The Future of Fusion Energy with Fatima Ebrahimi

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Jasla or Miente.

So, Paul, finally catching up with what fusion is doing here on Earth. What it's doing on Earth and where we're going to be because I know what it's doing in the universe.

The sun is plasma and doing fusion. The whole universe is this.
How about on Earth's surface? We need it here and we need it now. And we need it locally.
Yes. And

save money. And when is it going to happen?

That's going to be something we're going to find out.

Welcome to Star Talk.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.
I got with me Paul Mercurio. Paul.
What's up? Co-hosting today. Good to see you, my friend.
Good to see you, man. It's always fun.

Love you. And you're always doing interesting stuff.
I'm trying. Yeah, you got your own off-Broadway show? Yeah,

and then became Broadway. And then now we're taking it out around the country.
So I was going to ask you, wasn't it going to get an on-Broadway? Well,

we're coming back. I'm tired of seeing you in the streets off Broadway.

Good nine people across from the late show.

Off-Broadway. They loved it, yeah.
It's called Permission to Speak, and it's directed by Frank Oz.

We love Frank Oz. Yeah, he's the best.
And it involves people telling stories and connecting people through shared stories. And you're interacting with the audience.
Yes, of course.

Bringing them on stage, I'm telling my own stories. We were just in Florida with it.
We're going to be in Rhode Island. And people can go to paulmcurio.com to see where we're going to be.
Mercurio.

Mercurio. M-E-C-U-R-I-O.
Love you. Love it.
Love it. So, you know what? We got today.
The day has to arrive in all of our lives when you want to be in arm's reach of a fusion expert.

Well, I'm glad I could be here. You could be here.

Oh, her. I'm sorry.
Fatina Ebrahimi. Did I pronounce that correctly? Fatima.
Almost.

Ibrahimi. Yes, Fatima Ibrahimi.
Yeah, see, I got that, the last one.

Okay.

I love it.

You have a PhD in plasma physics. That's a whole thing.
Not just physics. Yes.
Plasma. Very specific.
You got to say plasma. Plasma.
Plasma. Plasma.

You heard me. I said it right.
And you're a research scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, PPP L.

out there in Princeton, New Jersey. Yes.
Up Route 1, I think. Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a fabulous Home Depot right there.

Big fan.

So this is,

people have heard fusion. They've heard the word.

And they've heard the word plasma. And most people think blood plasma.

This is a completely different plasma.

Blood plasma is like what's left over in your body. Body, right.
I mean, after you take out the red blood cells,

yeah, yeah. So this is not that at all.
Right. No, not that at all.
Let's start off, get the vocabulary on the table. What is a plasma? So plasma is the fourth state of matter, and it's 99%

of

observable universe is plasma. So it's really the first state of matter.
Exactly. You want to think of it that way.

And it's very unstable, right? It's unstable.

No, not necessarily. It could be.

Just because you wrote no, it doesn't mean you're correct. Okay.
Continue, Vatima. It's actually,

we are all floating

in a plasma state in our universe. So, so, and if you want to see

what is actually plasma is, is when, you know, electrons are kind of freely moving and charged particles, negative charge particles, ions, positive charge particles.

It's basically a soup of charged particles, this plasma is. All right, so why is it that we always, in physics, we see plasma joined together with the word fusion? Why are they relevant to each other?

Because our sun that Korean that actually produces a lot of energy is through fusion energy

and that's a pla is in a plasma state.

So plasma, in order to get a plasma, it has to be very hot. Yes.

Nothing is a cold plasma, is there? Yes, actually,

for the case of fusion, it has to be 100 million degrees to actually achieve fusion. But plasmas, you know, they could have variety, you want temperature, it could be low temperature plasmas.
So

then you're not going to have fusion. Exactly.

Plasmas could also be lightning strikes. That's plasma.

So I remember this, this, this, not a toy, this thing you could buy. Remember Spencer gifts? Yeah.
Anyone older than 70 will remember Spencer Gifts. Lava lamps.
Yeah, lava lamps.

Well, one of them was this ball that had this sort of glowing thing in it. And you put your hand on the ball and it would react to your hand touching the surface.

Exactly, because it's charged particles, you know. All of these, you know, the plasma kind of

makes it glow. Exactly glow.
Because particles could also can

um de-excite and kind of produce photons and lights and things okay so that the the electrons recombine exactly and every time they recombine they give off light exactly excite and recombine and you know de-excite and you get the you get the light so that's a plasma that's not at very high temperature right exactly okay it was just like a candle is also a plasma but the flame it's a flame yes the flame of a candle is a yeah.

All right, so now you need high temperature for fusion. Yes.
What are you fusing? It's actually required for fusion. High temperature is required to fuse really light atoms,

hydrogen. Yeah.

And also isotrope of hydrogen, heavier hydrogen, deuterium, and a little bit heavier, tritium, with having two actually

neutrons. So they can collide and they can fuse.
And it has to be really, really high temperature to be able to kind of overcome, you know, these forces and create a lot of energy through neutrons.

So the forces are because

you have

a positively charged proton over here and another positively charged proton over here. Like charges repel.
Right. Exactly.
They don't want to get together. Right.

And you're trying to overcome this

with high temperature. Yes.
Because high temperature means higher speeds

With

the soup. And you're able to achieve the high temperatures, or we're still working toward the temperatures, have to be high.
Temperature, actually, you can get very high temperature. But are we there?

Yes. That's what the protons ask on their long journeys.

Are we there?

Are we there?

I have to go to the bathroom. We're not pulling over.

Yes, we achieve really actually in the experiments

or facilities that we have

to create, you know, high-temperature plasmas to get to fusion, we really get to high temperatures.

The temperature we actually achieve in a fusion experiment is even hotter, you know, than the center of the Sun. Yeah, the center of the Sun is like 10 million degrees, something like that.

Yes, this is 100 million degrees. What do you generate? What do you use to try to make another star?

Yes.

What do you generate?

This isn't on, is it?

No?

This kind of stuff that, like, when you were a little girl, were you doing these kinds of experiments in your basement? And then your parents said, we got to do it.

That's how the nemesis to superheroes are done. I'm going to make something hotter than the center of the sun.

We just got you an easy bake oven.

Well, I'm going to turn it on. I gave it more power.
I gave it more power. And now it's 10 million degrees.
You know what I'm baking? Plasma. and you're gonna like it.

You want it with or without mozzarella cheese.

No, then the lights of the town go

off the Tima again.

You don't have to confess to that. That's fine.
So how do you get high temperature? Yes, how?

Because as I understand it, in order to make the plasma high temperature, something else has to be at a higher temperature than it. Is that right?

You get the high temperature because plasmas, you know, carry electrons and current, electricity current you could say they can they can exactly they can so therefore they can they can get to very high speed and high temperature so the question is that so you get this soup how do you where it's going to go so how do you confine it if it's a hundred million degrees what are you putting it in to contain it to control it to control it is

put a lot of energy through magnets

so a magnetic field is not a physical thing, so you can't melt that. Right, yes.
Right, and all your charged particles they respond to magnetic field

magnetism.

Right, and it's another force that our universe is electromagnetic force, yes, that is long-range.

It's one of the fundamental forces, you know, electromagnetic forces everywhere, you know, our sun, all the

stars, you know,

wherever you have plasma, you have electromagnetic forces and they respond to it. So you have the gas, you need to make the state of plasma, which means that

you can, you know, have some waves going into the gas, like antennas, and create your plasma. You could induce inductively current into your particles, plasmas.

It can go around your chamber, which we are talking about a

tokamak chamber, a donut-shaped chamber. So

yeah. Right, because Princeton has a tokamak.
Yes, yes, it has a tokamak. It's not a country.
What does that word even mean?

Because it's Russian. Oh, it's Russian.
It's a rather

two Russian scientists called this configuration tokamak.

They were a great act in the 70s in Atlantic City.

They worked the Stardust.

They worked the Flamingo. Okay, so I did not know that.
It's named for actual scientists.

No, it's not actual scientists. The two scientists actually called it.
It's kind of their invention, Tokomai. So when you say this chamber,

the chamber is basically sort of harnessing or controlling the plasma. That's the donut shape.
The donut shape, exactly. It's being heated up at incredible temperatures.
Exactly.

Various ways of heating the...

gas become plasma and heating the plasma to really really high temperature.

But are we heating it to the point where it is we're at the cusp of being able to use nuclear fusion and get nuclear fusion that then propels rockets through space much more quickly?

The rocket is a plasma propulsion. You actually get rid of the plasma you make from the back of the rocket.
You're not confining it with magnetic field. So the plasma rockets don't use fusion?

Not necessarily. They don't have to use fusion.
But if you kind of, you know that in space, we don't have any power or any, there's no gas station.

The only thing we have is our sun sitting there and it's only going to give some amount of energy there are rest stops with McDonald's

so if you want to go far

you need energy and you need fusion if you're going to go stay around with solar panels you have enough energy to to use locally you could use that for just propulsion I remembered reading yes because I know enough to know that in any gas at any temperature,

not all particles are moving at the same speed. Some are slow, some are fast.
The temperature is the average speed that everybody's moving. All right.

I remembered that there's some method where you can

pick off the fastest moving particles and put them over here, and their average temperature is going to be higher than where they came from. Here we go.
Treat them special.

Maybe put them in the slower group. You're in a fast class.
Yeah, they're in a special class. Leave everybody else behind.

You're cherry-picking the fastest-moving particles. Is that a thing?

Am I remembering that correctly? Conventionally, it's usually a collective

heating.

It's basically you have through current, you know, it's like current.

plasma also carry current. Current itself can heat, you know,

really,

it can actually, it's basically ohmic heating. That's one way of eating the plasma.
So that heats up internally,

not from, it's not hotter on the outside, you make it hot on the inside. That's how that's one way.
That's a conventional way of actually heating up the plasma, the first way to do it.

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Hello, I'm Thinky Brooke Allen, and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Nailed Grass Tyson.

I spent 10 years at Princeton and this is long ago. Yeah.
Like I'm old man now. In my day.

We didn't have electricity.

We would just yell and someone would hear us.

So in my day at Princeton,

every year there was talk of people saying, we're almost there by producing more energy than we put in,

which would then make it an energy source for the world, a very inexpensive energy source using readily available ingredients like hydrogen, which you will find at your neighborhood water molecule.

They would say, oh, we're just five years away. And that was 30 years ago.
Yes. So what's going on? You're almost there.

Oh, my God.

So wait, wait, wait, let's back up. So Princeton has a tokamak,

but Lawrence Livermore has a different

configuration.

So there are two approaches. One is just a toko mac.
Actually,

Princeton has a special tokamak. It's called a spherical tokamak, which is kind of not like a donut.
It's like a fat donut or core

at all. How is that different than a standard token? The nice thing is that it's more compact.
Oh, okay. So that's, and other differences, but the main thing is.

Really puffy donuts. Exactly, puffy.

You could say like a puffy donut.

It was created by a fluffinator.

I remember that. Fluffinator.
Remember?

So it's a tokamak, but a spherical tokamak. And it's very special because of compactness and other things and

so by using magnetic field you actually confine the plasma. Okay so there's that so now let's go to Lawrence Livermore in Livermore, California.

It's so-called inertial confinement means that by shooting lasers and a very at very small dense target you get fusion.

So our plasma at PPPL Princeton Plasma Physics Lab is not that dense, but we have very high temperature.

And so there's something we call a little bit specific, something called Lawson criteria, which is basically the multiplication of the confinement time, how hot you get, your density. So each kind of

all combined, and if it's larger than something, you say that, oh, I achieved fusion. So inertial confinement has, you know, more complex.
Generates a denser denser, exactly.

Of all of those factors, is density the most important thing that gets you to the sun gets high density for fighting because you're in the center of the freaking sun. It's dense there.

So they get free density.

But what you're generating at PPBL is not as dense. So

sort of like it's what I would get at Walmart versus Saks. Like if I were buying a product, it would be like the lower end.

That's the first time most of your stores have ever been in the same sentence. Ever.

Wait, so you can have it dense but not hot or hot but not dense. Exactly.
And some combination of those two will get you the fusion. Yes,

the time scale.

Do you know the optimum relationship?

So yes, we know the optimum is that you want to,

first of all, fusion was achieved in 19, in

around 1995. Wait, I have to correct that.
Fusion was achieved like in 1947. It was just uncontrolled, and we called it a bomb.

At all times, she's referring to control fusion.

Okay, pick up. Now, pick up the story where you left off.
Where we're safe.

We got fusion. We got it.

It's everywhere. We got fusion.
Correct, exactly.

The H-bomb

uses the A-bomb as a trigger for it. That's the gift.
Yes, correct. Exactly.
The controlled fusion was done

at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in the device called TFDR, you know, test fusion reactor. It was obtained

in

it was a you know, we obtained fusion, it was achieved in

the 90s

here at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab and also at another experiment jet in Europe later. So and

and

and

about 10 million joule energy was you know

or 10 megawatt million watt

power was obtained. So

we've got fusion. The question is that

one joule per second is yeah yeah yes

okay so she's thinking joules in energy but watts is a power. Well watt is the correct one.
It's 10 megawatt

and actually the the record is 17 megawatt later.

So it's around that much.

You have this big fat donut. Yes.
All right. And the whole thing is plasma.
Yeah. But if you hit the fusion threshold, does the whole thing undergo fusion?

Because in Lawrence Livermore, they know if it's going to happen, it's going to happen in that little pocket that they created. Yeah, it's basically in the vessel, in the core of the vessel.

So it's kind of your plasma, it's in the core.

it actually needs to finally touch the wall and that's where you actually get the energy it's touching it's touching the magnetic field around actually there is real wall it's magnetic fields are all around you made a dry wall like plaster boards

we call it we call it blanket

that actually

what forms the blanket in all seriousness like what what creates the wall

it's a various solution for wall you know it could be tungsten uh but does it come as a byproduct?

A various material.

It's a byproduct of what you're, the way you're manipulating the plasma. A wall creates out of that.
No. Actually, no, you actually put a physical, it's a physical wall.

Why is it only measured when it touches the wall?

Because it's not measured. It's actually the plasma heat is being measured in the core.
Yes. Yes.
And that's when you get really hot plasma. So what do you need the wall for?

Because it has to be confined and the plasma needs to meet some boundary well we thought that was the magnetic field right isn't that the magnetic field so the magnetic field is all around the torus all around the donuts okay so the magnetic field

gives it a shape yes exactly give it a shape so you could say at all you could think that you could put direct magnets around your your vessel or you actually put coils that goes around your vessel and then the wall and then the plasma.

Have these magnetic fields. We've all played with iron filings and magnets, and you can see magnetic field lines, and they form these loops, these toroidal loops.
Okay.

I know that on the surface of the Sun, because it doesn't rotate as a solid object, there are these magnetic fields in there that get stretched as the sun rotates its equator faster than other regions.

And there are points where the magnetic fields snap,

they break, and then they like reconnect. Does that happen in your space?

Yes, it happens on the surface of the Sun exactly the way you said. Sun actually,

as you correctly mentioned,

it's in a plasma state, also create, you know, fusion energy. So a lot of energy in there.
Another thing Sun creates is magnetic field. All the motions of the plasma there creates magnetic field.

So I'm creating magnetic fields. I need to get rid of this magnetic field somehow, these invisible field lines that

I'm creating. Where does it go? It goes to the surface and it kind of goes up like loops.

And then the loops kind of, at some point, this invisible field lines, one go up, one go down, and then they snap. They kind of cancel each other.

And then there's, we call it detachment.

The whole loop kind of get away and it's chaotic right i mean it's sort of it's it's not it's sort of like a bunch of well it's not controlled it's like a bunch of five-year-olds in kindergarten on skittles you can't control them on skittles oh okay

but but is it right yes or no it could be places that is really chaotic but also it could be likely collective you know um ropes of magnetic field they come together they you know they they they kind of cancel each other magnetic field, and then you get the reconnection site, and then the whole thing like detached.

The plasma and the magnetic field. That's how you know that physics do this, not astronomers, because the people who study that are called magneto-hydrodynamicists.
Oh, my God.

That's just, that should not be a word.

How does one long business card?

Little fold out extra sections.

Yeah, this is your business card. It's like that.
You know, just, just,

so let's get back to the energy, and then I want to go to rockets. Yes.
So, so if you're going to be useful to anybody, you can't just make energy under the ground in Princeton, New Jersey.

You got to, it's got to be, I don't want to call it portable, but it's got to be scalable. So you can move it to a town that can generate energy that has no radioactive byproducts.

You can generate it 24-7 and you're just using hydrogen.

Whose method will be better for this? The one, the inertial confinement from Lawrence Livermore or the tokamak design from Princeton and other places? You have to pursue all the methods.

It's actually.

I didn't know I was in Congress by that.

That was what you said about members of Congress. But Senator, we need to pursue all the methods.

Okay. America is great.

I like pie.

And you even don't know about other methods.

We call this some more innovative

alternate method. But again,

using magnetic field

to kind of confine plasma and get fusion energy. So all of them need to be prepared.
But all of them need to get to some condition.

And the condition is that you get more, you produce more energy than you put in. Otherwise, what's the point? What's the point? Exactly.
It's kind of the net gain that you kind of need to get.

And we haven't got there engineering-wise, physics-wise, scientifically, maybe in some range, we can say that, oh, we got energy from fusion.

And as I said, this happened also in the 90s, you know, at PPPL.

Yeah, there was a little bit of a overstatement about the Livermore experiment because that one had net extra energy from the experiment. And so this was a, it was championed.

But the extra energy they got was

to the energy that they put in in this little spot. It didn't add up

the whole system that made the thing a thing to begin with. Right, right.
So it wasn't the total energy budget of the experiment. It was just the energy budget of the experiment.

Local around the target, yeah. On the target.
It had to be attached to that target or near that target to be it.

Yeah, and that's how they make their measurements. So

I think, correct me if I'm wrong, if you're going to scale that, presumably you get some good engineers in there to say, how do we make this littler? And you can make this more efficient and that.

And then you just run the energy.

You actually need to also make better lasers, more efficient lasers, because the efficiency of it is not too great. Right, because you have to put energy in the lasers to make the same.

Yeah, but the lasers are going to help you to

use that. Exactly.
So engineering net gain is not too high in that experiment.

But the physics gain was good. And also the physics gain is also for magnetic confinement.
We have good gain before and we are actually moving toward it with various configuration. Okay, yeah.

And all of this,

the idea of excited particles, and where does that fit into all of this? And sort of

how do you calm down an excited particle? Jazz music, I don't know. candles, scented candles.

You're asking her, how does she cool down the plasma? Is that what you're asking? Sense, right? Because the whole plasma is excited particles. Right.

But there are specific things that you do to control the excited particles. Oh, yes, yes.
I think that you just want the whole hot, you know, plasma confined, controlled,

and self-heated because it kind of interestingly, if it gets to some temperature, it can kind of on its own can get, you know, heated the plasma for a long, long time and produce a lot of energy.

And that is fusion

system or reactor. And we have made a lot of progress in each

part of it. But as usual, we're not there yet.

So,

how many years from now can I plug in my wall and the energy on the other side of that plug is fusion?

So, I mean, you know that.

She's supposed to say five years away, didn't I?

We're listening, go on. You know that.
You didn't hear that. You didn't hear that.
Go on.

I mean, you know that like diesel engines are lots of you know advancement. Excuse me senator.
Senator, could I have the witness answer the question please?

Directly.

She mentioned diesel engines. That is not on the table right now.
So it all takes decades, yes. And fusion is, we are, it's a new physics frontiers, the whole plasma physics.

When an experiment, you know, is run, you kind of get into the new regime. Because what you're when you're doing actual research, you're on a frontier, right?

Yeah, you're not well, obviously, you're stepping where no one has stepped before, so you're going to discover new things.

So, you're going to discover, and you're going to discover hurdles that you could not have predicted. Seriously, right? So, in other words,

so I mean, that's the issue, right?

Yes, you get into a new regime, you discover new things, and the whole, in fact, actually, the whole rocket system, it was a discovery through in a fusion system, you know. So,

let's pivot to that, right? Yeah, because it's still decades away before she's going to make my electricity. All right.

I mean,

Miss Easy Bake Oven over here cranked this stuff up when she was 10, but she can't.

Commercially, you know, viable. Commercially viable.
I mean, you know. But everyone knows that.
We made fusion in a laboratory. Everyone knows how important that is.
Yeah. Culturally.

Do we have any practical application of fusion right now in any capacity? Bombs. Other than bombs.
In a shorter time scale,

we do not have to have a large scale fusion

system to kind of give electricity to a whole city. We could have compact design

for

taking, you know, for space.

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Right now, and forever, as long as we've had rockets, we've been using what we call chemical fuels, which means they're molecules that have energy contained within them.

And you break apart the molecule, the energy escapes, and that is our energy source. And so, that has not advanced in a hundred years.
Because you scientists are lazy,

you're not really trying to. But we use different chemicals, or we have solid rocket boosters.
That's a different propulsion chemical than the big tank. But essentially the same concept.

It's the same concept. And so tell me about plasma rockets, because there's a lot written about it.

And we're not even talking about fusion yet. We're just keeping in your plasma universe.
Yes.

Plasma propulsion is the basically we are uh talking about the next generation of rockets, specifically plasma rockets. And they're highly efficient, yes.
Yes, they are highly efficient.

In terms of so there are several things about them is that the exhaust velocity is really high. What's hard for people to see just being Earth surface dwellers? Yeah.

Because you say, if I want to go forward, I just have to run or step on the gas. You're doing that at the expense of Earth beneath your feet.

So the only reason why you can go forward is because Earth is...

You're putting friction between your foot on the Earth and you're changing the rotation of the Earth slightly.

You're pushing back on it. You have something to push back on.

this is... In space,

you have nothing to push. You got nothing to push back on.
So the only way you can change your speed is to give something up. And what are we giving up? Mass.

Take it from there. Yes, you take it.
And in this case, it's just you. create the plasma or plasmoid through the process of like solar flares, magnetic reconnection.

And you detach these, continuously detach this plasma from the back of the rocket and at high velocity because it's at high temperature and

yes high speed um

and the rocket is being propelled forward and it's not uh it doesn't have to be high temperature the interesting about the magnetic reconnection is that magnetic energy is being converted to kinetic energy.

So it's all magnetic, yes, it's like the solar doesn't have to be so this is like you you want to get from point A to point B with this

you snap your fingers you're there it's like badass no no no no no badass google maps yeah

no no this is it's it's different because the particle comes out the back

and the rocket recoils from it

but by how much

it's efficient but what's the mass

the mass is not too much so so there are various it's a tiny mass at high speed yes and i have a high mass thing on the other side that can only then go forward at low speed. Yes.
Right.

So how am I going to get anywhere? You're going to get anywhere by kind of having high

thrust, high force. And that is through, again, exhaust velocity.
You get it. And

it's constantly, you're kind of pushing it. You know, it's like a constant acceleration you get somewhere in a space.
It's different from, you know, right. So

you wouldn't use plasma rockets to launch. No, no, no, no.
Because they don't have that much, you can't send out that much mass. Because anytime you see a rocket,

this is coming out. So you've got to use it.
This comes out and it goes the other way. You can't use rocket fuel to get it there.
To get it there.

And then through empty space. And what do you think about like some

crazy, this is sort of like a massive Wi-Fi spot that's like got incredible power? Is that what this plasma thing, where we're going with it? Well, I think from what I've read,

but you're in the middle of it. So just correct me if I'm wrong.

When you're in free space, in open space, and then you turn on your plasma rocket, it's like one particle at a time. And so

you slowly accelerate.

But acceleration is a constant, in this case, increase in your velocity. There's resistance coming on the rock.

There's no resistance out there. It's a recoil, right? But since it's constant and you do it for a long time,

you can reach very high speeds. Exactly.

So based on the results that we have, and we are actually building this tabletop prototype at the

plasma. No, no.

Tabletop size of that. We're building it.

I'm using my oven.

At the lab, you're building it. You can get to 100, 500 kilometer per second.
So it's a still. So you can, that rocket can move at that speed.

Could you have a sunroof on the rocket at that speed or would it be that would that be possible? A sunroof to see.

You know,

just looking up.

What is up?

Yeah, that's true.

But you need to, to get to that speed, you know, if you go to the moon, you don't need that much of a speed. And you could do it with this plasmoid rocket.
You can do, you know, small payloads.

in three weeks or something with this with this plasma rocket.

And it's not that this is sci-fi no this is actually for real because we do plasma propulsion with just electric field now we are doing magnetic using electromagnetic field using magnetic connection which is a long time and astronauts apollo they got there in three days yeah but we're doing the fast you know it's efficient efficient it's efficient it means that it means that you go back and forth it's not expensive uh the fuel it's uh flexible you could use really hydrogen, you know, the one that we want to use for fusion.

You use really light atoms, so it's efficient. So it's fuel flexible and it's efficient.
Okay, so you would use this.

It's like a nice, nice car, yes. This would be the delivery vessel for supplies.
Exactly. Because you can just plan ahead, send it three weeks in advance, and then we get there quickly.

And supplies are very heavy,

right? But you'll get there. But wait,

we're using this plasma technology to

get the supplies there? Well, I think the point is, because you're just sending these very low mass particles, though they're traveling high speeds,

the recoil is small, but

real and measurable, and it accumulates. So

I bet if we were to fly humans with one of these rockets, it would only make sense if we were going to like Pluto or something or to the nearest star.

Yeah, for then you need for to use this plasmoid propulsion, you need the nuclear energy fusion or some kind of a battery to kind of give you both force the thrust yet you need like the like the

if you're approaching a planet's atmosphere can you control yes because otherwise are you just driving that rocket right through the center of the well that's that's a big problem in space travel because if you can accelerate and you want to land somewhere, you have to just pull up like a right, right, right.

There's no

right right. So what you have to do is like, you know, flip the ship around and then have it and have it send out particles the other way.
So then it's a negative acceleration, a deceleration.

And so that eats up some of your plan. But might we use this going to Mars, do you think?

Yes, yes, because of the

again, it's because of efficiency. You know, you could use

chemical rockets in 10 years

to go there once if you use all the resources you have, but you really need plasma propulsion um

for getting to the mars you also need the energy for that and that's what the compact fusion compact system come that that's why the we we work on that okay so the plasma rocket is not the same thing as a plasma fusion rocket because the fusion is just a whole other source of energy yeah so the plasma rocket the the energy can come from just the uh some solar panels because for example for the moon we have the sun sitting there, so we can get, you know,

use the solar panels

to get the power. That can be the level of

compared to plasma fusion, getting through solar panels cannot give you the same level.

It's enough from the I want more than enough.

I want the best. I'm an American.
And that's how we do this in America. But

we don't even have that.

This is like a FedEx going to moon coming back. Yes.
That's what we are talking about very efficiently.

And

you don't need that much of a power to do that. Like 500 kilowatt is enough.
It's enough. You don't need a million dollars.

So they get there faster, but the guy still leaves the package like 20 feet from your door and you have to walk out and you're underworking pirates steal it. Right.

Nothing changes with you scientists. You don't really need to.
But you walk out in your underwear to get your packages. Okay.

My neighbors requested that yes wait so so i just want to like

settle my understanding on this

when you have a plasma you have hype moving particles you can send them out the back and you recoil yeah

and the acceleration is slow but it's steady and it accumulates yes okay

so if you have solar panels

The solar panel is not itself a propulsion mechanism, but it's a source of energy. Yes.

And you can channel that energy back into your plasma and keep the plasma going as long as we're close enough to the sun. Exactly.
Okay. Now you're really far from the sun.

You still need an energy source.

And what would that energy source be if you can't use solar panels anymore because the sun is too dim? Would that be the fusion?

Yes. It's fusion.

It has to be non-chemical. Yes, and non-chemical.
So

the fusion source of energy would still be heating the plasma. Yes, the fusion plasma.
Basically, yes. The fusion.

I had not appreciated that. It's still a

plasma rocket. Exactly, exactly.
It's still a plasma rocket because

your magnets, you know, first of all, you can use several, but you still have to power your rocket. And the source of power, it could be a solar panel or

it could be the non-chemical fusion energy.

But But there's plenty of hydrogen gas in the universe. Yes, that's the same thing.
So you just scoop it up, put it in. So there are filling stations in the universe.
I told you.

When it's going through space, is the plasma sort of sort of morphing and changing? And do you have to account for that?

I mean, because it can survive, my understanding is it can survive plasma in various states, right?

I would imagine you have not been able to document every state that it can survive in, right? It's an ever-evolving science.

So it's just that basically you need the fuel here is like hydrogen, helium. Yes.
You have the fuel.

You can actually use the local resources in a space for the fuel. So that's the funding.
And that's what calls it ISRU. Yeah.
In situ resource utilization. Yes.
Ah. Which is a terrible acronym.
But

yeah, ISRU, that's the big thing. Yes, yes.
Because then you don't have to haul everything with you. Exactly.
So that you want to be,

That's why we call it efficient, basically, it's fuel flexibility.

That you can kind of, yeah. And it doesn't have to be helium.
It could be hydrogen, any kind.

And it doesn't have to be argon because some of the electric propulsion, your gas is going to be a lot of fun. Don't even get me started with argon.
That's ridiculous. So waste of time.

But why argon? Why not krypton?

All of them. They could be any kind of gas.

I was going to use krypton. I was going to say, I told you, I literally lost weak.
I'm weak around here. I feel.

So there's,

it can't exist on its own. It needs some other source of energy.
But what can't exist?

The plasma, then you kind of, you draw,

you draw some, you create it, you ionize it, you create the plasma, yes?

So that's the specific, you have to read the paper and the pattern to actually see, you see how the plasma is created from this fuel, local fuel, and then you get the plasma.

But as soon as you create the plasma, you get rid of it from the back of your rocket by the process of magnetic reconnection. And you've got to lose some of your mass every time you go into it.

You're going to go anywhere. But that's what I was saying earlier.
Magnetic reconnection is

plasmoids get created. They're not very unstable, but then become over time unstable and decay.
Magnetic reconnection, sort of, there's this constant

instability and how you control that and are you still working on being able to control that?

So

for a rocket, for plasma propulsion, we are not confining anything. So we don't basically don't care about stability because in a fusion device you can find plasma, you don't want it to go unstable.

For a rocket, you just make the plasma, you use the magnetic field then you just pollute space. Yeah, I get it.

Exactly. Exactly.
You get rid of it and then you make new plasma and get rid of it. And then the rocket just gradually goes one density.

And that's why you need 1-800 gut junk for space because you've been putting garbage into space with that attitude. I understand.
But the plasma is not really junk because, as I said, 99%

of our observable universe is plasma. It's basically some charged particles you have in space that you always have low-density plasma everywhere in space.
She was good.

She said the observable universe. Because we don't see the dark matter.
Yeah. We don't know what the hell that is, but it's not plasma.
Yeah. So she got that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yeah.

So you could say that is. But aren't you altering,

with these, this plasma coming out of the back of a rocket, aren't you altering space in a way by putting these particles in space?

If space is 99% plasma to begin with, wouldn't it? It's just a

pool. It's like putting more water in a pool.
Yeah, it doesn't care. It's like putting more hair gel in my hair.

That's state of matter.

Yeah, we are floating in plasma in the universe anyway. So you cannot make some little plasma and get rid of it.
Yeah. Go somewhere.
Universal mind. Yeah, universal on mind.
Yes.

So, Fatima, I got to land this plane.

So let's, I want straight answers. You're in Congress now.
Professor Ibrahimi, how soon are we from having plasma

energy generating centers in every city? We are close, actually. It's a

five, but five years? I would say five to ten years. Yes, there are experiments.

2030. They're going to be right there.

We've got a number.

So in terms of that, but that is... We'll drag you back in here.
Yes, but that's a scientific network. gain, I said.
Okay. If you want to put it on the

electricity. I'm not worried about the engineers.
They come through when you need them. Okay, that's first.
Second, when will we have rockets with humans in them that will use

plasma propulsion? And will the first trip to Mars use it?

The first trip, I don't know, because it's possible that if you put, if all the resources are put there, you could get there once with chemical

propulsion. But again, to have a sustainable kind of

travel,

so you need plasma propulsion. Does NASA have a group working on plasma propulsion? Or do they call you up to get there?

What do we do next?

Yes, give me more funding.

There you go.

I knew she'd be begging for money at some point.

But can a human travel that fast under

isn't that an issue? Plasma propulsion? I mean, is it a slow acceleration? It's a slower acceleration. Your face is not going to do this.
It's not, no, no, no, no, no.

I just wanted to get some of the lines out of the face.

It seems like a high acceleration would be

good for plastic surgery. Could I say that actually maybe we look at more

closer term, you know, places to go? And I think moon could be, as I said,

it could be just plasma propulsion. You don't have to do that.
Are we going to do that moon? We've been to the moon rocks. Resources, resources.
There's all sorts of things.

I got moon rocks in my top drawer.

Actually,

one of the ways to actually create fusion energy it's something it's called a neutronic means that you kind of the other

you use deuterium helium you know to create energy and you don't produce neutrons so that's just the p p chain in the center of the sun there's no loose neutrons yeah coming out of that yes exactly so it's not the neutrons are bad because they come out and they'll yeah they nothing stops them yes they don't have a charge they're very pushy

Their advantage is they don't have to push.

The other particles don't even know they're there.

Am I right? Yes,

yes.

Neutrons, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a fun reaction in the sun.
It's called the PP chain,

proton-proton chain. And it uses deuterium and tritium.
No, I don't remember tritium, but we have helium-3

in there.

Exactly, exactly. Helium-3.

So you have also fuel for also fusion. So there are things there.
And

you want to make some steps for the next generation, you know, non-chemical propulsion. You first make some good step progress and then gradually going further, you use fusion energy to go there.

So in this process, you guys seem fairly lazy. You're taking your time, five years.

Are you using, in all seriousness, are you using, how does AI factor into any of your work or will it in terms of the advancements you're gonna you're trying to make it's a fantastic question it's there can you just say that again fantastic question

i didn't hear it i didn't hear her say that fantastic yes she is ai right yeah

she doesn't really exist did you think she was real

i kept and my finger goes right through it goes through right through right through her leg it's so weird

yeah exactly

i didn't want to say anything i was like you know i think she's been around the uh plasma too much

she is

i'm sitting next to a plasmoid don't tell her yeah yes i think yeah yes definitely you know computers first of all all most of the progress we made in plasma physics and fusion have always been, you know, together, experiments and advanced computation work together to make discoveries and also any kind of achievement, it has to be together.

Well, I think we kind of need to wrap this up. Yes, we do.
Yes, we do.

Well, Fatima,

give me some words for the future.

Be patient in terms of.

Okay, I'm sorry I asked.

It's no, the answer is like this. Well, how do you define future? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, let me say

for the future is that progress and discovery

doesn't happen overnight. It's the continuous

work of scientists, long-term investments

to kind of you put all the energy you have, collaboration, all of that,

and

cross-pollination of various types of, you know, group working on various types of plasma or types of devices, fusion experiments. progress happened like that.
So it's not.

So it's just, it's also new physics. We learn every day in every regime of plasmas, we learn new things and we apply it like this, you know, rocket thruster.
We apply it for other applications.

What we learn in fusion, we also apply it for other

applications. And so

it's just

a continuous work. So Fatima, typically at the end of

our sessions, I offer the viewer a cosmic perspective on the topic of the day. But

you so beautifully summarized the plight of the scientist, the engineer, society, funding sources. That's any and all that I would have said in my cosmic perspective.
Thank you.

So thanks for making my job just a little easier today.

Good to have you, man. Always great to be here.

Thank you. Good luck.
You need some of that sometimes, right? Yes. When you're messing with plasma.
Exactly. And one day you'll give us a tour of your basement.

Exactly. And listen, whatever you do welcome both of you thank you and keep up your vague answers

that was really interesting very fascinating

this has been star talk neil degrasse tyson here your personal astrophysicist reporting from my office at the hayden planetarium the american museum of natural history in new york city as always keep looking up

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