Inside a Working Fusion Reactor

Video Transcript

I got a video. I got a video of Triala Energy. Only 4,000 views. October 14th, 2025. TAE Technologies Fusion Lab Tour. So, there's a lot of noobs out there, a lot of primitives. They think that Trialpha Energy hasn't built anything. They think that Triala Energy hasn't done anything. We're here to tell them trial energy has whole YouTube videos showing off their literal reactor that they've built where they've done all of this >> confine it and control it and this is really the art of doing plasma science. So TA uh approach is this very unique type of plasma configuration called field reverse configuration or FRC. So what really is it's about the shape of the plasma. So other devices like tokats they have like a donut shaped plasma. In our device the F FRC is more of a small ring that is spinning and as it spins it creates it own magnetic field and then it selforganizes similarly to a tornado that kind of self-organizes out of thin air. So you can imagine that to get this special type of plasma the FRC you need very special conditions the same way as a tornado does. Um, >> so the big secret of this F FRC stuff now you're seeing like you have to make a tornado like all of a sudden you just start spinning your your lasers, right? And they start spinning and all of a sudden boom, plasma just appears and it be creates this stable form and you would look at you go, "Oh, that's weird. Why is that happening? It's too stable. It shouldn't be so stable." The reason why they're so stable is because spacetime is not empty. Because space is not an empty vacuum. The same reason why the atom is stable. Why is the atom stable? What did I say at the beginning chat? Why is the atom stable even though the electron is zipping around it going super speed? Because spacetime is a medium of energy and the electron is absorbing that energy. So plasma is just a bunch of electrons. You can imagine plasma as a giant atom, a sea of negative and positive charges. So if you start to spin it up, you can see these self-organizing properties begin to occur because it's abusing the fact that energy is now being exchanged with the zero point energy with the medium itself. That's my rationale, my explanation for why this self-organization and this longlasting stability exists when it shouldn't. Just like with a smoke ring, unlike some other fusion devices you may have seen, you might notice that Norm's external magnet coils are simple, planer rings spaced along the confinement vessel, like a giant solenoid. This makes the engine of TA's reactors much simpler than that of the donut shaped reactors like Tokamax accelerators. Furthermore, our FRC plasma is simple and stable enough to achieve what we call high beta, which basically means that a tokamac would need 10 times stronger magnets to contain the same plasma pressure that norm does. This high beta or high relative pressure of the plasma is one of the unique characteristics of TA's configuration that enables the path to advanced fusion fuel cycles beyond dutarium and tridium. The ultimate goal of our company is to use TV11 which is neutronic and therefore much more friendly uh to use from a materials and regulatory standpoint. >> So there you go. I mean that was basically like an Ashen Forbes live stream right there. High beta value. He says high beta value 10 times higher than tokamax. Beta value close to one. This is the pressure magnetic field strength compared to the plasma pressure. This allows for much higher temperatures. This is what allows for boron 11 become a possibility. So if you are not doing field reverse configuration, you have no chance. Literally no chance right from the start. Just right from the physics right from the start, you are never getting to port proton boron 11 fusion using a tokamac. And that's what he's laying out right here is that field reverse configuration. The betas on Tokamax is only 10% 0.1 compared to almost 100% beta with field reverse configuration. It's no comparison. So when people ask me why are you interested in TAE? Why are you interested in Helium? Because they're the ones who are going to make it work in the long run and everybody else is going to switch to field reverse configuration. One consequence of our high beta linear confinement system is that we have open magnetic field lines that carry our plasma leakage out the ends of the confinement vessel. >> Ready guys? Get ready for it. You're about to get the yatsi of the night. So what do you just say there? He says, "Our design is simpler. Our design is a linear design. So we just have these lines. The exhaust goes out the axial jets just like with the orbs do. We got these lines coming out of it. So here at each end of the confinement vessel, we use a couple of stronger magnets to pinch the magnetic field down through this smaller vessel. We can pinch it even stronger now that we don't need to shoot plasma through it from the formation sections. That pinching of the field reflects a lot of the leaky plasma back into the combinement vessel. And because it reflects plasma like that, the effect is known as a magnetic mirror. The effect is known as a magnetic mirror, chat. When you're right, you're right. You just got to love it. Literally using magnetic mirror concept. And we figured it out that you can build your ring structure of superconducting magnets and the plasma is going to flow through it like this. And what happens here is when this plasma flows, it goes back out the other way. And the problem is it wants to go out through the exit. But what happens? We make these cusps. We make these squeezed magnetic fields on the ends. And what happens is this causes the electrons to reverse course. This causes the particles to reverse course. So they want to shoot out and they go, "Nope, nope. I'm going to come back." Whoop! And so now it creates this structure where there's just going back and forth in the middle of our fusion reactor where they can't escape even though there's just openings. There's openings on either side, but they can't escape. They're trapped in the middle in our magnetic mirror. A little bit of real leakage passes through the mirror and comes out the other end. And that's like the exhaust of our fusion reactors. Since our exhaust comes out the ends, we have a limited space to expand it and cool it off before it hits metal. That happens in this arbitrarily big vessel here, which we call a diverter. This neutral beam injector, this is the thing that now they don't need the ends anymore. They just use four or eight of these, four or eight of these big things that are like surrounding the core and they're just shooting lasers in there. Almost like they're little knits like you're knitting something, right? You're just shooting these laser and then you're just keeping this F FRC in the middle going and we're extracting energy from that. That's how this concept works. and the neutralization chamber which is this silver larger can. Inside the ion source there are four arc plasma generators that provide a plasma for which the ions uh that make up the neutral beam come from. After the ion beam is formed it travels into the neutralization tank where there's a gas chamber. Those ions interact with the slowmoving gas stripping away electrons from that gas neutralizing the ions. And this process is very efficient. Most of the ions are conver converted into neutrals that continues to travel through a vacuum duct into the confinement vessel and into the center of the field reverse configuration plasma. >> So you can see this device is pretty big, but it's not huge, right? Like this can fit inside of a pretty small warehouse. And if you remove the two ends from it, then it really can. Now this laser is like as big as this guy is. So you got some pretty serious hardware here. This isn't the kind of situation where you just roll up and you're like, "Hey, I'm building a fusion company." People are like, "Hey, Ashton, why don't you build a fusion reactor?" I'm like, "Do you see how much work goes into this?" Like, this is a large amount of work that's going on here. So, once again though, let me point this out. There's only a couple companies that even have any fusion reactors like this at all. And Trump just bought one of them. In fact, he bought this one, the the one we're actually looking at right now. And as far as I can tell, what Helion Fusion is doing is the exact same thing. Like exact same thing. Field reverse configuration is basically just got one setup. Now there's probably some minor differences in how they engineered it, but it's the basic same idea. Beam injection starts with a initial seed plasma. That's plasma is created by plasma generators on either end of the device with biased electrodes and magnetic field coils along the axis of the machine. Uh all here in red. The eight neutral beam systems then provide the neutral particles that interact with that seed plasma. As they are ionized and create fast ions, the they encircle that seed plasma, the confinement allows the fast ion population to increase. As that fast ion population increases, the current generates a magnetic field. The superposition of that generated magnetic field from fast ions and the generated field by the coils creates a closed field line system. Thus, you've created a field reverse configuration plasma. >> The first guy was talking about open field lines. Open field lines meaning that we've got field lines are axial jets where things can escape. And we said we built our magnetic mirror, our uh to confine that, right? That's what we did. Now, what he's saying is that we are shooting our neutral beams into our confinement mechanism. And what's happening is a structure is being formed. A plasma structure begins to form in the middle with closed magnetic field lines. This is important to understand. The closed magnetic field lines mean that the magnetic fields are completely encased like a smoke ring or like the earth. This means that there isn't that there's an actual structure there that you could look at on the inside. What would we call that that structure? I would call it a plasmoid. You've created a plasmoid in the center of that. Apparently, now we're calling it field reverse configuration. There you go. >> Beam injection is one of the most essential tools in magnetic confinement fusion. It works by launching beams of fast neutral particles directly into the center of the plasma. These particles bring both energy and fuel into the plasma, helping sustain the plasma by heating and feeding it. We thus created it. Here's the visual of that. If you missed the visual he was talking about, here's the visual of how it's done. You shoot these laser beams. You can see how it just spins up this plasma in the center of it. And then that plasma in the center now is our stabilized plasmoid. So this is a completely different way of doing it than what the hot fusion people are doing. To clarify the difference here, cold fusion is more of a concept of understanding how the lattice structure of metal and water interact and we pulse a current through it. we can produce excess energy. Hot fusion generally refers to tokamax or stellarators which are really just trying to achieve uh dutyium tridium fusion. What we're looking at here is a completely different configuration, completely different approach using the same underlying core concepts and physics that we're calling field reverse configuration. And in this configuration, we can achieve this high beta value. And they're shooting for the best possible fusion fuel, the one that nobody thinks is possible. Obviously, somebody thinks it's possible because they just spent six billion dollars on it. Right. Okay. >> Sustain neutral beam fast ions were used in a field reverse configuration plasma to stabilize the plasma. the increased velocity of the particles have larger orbits compared to the thermal particles and so their orbits can average over all the small perturbations and turbulence which stabilizes the MHC activity. Now the population of neutral beam pass ions is so large it actually reverses the magnetic field which is key to forming one of these types of plasmas. Norman the first iteration of C2W created two closed magnetic field line plasmas at either ends of the device and accelerated them towards each other. they would form a much larger F FRC plasma in the middle. Now we simply create the closed field line plasmids with the neutribe beam injection significantly reducing the complexity of our reactor. >> The way this worked originally we made two plasma tooids and we shot them at each other and then they would mix in the middle and they would create one new F FRC and then we would shoot our neutral beams injected and keep it going. He said now we don't need that anymore. Now just the neutral beam injectors can create the F FRC and then keep it going as well. I mean, that's huge to me. To me, that kind of breakthrough tells you that these guys know the answer, and they're dripping the information publicly over periods of time, and now they've just got the investment they need to go build a giant reactor. I'm in >> supply systems that support our fusion experiments. Over a hundred of these cabinets populate our machine hall, delivering power to our neutral beams, biasing system, plasma guns, and various other high power systems. Since the power feed we get from the grid is only about a megawatt. We must charge these supplies over the course of several minutes in order to reach the energy levels necessary for a plasma shot. When fully charged, some of these systems can achieve current on the order of 100,000 amps at potentials of in the tens of thousands of volts. To put that in perspective, most cell phone chargers charge at approximately 5 to 12 volts and only put out about 1 or two amps of current. The distinguished expertise that we have developed in energy storage and delivery forms the basis of our power solution subsidiary, which is adapting these systems to use in EVs, homes, and businesses. As one might expect, discharging such vast amounts of energy in just fractions of a second generates significant heat. Despite the massive thermal loads, we managed to keep these power supplies cooled to just 60° C or about 140° F. Our on-site cooling system chills and delivers water on demand to these systems as well as the neutral beams, diagnostic lasers, and other systems that need it. A programmable logic controller or PLC orchestrates. >> Okay, so you guys probably this probably going over your guys's head. It's going over some of my head. This sounds very similar to what uh helium fusion is doing. So helium's like we have to have all these batteries because we have to have all this energy and we have to discharge this energy into our plasmas and then we have to recharge those batteries right away using those plasmas. Right? So we have to have a very complex system for charging the batteries up and keeping them charged and distributing the energy and not losing that energy in terms of waste heat. That's what I wanted to figure out for this. and she just said we have to have this controller and Helium Fusion was talking about using either a centralized or a decentralized controlling system to control all these batteries. The other thing this reminds me of is you guys remember that guy that made the plasma gun? This dude makes this plasma cannon. He's got a tower of dis of capacitors that he bought. Oh, that familiar shock wave. I just hope the neighbors aren't too upset. That's essentially what they're doing here. That's essentially what they're doing here. But they're doing a more complex, more scientific, you know, not just doing it for the funsies, right? Kind of situation. >> So many pumps, valves, and sensors needed to achieve adequate cooling of our machine. This PLC also monitors for leaks and alerts us to any issues that may arise. A second PLC manages a combination of convection and hot cathode ion gauges which determine the pressure within our many vacuum vessels. This PLC also controls a system of roughing backing and turbo molecular pumps which are used to maintain ultra high vacuum. Each turbo pump has a pumping rate of about a cubic meter per second. These pumps can pull enough air out of our machine and to create an environment that is a trillion times lower in pressure than that of our atmosphere. >> One more thing I want to say here on this. I mean this is where you want to be investing, right? Let's just be honest. I've I've spoken to people even like you know ENG8 which I thought was pretty impressive. ENG8 stuff pretty impressive. They got nothing on these guys. I mean these guys the from a funding perspective is just no comparison. These people have had billions of dollars. They've got this is like the nicest facility I've ever seen. They've got a huge fusion reactor. They've got all their energy sides set up. This is exactly where you would expect a company be where you're now saying, "Okay, now I want to sign a deal. Now I want to sign a deal and start building commercial fusion reactors for people. This is the company that's ready for it in my opinion. >> That's about the same pressure as an outer space between the Earth and our moon. A third PLC monitors the status of each power supply system, opening and closing safety contacttors or switches as needed to protect the system and our personnel. These PLC's work in tandem with our machine control system, which takes advantage of highly specialized equipment that can track key metrics like voltage, current, and temperature at rates of up to 500,000 samples per second and issue triggers on a scale of 1 millionth of a second. This is a 100 thousand times faster than the blink of an eye. Field programmable gate arrays or FPGAs allow us to process many bits of data in parallel and reconfigure our hardware to suit the needs of our ever evolving experiments. With that, let me show you into our control room, the heart of our fusion. About a dozen people populate. >> Yeah. So, I mean, look at this thing. I mean, look at this facility we got set up here. This does not look like a miss to me, right? This doesn't look like smoking mirrors. This looks like a real They got something really going on here. We know the science and the physics is real. And you can see their massive device setup,