Alex McColgan
speaker
29,301 appearances
104 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 2d ago
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 68 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
This is the type of reactor which will be used at ITER.
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In contrast, inertial confinement fusion, the other confinement method, takes its inspiration from...
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thermonuclear bombs.
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It works by firing lasers or projectiles at a small pellet containing fusion fuel, seeking to create temporary blobs of plasma which release fusion energy only for a few nanoseconds before the plasma dissipates.
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Both of these approaches are immense engineering challenges, requiring either huge amounts of continuous electricity in the case of MCF, or even larger pulses of electricity drawn from banks of capacitors in the case of ICF.
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But not only do the huge amounts of power involved put tremendous strain on components, which have to be replaced frequently, it means that for a reactor to be viable, the energy obtained from the fusion reaction must exceed the colossal amount of energy required to initiate it.
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A considerable challenge.
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As I was saying, fusion reactors take huge amounts of energy to get going.
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Now, you might think, surely once you have surpassed this feat, you've got more energy out than you put in.
That would be it.
A huge win.
After all, the fuel, hydrogen, is both cheap and
abundant.
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But alas, it is not that simple.
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And to understand why, we have to look back once again at our star and the fusion reactions that only take place deep inside the stellar core.
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It is here in the Sun's core that hydrogen is fused into helium via multi-step reaction.
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Firstly, two hydrogen nuclei, or single protons, combine, with one undergoing a process called beta decay to transform it into a neutron.
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The resulting neutron proton pair is a nucleus of a heavy isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium.
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In the next step, another proton combines with the deuterium nucleus to generate a helium-3 nucleus.
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In the final step, two of these helium-3 nuclei fuse to produce a helium-4 nucleus containing two protons and two neutrons, also known as an alpha particle, as well as two protons.
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Showing 1781–1800 of 29,301 · page 90 of 1466
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