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.
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Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · 21 Jan 2023
podcast
So anything that keeps pushing the needle forward is a good thing.
But we also have to be realistic about what it means, you know, to making a fusion energy system.
So go back to that.
So why inertial confinement works on the same principle that a star works.
So what is the confinement mechanism in the star is gravity, right?
Because its own inertia of something the size of the sun basically pushes literally a force by gravity against the center.
So the center is very, very hot, 20 million degrees.
And literally outside the sun, it's essentially zero because it's a vacuum of space.
How the hell does that do that?
It does that by, and it's out of, like why does it just leak all of its heat?
It doesn't leak its heat because it all is held together by the fact that it can't escape because of its own gravity.
So this is why the fusion happens in the center of the star.
Like we think of the surface of the sun as being hot.
That's the coldest part of the star.
So of our own Sun, this is about 5,500 degrees.
A beautiful symmetry, by the way.
So how do we know all this?
Because we can't, of course, see directly into the interior of the Sun.
By knowing the volume and the temperature of the surface of the Sun, you know exactly how much power it's putting out.
And by this, you know that this is coming from fusion reactions occurring at exactly the same rate in the middle of the Sun.
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