AI to solve the energy crisis?
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What is the AI‑driven UK‑US collaboration aiming to improve in nuclear‑fusion research?
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
K-Rauda. K-Rauda.
Welcome to Inside Science from the BBC World Service. I'm Tom Whipple. Now, last week we might have left you with the impression that AI is going to kill us all. We did that by speaking to people who said that AI is going to kill us all. But what if it's not? What's the glass half full option? This week we are exploring one of the many ways in which AI might actually help us through, in this case, facilitating nuclear fusion. We're also going to discuss a more retro, old school sort of techno threat. Remember that distant time several weeks ago when techno panics were all about social media? Well, we speak to the author of a book about how the internet might be making us all sicker. And how about better understanding the data infrastructure of HI?
Yes, HI, human intelligence. How do we store data? Or as we used to call it, memories. Then there is the formidable HI that is Lizzie Gibney from the journal Nature. And she's been looking at some of the other news. Lizzie, what have you got for us?
I've got some exciting hints of an ancient Egyptian discovery.
OK, fabulous. Well, amid all of the AI apocalypse news, you might have missed a rather different AI announcement. It concerns nuclear fusion and plans to bring together some of the computing and data on both sides of the Atlantic. But before we get to that, maybe a primer. Lizzie, nuclear fusion, bit of a long-term goal, would be quite an energy panacea if we get it.
Absolutely. It would be incredible. It's one of those things where we know it works because it happens in the sun, right? So we have hydrogen atoms and they fuse to make helium and we get energy out of it. Doing that on Earth is actually very, very difficult. But there are a huge number of companies and governments who are trying to make it happen right now.
So the reason we want to do this on Earth is because the sun manages to have a pretty low carbon footprint and make lots and lots of energy.
Exactly. It's a way of getting out energy and it produces no carbon emissions whatsoever.
So it sounds great. So why haven't we done
it? Because it's really, really, really hard. So you need to make these conditions that are absolutely extreme, huge heats, talking like 100 million degrees, heat, pressure. You need to get these hydrogen nuclei to actually heat each other with enough energy to be able to fuse. And there are two different ways that they're trying to do it on Earth at the moment. One is you kind of Zap these fuel pellets with a laser and they have a shockwave and you get fusion there or you superheat the fuels to make a plasma. And that's where the nuclei can separate from their electrons.
Why is controlling ultra‑hot plasma the biggest hurdle for commercial fusion?
And you have this very, very hot gas and you can find it with magnets and you can kind of control that and get fusion to happen in the middle of that fusion. Malay.
So controlling this plasma and understanding it is a huge problem. And that's where the announcement this week comes out. The UK and US are combining the brains of their nuclear fusion supercomputers, each of them fed with data from the National Fusion Experiments, in the hope that by doing so, we can basically better use AI to model the behaviour of the plasma. Now, Tim Bestwick is the UK Atomic Energy Authority's interim chief executive officer. We spoke to him about why controlling plasma is so hard. because it's a
really big, complicated challenge, in short. All these complex processes in the plasma. We've talked about the fact it's held in a complex magnetic field. I mean, this isn't just a single magnet. This is lots of magnets which have to be controlled and produce a magnetic field arrangement that holds this plasma, in the case of the machines we make, in a shape of a ring donut, a torus. and they have to hold this plasma in the Sheikha for Taurus, all these things going on. It wants to do all kinds of funny things when the magnets are there to control it and hold it in that. That control and stability and confinement is really important.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the AI‑driven UK‑US collaboration aiming to improve in nuclear‑fusion research?
0:00–3:42
2
Why is controlling ultra‑hot plasma the biggest hurdle for commercial fusion?
3:42–7:44
3
How does Tim Bestwick explain the need for shared super‑computing data in modelling plasma behaviour?
7:44–10:30
4
What did the 2022 National Ignition Facility result mean for the quest for fusion gain?
10:30–13:46
5
Is Nefertiti’s tomb finally discovered and what evidence supports it?
13:46–18:10
6
How is the Royal Society’s Trivedi Book Prize shaping conversations about health and technology?
18:10–21:32
7
What health risks does Deborah Cohen identify from internet‑driven health information?
21:32–27:00
8
Why does Steve Ramirez believe memory manipulation could treat mental‑health disorders?
27:00–29:08