Dennis Whyte

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1,833 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2023 last heard Jan 2023

Dennis Whyte’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · 21 Jan 2023 podcast

So fusion, this is what makes fusion, and it's also, it's not an intermittent renewable energy source like wind and solar, but this makes it hard to understand.

So if you're saying the fuel is free, why isn't the energy source free?

And it's because of the necessary technologies which must be applied to basically recreate the conditions which are in stars.

Right.

In the center of stars, in fact.

So there's only one natural place in the universe that fusion energy occurs, that's in the center of stars.

So that's going to bring a price to it depending on the size and complexity of the technology that's needed to recreate those things.

Exactly.

It will have a revolution, I'm certain of it.

So about clean.

So clean is, at its heart, what it does is convert, it basically converts hydrogen into, it's heavier forms of hydrogen, the most predominant one that we use on Earth.

and converts it into helium and some other products, but primarily helium is the product that's left behind.

So helium, safe, inert gas, you know.

In fact, that's actually what our sun is doing.

It's eventually going to extinguish itself because it'll just make so much helium.

It doesn't do that.

So in that sense, clean because there's no emissions of carbon or pollutants that come directly from the combustion of the fuel itself.

Yeah, so this is also the counterintuitive thing.

So I told you temperatures, which like 50 million degrees, or it actually tends to be more like about 100 million degrees is really what we aim for.

So how can 100 million degrees be safe?

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