happens, there's a very tiny bit of mass that converts into electricity because of the line sign sets or one fine morning, I understand figure out the E is equal to MC square and it works. And it releases a great amount of heat. Now, this is all in theory. And in practice, it was first achieved inside a nuclear bomb.
That's, so what they did was they made an atom bomb, a nuclear bomb. And they figured that when the explosion happened, if they kept hydrogen in the center, as it exploded, it would just compress the hydrogen physically and that would cause a fusion reaction. So that is what is called an H bomb. So they did that.
The nuclear explosion was in orchestrated in order to compress the hydrogen even closer to each other, hydrogen atoms. And when those fused, the explosion was 10x bigger than the nuclear explosion. So technically, that's a killer bomb even compared to the one they exploded at Hiroshima and NASA. So hydrogen fuses together to form helium.
Yeah. So that's the, and that's what happens in the sun and all the stars. That's how it happened. So when the universe began and it was just hydrogen, it slowly gravity made everything come together.
And where it was a very large cluster and they're talking like several billion kilometers long cluster. Eventually, they would start coming closer because of gravity. And once a certain critical gravity was reached, they would come even closer. And even closer, it just started spiraling.
Once the pressure was crossed, it started fusing and that's why stars are bright. That's why they give off energy and light it. There is a really lot of hydrogen in them. So they go to keep going on for another few 11 billion years, some such crazy.
Yeah. So these guys, they decided, I mean, these guys, I mean, the scientists getting hydrogen atoms to behave and all those undesirable things. What they think is that if they're able to sustain a reaction like this, they could have a mini sun right here. And the product of this is helium, which is unlike when we use nuclear power.
We use nuclear power to create electricity, you know, to have a power plant. The products are harmful. They're heavily metals, which are very radioactive. And it's very difficult.
It's very serious if they get out, they leach out into the environment. So the spent fuel has to be sequenced on it, put it inside all kinds of concrete blocks and things like that. And it's totally, it is dangerous. But fusion reaction, it is not helium, it is a inert gas.
And as you know, inert means it won't hurt anyone. It won't hurt a fly. So they would have, you know, you would have free energy for literally forever. That's the holy grail of fusion reactions.
But it is difficult. First of all, it's very difficult to clump all the hydrogen atoms together that closely. So the Tokamak reactor is a Russian design which was sort of dreamt of in the 50s, developed in the 60s or 70 years. Because it's so difficult, as I'll just explain, it took forever to get to the state of the 33 or 40 years.
So it started in Russia. And what it does is it uses a very strong, really, really strong magnetic feed to keep the molten plasma in the shape of a porous. You know, on a porous, there's a doughnut shape. Yeah.
It makes that into a doughnut shape. And once the doughnut things get going, it increases the magnetic feed, it gets the doughnut tighter and tighter. That's basically how the doughnuts works. And once that starts happening, at some point of time, the fusion kicks in.
So at this time, the plasma is initiated as it's in the temperature range of tens of thousands of degrees. But once the fusion kicks in, it really increases. And these are called confinement devices, basically. So if everything goes well, the fusion reaction starts.
And the good part of it is if it fails and the plasma disperses, the fusion stops immediately. So unlike, you know, because in order to have fusion, you really need to push these things. So if any happens, if it explodes, it is a failure. It's not dangerous unlike the Fukushima or the Chernobyl thing where it's spewed out.
It's spewed out radioactive material and became dangerous. So yeah, I'm sure it's still as clear as what why it happens and why it's, but being simplified people so they're on. And why it's difficult to sustain again. What happens is in order to have those really strong magnetic fields, you need to have very high currents.
And if you have very high currents, you're going to lose everything in I squared out loss. You're going to get hot. And the only way you can keep very high current going in conductors without heating up is use superconducting. And the problem is with the current state of technology, superconducting can happen only at very low temperature.
So it's less than 220 or 230 minus that's the, you know, that's the, you know, that's colder than liquid nitrogen, colder than liquid. So it's very, very cold. And superconducting, you have like really hundreds of thousands of amperes running around. They create really powerful magnetic fields.
The other problem about magnetic fields is they're strength, it diminishes as the square of the distance. So you can't have the magnetic electromagnetic very far and have your, you know, still force the hydrogen of the plasma together. So when it starts becoming hot, the superconducting, you know, the apparatus, it finds it hard and hard to make those subzero temperatures going. And at some point, the superconducting stops.
So the, what they're trying to do is they're, so there are different ways. So one is magnetic. There is another one called inertial, you know, an inertial compression. What they do is they have two high energy beams of plasma which put together.
And since they are the same size and going in the same direction, they get attracted to each other. And it's somewhere in the middle, they sort of pinch into each other. And that causes the reaction. So there you don't need a magnetic field.
So you don't have to worry about the problem I said. But it's even that's not successful. This technology has been successful in creating fusion. So other people have done it to China.
China achieved Chinese, the Chinese reactor achieved a temperature of 150,000, 150 million. Wow. Okay. For a much smaller direction.
So that is one challenge is to keep the start the reaction and keep it one. That's one challenge. The second challenge is to get energy out of it. So the whole thing, so when we, you know, when we have our nuclear reactors, you know, uranium.
When the mass starts getting hot, it heats up water and water gets converted to steam and steam and the turbine. And that's how we get useful electric power out of it. In a fusion reaction, that's difficult because in a nuclear reactor, your temperatures are far lower. In fusion, how do you, how do you put a pipeline and what do you, how do you pipe water?
And it's really ridiculously hot. So they've got some, which I didn't understand, frankly, is they've got some way of getting helium out and sort of transferring heat with something else and transferring it. It doesn't elaborate. The thing is none of it has ever worked here because they haven't managed to get the fusion going for long enough.
So they haven't been there. So they've got plans of increasing this 30 seconds to 300 seconds in the next five years. Wow. Five years.
It's like how you plan to increase your breath, extending out, managing to hold it one second more every day. Five years later, you'll be able to hold it for 300 seconds. You'll be promptly able to hold it for 30 seconds. But I don't know whether the fusion reaction will keep going that long.
So what they do believe, a lot of people do believe that it is possible. There are, you know, you really need to throw money at it. Right now, people haven't been throwing money at it much. So there is one called ITE, or ITER, which is a conglomeration of 110 countries, including India.
Okay. So international, something I forgot what it's called. International thermonuclear experiment, that's what it's called. So it's even bigger than the K-Star.
And it's the most ambitious attempt to handle this. It's a $25 billion project, and it's in France. So a lot of the $25 billion is probably also a truffle lunches. It's like some kind of thing.
So whatever's left over, they're doing a big fusion with that. And it's a joint project to the European Union, and India also part. And its ultimate goal is to do what no fusion experiment has done before, which is to produce more heat than it consumes. So that's the other thing, more energy actually than it consumes.
Yeah. Most of these projects, they have been pumping in a lot more energy to keep these superconductors going. And the energy that's been generated inside, oh, it's 100 million degrees. It's in a very small core.
So the energy is not nearly enough. There's about several orders of magnitude higher, the energy that you need to spend in order to get the fusion going. And yeah, so that's the state of things. And so a simplified strongly advice is to keep paying your electricity bills because we're not going to get free energy any time, like this year at least.
Yeah. Slightly too bare-fluted some points. Yeah. Or 2065, you and I will be hopefully hobbling around with walking stakes and still running simplified.
And we'll have the unique opportunity of pointing out to episode something that I told you so. But nuclear energy has gone down in popularity now, right? Yeah, actually it got a bad rap from the environmentalist, but a lot of people feel that it's actually the best, our best bet at the moment because renewable energy has its own problems. Fossil energy is not going to talk.
Yeah. And renewable energy, the problems are you don't get a uniform, like if you have solar energy, you don't get a fruit energy at night, if it's wind, you don't get a continuous energy. So you need gas turbine power plants to pack them all the time. So they need to be there to balance it.
So it's not environmentally friendly. And you can't, you know, those are basically insurmountable. There's no way you can, there is, you can have batteries to store so hard. But all of those are not environmentally friendly.
So in order to make a solar cell or a lithium ion battery, you know, a lot of environmentally unfriendly things to make. So it's not a great idea. Nuclear fuel, if you look at it, is the best because it doesn't pollute. There is absolute only thing you have to worry about is the nuclear waste.
A small matter of it. Yeah. And so there's a small body of, you know, a small voice, a small body of people to say that maybe nuclear is the way to go. And Fukushima in Chernobyl not withstanding the current state of safety and security is much better.
Nothing will happen. So that's a popular opinion against it. You might remember we had this Kalpakam phase two reactor. And so everyone is very enthusiastically for nuclear energy, but they don't want it with the living.
So that's the way. So that's about it for me. It's a big broad overview of fusion and how it's possible and not possible at the same time. So going to K star model looks more likely than the next five years.
So by then we'll come back in models. Actually, things are pretty high. I went the other day to a mall. And it was pretty, you know, well-visited.
I was surprised. I went to the mall for a specific thing. I wanted to buy something and use the shop. I didn't expect to see that.
That's when it was. Yeah. So it is. Oh, it's a lot of opinions that a konai is over.
Nobody has many things for a while. It's scared. First of all, it was COVID-19. We are out of the 2020.
Yeah. So, yeah, it's been good having the first episode of 2021 out. First, like, we recorded it in 2021. So that's good.
That means that 2021 is still around. Everything is fine. And hope things get a bit of all of you out there. And, well, stay safe, stay fused and stay simplified.
And see you guys around next week. See you. Bye.