Nuclear Fusion: Infinite Power, No Meltdowns, and Why It’s Always 20 Years Away | Entropy Rising Episode 10

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Fusion power has been "just around the corner" for decades—but is that finally changing? In this episode of Entropy Rising, Jacob and Lucas dive into the science behind nuclear fusion, why it's so difficult to achieve, and how recent breakthroughs are bringing us closer to a future of clean, limitless energy.

This episode explores the core differences between fusion and fission, why the sun is actually a terrible fusion reactor, and how scientists are building Earth-based fusion systems that operate at temperatures hotter than the sun’s core. From tokamaks and laser ignition to the promise of helium-3 and space-based fusion, we examine the breakthroughs that could make fusion power a reality.

What’s Covered in This Episode

• How fusion works and why it is considered the holy grail of energy
• The biggest challenges in fusion research beyond just high temperatures
• The most promising fusion reactor designs and how close we are to net energy gain
• How fusion could revolutionize space travel, transportation, and global power grids

If fusion energy becomes practical, it could eliminate fossil fuels, power entire cities, and even enable deep space missions. But can scientists overcome the immense technical challenges? Will fusion finally arrive within our lifetime, or will it remain just 20 years away forever?

Join us as we separate fact from fiction and break down what fusion really means for the future of energy, technology, and society.

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Transcript

0:00

We've had fusion for a very long time. hydrogen bombs have been around for a while now. By their definition, A fusion bomb releases more energy than you put into it. if you really wanted to, there's nothing stopping you from taking a fusion bomb, putting it in a large tank of water, setting it off, and then harvesting that steam. Would that be efficient? Absolutely not. It would generate energy though. So we can generate fusion energy right now if we really don't want that one. Hello and welcome to Entropy Rising, where we talk about science and futurism. I'm your host, Jacob, and I am here with my wonderful co host, Lucas. Lucas, how are you doing today? Jacob, I'm doing great today. How are you? I'm doing great, especially since I just heard some wonderful news. Oh yeah? Yeah, that fusion reactors are only 20 years away. Wow, it seems like just 20 years ago they were 20 years away. That is always the joke of Fusion, and I feel like we just need to rip that band aid off right now since that's what we're talking about, and just acknowledge that this has been a technology that's always been on the horizon of science. But genuinely, we are getting to a point where this is becoming an achievable technology, and hopefully in this episode we're going to be able to convince you, the audience, of that, and also talk about some of the really cool stuff that we can do with it. Once we actually do have this technology in about 20 years. Yeah. Alright, Lucas, I feel like if we're going to talk about nuclear fusion, we have to at least talk about some of the physics behind fusion and some of the differences behind fusion and fission. Okay. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Yeah. I think we have a fairly scientifically literate, audience so I'm not going to go too in depth into this but as you know, nuclear fission is the process by which heavy elements, like uranium or plutonium, split apart and when they do so they release a lot of energy. And then nuclear fusion is the opposite process by which Smaller, lighter elements, hydrogen, helium, anything like that, come together and form larger elements, and then they also release energy in that process. Now, it's worth noting that both of these processes can only release energy up to a point, and since we're talking about fusion, you can gain energy through a fusion reaction fusing elements as heavy as iron. Iron is the cutoff on the fusion chain. If you try to fuse elements any heavier than iron, it's a net energy loss. So that's typically why we're always talking about lighter elements. Worth pointing out, and I know we covered this in a different episode, it's not that you can't fuse elements heavier than iron. Ultimately, every element that exists was made through fusion. It's just that once you hit iron, that's the dead end for the fusion energy game. You're losing energy. Right. Which is why you see in stars, they have cores of pure iron when they die. The minute a star makes iron, it is on its death throes. It's one of the last things a star does before it goes Nova or supernova, depending on how large it is. So, you know, when we think about fusion, obviously, if we want to point to a successful fusion reactor, just look up, right? it's the sun, it's the stars. Those are all powered by nuclear fusion. Now, one of the things we all know is that the sun is made up of mostly hydrogen. Yeah. you'll notice that they never really talk about hydrogen fusion. They're always talking about using deuterium and tritium, and if they're a little more adventurous, and maybe if it's a science fiction book, they might even be talking about using like helium 3 for fusion. Right, which, deuterium and tritium are just isotopes of hydrogen. Yes, yes, exactly. But there's a reason that we use isotopes of hydrogen for fusion versus using just hydrogen, right? Because it would be nice to use hydrogen because it's everywhere. We already have hydrogen. Deuterium isn't that hard to get, you know, we can refine it out of ocean water because it's there in the form of heavy water. But tritium is really tricky actually to get. It's radioactive, it only has a health life of 12 years and even if you do get it, it's still a hydrogen isotope. It's one of the smallest isotopes there is, so it can escape out of almost any enclosure. so why is it, that we're using, deuterium and tritium versus hydrogen is at least something that I used to wonder and it's something that I think is a fairly common question maybe. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever ran across that. Well, I mean, I, I would love to take a glass of water and just be able to power my house, but you can't. I feel like that was the dream of Fusion if I definitely think I've watched some older infographics on Fusion from the 50s and 60s of like this glass of water has enough Fusion fuel in it to power a whole city or something. I mean I just watched a clickbait YouTube video last week. It said that the guy powered his car with water. Oh god, did it try to say through a fusion reaction? Well, I had to assume. Well, yeah, absolutely. You know, hydrogen is very abundant. It's actually the single most abundant element in the universe. Unfortunately, it's like the one thing you can't just do fusion to. Because hydrogen is just a proton. If you actually zoom in. to the atom. there's no neutrons there. It's just a single proton. And unfortunately, the way fusion works is that, there's basically two forces at play. You have the strong nuclear force, which is an attractive force between protons and neutrons. This is what holds the core of atoms together. And then you have the electromagnetic force, which is, what holds your magnet on your refrigerator, right? And if you've taken any science course, or just been a curious kid with a magnet, you've probably learned that like charges repel each other. If you try to take the north end of two magnets and shove them together, it doesn't work. And it's the same thing with atoms. The cores of atoms are positively charged, and so they have a repulsion. unfortunately, the electromagnetic force, while orders of magnitude weaker than the strong nuclear force, has a much, much longer range. So, what you basically have when you think of two atoms trying to fuse, is you have this electromagnetic repulsion that keeps them away from each other. But if you resist that, and you keep Shoving them together, force them, force them, force them. If you eventually get them close enough, they will interact with each other through the strong nuclear force, come together, and release a bunch of energy. It's just getting them there. Yes, and if we're talking about hydrogen, there are no neutrons. in the hydrogen atom to actually achieve that. So how do we get those? That's a great question. in the sun this happens because sometimes when you have a bunch of hydrogen and, extreme pressures, like what's going on in the core of the sun, and high temperatures, you will actually have two protons, fused together. However, that is an unstable system. So they immediately fall apart. Most of the time. Like 99. 9999 percent of the time. However, sometimes, another process steps in, it's called beta plus decay. And it's a process by which a proton can turn into a neutron, and it also releases an electron and a neutrino. So sometimes you have two protons come together, and then one of those protons spontaneously turns into a neutron, releasing some energy and an electron, and deuterium. This is a very uncommon process, but the sun has so much hydrogen that, it just happens abundantly enough. And then those, newly minted neutrons can go on, and now you can have proper deuterium, tritium, and all that fusion going up until you end up making, helium, which is the amount where our sun stops. There's also a CNO cycle, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, heavier stars do that more. Our sun does a little bit. Primarily though, our sun does fusion up to helium. Fascinating. Yeah. So a bit of a rundown, I know. I just wanted to get it out of the way, but yeah, that's kind of fusion in a nutshell and that's some of the stuff that we're dealing with here. Okay. So that's how it's working. on the sun. Yes. But how are we doing those reactions here on earth? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So here on earth, we don't have the luxury of time, right? We can't sit around and wait for protons to go through beta plus decay and turn into neutrons. So we just skip that step and we start with deuterium and we start with tritium and we take them and we heat them up to extremely high temperatures, much, much hotter than the core of the sun, by the way. I don't know if you know this, but the sun's like a terrible fusion reactor. I mean, it sounds like it. Yeah. You've got a one in a million chance of maybe having a reaction. If it was one in a million, that would be good. No. No, it really is. The sun has a horrendous energy density. I think it's 0. 01, milliwatts per kilogram. to put that in perspective, you sitting here right now, just through metabolic processes, you have an energy density of about one watt per kilogram. And, something like a gasoline engine has energy density of 200 watts per kilogram. So like energy density wise, the sun's not very good. mean, that's a good thing for us. That means it's going to burn for a very long time. That's not a good thing for a power generator, right? no. Yeah. So, we can do it better here on Earth. we can. So, we don't have the luxury of extreme pressures, but what we can do is work at higher temperatures, and significantly higher temperatures. a deuterium tritium reactor works at 150 million degrees. if you want to do just deuterium deuterium, you're up to like 300 to 500 million degrees. And if you want to do something like helium 3 fusion, which has some advantages because it doesn't produce neutrons, which go on to make some radiation we don't want to deal with. Well, guess what? Now you're working at a billion degrees. That's crazy because at a billion degrees, we're at almost 15 times hotter than the of the sun. Yeah. So because we don't have the pressures of the sun and we don't have 10 billion years to wait around for these things to fuse, we have to work at significantly higher temperatures. That's insane. Now achieving those temperatures. I know that in the most recent fusion reaction, we used high energy lasers to heat a very small amount of isotopes. Yeah. and we were able to achieve a successful fusion reaction doing that. So, how are we containing that heat, though? Oh, no, that's a fair question, because no material can withstand that temperature. for something like a tokamak, which is, the most famous, I think, fusion reactor that you ever see, it's like the one that's like a big donut. Like a Tony Stark reactor? Yeah, is it? Is that actually what they use? Yeah. I didn't know that. I gotta be honest. I haven't watched the movie in a very long time. I didn't know there was a tokamak in it. Well, yeah, and the one in his chest is a miniature one. Is it? So I thought it was fusion, but I didn't know it was like a tokamak design. That's really cool. Damn, that is impressive that he managed to make that, then. I know, right? In a cave, of all things. Um, yeah, so for things like tokamaks, stellarators, We use strong magnetic fields to confine the plasma, Because otherwise, it'll just melt the reactor. Okay. Very cool. it is comforting to know that if that were to happen, all of that heat and energy would dissipate very quickly. It wouldn't be like a Chernobyl accident. Oh yeah, that's 100 percent right. one of the biggest benefits of nuclear fusion is the safety, like what you were saying, Nuclear fission is a, a failed dangerous process. You have a bunch of matter that's reacting with it, with itself. And if you don't have those safeguards, it'll run away. Nuclear fusion is the exact opposite. It's a failed safe reaction. Yeah, if you don't have the perfect environment and all the things that it needs to continue its reaction, it just stops. Yeah, it just fizzles out, goes away. I mean, I don't want to be standing next to the reactor if, if the plasma events, but it's not going to blow up the city. Yeah, you know, it's, it's better to have a charred hole in the ground about the size of a city block instead of an elephant's foot that's still to this day falling into the earth in a radiating Chernobyl. Honestly, even the, the hole in the ground in the city block is way larger than you would ever get it. It's, it's not even that it's more or less just like, um, it damages the reactor a little bit, but even when. These things lose magnetic confinement, the plasma. Yes, it's very hot, but it's, it's not very dense. So it just, goes away. It doesn't even make itself through the wall of the reactor. They're very safe. They're very safe to work with. Which is crazy because you're talking about essentially generating a super efficient sun inside of a little chamber. Yeah. Even hotter than a sun. Right. Yeah. But it's just, again, it just comes down to energy density, It's not just about the temperature, it's about the mass, and these plasmas that are going on inside of these reactors, there's just not a lot of mass there, it's just hydrogen gas. So high temperature, but not a ton of total energy. And that's the real allure of fusion. Really. You're using not a lot of mass it's safe. And if you can get it going, it would be incredibly reliable, providing us with, almost unlimited amounts of energy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's one of the many benefits of fusion versus fission is nuclear fission is about one to three percent of the total mass whatever you're using converted to energy, whereas nuclear fusion is much closer to like ten percent of the total mass gets converted to energy. So there's just so much potential energy in these fusion fuels that we could potentially access. And these fusion fuels are potentially very abundant. You know, it's Like I said, it's deuterium, which is fairly common. tritium is a little bit more complicated, but we can make it. Conveniently, the fusion reactor itself, if you line it with some lithium, the fusion reaction generates neutrons, which when they collide with lithium. Make tritium. So you could get it to almost just, refill itself. Yeah. At least with the tritium and you just keep dumping in more deuterium, which is the easy one to get. And yeah, there you go. You have very cheap and readily available source of fuel. Yeah. I guess the biggest thing to look out for would be us just absorbing our oceans. Yeah. How are our fusion reactors? Fortunately, not something we have to worry about very much. but yeah, but talking about that, really, we don't have to worry about fusion, sucking up our oceans, like you said. It's actually a very clean energy source. it emits really only helium as a byproduct. there is the issue of stray neutrons. that is an issue that deuterium tritium fusion has, which is the deuterium tritium. fusion reaction. A byproduct of that is high energy neutrons. they're neutral, they're neutrons. So they can't be controlled by magnetic fields. And they're really hard to absorb, you need a lot of matter to absorb them. And they can also go on to make components of the reactor radioactive. Because when they hit other elements. they basically turn them into heavier isotopes of themselves, which can be radioactive. The reactor would have to be in a lead cube and the pieces replaced every 10 years. It's much lower levels of radioactivity than what you're going to get in like a fission reactor, but it is a genuine cause for concern. So there is a slight downside. It's not always the case, though, if we ever can achieve helium 3 fusion. that's considered an aneutronic fusion process. And you don't have any of those neutrons flying around, making the sidewalls of the reactor radioactive. Alright, we would just need to figure out how to heat something up to a billion degrees. Yeah, so helium 3 is a lot higher of a temperature. it's also really hard to find. it's not a stable product, so, You know, some of it's on the moon, But it's very out. yeah helium 3 Would be the most ideal fusion reaction if you can make it happen, but it's really questionable if you could ever get enough of it and, if you could actually achieve the temperatures needed to make it happen. something to look forward to if we can achieve, fusion up here in 20 years, right? We can start looking into the future to better advance it in that way. You know, Lucas, when we're talking about nuclear fusion though, I feel like one of the things we have to touch on is what impact do you think this is going to have on society? fusion, I feel like would have, almost unfathomable impacts on society when we talk about. The cost of things and our lives and, what we go through, it's all based off of energy, the energy to transport material, to create things, to raise crops and food and farms and to put up homes and it really is. Everything and our progress as humanity has been based off of not just our energy production, but our consumption as well. So if we are able to produce fusion, which is almost infinitely better than what we currently have with our highest level fission reactors, as far as efficiency and output goes. You can only imagine that the, development of technologies will follow suit as it has. Absolutely. so I don't, of course, know what that future looks like, but it looks like something like you not sitting at a gas pump anymore, right? Paying for, expensive gas. If we could have a fusion reactor built for every major metropolis, there would be no need really for, solar panels or big windmills or, anything. You can really just concentrate all that power that is needed for all the people on earth Areas that don't really disrupt anything. Yeah, because you know one of the biggest issues with fission, which Fission is a viable method of energy production, but people are scared of it. no one wants it in their backyard god Yeah, fusion being so safe being so clean and I think also being held as like this holy grail of technology I think people would be very proud to have that in their backyard, so to speak. Yeah. imagine, you're living in a major city and they're like, we're going to be one of the first cities to be powered entirely by fusion. Actually, near us, in Virginia, for those who don't know, we live in North Carolina, but just across the border in Virginia, MIT, I think is doing, one of the first. commercially viable fusion reactors. Really? Yeah. And are they, what are they hoping to power with it? I don't fully know. I think their main goal is just to achieve net energy output and to be able to sell that at a profit. So, you know, this is a collaboration with a research institute, but I think the whole point of it is to prove that this is doable, they're claiming that they're going to have this done, well before 2030. I think it's like 2026, 2027. So not in 20 years? Yeah, not in 20 years. God, now I've done some light research into this, so I don't want to speak too much on it. just cause I don't want to, you know, talk about something I don't know about, but my understanding is they haven't fully figured out the fusion process they're going to use yet. And they're still settling on a reactor design. And so very likely they're sharing, let's just say overly ambitious timeline of two to three years from now. But you know, there's some venture capitalists putting money into this thing. And, Pretty big name institution putting their name on it. So this is hugely promising. Yeah. I mean, I imagine the first thing that they're going to power will be their university. And it'll be like, wow, this is the first institute powered by fusion technology. I could 100 percent see an institution doing that. I don't know if this one would really work because MIT is not very close to Virginia, I don't think. but, this is obviously just a test venture for them. But I can see that. Imagine, MIT building a fusion reactor and powering their whole campus. Well, if they build one in Virginia and it works, they're going to want one. Yeah, exactly. I, made the joke at the beginning of the episode, Fusion's always 20 years away, but, We've had fusion for a very long time. hydrogen bombs have been around for a while now. Fusion bombs already exist. By their definition, A fusion bomb releases more energy than you put into it. we already have net energy gain from fusion. If you really wanted to, there's nothing stopping you from taking a fusion bomb, putting it in a large tank of water, setting it off, and then harvesting that steam. Would that be efficient? Absolutely not. It would generate energy though. So we can generate fusion energy right now if we really don't want that one. Would you need a large tank? Yes. Would it be safe? No. Would it work? Technically, yes. Right. Oh god. So we have fusion now. If we really wanted it, if we just wanted to have fusion power. We can just set off a couple of fusion bombs. We've got it done. The hard part is making it, a little safer and not so scary. containing it and not killing a bunch of people. Yeah. Not relying on, a world ending weapon to do it. But you are right. Fusion does allow for you to do crazy things. I mean, when you have a fusion economy, energy is no longer a concern. And, that doesn't just mean you don't have a power bill. Because to be honest, you Probably still would have a power bill. It still takes money to build these facilities, to fuel them, to have the manpower to run them. But the energy you get out versus the money you put in is so large that you can just do some crazy energy inefficient things like, you can just make fossil fuels. For example, right now we can manufacture gasoline. It's not really necessarily hard to do, but you always lose a ton of energy when you do it. It could be the case that when you have a fusion economy, you can say, well, There's some very specific use cases for gasoline that maybe battery technology is not catching up. You can just take your fusion power, to make, gasoline. maybe the huge energy loss could even be a tenfold energy loss. Use that for the special use cases you need it for maybe. I don't know, off the top of my head. Can't think of any, my point is this is something you could do. Yeah, absolutely. the uses that we would have for fusion would be. not just for, the problems that we face now, but for conquering even unforeseen problems in the future. but as far as efficiency goes, it would make everything a lot cheaper. Assuming that of course, companies don't want to continue to be greedy. they will, But. if you were to have a fusion reactor instead of your house being powered by coal, like most are, it would be like the difference between having an led light bulb and a, light bulb from like the forties. Absolutely. because it's going to last a lot longer, take a lot less maintenance and it's going to cost you one cent or it would've cost you, 3. You put that into your entire energy bill. you're paying a lot less. Yeah, exactly. And like I said, just the amount of energy you get from this is crazy. Oh yeah. But you know, and since we're talking about using fusion and the future, I think one of the most ambitious uses for fusion technology is going to be in exploring space and traveling the stars. Yeah. that fixes a lot of our issues that we currently face where. If we want to get material into space or mass into space, it costs this much money for this much fuel to be put into the ship to fly it up there. If we can put a fusion reactor on that ship and use that reactor to power thrusters, the weight of the fuel, which is minimal, and then the weight of the reactor is all that we have to worry about. Yeah. and I don't really know about using fusion to get off of earth. It's just going to depend on the reactor design you go with and. how comfortable people are with having that, because some of these fusion reactors that we talk about for space travel are, definitely a not in my backyard technology, if you will, but, but once you're in space fusion, it's, it really is a good technology. And I know on our interstellar travel episode, we briefly, I think, touched on some of the uses for fusion and space travel, but I don't think we went too in depth into it. one of the famous ones, I think is going to be something like a fusion torch drive. Which I know you've seen The Expanse. I know you've read all the books too. Mm-hmm . But that's actually what, they use in the Expanse to power their ships is a fusion torch drive, which it's not really that sophisticated to think about, big picture wise. Anyways, it's actually really complicated and sophisticated to build, and we're unsure even how to do it. But, it's essentially just, if you can imagine like a tomac or a nuclear fusion reactor with a hole in it. that's basically a fusion torch drive. you make all this plasma and you shoot it out at one end. And that's what powers the ships in the Expanse. Granted, they have some magical, you know, Epstein drive that makes it work at levels of efficiency that just aren't feasible. But the core technology is still this fusion torch drive. And, you also have pulse fusion reactions. Those are some things we could do where if you have a fusion pellet. you can take it, put it in a reaction chamber, shine some high energy lasers on it superheat it, it undergoes a fusion reaction and you can propel your ship that way too. Yeah, that would be a little bit more, sporadic, I feel like. That would work similar to lead to the ship design where you would have miniature nuclear bombs. Oh, how did you know where I was going? It's called a Manusa, uh, not a, what's that one? Not a Manusa drive. That's a slightly different Oh, an Orion drive. yeah. But, you know, the original Orion drive was going to use nuclear fission bombs. And you 100 percent can just make an Orion drive with nuclear fusion bombs as well. Hey, that's one of the drives that has been proposed that go up to a high percent of the speed of light. Why not do it in a cleaner way? Yeah, exactly. And the nice thing with the fusion reaction versus the Orion reaction is, A, you can just get more energy per mass fuel carried. So you don't need to carry as many of them or B, you can just keep the same size bomb and just get more thrust per bomb set off, pushing your ship along. Yeah. really that's what it comes down to at the space travel is like how much mass you have on these ships and what you're getting out of them. So I feel like being able to reduce that size by. A lot, right? Because we're replacing uranium or plutonium with, small hydrogen isotopes. I feel like that would be a, a great replacement for that. Absolutely. And fusion doesn't stop there. We can actually go a little further with fusion as a ship drive. There's a couple of other options. one of them is actually, we can do something called antimatter catalyzed fusion. It's almost like a hybrid, maybe like a fancy, Toyota Prius. So instead of, just an anti matter rocket, which we touched on with interstellar travel, that was kind of the Holy grail of travel, right? You know, like 80 percent of the speed of light, really good. what you can do because anti matter is. It's tricky, it's complicated, we don't know how to make it. Even if we can make it, making large amounts of it might prove to be an issue. So with anti matter catalyzed fusion, what you can do is you can mix a small amount of anti matter, and then you can take fusion pellets, shoot them out, them collide with the anti matter in a reaction chamber, and then the anti matter, when it hits the fusion fuel, It'll annihilate as matter anti-matter does But the resulting energy release from that anti-matter, matter reaction, will set off a secondary fusion reaction So if we could master, anti-matter and learn to tame it and then utilize it, we wouldn't even need to put that high amount of energy from lasers or Yeah, exactly. Explosives into the fusion fuel. If we could just start the reaction with two stable bits of matter. Yeah. Just anti-matter or anti-matter. Just throw a little bit.'cause the fusion fuel itself is already matter, so just. throw some antimatter in it. And yeah, that resulting antimatter matter collision sets off the fusion pellet. Interesting. So it's a good hybrid design. It gives you one of the largest exhaust velocities you can get through a fusion reaction. And it's much more efficient on your antimatter because you don't need very much antimatter to set these reactions off. So, you know, nowhere near the hundreds of millions of tons that you would need to power a ship to get to Alpha Centauri. You might only need a few thousand tons of antimatter. Maybe less. Who knows? It depends how fast you want to go. Just imagining the little eco friendly tag on hybrid anti matter engine, anti matter hybrid engine, as it lights up a brand new sun in your solar system on its way to Alpha Centauri, that's awesome. But it essentially still works the same way as like the Ryan drive of, you know, these are going to be pulsed reactions. They're not going to be continuous. So you have to deal with that, but it's not a big deal. Yeah, now with those post reactions, I feel like that would be efficient if you're traveling just in a straight trajectory with that, but, what is it possible for a fusion like in, the expanse for us to have essentially a directed nozzle of plasma to be able to maneuver maybe a little bit better on smaller ships? you can definitely, imagine a gimbling system where this can, um, fire the. the resulting pulse in an off axis depends on the ship, you know, and what kind of technology you're doing. If you have like an O'dryan drive with a pusher plate, maybe you have an ability to angle that plate to give you a vector to help you turn or anything like that. is it possible? Yeah. And it's ultimately going to come down to ship design and how you want to engineer around it. Okay. I was just wondering, because it's such a. Yeah. Where if you're having an explosion of fusion, that's fine because you want it to expand like that. But if you're trying to direct that fusion outside of a nozzle, it could disrupt that. But it, that's just. Something that I've thought about. Yeah. there are more efficient drives too. I mean, you've also got the last option, which is essentially, almost another hybrid drive if you want to call it that. But you can just use a normal fusion reactor, you know, a tokamak, whatever it is, whatever proves to be the most efficient, reactor design. And then you can basically just use that to power an ion drive, which is basically just, a large magnetic accelerator that fires charged particles out of it. Very efficient, these particles can go near the fraction of the speed of light. Slow acceleration, but you can accelerate for a long time. So yeah, you can definitely use hydrogen to power stuff like more traditional drives, like ion drives as well. Yeah. then building something like that where you're not going as fast, but it goes on for a long time is I feel like more important to be able to develop than being able to go really fast for a little bit of time, Thank you all so much for joining us. I hope you enjoyed the episode. please consider following us on your podcast player of choice or leaving a comment, just let us know you're there and, stick around for our author spotlight and thank you all so much.