The State of Fusion Energy w/ Gerrit Bruhaug

I, I think starting with the history is pretty fun because I, I learned relatively recently that the story's even more complicated.

So fusion was found before fission, which sounds crazy, but-

Right

... fission, fission was a big surprise.

People kind of thought fusion had to be a thing.

Right.

They were starting to wonder what's powering the stars.

Yeah.

There's only so many answers.

Um, and, uh, fi- fission's like a cheat code for the universe, but fusion makes a lot of sense when you start to do even very basic nuclear physics.

I was joking with a friend of mine that I could probably explain fusion to someone a couple hundred years ago 'cause it's just really hard fire.

It's like, what if fire had, like, an extra hard mode? Um, whereas fission sounds like witchcraft.

You arrange the magic rocks in the right way, and then all of a sudden you get energy.

Like, come on, dude.

In, uh, '34 is when, like, the official reaction was found, but it was actually Ernest Lawrence, uh, you know, Nobel Prize winning fame and, uh, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who found fusion first with his cyclotron.

He was shooting, uh, deuterium atoms, and he was hitting a solid target, and the beam from the cyclotron was building up deuterium into the target, and then he was eventually getting neutrons out.

And he was convinced he was doing a different kind of reaction.

He thought he was, like, knocking neutrons off, which is a thing that does happen.

And he was touring the world, and I believe he was in the UK when he was explaining...

It was either UK or Italy, one of the two.

And he was explaining this experiment and, uh, all those smart Brits said, "No, man, you are, you are way off.

You did fusion.

You did a way bigger thing." And Lawrence was so convinced that they were wrong, and then he refused to, um, cede the point.

So they went and did a better version of the experiment, published it, won the Nobel, and showed fusion.

And that's Oliphant and Rutherford.