The Infinite Monkey Cage
Fusion – Ria Lina, Yasmin Andrew and Howard Wilson
December 3, 202542 min · 8,828 words
Show notes
Robin Ince and Brian Cox get all fired up, overcome their natural repulsion and come together for this stellar episode on nuclear fusion. They’re joined by plasma physicist Yasmin Andrew, fusion scientist Howard Wilson and comedian Ria Lina to uncover the secrets of star-making here on our planet. Together the panel discovers how the sun fuses atoms to release energy and why misbehaving, jiggling plasma makes this tricky to recreate on Earth.
Highlighted moments
So fusion is the process that powers the stars, powers our own star, the sun. You take the light elements, hydrogen, really the light end of the periodic table, or isotopes of hydrogen, heavy forms of hydrogen, and if you push them together close enough, such that the nuclei that sit in the middle of the atom, get those nuclei to touch each other, there is a significant probability that they will fuse to create something heavier, a heavier element, and they release energy at the same time.
“The sun is a fusion reactor, power plant, but it's not a very efficient one. We have to achieve temperatures at 10 times that temperature to get these nuclei to get close enough together.”
“if you take all the deuterium that's in a bath full of seawater and if you take the lithium that's in maybe one maybe two laptop batteries and you do fusion with it instead of having a bath and instead of using your laptop that will give you your full lifetime's electricity needs”
“if it wasn't for plasma turbulence. Fusion would have been working decades ago.”
Transcript
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