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 like building a fire.

And what this means is that if you, when you release the energy into this or apply heat to this, if it just instantly leaks out, it can never get hot, right?

So you're familiar with this as like you've got something that you're trying to apply heat to, but you're just throwing the heat away very quickly.

This is why we insulate homes, by the way, and things like this, right?

It's like you don't want the heat that's coming into this room to just immediately leave because you'll just start consuming infinite amounts of heat to try to keep it hot, right?

So in the end, this is one of the requirements, and it actually has a name.

We call it the energy confinement time.

So this means if you release a certain amount of energy into this fuel, kind of how long, you sit there and you look at your watch, how long does it take for this energy to like leave the system?

So you could imagine that in this room that, you know, these heaters are putting energy into the air in this room, and you waited for a day, but all the heat have gone to outside if I open up the windows.

Oh, there, that's energy confinement time.

Okay, so it's the same concept as that.

So this is an important one.

So all fusion must have confinement.

There's another more esoteric reason for this, which is that people often confuse temperature and energy.

So what do I mean by that?

So this is literally a temperature, which means that it is a system in which all the particles, every particle, has high kinetic energy and is actually in a fully relaxed state, namely that entropy has been maximized.

I think it's a little bit more technical, but this means that basically it is a thermal system.

So it's like the air in this room, it's like the water, it's the water in this.

These all have temperatures, which means that there's a distribution of those energies because the particles have collided so much that it's a...

So we, this is distinguished from having high energy particles, like what we have in like particle accelerators, like CERN and so forth.

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