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 this actually turns out to be 10 to the 25th.

So this is one with 25 zeros behind it per cubic meter.

So we can figure out like cubic meters about like this, the volume of this table, like the whole volume of this table.

Okay, very good.

So like fusion, there's a few of those.

So fusion, like the mainstream one of fusion, like what we're working on at MIT will have 100,000 times less particles per unit volume than that.

So this is very interesting because it's extraordinarily hot, 100 million degrees, but it's very tenuous.

And what matters from the engineering and safety point of view is the amount of energy which is stored per unit volume.

Because this tells you about the scenarios and that's what you worry about.

Because when those kinds of energies are released suddenly, it's like what would be the consequences, right?

So the consequences of this are essentially zero.

Because that's less energy content than boiling water.

Because of the low density.

So if you take, water is at about 100 million to a billion times more dense than this.

So even though it's at much lower temperature, it's actually still, it has more energy content.

So for this reason, you know, one of the ways that I explain this is that if you imagine a power plant that's like powering Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Like if you were to, which you wouldn't do this directly, but if you went like this on it, it actually extinguishes the fusion because it gets too cold immediately.

Yeah.

So that's the other one.

And the other part is that it does not, because it works by staying hot rather than a chain reaction, it can't run out of control.

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