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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

And they've got this plethora of approaches.

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

Like, I haven't even described all the approaches.

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

I've basically described the mainline approaches.

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

You know, and they're all at varying degrees of technical and scientific maturity with...

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

very huge different, you know, balances between them.

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

But what they share is that because they're going out and finding, getting funding from the private sector is that their stated goals are about getting fusion into place so that both it meets the investor's demands, which are interesting, right?

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

And the timescales of that, but also it's like, well, there's going to, and why?

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

It's because it's easy.

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

There's going to, there's this enormous push between,

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

driver about getting carbon free energy sources out into the market and whoever figures those out is going to be both very it's going to be very important geopolitically but also economically as well too so it's a different kind of

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

bet, I guess, or a different kind of gamble that you're taking with Fusion, but it's so disruptive that it's like there's essentially a class of investors and teams that are ready to go after it as well, too.

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

So what do they share in this?

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

They typically share getting after Fusion on a timescale so that could it have any relevance towards climate change, battling climate change.

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

And I would say, this is difficult, but it's fairly easy because it's math.

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

So what you do is you actually go to some target like 2050 or 2060, something like this, and say, I want to be blank percent of the world's market of electricity or something like that.

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

And we know historically what it takes to evolve and distribute these kinds of technologies because every technology takes some period of time.

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

It's so-called S-curve.

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

It's basically everything follows a logarithmic curve, exponential type curve.

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

It's a straight line, a log plot.

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

And, um, like you look at wind, solar, fission, they all follow the same thing.