Fusion Energy EXPLAINED

one minute Fusion Energy is the future one minute Fusion Energy is gonna end the world but there's one question that I have been far too afraid to ask what actually is Fusion Energy let's have a look full disclosure I am not actually a scientist so when I say that Fusion Energy is a controlled thermonuclear fusion reaction which occurs under high temperatures that allows ions to overcome

what's called repulsive electrostatic forces so that they fuse together thereby releasing energy I'm not 100 on what all that means so let me bring in an expert to explain it okay okay that may be from a Spider-Man movie but the idea is essentially accurate minus the metal Octopus arms used to control the floating sun in the room Fusion is what occurs inside stars like our very

own sun and thus is responsible for everything in life right that's pretty easy to understand breaking it down even further the process that powers these stars is when two nuclear leai the central part of an atom fused together to form a heavier nuclei this process creates energy this requires a huge degree of heat and pressure that creates a plasma state which you can see in the

exterior of stars so you know how Vegeta and Goku fuse together to form the much more powerful Gogeta that releases much bigger energy blasts yeah it's sort of like that by like the loosest possible definition harnessing the same power that has literally powered the universe itself is uh yeah kind of a big deal for scientists ever since it was first theorized the applications are endless but

so are the potential dangers and before the Earth gets swallowed into a black hole that consumes everything we know and love into an endless void of gravitational pressure don't forget to like And subscribe for more cheery videos on the latest achievements in the tech world so you've probably seen headlines that there's been some kind of huge breakthrough when it comes to Fusion reactors you've also probably

scrolled right on pasta to take a quiz on what Yellowstone character you are and don't worry I got you covered we both know you took that quiz until you got ripped and I don't blame you scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California crossed a big milestone in 2022 when they used 192 lasers to produce a fusion reaction in a laboratory setting what was such

a big deal about this is that it was the first fusion reaction that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction everyone freaked out about this and naturally got the cart way ahead of the horse and then started theorizing how this was gonna change the world and you know anything that gets Bill Nye the Science Guy this excited should get all of us

excited so is a fusion reactor one of those fancy scientific devices that are really really expensive but don't actually have any practical applications nope it's the exact opposite of that mastering this technology would be about as big of a deal for Humanity as it was when we started using light bulbs and cars or running water the primary use for Fusion Energy is for the production of

electricity it is so much more efficient than most of the ways that we generate power today such as burning fossil fuels or coal how much more efficient like four million times more efficient this kind of tech could be used to power the entire planet in a superior way to any other form of power it could be used to convert radioactive waste into harmless Isotopes through a

process known as transmutation which I kind of understand and which is pretty freaking cool it could also be used to power desalination plants that are going to be on the rise as fresh water becomes more scarce if we are talking about agriculture the processing of materials like steel or heck 10 000 other applications a fusion reactor is 100 a game changer though there is one thing

that I'm always focused on in the back of my mind that would of course be space travel to Mars this might make that dream so much easier to achieve my personal favorite application of course revolves around space travel my love everything SpaceX NASA or any other kind of program that wants to make us into a Sci-Fi Utopia when it comes to Fusion Energy we've got the

theoretical Fusion rocket that would totally revolutionize space travel as we know it these Rockets would feature a giant Fusion reactor that would produce efficient energy that would not need to carry such a huge fuel supply not to mention the fact that it would be able to accelerate much faster than normal there are several theorized diffusion rockets that are ridiculously faster than what we've got right now

right now that 300 million mile Journey would take like seven months and that's assuming nothing goes wrong which is a big assumption when we're talking about space travel there are some theorized rockets that are said to take that trip in something like five days I mean it wouldn't quite get us to faster than light travel which is the dream for well pretty much every sci-fi fan

who wants to casually go to a summer house that sits in the fashionable hemisphere of Jupiter but it definitely wouldn't hurt theoretical FTL Technologies like warp drive would require unbelievable amounts of energy so anything that cuts that down is a step in the right direction when we are talking about Transportation though there's something much much closer to Earth that it could revolutionize we actually live in

a world where we could all consider cars that use the power of freaking stars to be pretty mundane electric vehicles really struggle nowadays to compete with normal fossil fuel burning ones of course if fossil fuels were the energy source of the past EVS that run on Fusion Energy could be the norm you know how people who own electric vehicles are always talking about how they will

be the only cars on the road soon this would actually make that a reality much faster than anyone suspected that and it would get rid of the biggest problem with cars you know that whole thing about how they're poisoning the entire world possibly leading to a Roland Emerick style apocalypse it would be nice not to worry about that anymore the biggest deal around Fusion Energy is

that it is a much much cleaner source of energy than anything that we've got right now global warming is largely caused by greenhouse gases that are released when burning fossil fuels so if we've got a cheaper sustainable alternative to those fossil fuels that could be widely applied throughout the world there's no underselling how big of a game change we could be looking at here so we've

already discussed how this whole thing was the dream of Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2 the big conflict in that movie was that his Fusion reactor was going to totally destroy New York city so is that possible I mean I assume Sam Raimie did his research right well I never thought that I would disparage Sam raymie but uh yeah Spider-Man 2 lied to all of us there

is pretty much no way the Doc Ock was gonna blow up the city all Spidey did was just ruin renewable energy for all of us the process is reported to be incredibly safe it has a self-limiting process and that means if the reaction becomes uncontrollable it shuts off altogether could it cause a nuclear Armageddon like in Chernobyl nope it's much safer than those types of reactors

and actually uses much less radiation and is much safer in terms of radioactive waste okay how about this one will the fake sun implode and then become a black hole that's gonna eat us all no just uh no that is evidently not how any of that works our sun is still certified good for another 5 billion years so yeah no worries about Fusion reactors destroying us

well okay unless it's used to power a weapon but it's not like anyone has thought of that right when it comes to weapons of mass destruction the first stage of every nuclear weapon is to detonate a fission bomb that produces the high temperatures and pressure needed to start a fusion reaction there's a hypothetical hydrogen bomb design that's referred to as a pure Fusion weapon this would

be a wmd that bypasses the first stage altogether so yeah much more efficient City obliterating weapons could actually be possible soon now thankfully nuclear weapons are not as popular as they used to be if they ever really were thanks to things like the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons the nuclear Test Ban Treaty and other treaties like it it seems much more likely that we've

sidestepped nuclear Armageddon I mean come on it's not like there are any completely irrational world leaders who have access to these kinds of weapons so yeah back to what I said before this might legitimately destroy us all let me introduce you to Arthur Eddington the terrifying looking British astrophysicist who suggested that the sun and the stars like it made endless energy from the fusion of hydrogen

into helium he wrote about all of this in the internal constitution of the Stars he also helped to spread the news about Einstein's theory of relativity after the tumultuous political stage of the early 1900s made communication in the scientific Community difficult and knowing that makes up for the fact that yeah he looks like a scarier version of Tywin Lannister ever since the 20s theories about Fusion

have gone wild but an actual fusion reaction in a lab like we saw in 2022 was something of a pipe dream that successful experiment was nothing short of the culmination of a dream 100 years in the making Humanity can do some impressive things when we put our minds to it and now that I'm 100 an expert on Fusion Energy all I gotta do is learn about

the God particle super volcanoes and whatever The Masked Singer is