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

What does this mean?

Superconducting magnet means that the materials which are in the electromagnet have no electrical resistance.

Therefore, when the electric current is put into it, the current goes around unimpeded.

So it could basically keep going around and around, you know, technically for infinity.

Or for eternity.

And what that means is that when you energize these large electromagnets, they're using basically zero electrical power to maintain them.

Whereas if you would do this in a normal wire, like copper, you basically make an enormous toaster oven that's consuming enormous amounts of power and getting hot, which is a problem.

That was the technical breakthrough that was realized...

by myself and at the time my students and postdocs and colleagues at MIT was that we saw the advent of this new superconducting material, which would allow us to access much higher magnetic fields.

It was basically a next generation of the technology.

And it was quite disruptive to fusion, namely what it would allow that if we could get to this point where we can make the round 20 Tesla...

We knew by the rules of Tokamaks that this is going to allow us to vastly shrink the sizes of these devices.

So it wouldn't take, although it's a worthy goal, it wouldn't take a seven-nation international treaty, basically, to build it.

You could build it with a company and a university.

Yeah.

And if, in fact, if you look at it, it's like it's, if you just expand the size of it, they're like, they look almost identical to each other because it's based on the, and actually that comes for a reason, by the way, is that it also looks like a bigger version of the tokamak that we ran at MIT for 20 years, where we established the scientific benefits, in fact, of these higher magnetic fields.

So that's the pathway that runs.

So we say, so what does this mean?

The context is different because it's primarily being made by a private sector company spun out of MIT because the way that it raised money and the purpose of the entity which is there is to make commercial fusion power plants, not just to make a scientific experiment.

This is actually why we have...

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