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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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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