Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Laser Fusion: Is it Hype? Professor Charles Seife (#283)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The announcement last week was the first defensible announcement, I would say, in either the magnetic or inertial confinement fusion sectors, to get more energy out than in. And that comes with a big asterisk. The big asterisk is that the way they define more out than in in this context is more energy of laser fusion out than laser light in. Now the problem with that is lasers are inefficient and it takes a hundred times more energy to generate the beams than it comes out shining. So even if you have that break-even, the laser side, there's still a huge drain of energy

Starting point is 00:00:45 there between the wall plug and the lasers that aren't accounted for. A lot of these experiments are not very well reproducible, but there's a huge sensitivity to initial conditions. of the reason that this device was created in the first place is to experiment throughout parameter space and figure out so they can simulate implosions better, which is useful for weapons design and stockpile stewardship. So what they're really doing is trying to figure out how to get things, what parameters are really sensitive, what parameters really aren't, where are the simulations failing, where are

Starting point is 00:01:19 they not. So they've got a lot of science to do, not in the energy domain as much as it is in kind of understanding this liminal space, which is really kind of interesting, physically and interesting for weapons, just not for energy. Welcome, friends, to this rip from the headlines edition of Into the Impossible with your host, Dr. Brian Keating. Hype or Hope. Will fusion save humanity with an inexhaustible supply of clean energy?

Starting point is 00:01:51 Can we harness the energy source of the stars? Lawrence Livermore Labs' National Ignition Facility recently announced. that their controlled fusion experiment reached energy break even. What does that really mean? Dr. Keating interviews NYU Professor of Journalism and award-winning science writer Charles Seif for the answers. Professor Seif's book, Sun in a Bottle, The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, has taken on new relevance. Please, dear listener, while we're helping to keep you the most interesting person in almost every room, rate the show with an asterism of a star. And leave us a review. Dr. Keating reads them all.

Starting point is 00:02:33 The video of this podcast can be found on our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's D.R. Ryan Keating. So now, find out from the leading expert. Fusion break even. Is it hype? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please. Charles, how are you today, Professor Charles Seif of...

Starting point is 00:03:03 I'm doing well. Thank you very much. Great. are a rare two-time guest on The Into the Impossible podcast and an audience demand recently, thanks to this novel result released recently from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory up north here in Northern California, and we're going to get into that. And we'll also discuss your book. You were on previously for a wonderful book called Hawking Hawking, which came out in 2021.

Starting point is 00:03:35 I was one of my favorite books of the year. Scientific won many awards, as have many of your books. And first, maybe you could introduce the fact that you are a journalist, professor. Sorry, you were a science journalist, but now you're a journalism professor as well as a journalist. You're still right. What gives you so much authority to talk about general relativity, quantum mechanics, and also fusion? What does a journalist know? Tell us, Charles.

Starting point is 00:04:04 Well, journalism are journalists are meta-experts, that we kind of are experts on expertise if we do our jobs right. And so we, in some ways, assemble a peer review, which for the best science journalists can sometimes be more effective and quicker than the peer review going through the journals. I'm not saying necessarily that I'm the best jury of science, but what we do is very much in accord with what good science is. And my background is I was training as a mathematician before I was a journalist. So I have a somewhat unusual skill set within the journalism community. And I've been studying fusion for actually my first job I actually wrote about fusion when I was at The Economist, more than 20,000.

Starting point is 00:05:04 five years ago, which kind of terrifies me. So, yeah, it's been a while. And then that eventually must have played some role in this wonderful book, Sun in a bottle, S-U-N, in a bottle. Let me see if I can get this to work. I'm trying to do so many things here. I'm going to purchase it accidentally. But Charles, as may be new to you, but not to my brilliant audience, I love, always

Starting point is 00:05:30 love to play a game that you're never supposed to play. which is to judge books by their covers because what else you have to go with. So I'm going to show the cover now. I'm not going to be able to have the animation. I have this custom-made, beastbook animation with a judge, hitting a gavel. Anyway, Charles, you'll watch that some other time, and maybe we'll edit it in at some point. I'm going to share the cover. There it is.

Starting point is 00:05:52 Right up now, I'm showing it. You can buy it. It makes a wonderful Hanukkah present. And this darkest day of the year, happy solstice to you, my winter listeners, and also to my friends at the South Pole, celebrating. the first day of summer. So Charles, describe the image of my audience is now seeing. There's three circles, there seems to be a person, and the title and the subtitle is the most provocative aspect of this book to me. Describe this title that book and let us judge it.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Well, there's two versions of the cover, and if you've got the one with a little person on it, it is actually the inside of a tocomac. But it's turned on its side, which actually always drove me nuts a little bit about this cover. So a tocomac is a magnetic bottle for a sun, for a plasma. And so it goes around confined by the magnetic fields as you heat it to tens and hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin. And so hopefully you keep the pressure up and confine it tightly enough, you get these atoms to fuse and release more energy. than you put in. That's the idea anyhow. And there's

Starting point is 00:07:07 another cover. It's interesting because the cover when I click on the cover, it shows the first one shows a nucleus. By the way, is there a law that says whenever you're showing something to do with atomic physics, you must always show a lithium atom. It always has three

Starting point is 00:07:23 electrons, Charles. What the heck? It's a beautiful symmetry there, yeah. And they always have these nice orbits. I mean, it's obviously Bessel functions aren't is beautiful to show on graphics. That's right. That's right. So we talked, as I said, about a year ago,

Starting point is 00:07:41 about hawking, hawking. I'll put links to that. Also, in the show nuts after the video gets a little bit of loving care after we're done. But the subtitle has to do with the notion of basically hype, and I kind of incorporated that in the clickbait. I mean the thumbnail title that I used, which has the word hype, because I think of you as an expert on these things. And I knew

Starting point is 00:08:08 there's no one I'd rather talk to than you about this. The subtitle of the copy I'm looking at says, The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking. Tell us more, Professor. Yeah, this has kind of been a, in all the journals, you have these terms holy grail over and over and over again. And the idea of free energy more broadly than fusion energy has been something which has been capturing the ideas of tinkers and alchemists and inventors and hoaxers since the beginning of time. Only since kind of the advent of thermodynamics, do we know that we couldn't have a perpetual motion machine. But fusion in some ways offers the next best thing, because if you can

Starting point is 00:09:03 convert these tiny amounts of matter into energy, you can reveal, release basically as much as you want. Based upon the most abundant element in the universe, you can theoretically generate energy like the stars do. So this has kind of been the perpetual motion machine quest for centuries. And fusion in particular for almost a century now, people thought it was around the corner for 20 years. And my book was really exploring as much kind of this phenomenon of fusion, as much as it was how scientists always managed to get so excited about this idea that they throw away caution to the wind. And in fact, throw away sometimes their scientific method in hopes of achieving this quest, which has been much, much hard. than people have anticipated over the years. Yeah, the old joke was, you know, it's the energy source of the future.

Starting point is 00:10:06 It always will be. That's been used in many, many contexts. Let's first talk about fusion. I'm showing figure one or two, the fusion. Sorry, I'm showing fission, which is the generation of energy. You call it the sword of Michael. What does that mean? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:23 So that was kind of a play on Ivy Mike, which was the first full-on hydrogen bomb test. So we entered the atomic age thanks to World War II. And the Manhattan Project, after kind of the Fermi, had a critical pile in the University of Chicago, was able to show that with heavy elements, with uranium, you were able to get a chain reaction of fission. And fission is where heavy elements,

Starting point is 00:10:58 heavier than iron and nickel, split apart. And when these heavy elements split apart, they release energy. And in the case of uranium, certain isotopes of uranium and plutonium, they also release neutrons which strike other atoms, which split the atoms, which release more neutrons. And you get a chain reaction. So Fermi and the Manhattan Project prove that you could do this in a controlled fashion in a pile. You get enough together with enough moderating rods that absorb and slow neutrons.

Starting point is 00:11:31 You can actually create energy by this breaking of uranium fuel. Or you could do it in uncontrolled fashion by creating a critical mass together all of a sudden and getting an atom bomb. So that was the state of the art as of 1945. That's what helped end the war. after that though, the quest continued to do not just fission bombs, but fusion bombs, which unlike plutonium and uranium bombs, don't have an upper limit on how big you can build them. And for political reasons, Edward Teller wanted to have these city-busting bombs rather than just the ones which would devastate downtown Hiroshima. And so the way to do that was,

Starting point is 00:12:21 figure out a device that used a fission bomb to generate enough x-rays to cause pressure to implode a secondary full of light elements, isotopes of hydrogen, to cause a fusion reaction, which was even bigger. So the primary, which is fission, detonates, shines radiation onto the secondary, which implodes and causes a fusion reaction. And that happened in the early 1950s, first with what's called a boosted reaction, where you kind of increase the power of a fission reaction

Starting point is 00:13:02 by injecting neutrons into it in a test called Greenhouse-George. And the big one was Ivy Mike in November, 51. And all of a sudden, we had more energy than we could want. out of a bomb, which is great if you're trying to destroy cities. It's not so great if you want to generate energy and put it on the crypt. And so the quest began, can we take this energy and do it in a controlled way like we do with Fission and Fermi did in 1942? And with the kind of knowledge that stars are giant fusion reactors, I can't resist,

Starting point is 00:13:47 but to kind of bring up somebody that is not really your favorite person to talk about, and that's Elon Musk. And Elon has said that the quest for nuclear fusion is basically a fool's errand. After all, we have a continuous fusion reactor that happens to show up once a day, never goes on strike like my graduate students currently are. I'm not upset about my graduates. at the University of California. I stand with them, Union Power.

Starting point is 00:14:18 But they don't go on strike. The sun doesn't go on strike. It's available. Well, not rain or shine. It's there. But why go to any trouble whatsoever? Then just build more Solar City, you know, Tesla power walls.

Starting point is 00:14:33 Now, I know that causes you trouble because you are an investor in a competitor to Elon. That's truth social. And I know how much you've got. You become, you're almost the first person in history to convince me to go to Mastodon. If I have to follow you on Mastodon, Frickin Charles, you better, you better follow me back. But anyway, is Elon right? Are you guys making strange bedfellows? In some ways, I agree with him that I do think that fusion, at least in the near term, is not going to be a practical energy source.

Starting point is 00:15:07 However, I mean, I think that Elon is ignoring the fact that we do need. good sources of energy in a practical way short term and solar is just not going to cut it. And I don't think solar electric is going to cut it either. I think that there are other kind of solar versions that are probably more practical. But we can't rely entirely on renewables at this point. That's just a fact. We're burning coal or burning gas or burning oil. That's because our needs aren't taken care of in a economically viable

Starting point is 00:15:42 way, not just a technically viable way. So I think we do need other things out there to fill in the gap. Whether fusion is that answer is another question. Honestly, I think vision is as many problems as it has is here now and has many of the same advantages that fusion does. So the fact that traditional fission nuclear is having so much difficulty and is so expensive relative to other forms of energy is kind of a sign that even if we do manage to get a fusion power plant in the next 30 years, it's not going to be a panacea. It's certainly economically, it's got a lot to, a lot of problems to overcome there. Yeah. And, you know, when you do these kind of deep dives into physics, you do bring, first of all, you're an excellent writer, and I really enjoy that. And I think it's a rare gift that not many, you know, scientists actually have. And you're not practicing as science, trained as a scientist. But you also bring this journalistic ethos where you're really not afraid to speak truth to power. And I've been very much impressed by your courage and kind of, you know, taking on big fusion.

Starting point is 00:17:07 and, you know, these other, you know, kind of national laboratories and really pointing out the hype. And I don't think it's to sell more copies of a book you published in 2009. But maybe, you know, that will be an ancillary benefit. But I want to go through the announcement. And before we do, we're talking about, we're talking about Professor Charles Seif of New York University, who's a two-time guest on the show. First book was Hawking, Hawking, which I just devoured. And really resonated with me because, you know, I had opportunity to meet Hawking once. And And the only aspect of that interaction I remember is that he did was asked by an audience member when he could still speak in quasi real time.

Starting point is 00:17:45 Why did you write a brief history of time? And as I told you last year, he replied after five minutes of, you know, poking around with his eyes, he replied, because I needed to pay for my daughter's private school. So at least he was honest, but there was an industry. And there still is this mythos and ethos surrounding him that really he solved all these problems in which really weren't solved or that he was the sole contributor to many, many things. It is, of course, a shame that he died, you know, before his colleague and friend, Roger Penrose,

Starting point is 00:18:14 past 12-time guest on the show, you know, received the award that, you know, rightfully maybe Steve would have participated in as well. But the reason I'm bringing this up is that, you know, he's a cherished icon. You know, there's T-shirts of him. He's as close as we've gotten to Einstein in our age. You and I are the same age, approximately. And so I think we grew up with that. And now we've grown up, you know, for decades, both with the, I mean, there are very few things that can solve, you know, resource wars that can prevent global, further global climate change.

Starting point is 00:18:44 And if successful fusion could allow unlimited energy to not only produce energy, but to decarbonize, as I understand it, could decarbonize the planet and reverse global warming, not just halt it. So you're taking on powerful forces. was there any time the writing of this book maybe is a long time before this announcement that we're about to get to but did you ever feel like there were forces that

Starting point is 00:19:12 would rather you just shut up and that you had to use your journalistic you know you're like an old-fashioned newspaper man what did you ever encounter threats let me just be totally blunt did you ever feel you were threatened in any way career-wise intellectually or otherwise

Starting point is 00:19:28 I didn't feel a heck of a lot of pressure except from certain fringe groups. Believe it or not, the LaRushies, the Lyndon-Lorish backers were very heavily into fusion, and they really disliked me to made it known and were trying, kind of personally, kind of sending me stuff. Cold fusion backers tended to be pretty angry at me, but generally speaking kind of the scientists most of them were even the ones on the inside were didn't have an issue with what I was saying

Starting point is 00:20:06 because they really the good ones really admitted it that this really isn't an energy project for now which is if you push them they will tell you frankly if you push the people at NIF who did this announcement they will say that this is really not

Starting point is 00:20:26 practical in the near term. They're going to say that they're on the road to energy. This is a great step forward, even though at the same time, they'll admit that NIF is primarily a stockpile stewardship project rather than energy project. It really is meant for nuclear weapons. More recently, as money has been flowing into the private sector with fusion, I've gotten more virulent opposition. Yeah. But it's not, actually, the only time I've really felt more threatened is not when I write about physics, but write about biomed. And the amount of money going in there is so much greater that I don't think the physicists really have the energy to get angry with me the way the bio people do.

Starting point is 00:21:13 Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Well, I'm reminded hearing you say that of a quote by a man whose job title, I don't think it exists anymore, Charles. Tell me if I'm wrong.

Starting point is 00:21:51 It was Muckraker, and that's Upton Sinclair. who said the following, never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced. It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. So, you know, I don't want to, I mean, I think, I haven't talked to you about this, but I assume you'll agree with this one statement, which is that the technology, the actual, you know, the actual laboratory and scientific technology has got into this is incredibly impressive. Now, despite the vast cost of it, I mean, what is the total lifetime cost just to construct the national ignition facility? With projects like this is often hard to get a good number.

Starting point is 00:22:38 The number I have heard brooded about for construction was about $4 billion. It's almost double that, I would say, in terms of kind of lifetime costs. Yeah. That's something that, by the way, just parenthetically, just from my audience is ultimately incredibly brilliant, but they're maybe younger people in the audience. Whenever you hear something, like, oh, the LHC upgrade will cost $3 billion. That's true. It will cost that. If you're right, usually you have to multiply by the famous fudge factor of pie, right?

Starting point is 00:23:08 But that just as soon as you want to build it, just gaze at it, you know. But if you actually want to use the darn thing, it cost about rule of thumb from the Department of Energy for my friends that worked there, it's about 10% of the construction cost per year to operate said instrument. And it's kind of scale and variant across all different fields, including cosmology. So my $100 million Simon's Observatory that I get to be PI with and lead with my friends at Princeton and Penn and Berkeley, this incredible project and Chicago, this project is going to cost twice that, you know, $200 million over a decade. It's just astounding how much these things cost. So just notwithstanding or normalizing out the technology, the money, I think the technology is rather interesting.

Starting point is 00:23:50 And I think there are two different forms of plasma that are promising on Earth. One is called inertial confinement, which we'll talk about. But the other is called magnetic confinement or alternate confinement. And that's to solve this triple product. And maybe you can kind of explain what is the physics behind what actually has to come together, literally. And in this case, we'll just stick to Deuterium and Tritium. and the components of this fusion reaction at the National Ignition Facility, what needs to be achieved and what have they actually claimed to achieve?

Starting point is 00:24:28 Yeah. So to get fusion, you need a reasonable amount of energy out. You need high temperatures and pressure, and you need a reasonable amount of confinement time, that these things work against each other. And getting all three simultaneously is very difficult, which is why you have so many records saying, we'd have the highest temperature ever in a tocomac, or we can find for 1,200 seconds in a tokenac,

Starting point is 00:24:53 but they don't talk about the other factors that you need to kind of get all fusion going. So ICF, the inertial confinement fusion, which NIF is doing, uses external factors like lasers to compress something. Magnetic confinement, which Eater, the big project in France, is using, uses large magnets, generally in a donut-shaped configuration to confine and heat

Starting point is 00:25:24 the plasmus. So two kind of separate branches. NIF is, inertial confinement uses lasers, which are these basically a building-sized laser bank, which has these incredible, I mean, this is amazing stuff. Doped glass amplifiers, which with two megajoule capacitors in all through the room, these capacitors hold so much energy that they regularly explode

Starting point is 00:25:54 and they have to be armored so that they spray shrapnel in places that won't hurt people. So amazing technology. They take these lasers, 192 beams worth, that bounce, kind of go

Starting point is 00:26:09 back and forth like lasers do, picking up energy, then gets their frequency tripled. It has to be very, very high frequency, and then shined into a little sleeve, a gold sleeve called a whole rom. And this is very much like what happens in the secondary of a hydrogen bomb. The lasers get converted to x-rays and you have this radiation floating about the radiation pressure is focused upon a tiny little BB-sized pellet full of hydrogen isotopes. Yeah, and I'm just, Charles, sorry to interrupt, but I'm showing this, the image gallery that you forwarded to me, and I'll put that in the show notes. If you're listening to this on an audio podcast, I'm now just showing some slides and

Starting point is 00:27:03 images from lasers.llllnl.gov, and I will link to those in the show notes as well. So I'm showing the BB now, the Holrom. So what does Holrom stand for, or what does it mean? It's the German term for, I guess, I don't speak German. It's a reflection room, a hole, a room with a hole in it. I'm not exactly the term. But it is the term that was used to describe this. That's not the, that's the target of the lasers, but the real ultimate target is that pellet. Yes. And so that x-rays shine on the pellet, the pellet begins to ablate and shoot stuff off and you get the jet effect and everything just compresses. And if you do it right, you get enough pressure, enough temperature just through the compression heating and through the heating of the plasma to get a small fusion reaction.

Starting point is 00:28:00 and of course it blows itself apart very quickly, so you have to have enough oomph to get more out than N. So the announcement last week was the first defensible announcement, I would say in either the magnetic or inertial confinement fusion sectors, to get more energy out than in. And that comes with a big asterisk. But the big asterisk is that the way they define more out than in in this context,

Starting point is 00:28:30 is more energy of laser, of fusion out, than laser light in. Now, the problem with that is lasers are inefficient, and it takes 100 times more energy to generate the beams than it takes to, then comes out shining. So even if you have that break-even on the lasers, side, there's still a huge drain of energy there on the, between the wall plug and the lasers that aren't accounted for. So whether that is really breaking, well, it's a definition that scientists agreed upon

Starting point is 00:29:16 in the late 70s, early 80s. So it is a milestone. I don't want to diminish that. But in terms of real world. But given that, I'm sorry to interrupt again, Charles, but is it really, I mean, you described a fusion device, a bomb, you know, isn't it true that the net, you know, production of energy, just raw energy heat from, you know, the Fat Man or whatever the first fusion devices were, they had some amount of input from a fission device that was lower than what was

Starting point is 00:29:48 liberated. So, I mean, this wasn't sustained. This isn't connected to, you know, SDG and E here in San Diego and generating electricity. So is that really true? I mean, in the lab, in a controlled manner. You're absolutely right that if you wanted, you could have an underground cavern, a salt cavern, and you detonate fusion devices and boil steam, in fact. John Knuckles, who is the architect of this whole ICF thing, was actually investigating as part of Project Plowshare, the idea of generating energy by detonating hydrogen bombs.

Starting point is 00:30:23 It just didn't make sense to do it. But you're absolutely right. That is an energy source, and that energy source infusion. That was done in the 50s. Yeah. I was talking to some friends over Shabbat this past weekend. They're all asking me about this big breakthrough

Starting point is 00:30:43 and how interesting it is. And it is interesting. I guess that technologically, the experimental physicist in me is delighted and mesmerized by it. On the other hand, it is, and this is, again, where your journalistic expertise positions you in a role that's unique in the world.

Starting point is 00:30:57 I have to say not with, you know, untold flattery, you know, to get you to follow me on Mastodon. But, but the point being, I made the analogy, it's kind of like, you know, you're using like your friend Elon's, you know, magic dragon, a rocket or Falcon rocket, and on the side of it is a match. And it goes up and as it launches it, it rubs against a piece of, you know, of sandpaper igniting the match. And, okay, so, well, like the actual motion, that wasn't, that wasn't so much energy to get a little bit more, a little bit more heat. But you had to build a rocket. You had to put in all the energy to make this device.

Starting point is 00:31:31 It's not sustainable. It doesn't seem to be like a technological path forward. So is it just, you know, quote unquote, and again, this is with incredible respect and admiration for these colleagues doing the hardest job, you know, and the most rewarding job in this sense, the experimentalist. But is it an evolutionary dead end? Is there a prospect for this to actually any inertial confine? this one or another to provide sustainable power in the foreseeable future?

Starting point is 00:32:00 From a power point of view, I do think that this is a dead end. At least certainly this technology that NIF has done. I mean, the flash lamps are unbelievable. However, you've got a room full of glass that takes a third of a day to cool down. And 2.1 megajoules, or I guess they create a 3.5 megajoules out, that's about what you get by tossing a piece of kindling in the fire, which is all very nice and good, but isn't powering much. So really for a reasonable ICF power plant,

Starting point is 00:32:34 you've got to have a repeat rate in the tens of hertz. So thousands of times a day, tens of thousands of times a day, hundreds of thousands of times a day. So you've got to go to totally different technology, probably solid-state lasers, and you have to have solid-state lasers in very high frequencies. And so there's so many kind of technical barriers that haven't been worked out, that this is really not a proof of principle of anything on the ICF path to power, I would say.

Starting point is 00:33:04 What is it really? I mean, I think it's significant for NF because that was its design goal. And to have a $4 billion project that 12 years after it turned on was unable to achieve its design goal would be a major black eye for Livermore. And so the fact that they finally lived up to, it's not the national threshold of ignition facility anymore, is a major deal for them. What it means for us, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:33:37 I mean, it's in terms of stockpile stewardship, they are in a new regime. And I'm hoping that they'll be able to increase their gain significantly over the next few months and years. that they're in a regime where you're actually getting significant heating from fusion, which is new, but for energy, not really. I'm afraid it's just not helping much. What is the next goal of their research?

Starting point is 00:34:04 Is it to just improve the cure, the amplification factor, which you characterize about 50% energy net gain, or that's their characterization. What is there, are they just going to try to increase that? Again, just shouldn't be demeaning, guys. I'm not diminishing it at all. But is that the main technology kind of, you know, forking point that they're going to pursue? Are they going to, you know, add doubling the lasers and, you know, doing something? Or, you know, going to gamma rays instead of, is there some technological hurdle?

Starting point is 00:34:35 Or is it more and better of the same? It's more and better of the same, although they are definitely, they've got this huge parameter space to fool around with. And they're tweaking all sorts of things, not just the aim of the lasers. the power of the lasers, the thickness of the ablator, the kind of the finness of the shell, the fills of the shell, whether you put a magnetic field around it, whether you don't put a magnetic field around it. So there's lots and lots of things that they play around with. And part of the issue is that a lot of these experiments are not very well reproducible,

Starting point is 00:35:06 that there's a huge sensitivity to initial conditions. So part of the reason that this device was created in the first place is to experiment throughout parameter space and figure out so they can simulate implosions better, which is useful for weapons design and stockpile stewardship. So what they're really doing is trying to figure out how to get things, what parameters are really sensitive, what parameters really aren't, where are the simulations failing, where are they not. So they've got a lot of science to do, not in the energy domain,

Starting point is 00:35:47 as much as it is in kind of understanding this liminal space, which is really kind of interesting physically and interesting for weapons, just not for energy. I'm showing now some of the videos from Secretary Granholm's visit there last week on the 13th, you know, showing some of the swag that they gave out and the threshold and going beyond the threshold. Talk a little bit about some of the, the, you know, kind of downstream effects.

Starting point is 00:36:22 You know, and I think about, you know, energy and fusion. Obviously, you can't not think about, you know, weapons at some level. And I'm wondering, you know, is there kind of a potential beating of swords into plowshares moment where we see that we have fought many resource wars around the world? And in fact, there's this thing called the resource curse, you know, which you've heard about probably, but, you know, just loosely explained is that countries that have the most, you know, diamonds or oil and stuff, they often have the least tolerant, least democratic regimes, and least open, at least, to journalistic freedoms and all sorts of other things, from, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:01 time immemorial. Now, what if, you know, the U.S. becomes the world's leader in generating fusion energy, would that happen to us, you know, would be, would the U.S. become a giant, you know, South Africa, De Beers. What are the implications of this, just from a geopolitical standpoint? if you would. Well, I mean, if one were to create fusion energy, I mean, it's, for there to be this resource curse, there would have to be some sort of moat to prevent others from coming across. Just like with nuclear weapons, once someone proved it was able to be done, it wasn't all that hard for others to reproduce the issue.

Starting point is 00:37:41 So unless there's some sort of secret sauce, which is patentable, or there's some very difficult technical fix that we keep top secret. It's hard for me to imagine that there would be this, it would become the domain of one country. I would assume that Europe and China and other places with the technical abilities would follow on fairly quickly. So I don't see a resource curse, even if we get this working. Again, I don't see it happening.

Starting point is 00:38:13 I think that the magnetic branch is more likely than the, inertial branch, it happens to be less useful for weapons research, which is part of the reason why it's much more international. Right. Mm-hmm. And speaking of weapons, you know, I've thought, and this is just more of a sidetrack because I'll get to talk to you that often. But, you know, when you think about, you know, I was thinking recently, you know, this geopolitical

Starting point is 00:38:40 situation that the world has been suffering through since February 26th or whatever, whenever Putin invaded. Ukraine, you know, lingering and looming over that conversation has been this dreadful thought of nuclear war. And even some claiming were already in, you know, World War III, and it's just a matter of time before a device is detonated. Some, including my friend Eric Weinstein, I'm not going to dwell on, you know, some of the claims that he's made, but at least on his podcast, he called for the resumption of

Starting point is 00:39:10 atmospheric nuclear above-ground testing as a warning to society to kind of illustrate the horrors of it. I don't want to talk about Eric's. Hopefully he's coming on the podcast back on the podcast at some point soon to talk about that and many other things. But I want to ask you, you know, I was thinking, you know, about the Holocaust recently and thinking about, well, how visceral it is and except for the insanity of, you know, Kanye West. By the way, do we have the journalists have to call him yay? I mean, like, who is this guy? Like, you have to call him by preferred new name because he chose it, but anyway, I don't want to get into that. The point is, when we look at, when we think about, you know, what could have, what could

Starting point is 00:39:54 happen, what did happen during the Holocaust, one of the most, you know, kind of poignant outcomes of it has been the portrayal of it in society and the awareness of it and how awful and well-documented it was, in fact. Things from the Butterfly Project started here in San Diego, documenting 1.5 million Jewish children exterminated all the way up Schindler's list, obviously, the Holocaust Museum. Anyway, do we need some sort of like nuclear Holocaust Museum? And do we have any equivalent or would it be useful

Starting point is 00:40:25 to kind of just really relate to humanity, how horrific and awful any kind of, you know, well, nuclear war is winnable. No, it's not. I mean, yeah, okay, you could say tactically, whatever, the Russians have some plans. But anyway, Charles, do we need some? some kind of education, you know, kind of tantamount. I'm not asking to speculate on the morality of

Starting point is 00:40:46 the Hiroshima and Nagasaki device. I happen to think that they were, but let's not get into that. But do we need education about the horrors of it? And could these technologies that we're now talking about? Could they be a tool to educate the public? Well, yeah, I mean, you and I grew up in a moment when we couldn't forget about nuclear weapons. I mean, Cold War was hot, and we heard about the Cuban military weapons. missile crisis. We didn't hear about Abel Archer in 1983, but we know about it now. And I think that it does seem a little remote to us in a way that feels dangerous. I wish we did have a little bit more understanding of the horrors of these weapons. I think part of it is, I mean,

Starting point is 00:41:33 we are hamstrung partially by the fact that of nations in the world who have used these weapons and anger, we are the only ones. So I think that it doesn't dwell in our psyche in the way that it does say for the Japanese. I think it is a bad thing that, I mean, similarly with, I think with the, as the Holocaust survivors, the last ones die out, that we as a society are in danger of losing our historical memory. So, and I would be in favor of anything we can do to kind of get, get an immediacy to our kids to understand that this is part of what they have to live with, even if they don't see it. Yeah, I think that's, you know, that's kind of the obligation of an educator is to,

Starting point is 00:42:28 is to really, you know, bring these things home, but in a way that, you know, is done in a controlled fashion, but also is visceral. I mean, we know from being educators. Although I don't know, I was never taught it. I learned it on the job. But, you know, the most vivid and permanent demonstrations are those that adhere to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, including, you know, the removal of threats against safety. And then conversely, I suppose that if you really visualize how awful something could be, you'd be less likely to employ it. So I know we only have a few minutes before I have to go, light my Hanukkah candles using my fusion reactor. You can see it behind me in the background.

Starting point is 00:43:09 I actually did a video recently about heavy water using Deuterium to make ice cubes that sink instead of float. And that was really fun. But I guess the last question I wanted to kind of delve into is, you know, where would you like to see this go? If you were, you know, not, I don't want to say some eccentric billionaire, but could you think of a way that you would like to see this going with not unlimited resources, but billions of dollars, private sector, public sector, where do you see? You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

Starting point is 00:43:51 How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with help. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Well, I'd love to see kind of a reasonable coherent plan of when we can respectively get this on the grid and a solution.

Starting point is 00:44:27 And right now, I mean, we haven't had a kiddie hawk moment where you get wings off the ground. So honestly, I think it belongs as part of a larger portfolio of dealing how we are going to deal with climate change in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years. And that includes a portfolio of technologies that are here now, technologies that are a bit of a stretch. and that's not just on the supply side, but on demand side as well as kind of geoengineering. I mean, we've got to open those discussions, as sad as it is. So I want Fusion to take its place within the larger portfolio rather than kind of being a techno fix that seems to solve everything.

Starting point is 00:45:19 There's an old story, and I'm not sure whether it's true or not, I think it was told by I think it was Martin Luther King a person on death row kind of marching towards death row he's muttering under his breath save me Joe Lewis save me Joe Lewis

Starting point is 00:45:40 I mean for me kind of clutching at fusion as this technological save all is as futile as kind of having their hero step in and kind of magically whisked you away from death row. We've got to really work on practical solutions. And while fusion may be there in 30 years, we need something sooner. Great. So there's a couple of questions and folks that are online on YouTube. You can ask a couple more questions. There's some debate back and forth,

Starting point is 00:46:13 whether or not we could ever ramp up tritium production substantially. So I couldn't make a Tritium heavy water ice cube for a variety of reasons. One is it's radioactive. but the other, it's controlled and it's very expensive. Is tritium a bottleneck? And then just remind my audience, you can ask more questions for a couple more minutes. Yeah, it's a bottleneck now because we have a limited supply. But once you have neutrons, you can kind of generate tritium to some extent, especially when you have adequate supplies of lithium.

Starting point is 00:46:47 So I'm less worried about kind of the materials part. the fuel than I am about the process itself. And then so there's a question, how much energy would be used, if you could do this, I suppose, to split water into hydrogen and deuterium. I guess the question would be, you know, could you attach your fusion reactor, you know, energy source coming out, the back end, then put it into a centrifuge, you know, it's just a series of centrifuge. What is the potential?

Starting point is 00:47:19 I mean, desalination of the ocean, scrubbing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide? oxide, do you think these will ever come true? Are these things that will likely materialize or not really? Good question. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is desalimization. If you have infinite energy, desalimization, and carbon scrubbing and things like that, my big question is, can civilization hold on long enough until we get to the point where we can get there? And also, honestly, I wonder whether we have a society that would allow kind of of a free energy solution or whether we kind of always have commercial barriers to kind of this paradise that people see.

Starting point is 00:48:03 And it's not like Star Trek where we can all drop the idea of money and we can get Earl Gray team just by pure energy. Of course it's theoretically there. But the way we humans behave, I think scarcity is built into our bones and I'm not sure we'd let go of it so quickly. Yeah, that might be. So let's see, thorium reactors. Talk about thorium reactors. Charles, any interest that you have there from a golem? We've got Mitzvus Golem in the house tonight. I'm Mitzvizs, Hux and Mayak. What do you think about thorium? As a thorium-fueled sodium-cooled reactors? I think advanced fuel cycle reactors are really, really interesting. I think pedal bed reactors, I think, even kind of traditional kind of uranium, low-enriched, with advanced designs, I think those are worth exploring and worth doing something, especially since their near term than fusion is.

Starting point is 00:49:03 So, again, I think it fits very nicely into that niche that Fusion occupies, but because Fusion is so beautiful an idea, it's kind of crowded out everything, because it seems like the ideal techno fix, when there's stuff like this out there that's probably more correct. And then the last question I'm going to ask, using my host prerogative, totally pivoting now, the state of journalism today. So we've seen journalism kind of assailed from many different angles. We've seen, you know, posts and accusations, you know, from places like journalists on on Twitter, complaining about Twitter as I, you know, tweeted the other day, you know, Twitter sucks, he tweeted, you know. And I know you have kind of found it much less hospitable.

Starting point is 00:49:51 I've tried to set up Mastodon. I've been banned from truth social. What does the landscape look at? What are you teaching your students? What do they feel about this profession that they've, you know, admittedly tried to become a part of? There's a lag in time between what they wanted to do four years ago and maybe the way things are now. So talk about the landscape. Talk about your how you're good.

Starting point is 00:50:17 dealing with all these radical changes on a daily basis, depending on how much die-coke certain South African billionaire has happened. Yeah, no, no, it may live in interesting times. Yeah, it's kind of the culmination of a lot of things that's been rocking journalism for the past 20 years. Because we were talking about scarcity, that the digital environment creates post-scarcity for information technology. that you can you no longer have to have a physical paper or us delivered it's can be copied

Starting point is 00:50:54 indefinitely without without anyone paying so that kind of broke the journalism model and we've kind of been writing from fad to fad trying to figure out how to make money despite the fact that our chief um uh asset was a audience that we could sell things to. And other people have basically been able to duplicate that, and we can no longer sell for a subscription model very easily. Twitter happened to be a niche where we as an industry did not kind of come up with a good infrastructure where we could disseminate our work in a smart way. So we kind of have been. peggy backing to our mistake, I think, on Facebook and on Twitter. And we learned very quickly

Starting point is 00:51:55 how hostile Facebook was. It took a little longer to figure out how hostile Twitter is. So I mean, I think that this is a reckoning that's been happening in slow motion for 20 years. And I don't think that it's over by any stretch. I don't think Mastodon is an answer. I don't think Post is an answer. we have to figure out how to maintain our audiences, maintain the trust in the audiences, even as our audiences get more schismatic, which is really, really hard. It's hard to do a broadcast when the audience is in two different places. We can't capture everyone we want. No, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:52:36 All right. Well, Charles, I want to thank you so much, Professor Charles Seif, New York University, the best university, one of the best universities in the world. and a true thought leader, someone who has an old-fashioned newspaper man. I know you've got one of those tweed hats in addition, you know, with the card that says press, and you break that out with your tweed jacket as a professor.

Starting point is 00:52:59 I want to remind you if you are interested in getting exotic materials shipped to you, won't make it in time for Hanukkah or Christmas, but these are fragments of a meteorite, highly magnetized meteorite that landed some four billion years ago, the Americas in Argentina. Join my mailing list. I have a link up there, briankeating.com slash list.

Starting point is 00:53:20 Please leave a review wherever you're watching this. If you like this, if you'd like to see some more videos with Charles, I can read more of his books. He's got another phenomenal book called Zero, which is about the dangerous idea of Zero.

Starting point is 00:53:35 We've had on Charles twice now. Maybe I'll come back for a third time. But let me know what you thought of this episode. And if you'd like to see more of these live conversations with thought leaders and truly a generous, generous scholars. I think of you when I think about what should a scholar be at somebody like you, Charles. So I want to thank you so much.

Starting point is 00:53:54 Wish you a happy holiday season. Happy New Year. And I hope we can talk next year. And may we have nuclear few. May we have thousands of flowers blooming without any booms, right, Charles? Hopefully. Thank you very much. And hugs on May.

Starting point is 00:54:20 Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll. with your goals because we're built for what you're building fit for your ambition for citizens back

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Laser Fusion: Is it Hype? Professor Charles Seife (#283)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.