https://youtube.com/watch?v=2DzKXN1pcwY
A five part overview on the basics of nuclear fusion including what it is, how it works, the different ways it can be accomplished, and the challenges of making a commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant. It doesn't require any specialty knowledge, just the basics of physics. The presentation is a bit basic but he knows what he's talking about and conveys the information in a way that's understandable.
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You just have to look at the sun, preferrably directly, for a long time, and without eye protection, to see that it does indeed work
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Get a load of this fusionlet
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Free energy here I come!
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I haven't watched it yet, but this sounds amazing.
Does he talk about chromodynamics/flavordynamics, quark-gluon interactions, nucleons, muons, electrostatic repulsion, and all the goodies?
I got to take a tour of the National Ignition Facility right before they did their successful tritium ignition with lasers converted to X-rays.
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Nah most of that no. It's more basic than that. It's aimed at a more casual audience who probably doesn't have much of a physics background.
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I ask because I had a boss who had an PhD in Quantum Chromodynamics.
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Explain it to us non-physic-cels
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the modern day version of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin". half those things aren't even real
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!physics
@Geralt_of_Uganda is that so? 
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What
@ACA said. It's definitely real in the sense that I had to study it
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Sort of. Everything is gay and always will be so like yeah.
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I seriously recommend a PBS series. I'll make a post.
There are just fancy words for insanely boring things.
You'll be like "oh, ACA is r-slurred."
I'm on a work meeting but I'll give you the gist.
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I watched a few of them, I realize they don't oversimplify like most pop-sci channels by the fact I can't understand 80% of what they're talking about lol.
ACA might be an idiot savant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome
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An atomic nucleus is made of protons and neutrons.
All protons have positive charges, so they should push repel each other like positive ends of magnets. This is true, and they try to.
But because of the next smaller level of particles, protons and neutrons end up attracting each other a lot more than they repel each other.
This next level is quarks. Every proton and neutron is made of three quarks. The only two types of quarks that matter in your life are the most basic ones, called Up and Down quarks. Everyone who disagrees with me is neurodivergent.
So now we have descended to another layer.
While electrons create bonds between atoms to form molecules, they are now not part the of the discussion.
A quark can exist in positive or negative charge to create either a proton or a neutron. A proton has a total charge of Positive 1, and a Neutron has a total charge of Neutral 0. The math works out that Up Quarks have a positive ⅔ charge, and Down quarks have a negative ⅓ charge. This doesn't matter for the discussion, except to introduce a different type of charge -- Quantum Chromodynamics, aka color charge.
In addition to charge, Quarks have a different kind of a charge that isn't binary like Positive or Negative. They simply gave it color names which have nothing to do with actual color.
Imagine if there were three types of charge -- Positive, Negative, and Marseyative. These aren't great terms, so nerds invented new words:
Separately from being positive or negative, quarks also have a "color." This doesn't mean that this is what they look like. It's just a nerd term. Instead of "positive/negative" they invented calling them "red/blue/green." Idk just pretend that it's the Triforce.
So, because protons and neutrons are made of three quarks, each quark in them is either red/blue/green. The next fun detail is that there is another particle bouncing between them called a gluon. Not only do gluons create an attraction between quarks to form protons and neutrons, that force of attraction extends slightly to other protons and neutrons which aren't part of the trio.
Hence a nucleus stays together under almost all circumstances.
The interaction between quarks and gluons overrides the repulsion between protons in the nucleus and therefore you don't explode in a nuclear reaction.
But then we found out how to break that interaction and now there are nukes.
I guess there is more to talk about.
!ifrickinglovescience !physics !chemistry this is the best I could do off the top of my head
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So gluons are subatomic "glue-like" particles?
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That's literally where the name comes from. Because fricking nerds.
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You had a chance to not be completely worthless, but it looks like you threw it away. At least you're consistent.
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Launch a nuke and have it reflect the right way.
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!ifrickinglovescience !physics
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If they know it works how come it's never been done successfully
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They have done it successfully. The problem is that so far it requires more energy than the generated output.
Making Fusion feasible is a !engineering problem
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The National Ignition Facility actually achieved positive energy gain in 2022
They're doing a different type of fusion (inertial confinement fusion) compared to most fusion experiments being done today like ITER, which will do magnetic confinement fusion.
In very simple terms inertial confinement fusion is achieved by blasting pellets of fuel (normally deuterium and tritium) with lasers to induce a fusion reaction and then capturing the energy output. The next steps, and they're a doozy, are to increase the energy gain factor (the 1.5 achieved by the NIF is far below what would be needed in a power plant to account for energy overhead to keep the reaction going and efficiency losses throughout the process) and to make the "blasts" repeatable (right now the NIF does like one blast a day while an actual power plant would need to do like one blast per second lol). There's also the problem of using tritium as one of the primary fuels, magnetic confinement fusion reactors solve this by using a tritium breeding blanket around the reactor so the reactor can generate its own tritium fuel supply as a byproduct of the main fusion reaction. Idk how inertial confinement fusion reactors plan to solve this problem, maybe someone smarter than me knows.
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That's great and all, but I asked for my burger without cheese.
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aofcoure thermodynamics
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Inside my brain when I take a couple XRs
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Snapshots:
:ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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Who the frick cares? Wow we're going to use the very fundamental energies of the universe to fricking boil water and spin a turbine.
Call me when we generate power from something newer than a windmill
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