Name: 核融合発電はいつ実現する？MIT教授が最新の研究と技術を解説 | 5 Levels | WIRED jp
Uploaded: 2025-03-10T09:46:03.000Z
Duration: 24 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and I've been challenged today to explain nuclear fusion in five levels of increasing difficulty.

Fusion is so exciting because it is extraordinarily beautiful physics, which underpins some of the most basic processes in our universe.

Nuclear processes has a tremendously valuable application for humankind, a virtually limitless, clean, safe, carbon-free form of energy.

I'm in third grade, and my favorite subject at school is definitely science.

So my son is five years old, and he asked me what kind of science I do.

That's a good answer, because it sounds a little ridiculous, right?

Well, we're not actually going to put the sun, which is a star, inside a jar.

But instead, we're going to take the same kind of material that the sun is made out of, and we're going to hold it for a really long time in some kind of container.

So fusion is about bringing things together.

When those fusion reactions occur, a new particle is created, and energy is also released.

So an atom is what everything in our world is made of, and at the very center of the atom is what we call a nucleus.

We want to take those protons and push them together to make them combine and release energy, fusion energy, that we can use to make electricity.

And there's a lot of different energies and forces that we have to think about.

So that is a big, important fundamental force.

So another fun force to talk about that's important for fusion, you're familiar with electricity?

And so there's also electric forces, electrostatic forces, and you've heard of static electricity.

So now let's see about static electricity lifting my hair up.

I can move this white strand that's like hanging down.

The balloon took all the force from like your hair and put it in here now.

And so if we want to take those protons and push them together to make them combine and release energy, fusion energy, that we can use to make electricity, then we have to actually overcome that strong electrostatic force that just want to make those balls bounce off of each other.

There's another force, which you might be familiar with, which is like a magnetic force.

Our teacher showed us putting one magnet on and then flipping the other one around and it made the top one kind of bounce.

And I was also thinking on how they do that.

You know, scientists are still studying exactly how magnetism works, right?

It'll still be there for you to tackle when you become a scientist.

So if you take this and you take the magnetic end, maybe you can show us what's going to happen with it while you move around those iron filings with the magnet.

You're totally in control of that material.

You're pushing, you're pulling it, you're moving it around.

And so you're using this magnetic force to also do something useful for you.

Have you learned about the states of matter?

So we were in second grade and she put up a picture on the board, three states of matter.

She shows a picture of ice, a picture of water and a picture of gas.

Did you learn that there's also a fourth state of matter?

When you heat up a gas, you create a plasma.

The plasma I study is actually invisible.

It's light that I can measure with very, very special instruments.

Because instruments we use to play music.

You keep them in one spot so you can show where they are.

We hold it inside the container with the magnetic fields.

So you didn't have to actually touch the iron filings in the toy to move them around.

You could pass the magnetic field through the plastic and control them with it.

We don't have to touch this very, very hot plasma to control it and hold it in place because we use magnetic fields.

I'm so glad that science is your favorite subject.

The way our sun generates energy is by fusion reactions.

It fuses hydrogen, the lightest element we know about, into helium, and that gets fused into heavier and heavier elements.

So here on Earth, we're going to take some special kinds of hydrogen, a special flavor of it, if you will, which we call an isotope, and we're going to combine them to create new particles.

And we can only get that combination of particles to happen if they are in a plasma.

What's your favorite exhibit at the Science Museum?

You probably have learned in school about three states of matter.

We take the gas and we add heat and we get a plasma.

And a plasma is a state of matter where you have an ionized gas.

And if we break down that gas, if we add enough energy to ionize it, we can take the electrons and the ions in the atom and separate them.

And now there's this soup of charged particles that are moving around.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

核融合発電はいつ実現する？MIT教授が最新の研究と技術を解説 | 5 Levels | WIRED jp

sort

absolutely

material

matter