Curiosity Daily

Fusion: Homeward Bound, The Last Light Show, Burnout Blues

Episode Summary

Today, you’ll learn about how the next step in nuclear fusion is actually a real estate question, how the death of our sun would be a beautiful thing to see if we were around to witness it, and how an athlete’s desire for perfection can lead to them burning out with their sport altogether.

Episode Notes

Today, you’ll learn about how the next step in nuclear fusion is actually a real estate question, how the death of our sun would be a beautiful thing to see if we were around to witness it, and how an athlete’s desire for perfection can lead to them burning out with their sport altogether.

Nuclear plants near the nuclear family.

 

A new take on sun flares.

Perfection can be dangerous.

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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/fusion-homeward-bound-the-last-light-show-burnout-blues

Episode Transcription

[SFX: Intro Music]

NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.

 

CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back! 

NATE: Today, you’ll learn about how the next step in nuclear fusion is actually a real estate question, how the death of our sun would be a beautiful thing to see if we were around to witness it, and how an athlete’s desire for perfection can lead to them burning out with their sport altogether.

CALLI: Without further adieu, let’s satisfy some curiosity!

[SFX: Whoosh]

NATE: Calli, remember a few weeks back when I brought in those donuts to show the shape of a common fusion reactor? 

CALLI: How could I forget, you told me you brought donuts and then told me they were food-free donuts. Meanwhile, I’m not really a donut person...

NATE: I do love bringing a visual aid to a podcast recording. And today’s is a map! Take a look at this map of the UK. Do you see any places, a little less than half a mile square, with good access to the power grid and room to build in a few layers of safety in case a fusion reaction should go wrong?

CALLI: So what’s this about ... maybe ... they’re looking for a home for that new fusion reactor?

NATE: That's right. UK energy developers are working on choosing a location for what they believe will be the world’s first fusion reactor. They’re expecting it won’t go live for more than a decade but hope that picking a location now will help them get ahead of future developmental and regulatory hang ups.

CALLI: Can you give me a bit of a recap on what that fusion reactor will look like?

 

NATE: I sure can, let's revisit the last time we talked about this. Hit the rewind button!

[SFX: Rewind Sound]

NATE: Nuclear power plants around the world generate energy using a process called fission. This story is about another type of nuclear reaction… fusion. The two are basically opposites. Fission tears the atoms apart… Fusion smashes them together. There was a recent breakthrough at the Joint European Torus, or JET… a fusion research facility in the UK. Powering JET’s experiments in nuclear fusion is one of those Tokamak nuclear reactors. That fun word… Tokamak… means “torus-shaped chamber with magnetic field.” Now, Torus is geometry speak for ...?

CALLI: A reliable midsize sedan?

NATE: That’s a T-A-U Taurus… This is a T-O Torus. It’s the geometry term for donut. The visual aid helps, no? Little Tokamak donuts.

CALLI: Right, donut shaped machines smashing atoms together to create energy generating reactions. 

NATE: Yep! Developers are hoping to break ground in 2030 for the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, a tokamak fusion reactor that these developers think could be the first in the world to go live some time before 2040.

CALLI: So, where are they looking? 

NATE: Oh man, Calli, our English listeners might not love me after this but I’ll do my best: Ardeer, North Ayrshire; Moorside, Cumbria; Goole, East Yorkshire; West Burton, Nottinghamshire and Severn Edge in Gloucestershire.

CALLI: Okay, regardless of how the audience feels, I think you did great! So, wait, why does site selection matter so much?

NATE: Well just like with fission reactors, the neighbors will want to know everything is safe. But fusion reactor safety is a whole new field, and fusion involves temperatures in excess of millions of degrees. A potential meltdown could release tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that wouldn't just cause radioactive damage itself, it’d bond to other things as well. 

CALLI: Oh man, if I was a neighbor, I’d want to be sure they had it all worked out. 

NATE: Totally, and that's why they’re starting this process now. There is going to be a lot of red tape to get through, and a lot of safety concerns to deal with, so it's better to do it now while there is time to address concerns and alleviate public fears. 

CALLI: So, I have to ask, why is this a big deal? I don't tell people when I’m looking for a new apartment, I tell them when I found a new apartment. 

NATE: Well it just means that we are still humming along on our journey to have feasible fusion in the not-so-distant future. Other fusion efforts have had pauses and conceptual changes, it's been a history of fits and starts.

CALLI: Well what's it going to cost to make this the reactor that finally gets across the finish line? 

NATE: To start, more than two-point-five billion dollars. Right now, the cost per megawatt is about 5 times what it is for fission, but that's the cost of innovation baby! 

CALLI: Surely that cost will go down as we perfect the tech, and develop standard safety protocols. 

NATE: Certainly. And committing to a location means that this project, its partners, and the nearby community it will be in are invested in making the world's first fusion reactor. 

CALLI: Fusion, coming to a Gloucestershire near you soon!

[SFX: Whoosh]

CALLI: Nate, you know what I’m still not over? 

NATE: What's that Calli? 

CALLI: Losing Betty White. 

NATE: Ah, that was sad. But it was wonderful to see the outpouring of support and love for her that came when we lost her. 

CALLI: That's so true. There can be moments of beauty in death. Did you know that extends to our home too? Scientists have new insights into what the death of our favorite star, the sun, will look like. While we won’t be here to see it, it is sure to be spectacular, beautiful and visible in galaxies more than 2 million light years away. 

NATE: Sun death, that’s pretty hardcore. Before we get into the potential beauty, you’re SURE it won’t happen in our lifetime?

CALLI: Depends how long you’re going to live, I guess. Our sun is 4.6 billion years old and scientists figure it should last about another ten billion years. 

NATE: Yeah, I don’t think I’ll make it that long.

 

CALLI: But ... five billion years from now, the sun will run out of hydrogen for nuclear fusion, and start fusing helium atoms. The core will shrink and the outer layers of the sun will expand until the sun swallows the earth and reaches the orbit of Mars. 

NATE: Swallow the earth? I knew of a guy Jonah who lived in a whale, but living in the sun...?


CALLI: Oh don’t worry, we’ll be long gone before then. Our sun gets ten percent brighter every billion years, and so, a billion years from now, that solar radiation will make our planet basically uninhabitable. The surface would be too hot for water to form. 

NATE: Oh, that's….great.

CALLI: Ha, don’t stress too much, maybe that mission to the moon we talked about will help us get off the planet. But anyway. After the sun runs out of helium for fusion, it will turn from a red giant into a white dwarf, crushing down again, but this time into a hot-white glowing body only the size of Earth. Except incredibly dense!

NATE: So will it be dead at that point?

CALLI: Well, dying. But computer models from 2018 have shown that something spectacular will happen in those final moments. The sun will eject gas and dust, as much as half of its mass. That stuff will shoot out into the space around it in what scientists call its envelope.

NATE: The Post Office is no joke: neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail ... nor star death!

CALLI: After ejecting the envelope, the super-hot core will be exposed to the universe and paint the envelope with an intense light. The glow will be beautiful for anyone who does see it. It’s called a planetary nebula.

NATE: Planetary? Does that mean there is hope for any planets still orbiting? 

CALLI: Actually, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. They get their name because when they were discovered by William Herschel in the 18th century, the glowing objects looked like planets in his more rudimentary telescope. 

NATE: Oh so we’ve had our eyes on planetary nebulae for a while. How long do they last?  

CALLI: For just a blip in astronomical time, about ten thousand years. But it will be beautiful and bright, visible all the way to the Andromeda galaxy. 

NATE: What? That's super far, does our sun’s light reach that far? 

CALLI: Nebulae can be brighter than the stars that made them, making dim stars shockingly visible from afar in death. Our relatively modest-sized sun will reach more than two million lightyears, but bigger stars can make massive planetary nebulae visible for tens of millions of light years.

NATE: Talk about going out with a bang. That's why I want a flaming-arrow, viking-style burial when I go. You’ll be able to see me from Milwaukee! Did this computer model teach us anything else about other stars?

CALLI: About 30 years ago we realized that the brightest planetary nebulae in other galaxies were all about the same brightness. By looking at the brightest nebulae in distant galaxies, we can often figure out the distance to those galaxies. 

NATE: A gift from the dying star, one last bit of information on the way out. 

CALLI: It's been a huge help for measuring galaxies billions of light years away. The computer models also settled a debate. Researchers had long argued about whether the sun was big enough to create a planetary nebula. The new models confirmed it is just big enough to make this lovely light show.

NATE: Well when it does, I hope my great-great-great to the millionth grandchildren are far away, but with a good set of binoculars. 

CALLI: Me too, it's going to be spectacular.

[SFX: Whoosh]

NATE: Calli, were you much of an athlete growing up?

CALLI: Sure, I played a bunch of sports but not competitively, always more for fun than anything else.

NATE: You know keeping it fun might have actually made you a better athlete? 

CALLI: I am the Lebron James of having fun Nate. 

NATE: Well new research is showing that an athlete’s obsession with being perfect might lead to burnout. While the current focus is on athletics, it's giving us great insights into how we perceive accomplishments and keep ourselves motivated. 

CALLI: Oh interesting. I’ve heard the word “burnout” thrown around a lot. How did the researchers define it? 

NATE: Sure, for this study, burnout means having a reduced sense of accomplishment, prolonged exhaustion, and just a general falling out of love with the sport. 

CALLI: Oh boy, none of that sounds good, I’m sure it would be hard to stay motivated and get better if you’re just tired, unhappy, and not having fun.

NATE: Totally.

CALLI: So how did they go about testing this? 

NATE: Well researchers started with 250 athletes with an average age of 21. Each had competed in their sport for more than eight years, and were currently competing anywhere from the university to international level. 

CALLI: So, very serious athletes. What kind of sports were they looking at? 

NATE: Well they looked at both individual and team sports including golf, soccer, and weightlifting, among some others. For each of these athletes they measured stress, burnout and perfectionism.

CALLI: So what do they find? Practice makes perfect? But perfectionism makes….burnout?

NATE: Well the biggest finding was that the pursuit of perfection was actually one of the biggest impediments to long term success.


CALLI: Wanting to be the best actually works in reverse? 

 

NATE: Not wanting to be the best, wanting to be perfect. The study found that athletes who were particularly self-critical—who beat themselves up over even minor mistakes or failures—they were at higher risk for problems like burnout.

CALLI: Oh, wow. I know I can definitely be self-critical. It all comes from wanting to be better, so that stinks that it has the opposite effect. How did that play out in these athletes?

NATE: Well they found that over time these athletes who were obsessive about being perfect and had excessive reactions to these small failings mentally disengaged from their sports, saw any future achievements as inadequate, and were disproportionately stressed about upcoming events.

CALLI: That doesn't sound like a recipe for athletic success. I know we’ve seen some of this on the international level. I can’t imagine the pressure athletes at the elite level ... you know, someone like Simone Biles ... I can’t imagine the pressure they must be putting on themselves. 

NATE: Totally. Researchers say it creates something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the fear of being imperfect. So, it made it harder to succeed, and caused more of that emotional exhaustion, less motivation.

CALLI: Oh wow, the brain is a powerful thing. Mind over matter, right? Okay, so how do athletes go about avoiding this kind of burnout and stress? 

NATE: Researchers said the athletes have to be kinder to themselves. Maybe through cognitive behavioral therapy.

CALLI: Which one is that?

NATE: Where the therapist helps the patient notice their destructive thought patterns and change them. The researchers said this stuff could apply to nonathletes too. Athletes—and average folks like you and me—need to be aware that the more hypercritical they are the more harm they’re doing to themselves. 

CALLI: So, accepting failure can help you avoid failure? 

NATE: Right on. The study suggests athletes would do better to celebrate their successes and embrace failures as an opportunity to reflect and improve. 

CALLI: That sounds like a good lesson for all of us. I’m going to start thinking about being kinder to myself. ... You’re doing great Calli. 

NATE: The best path to success is one where we can celebrate our failures along the way.

CALLI: Well I support your failures Nate. 

NATE: Thanks Calli, me too. 

[SFX: Whoosh]

NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.

CALLI: UK energy developers have started the process of finding a home for what they hope will be the world's first nuclear fusion reactor. While they won’t build the reactor for a number of years, they hope that choosing a location will help them get ahead of regulatory and bureaucratic issues before they have a chance to stall the project. Nuclear fusion is coming, and soon we will know where. 

NATE: Scientists have settled the debate about when and how our sun will die. We’ll be long gone when it does, but we now know what we’ll be missing: a spectacular and beautifully bright light show.

CALLI: A new study found that athletes who fixate on being perfect, are actually more likely to burnout from their sport. Long term success, and fun, rely a lot on being kind to yourself, and accepting your failures.