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Dennis Whyte

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
1833 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

Yeah, so the geometry is typically what you do is you want to produce a magnetic field that loops back on itself.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

And the reason for this goes down to the nature of the force that I described.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

which is that there's no containment or force along the direction of the magnetic field.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

So here's a magnetic field.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

In fact, what it's more technically or more graphically what it's doing is that when the plasma is here, here's plasma particles here, here's a magnetic field.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

What it does is it forces all those, because of this Lorentz force, it makes all of those charged particles execute circular orbits around the magnetic field.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

And they go around like this, but they stream freely along the magnetic field line.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

So this is why the nature of the containment is that if you can get that circle smaller and smaller, it stays further away from earth temperature materials.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

That's why the confinement gets better.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

But the problem is, is that because it free streams along.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

So we just have a long straight magnetic field.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

Okay.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

It'll just keep leaking out the ends like really fast.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

So you get rid of the ends.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

So you basically loop it back around, right?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

So what these look like are typically donut-shaped or more technically toroidal-shaped, but donut-shaped things where this collection of magnetic fields loops back on itself.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

And it also, for reasons which are more complicated to explain, basically it also twists slowly around in this direction as well too.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

So that's what it looks like.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

That's what the plasma looks like because that's what the fuel looks like.