Engineering The Largest Nuclear Fusion Reactor

What’s your guess for when the first commercial fusion power station will come online? Compare news coverage from diverse sources around the world. Take advantage of their Black Friday sale to get 40% off unlimited access by going to: ground.news/practicalengineering

Its insane to think that no matter how advance humanity get, the only option to generate massive power is to spin a steam turbine.

it never ceases to amaze me just how many ways we've come up with to boil water, and just how complicated we can make it!

I'm a civil engineer at ITER :). Nice to see my project on a cool channel.

Love how enthusiastic Monsieur Patisson is to share his team's truly insane engineering achiements!

The most intimidating part of projects like this (similar to Apollo program, or building a megastructure) is that not a single person knows every part. Everyone realizes they are only a small cog in a large machine. With billions of different bolts and nuts, it is easy to imagine one person making a mistake somewhere along the line. I am deeply interested in the mechanisms that would prevent human error (redundancy, double or triple checks, etc.). This project will take 20-30 years to complete, meaning a large transfer of personel over the years. Only a few people saw the beginning as well the end...

What a fascinating exploration of the ITER infrastructure. Diving into the nuts and bolts of ITER with you was a blast!⚒🔨🪛🔧⚙

You can see and hear on the head engineer that he could talk about this for hours, it was probably amazing having someone not on his team react in such a interested way. Simply amazing.

The physics and engineering in this project is insane.

Star in a jar

As someone that worked exclusively on the physics and diagnostic systems of iters tokamak, its nice to have a civil engineers perspective on the whole build

I visited the ITER site around 4 years ago, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the opportunity. Thanks for making this video, it was really fascinating to watch.

With all the rubbish happening around the world right now, it's so relieving and rewarding to see this progress. Thank you for covering this ❤

ngl the idea of a multi-hour chat with Monsieur Patisson on the bearings sounds lit

0:25 Grady finally admits to liking construction

I work in a temperature related field, just the scale of these components and the tolerances involved means these guys probably have procedures to stop work if temperature control goes down for x hours, and they'd probably keep it in place for up to a week depending on the outage, these scales are absolutely insane, just wow Edit: not to mention procedures for moving parts between temperature controlled environments, letting parts just sit for x hours/days before continuing work

9:30 LHC has an automated beam dump process that works based on perturbations in the magnetic field. However their process has to work in the span of milliseconds in order to prevent structural damage from the beam. So I was somewhat surprised that you mentioned this process took seconds for ITER, since that may actually be too long in the case of magnet quenching.

I really appreciate Grady's cautious neutrality.

Very cool. Feels almost like we just might see fusion in my life.

In the example of 50 MW thermal power in and 500MW out - that 50 MW is just a fraction of the electricity used by the whole facility: as you mentioned there are several power hungry support buildings that provide heating and cooling etc. for the whole facility so that in actuality the TOTAL INPUT while functioning will most likely exceed 500 MW, so Q total will be less than 1