Dennis Whyte

Those are high kinetic energy, but it's not a temperature.

So it actually doesn't count as confinement.

So we go through all of those.

You have temperature.

And then the other requirement, not too surprising, is actually that there has to be enough density of the fuel, right?

Enough, but not too much, yes.

And so, in the end, the way that there's a fancy name for it, it's called the Lawson Criterion, because it was formulated by scientists in the United Kingdom about 1956 or 1957.

And this was essentially the realization, oh, this is what it's going to take, regardless of the confinement method.

These are, this is the basic, what it is actually, power balance.

It just says, oh, there's a certain amount of heat coming in, which is coming from the fusion reaction itself, because the fusion reaction heats the fuel, versus how fast you would lose it.

And it basically summarizes, it's summarized by those three parameters, which is fairly simple.

So temperature, and then the reason we say 100 million degrees is because almost all in...

And for this kind of fusion, deuterium tritium fusion, the minimum in the density and the confinement time product is at about 100 million.

So you almost always design your device around that minimum.

And then you try to get it contained well enough, and you try to get enough density.

So that temperature thing sounds crazy, right?

That's what we've actually achieved in the laboratory.

Like our experiment here at MIT, when it ran its optimum configuration, it was at 100 million degrees.

but it wasn't actually the product of the density in the confinement time wasn't sufficient that we were at a place that we were getting high net energy gain, but it was making fusion reactions.

So this is the sequence that you go through.