174: Fusion + Medicine = The Future?

 Hey everybody on today’s episode of Still and I will explain what that pronunciation is about. Still to be determined, we’re gonna be talking about making an impact in energy production. Via fusion and its impact will be felt in medicine unexpectedly. We’re also gonna be talking a little bit about home heating and sharing some other listener feedback.

Hey everybody, as usual, I’m Sean Ferrell. Thank you for tuning in with Still To be Determined, I am a writer. I write some sci-fi, I write some stuff for kids. Like recently released the Sinister Secrets of Singe, which is a middle grade adventure book. I hope everybody will check out, and I’m just generally curious as well about technology and its impact on our lives.

And luckily for me, my younger brother is that Matt of undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at technology and its impact on our lives. What a weird coincidence. It’s so strange. Matt, how are you doing today?

I’m doing great. It’s, it’s a good weekend. How about you? So far it’s been kind of a mixed bag.

This is, we’re recording this over, what is the July 4th weekend, which is of course, here in the States a big time for, you know, if Memorial Day at the end of May is the kickoff of summer. This weekend is the heart of summer where yeah, people take time off, people travel, people go to the beach.

Unfortunately for me, I dunno if it’s hit Matt in quite the same way. I don’t think it has. The wildfires in Canada are still spewing smoke. Yep. And it is making its way in kind of large. Swaths that move across the US and this most recent one settled into the city yesterday. So yesterday was kind of a rough day for me as I was walking around with a mask.

It was, uh, flashback to pandemic days, but it’s the inverse. I was. Outside with a mask hoping to get inside where I could take my mask off. So, and the impact was obvious as I was walking around with my partner, she did not have the same issue I did. But as we were outside for more than just a couple of minutes, I started to get asthmatic.

Yeah. And so it’s uh, one of those clear indicators, climate change, the impact of water scarcity. Drying out environments, wildfires that are burning out of control, air quality, like all of these things are just constantly being thrown at us right now. Yeah. And it was a real lived experience of it. So yeah, we we’re getting a glancing blow of that smoke here in, uh, new England, but, It is bad enough.

I went for a walk the other day. It was like, I gotta get outside and just go for a walk. And about halfway in the walk I was like, why am I getting asthmatic? Yeah. That’s when I looked at my app and it was like, oh, there’s an air quality warning that that’s what’s going on.

Back when New York was the hotspot of bad air quality, which was several weeks ago, it would’ve, yeah.

You know, it was in June. Um, the sky here, you could just see it. It. It was orange. We, the sky was orange. Yeah. Looking out. I have a day job where I work in an office building. I’m on the sixth floor and looking across Manhattan, you couldn’t see much further than half a block before. Wow. The buildings would become obscured and it, and they were saying, oh, the air quality is as bad as it was back in the 1960s.

And I’m like, this is what it was like in the 1960s. Holy crap. That’s just nightmarish. It was like something outta Blade Runner. It has not been like that. In the past couple of days, and that’s, that’s where it’s interestingly scary. Because it just looks sort of summer hazy. It doesn’t look like there’s bad error around you, but I downloaded.

And then for anybody in the US who’s interested in having something on hand to help them with this, the E P A actually has an app, and it’s called AIRNOW. One Word, A I R N O W. It’s available on the Apple App Store. It’s also, I think they have an Android version. Yeah. It is a very handy tool. It is kind of a more detailed permutation of what the inherent weather app on an iPhone looks like.

It gives you an air quality gauge from green through yellow, orange, red, and beyond into like. Do not go outside sort of levels of warning. It gives you a particulate matter reading and it gives you a forecast. I found it very helpful because it’s more that’s great detailed and it’s more up to date than the weather app.

And what I was doing was just when I’m planning on leaving the house, I give it a quick glance and like, today is better than yesterday, so I’m gonna be heading out later today. And, and I feel more confident in being able to manage it today than I, than I did yesterday. But it really, uh, kind of feeds into, I mean, this is.

Our initial, you know, Hey, how you doing? Intro to the episode. But it really is kind of an opportunity to point out this is the lived experience of the kinds of things that Matt’s main channel and this channel are both about, which is there are changes in our lives that are necessary. There are some things that are exciting breakthroughs that we’re excited about just because of the sci-fi at all.

There are other things that we’re excited about because of what it could mean in its daily impact on our lives, in the form of less reliance on burning. Fossil fuels, which is a great thing in and of itself. A more sustainable, more affordable future is a great thing. But then there’s the side of it, which is this, which is we have things happening in our environment and it’s happening globally, which are going to have very real health impacts on us.

And as somebody who does not have a history of explicit asthma, but does have a background that makes me sensitive to it. Having the experience of going outside and in just a couple of minutes realizing I’m coughing, I can’t breathe and I need to get a mask on, is a kind of like, this is it, this is what, this is what we’re talking about on a weekly basis.

Yep. How unfortunate how the environment around us is changing and what we can do to mitigate that and make it better. So yeah, it’s, it’s unfortunate. So, onto our discussion, which we usually rely on your feedback, we appreciate your dropping into the comments and. In future days, I think people may notice a slight shift.

And Matt, you may be among those who notices this slight shift because this is news not only to you the listener, but to Matt, my brother. I’m going to be trying something new for the first next few weeks, and you can let me know in the comments if you think it’s a good model or not. What we’ve done in the past.

We’ve had a conversation about Matt’s most recent episode. Mm-hmm. I want to kind of broaden that window and I wanna revisit not just Matt’s most recent episode, but also maybe some of his previous ones before that, and maybe previous episodes of ours before that to create more of a wide ranging scope of topics.

Yeah. So let me know in the comments. Do you like the, the model of it being narrowly focused on one episode, or do you like being able to have a little smattering of a little of several episodes and we will continue to revisit? So, Matt’s most recent episode this week, we’ll talk a little bit about today.

I plan on revisiting it again next week and maybe the week beyond, depending on whether there are new comments in. Those videos, I’m trying to view it as some of the videos get lots of response very quickly. Yeah. Some of them, it’s spread out over several weeks and I don’t wanna lose those discussion points just because.

Somebody didn’t revisit his episode the first week, but they dropped in the second or third. So that’s my goal. So from the most previous episode of this podcast from episode 1 73 in which we discussed radiant heating, there was a comment recently from Glenn who dropped into, into share a little anecdote on the radiant heating front.

I grew up in a house he writes that had radiant heating. It was great. You could always walk around in the winter barefoot. But the drawbacks were you couldn’t use carpet because you were just insulating it. We always sat on the floor in the winter and hardly used the furniture. My mom wasn’t happy some of the time about it.

The boiler was next to the bathroom and the pipes came out first at the toilet on this old system with four boys in the morning jumping around with hot feet trying to use the bathroom. He did not make for a happy mother. It’s an interesting aspect. Of radiant heating. And I also think it’s interesting, Glen writes, I grew up in a house that had radiant heating.

I imagine the radiant heating models now are probably a lot more efficient than what Glen is describing. He’s literally describing a hotspot because it was too close to the boiler. So I imagine there have been changes in how the, how the piping. Routes from nearest the boiler further into the house, creating more even heating throughout.

And I wanted to ask you, in your research, have you seen how there have been those kinds of updates? Oh yeah. What about the carpeting issue? There’s

definitely, there’s zoning issues. It sounds like there’s a zoning issue. The way that they built it out was probably not the best way, but like you can have basically separate piping networks that go to different rooms and different zones of the house, so you wouldn’t end up getting a hotspot in one room that you can’t control because you need it warmer in another room.

Right. Those kind of issues can be mitigated just with a, a good design of the, the HVAC system. So it sounds like there was probably a, um, poorly executed radiant system in his house. Yeah. Which shows. How important a good mechanical engineer is in designing your heating system and on, on the carpet side.

What was the question about the, what was the point about the, the carpet? You said you

couldn’t use carpets because you’d just be insulating the floor and keeping the heat from being able to enter the, the room. And I imagine that is an ongoing yes issue that you would not be able to carpet most of your, your home if you were using radient flooring.

You can carpet, but yes, it is an insulating layer. So ideally you don’t wanna do wall to wall carpeting. You could have an area rug. But again, you’re kind of adding an insulation layer right? To wherever the heating is. So there’s, there’s downsides to radiant floor heating, easily work. You can work around them.

It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not like a showstopper, but it’s something you have to be aware of for sure. Yeah.

And also, you know, to be sure there are reasons why people put carpeting down. People often put carpeting down because, because it’s cold, the floor will be cold, so you won’t have that issue. And the other part of it is, I know from my own experience, carpeting.

Adds to allergens in the home, and I know there’s been a trend lately of moving away from carpeting, so, yep. It’s not to say that carpeting is bad, or anybody who uses carpeting as a fool, although I do think that personally, no, I don’t. It’s just, it’s another element of this that kind of plays into most recent home design, which seems to be hardwood floors, clear floors are preferable, so, yep.

There was also this from John Doe, which is why I introduced our episode of Still To Be Determined So clearly John Doe wrote, ah, these auto-generated subtitles on today’s episode of Stool to Be Determined.

That’s for any of our, that’s completely different show. Absolutely. It sounds like we’re talking about number two.

It’s it’s, it’s our number two podcast. Yes. And I guess now’s the best time to drop news about that. Oh, Sean,

if anybody wonders about the Bad Dad jokes and the puns that I sometimes work into my undecided episodes.

You just got a good example of it there. It runs in the family. Yes,

it does. Boy, and the thing about the bad dad jokes in our family is they’re actually bad mom jokes. They’re bad mom jokes, bad mom jokes. So yes, dad is usually sitting in the background just being like, I wouldn’t have gone that direction, but, So in Matt’s most recent episode, which is how nuclear fusion can benefit us today, which dropped on June 27th, 2023.

This was of course his video talking about how a smaller scale fusion research reactor, and I won’t call it a fusion reactor cuz that’s, it’s not a full blown fusion reactor. It is doing a fusion scale up. Am I correct in that it’s getting well, like it’s, it’s getting fusion fusion reaction ramping up, but it’s not reaching like self-sustainable?

No, no, no, no. They’re not going for like the, uh, ignition point. They’re not going for those high level temperatures. You could actually say that this is not cold fusion do not take, what I’m about to say is it’s cold fusion, but it’s a much lower temperature that they can. Get this reaction at, so it’s like, right, you can get fusion very easily, but getting that ignition point is where it’s like crazy hard.

Right. And that’s, that was just recently achieved this past year, so it’s like that’s not what they’re going for. It’s not the ex ignition point.

Right. So it’s this small scale fusion reaction is mm-hmm. Being developed with an eye toward medical application, so this is potentially going to open up for treatments using radiation such as those that are used in various forms of cancer.

Yep. It would potentially make it more easily available. In hospitals around the world as opposed to our current model, which is hospitals have to be closer to a much larger mm-hmm. Level of fusion reactor. The scale of the fusion reactors that were the ones most used now, it looked like it was larger than a football field.

I mean, it, it looked enormous.

It, it, it depends. Some of them are not quite that large, but the one that I showed in that video from Tom Scott, it’s a, it’s a major facility. It is, it’s a, it’s like a small office park. It’s a huge building that’s, you know, tens of thousands of square feet that are needed for this machine to do what it needs to do to get, reach the, the levels of production that it needs for the types of radioactive medical isotopes that they’re making.

It’s kind of shocking. It’s like, I didn’t know about any of this, like how. Few of these there are around the world you’re talking about. It’s like in thousands for. Billions of people on the planet. So it’s like there is a limited resource here for being able to make these materials, which means that there’s not equitable access.

Yeah. To the medical care that you might need if you have some form of cancer that needs that kind of treatment. It’s

an indication of why you may know or hear of people who say, I have to travel to, yeah. Such location for medical treatment. And that of course becomes then the barrier. Some people just simply are not going to be able to do that.

And then you end up with those people who receive lesser treatment or maybe no treatment for certain types of cancer, and that’s patently unfair. And this, so this becomes then an ethical argument to say, right, this kind of research and this kind of development. And so you moved away from the large scale facility in some cases, like the one that was shown in the video into a fusion reactor that.

For all intents and purposes look like you were in a janitor’s closet. Yes. Not one window in that little tiny room. No. It was just this weird device that had a bunch of bolts with numbers literally written in Sharpie. I loved it’s, it’s the test device description of like, it’s the test to do this.

Because when I started doing this, I did not realize how often I would be removing bolts. It was just such a, Dry British response. So funny response to like, you’d be surprised how often I’m doing bolts. Yeah. Um, but the scale of size, I, I was dumbfounded by how big the or small this research facility actually was.

Yeah, this is their, their initial research facility where they’re kind of proving out the basic concept and sh Right. And using as a showpiece to show people what they can do. And they’re already working on trying to lay the groundwork for their next, like step up facility, which they’re gonna be, be building.

Right where they’re located, um, in, in England, they’re gonna be building another facility where it’s gonna have, imagine that one, they call them heads. So that one thing we were looking at is one head. Now imagine a system that has five heads kind of in a circle that are all kind of like working together.

It can get more power, get higher levels of production. That’s what they’re gonna be building next, and they already have a lot of interest from. They’re, they’re talking to the UKAEA, which the Atomic Energy Authority. They’re talking to a bunch of other businesses and investors already that there are interested in having systems that go from five heads up to more.

Yeah. But it’s, it all depends on how much production, like what kinda levels they need to hit to produce whatever that person or company needs scaled this very easily and because of the multi-state fusion. Breakthrough they’ve had, they can achieve orders of magnitude more production than previous. It’s called IEC Fusion.

They’re hitting IEC, they can hit levels of production much higher than the older systems could ever hit. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a definite breakthrough. It’s a, it’s kind of a, a game changer. As far as what they, what they’re able to do, what

you were just talking about meshes nicely with the next comment I wanted to share, which was from the Void Singer who wrote for nuclear medicine.

This is a huge game changer that can move the options available at limited university scale facilities out to roughly any large city. There’s also a similar but more limited potential spread for university research. Moving to smaller, less central campuses. Point two megawatts is nothing to sneeze at for requirements, but it’s vastly more budgetable than current standards and requirements in all metrics from area to support to of course, cash.

So jumping off of that, and you’ve already touched on some of this, are there research teams, schools or companies that you would bet would jump onto smaller scale reactors like

this? Oh yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. This is, it’s interesting because what th this group is doing, there’s lattice confinement has kind of a checkered past.

There’s a lot of controversy around it, even though it’s been. It was developed by nasa, kind of proven by nasa. NASA’s still working with lattice confinement for space exploration missions to like Jupiter, things like that. There’s still a lot of controversy around it, so whenever you, you mention the lattice confinement fusion within the fusion industry, it’s like you kind of get an eye roll, kind of like, oh, here we go again.

But it’s like what they’re doing is so unique and different and the way it’s combining these two reactions at once with the same amount of energy input. I was finding it interesting when we were talk at the UKAEA, I was actually there with them and we were having lunch and they were describing what they were doing to a couple of people at the table, and there wasn’t hesitation on those people’s faces, but as they were describing exactly what they were doing, you could see the light bulb go off and then go.

Oh, oh, that’s what you’re doing. And they suddenly, we like kinda lean in and get very interested. Mm. That’s gonna happen at universities around the, the, the world. It’s like once they start to kind of show what they’re doing, describe exactly what their stuff is doing, there’s gonna be a lot of interest from research facilities being like, this would be perfect for us.

Cause it uses far less energy and we can do our research and, you know, whatever they need. Yeah. They’ll be able to potentially do with this. So there’s a lot of potential here. I mean, I, it’s on my videos. I get accused of using the word game changer or breakthrough too much. Yeah. This is not, this is not overusing that this is a game changer.

This changes the dynamics a lot. It’s a, it’s an impressive thing that they’ve

built. Yeah. And it’s one of, and this leads into the next conversation I wanted to have, which is going into the way back machine. So this is from Matt’s video about rail gun experimentation, which again, it was the form of fusion.

Mm-hmm. So this is from a couple of weeks ago and there was a comment from Hal 9,000 who wrote, I’m not gonna open the pod bay doors. No, he did not write that. Hal 9,000 wrote Good proof of concept. On the rail gun fusion experiment, this is useless for industrial scale electrical potential production.

However, cold fission and water height potential is still the best. I’m curious about these two that are mentioned. I am not familiar with water height potential, neither I Do you recognize what that means? No. So, Let’s lean into the cold fission statement then. So cold fission, Hal is arguing is the better option between cold fission and these fusion concepts.

Where do you see them compared to each other? Neck and neck. Fusion’s actually out ahead, but everybody’s denying it because it’s always been 30 years away.

I would, I would argue that they’re both, they’re both hotly contested, just like they’re very controversial. It’s like, depends on who you ask.

Somebody’s gonna say, never gonna happen. Some people will say, it’s always gonna be 30 years away, not my lifetime, 200 years away. You’re never gonna get a consensus about any of this. It’s like, th there’s th That’s the kind of the problem with talking about things like fusion. No matter what you’re talking about, it’s still in that theoretical research phase, and it’s going so slowly that I think people are losing sight of how much advancement’s actually happening with our understanding about these different technologies.

So I’m not gonna place a bet on like, which one’s gonna win? Which one’s closer? I, I’m not even gonna go there. It’s just a matter of, I think for all of us on the outside looking in, we need to take a. Collective breath and realize if you look at the past 50, 70 years of research that’s been done, the amount of understanding we have today is so much further than where we were 50 years ago.

And what’s happened just in the past decade. It’s astonishing and that, that it’s like a hockey stick understanding here. It’s like it’s increasing. So it’s to me, inevitable that some of these things are going to happen. It’s just a matter of when, and I would not even want to hazard a guess. Mm-hmm. I would, and maybe this is a topic for your main channel for a future video, and we’ve talked about this before, which is taking historical.

Moments? Mm-hmm. As a comparison point, and taking a look at what the public perception about that thing was before it became a reality, and how quickly then something got adopted. My curiosity is, are we talking about these alternative energy methods, and I’m talking about the ones that have always been 30 years away, cold fission Fusion, like.

Are we talking about these right now in the way that newspaper editorials talked about flight, right before the Wright brothers flew at

Kitty? Well, even the, even the Wright brothers said, I don’t think we’re ever gonna be able to make flight work. One of ’em even said that like, we’re not gonna be able to land.

They got it to work. So it’s like, it’s like you don’t know what you don’t know until suddenly you know it and you understand it. So it’s like, I think anybody, I’m gonna cast some shade here. Anybody that says it’s never going to happen, Yeah. Those words are not gonna age well. Yeah. I would never say never, but it’s just a matter of when it’s, when are we gonna actually figure it out, get it working in a way that we expect, because the theory, the theory’s actually been proven now it’s like we know how to do it.

It’s just how can we get it doing it? It’s how can we get to do it in an energy efficient way? Right. That’s the challenge at the moment.

There’s knowing it can be done. Theoretically. There is. Then I. Having the power to do it. Yeah. Having the funds to do it and doing all of that with a good end result in mind.

Like doing it just to do it may not be the best reason to do it, but doing it because it could lead to benefits for, well humanity moving forward may be the better option. Well think about, think about some, a lot of the advances that we see happen in our lifetime. Like you hear about new thing here and then 10, 15 years later, it’s a reality, right?

So we see it happen in front of our eyes. Fusion is a generational. Experiment. It’s like it’s been going on so long that people had started it and then they died and the next generation picked it up and is still doing it. And it’s like, it’s a generational understanding, so it’s a different timescale. So we kind of have to understand that we have to give it the space to that it is go, it is advancing quickly.

It really is. But it’s an a huge challenge. Like yeah. You wanna talk about a physics and engineering challenge? This is like something that we’ve never done. So it’s like once we get to the point of understanding it’s gonna revolutionize everything, but it’s just a matter of how long will it take us to get there?

Let us know what you think about all of this. There’s a lot of stuff to talk about, and I’m looking forward to revisiting this again in the future. Jump into the comments. They do drive the content of the show and they also help Matt drive the content of his main channel undecided with Matt Ferrell, which is of course our mothership.

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