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

The fissioning.

And so when that happens, because the products that are... It roughly splits in two, but it's not even that.

It's actually more complicated.

It splits into this whole array of lighter elements and nuclei.

And when that happens, there's less rest mass...

left than the original one.

So it's actually the same.

So it's again, it's rearrangement of the strong nuclear force that's happening.

But that's the source of the energy.

And so in the end, it's like, so this is a famous graph that we show everybody.

It turns out every element that exists in the periodic table, all the things that make up everything, have a... Remember, you asked a good question.

It was like, so should we think of mass as being the same as stored energy?

Yes.

So you can make a plot that basically shows the relative amount of stored energy that

And all of the elements that are stable and make up basically the world, okay, and the universe.

And it turns out that this one has a maximum amount of stability or storage at iron, right?

So it's kind of in the middle of the periodic table because this goes from, you know, it's roughly that.

And so this, what that means is that if you take something heavier than iron, like uranium, which is more than twice as heavy than that, and you split apart, if somehow just magically you can just split apart its constituents and you get something that's lighter, that will, because it moves to a more stable energy state, it releases kinetic energy.

That's the energy that we use.

Kinetic energy meaning the movement of things.

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