Dennis Whyte
speaker
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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · 21 Jan 2023
podcast
I mean, they're amazing pieces of technology.
So what you do in the end is think you, what you have is a spherical,
assembly of this fuel, like a ball.
And what is the purpose of the lasers?
The purpose of the lasers is to provide optical energy to the very outside of this.
And what happens is that energy is absorbed because it's in the solid phase of matter, so it's absorbed really in the surface.
And then what happens is that when it's absorbed in something called the ablator, what does that mean?
It means it goes instantly from
the solid phase to the gas phase.
So it becomes like a rocket engine, but you hit it like very uniformly.
So all, there's like rocket engines coming off the surface.
Think of like an asteroid almost, where there's like rockets coming off and all this.
So what does that do?
What does a rocket do?
It actually pushes, by Newton's laws, right, it pushes the other thing on the other side of it, equal and opposite reaction, it pushes it in.
So what it does is that the lasers actually don't heat.
This is what was confusing.
People think the lasers, oh, we're going to get it to 100 million degrees.
In fact, you want the exact opposite of this.
What you want to do
Showing 701–720 of 1,833 · page 36 of 92
← Previous
Next →