#353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

Dennis Whyte is a nuclear scientist at MIT and the director of the
MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Please support this podcast
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Dennis's Twitter: https://twitter.com/MIT_Fusion Dennis's LinkedIn:
https://linkedin.com/in/dennis-whyte-33474a54 Dennis's Website:
https://www.psfc.mit.edu/whyte SPARC:
https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc MIT Plasma Science and Fusion
Center: https://www.psfc.mit.edu MIT Plasma Science and Fusion
Center's YouTube:
https://youtube.com/@mitplasmascienceandfusionc6211 Commonwealth
Fusion Systems: https://cfs.energy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CommonwealthFusionSystems PODCAST
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https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for
the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click
the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (05:54)
- Nuclear fusion (23:53) - e=mc^2 (38:20) - Fission vs fusion
(43:32) - Nuclear weapons (47:19) - Plasma (54:29) - Nuclear fusion
reactor (1:09:50) - 2022 nuclear fusion breakthrough explained
(1:30:27) - Magnetic confinement (1:49:36) - ITER (1:54:23) - SPARC
(2:08:23) - Future of fusion power (2:16:55) - Engineering
challenges (2:35:36) - Nuclear disasters (2:40:21) - Cold fusion
(2:54:36) - Kardashev scale (3:04:00) - Advice for young people