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

And it's safe because it is...

This is so much hotter than anything on Earth, where everything on Earth is at around 300 Kelvin, you know, it's around a few tens of degrees Celsius.

And what this means is that in order to get a medium to those temperatures, you have to completely isolate it from anything to do with terrestrial environment.

It can have no contact, like with anything on Earth, basically.

So this means what we, this is the technology that I just described, is it fundamentally what it does is it takes this fuel and it isolates it from any terrestrial conditions so that it has no idea it's on Earth.

It's not touching any object that's at room temperature.

Even including the walls of the containment building or containment device.

Or even air or anything like this.

So it's that part that makes it safe.

And there's actually another aspect to it.

But that fundamental part makes it so safe.

And the mainline approach to fusion is also that it's very hot...

But there's very, very few particles at any time in the thing that would be the power plant.

Actually, the more correct way to do it is you say there's very few particles per unit volume.

So in a cubic centimeter, in a cubic meter, something like that.

So we can do this.

So right now, although we don't think of air really, there's atoms floating around us and there's a density.

Because if I wave my hand, I can feel the air pushing against my face.

That means we're in a fluid or a gas, which is around us.

That has a particular number of atoms per cubic meter, right?

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