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

I can show you a demonstration of a plasma that you can see with your eyes.

And it's at about 10,000 degrees and you can put your hand up beside it and all this.

And it's like, and nothing, there's zero fusion going on.

Well, you can't stick your hand into it, but there's a glass tube.

You can basically see this.

See it right there.

Yeah.

And you can put your hand on the glass tube because it's... What's the color?

Is it purple?

It's purple, yeah.

Blue and purple.

It's blue and purple.

It is kind of beautiful.

Yeah, plasmas are actually quite astonishing sometimes in their beauty.

Actually, one of the most amazing forms of plasma is lightning, by the way, which is an instantaneous form of plasma that exists on Earth but immediately goes away because everything else around it is at room temperature.

Yeah, so there's different requirements in this.

So making a plasma takes...

But at 10,000 degrees, even at a million degrees, there's almost no probability of the fusion reactions occurring.

And this is because while the charged particles can hit into each other, if you go back to the very beginning of this, remember I said, oh, these charged particles have to get to within distances which are like this size of a nucleus because of the strong nuclear force.

Well, unfortunately, as the particles get closer, the repulsion that comes from the charge, the Coulomb force, increases like the inverse distance squared.

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