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, it's actually an energy you can do something with.

And fusion sits on the other side of that because it's also moving towards iron, but it has to do it through fusion together.

So, this leads to some pretty profound differences.

As I said, they have some underlying physics or science differences.

proximity to each other, but they're literally the opposite.

So fusion... Why is this?

It actually goes into practical implications of it, which is that fission can happen at room temperature.

It's because this neutron has no electric charge, and therefore it's literally room temperature neutrons that actually trigger the reaction.

So this means in order to establish...

what's going on with it, and it works by chain reaction, is that you can do this at room temperature.

So Enrico Fermi did this on a university campus, University of Chicago campus.

The first sustained chain reaction was done underneath a squash court.

with the big blocks of graphite.

It was still, don't get me wrong, an incredible human achievement, right?

And then you think about fusion, I have to build a contraption of some kind that's going to get to 100 million degrees.

Okay, wow, that's a big difference.

The other one is about the chain reaction, that namely fission works by the fact that when that fission occurs, it actually produces free neutrons.

Free neutrons, particularly if they get slowed down to room temperature, can trigger other fission reactions if there's other uranium nearby or fissile materials.

So this means that the way that it releases energy is that you set this up in a very careful way such that every, on average, every reaction that happens exactly releases enough neutrons and slows down that they actually make another reaction, exactly one.

And what this means is that because each reaction releases a fixed amount of energy, you do this, and then in time, this looks like just a constant power output.

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