#485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with David Kirtley, a nuclear engineer, expert on nuclear fusion, and the CEO of Helion Energy, a company working on building nuclear fusion reactors and have made incredible progress in a short period of time that make it seem possible like we could actually get there as a civilization. This is exciting because nuclear fusion, if achieved commercially, would solve most of our energy needs in a clean, safe way, providing virtually unlimited clean electricity. The problem is that fusion is incredibly difficult to achieve. You need to heat hydrogen to over 100,000
So fusion is what powers the universe. Fusion is what happens in stars, and it's where the vast amount of energy that even that we use today here on Earth comes from the process of fusion. It also is what powers plants, and those plants become oil, and those become fossil fuels that then powers the rest of human civilization for the last hundred years. And so fusion really underpins a lot of what has enabled us as humans to go forward. However, ironically, we don't do it actively here on Earth to make electricity yet. And so fundamentally, what fusion is is taking the most common elements in t
Okay. So there's a million things I wanna say. So first, maybe zooming out to the biggest possible picture. If we look across hundreds of millions, billions of years, and all the, my opinion, alien civilizations that are out there, they're going to be powered likely by fusion. So our advanced intelligence civilization is powered by fusion, in that the sun is our power plant. Mhmm. Then the other thing is the physics. Again, very basic, but you said e equals m c squared a couple times. Mhmm. Can you explain this equation?
Equals m c squared is a fundamental relationship that a patent clerk, Einstein, discovered and unlocked an entire new realm of physics and engineering and has shown us atomic physics, what happens inside the nucleus, and unlocked our understanding of the universe and paved the way for many of the physics advancements that came after that we think about mass as these particles. But in reality, also, at the same time, they're energy. And there's a direct quantitative relationship between how much energy is in all of that mass. And in fact, all of the energy that is released even by by atomic phy
Can you also just speak to the the different fuels that you mentioned, both on the fusion and the fission side? So uranium, plutonium for the fission, and then hydrogen isotopes for the fusion.
So for fission, uranium and plutonium, we don't make those nuclei. Those right now, for humanity, those have been made in the primordial universe through super supernova and big bang and the initial formation of the universe where matter was created. And so we dig those up. We dig up uranium, plutonium out of the ground. And in fact, most plutonium, we make from uranium. And we can talk about how to enrich uranium if we if we wanna go down that road. But that's how we get those molecules and nuclei. For fusion materials, hydrogenetic species or hydrogens are primordial in the universe. Also, o
So the basic fuel for vision is already in the ground, and then the basic fuel for fusion is everywhere.
It's everywhere. And we particularly use a type of hydrogen called deuterium, which is a heavier isotope of hydrogen. Hydrogen is typically one proton and one electron, atomic mass of one. Deuterium is an atomic mass of two, which is a proton, which is charged particle, and it has a neutron in its nucleus, which is an uncharged particle. And so that's deuterium as the fuel.
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