Frozen Robot? Artificial Sun? Sodium-Ion Batteries? It's TECH IN CHINA!

16:15Elliot Richards:I don't think I could walk 130 ,000 steps.

16:19Robert Llewellyn:No.

16:20Elliot Richards:Just like a British fry up in the morning.

16:24Robert Llewellyn:Yeah. I mean, I think my record is probably at the Shanghai Motor Show last year with you, where I think I did sort of 35 ,000 steps and I definitely needed to lie down. Yes, a little nap. At the end of that.

16:38Elliot Richards:That was nothing in gatekeepers. I think it's starting to demonstrate what use these will start, like these real use cases that these will actually have. So search and rescue missions or border patrols in remote areas or, you know, you could just send it out for three days and it does like 30 ,000 steps and covers, you know, how many square kilometres.

17:01Robert Llewellyn:Yeah.

17:02Elliot Richards:And then you just bring it back, swap the battery, and off it goes again. I think beginning to see actual real world use cases of these robots. And I think that's what's really exciting. But again, you know, we've seen a robot kick a man in the balls. Now we've seen it walking 130 ,000 steps. In deep snow. In deep snow. So what's next?

17:25Robert Llewellyn:What's going to be next month of robot news? That's one. I mean, the thing, because I've been looking at, I've been, you know, since we've talked about this, getting slightly obsessed. And you have to kind of watch. I have to say something to go, don't look at any more robots. But there's some, there's some, both were being developed in China and in the United States that are kind of, I just found it's quite an interesting twist on it. So it's essentially a box on wheels, but it's got one arm. It's got one arm that's incredibly articulate. So it's got like nine elbows in its arm. And it has different attachments on the top of the box.

18:00Robert Llewellyn:So the arm goes, and it gets a brush. and it goes and it's a toy that was a toilet cleaning one okay but it also can do you know it's got longer probing things that can unblock drains okay let's not go into any details there but you then go it doesn't look like a human being it's a box with an arm and it's got so many advantages because of that i mean obviously if it's a box with an arm and it's got wheels it needs a smooth floor but i mean if you're in a build if it's work is in a building and then you go well whatever else happens with that robot it can't chase me no forever i've just got to go

18:36Elliot Richards:upstairs and it's stuffed and it's stuck yeah but it could get you through the toilet when you least

18:41Robert Llewellyn:expect it that is worrying okay that i wish you hadn't put that thought in there i hadn't thought of that it understands the sewage network brilliantly and sends a probe get you when you

18:51Elliot Richards:least expecting.

18:53Robert Llewellyn:It's an autonomous probe. Oh no. I wish I honestly hadn't considered that. Now I will not be able to think of anything else. I will have to go to the toilet out in the garden. I can never use a toilet again.

19:06Elliot Richards:I apologize for that thought. Should we move on to nuclear fusion? Let's quickly.

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19:56Robert Llewellyn:With thousands of glowing five-star reviews, why not give it a try? Subscribe today and you can get the amazing Meaningful Beauty system for just$49.95. That includes our introductory five-piece system, free gifts, free shipping, and a 60-day money-back guarantee. All of that available at MeaningfulBeauty.com. can i just say this it goes in my bucket with carbon capture and storage nuclear fusion hydrogen fuel cell cars you know it's one of those things that is going to be the absolute thing and it hasn't well yes well so i'm going to refer to my notes because this is quite

20:32Elliot Richards:complicated but so i saw that this week there was a fusion break fusion breakthrough um where they went past something called the green walled limit okay so china has got this big artificial sun project um and there's always been this barrier it's been there for about 40 years um around plasma density um and the scientists have been thinking oh it must be fundamental physics that we can't get any more energy out of this than what we put in or something like that right and so the reactor which is in herfei province here in china it operated at 1.6 times the green world limit without instability so i think previously it got every reactor got to this point and then made everything unstable and everything fell apart but they've now gone beyond that and they've made uh it 1.6 times this limit which means that in theory they can get i think more power using less energy in the future right so i i asked ai to help me try and explain this in A simple term because I was like, I don't understand any of this.

21:43Elliot Richards:So he says, imagine you're trying to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. So the more friction you create, there's more atoms smashing into each other. The easier it is to get a flame. And fusions works the same way. So you want to cram as many hydrogen atoms into as small a space as possible. So they fuse together and release energy. And the problem was that when they packed it in, the stick would start getting unstable. Right. and start kind of fall apart but now they've been able to squeeze even more in and it still remains stable um so it's very exciting because it means smaller and cheaper reactors in the future yeah it actually means that there is potential for that to go two times this limit four times this limit eight times right and really actually give us not limitless energy but much more energy

22:32Robert Llewellyn:from less of an input but also i think critically important is no or infinitesimally small amounts of dangerous waste i mean it's completely opposite to nuclear fission which is what we're doing at the moment yes correct correct it's very important it's because it's one of those things that you

22:51Elliot Richards:hear about all the time isn't it you think oh this is the future of this this is the future yeah yeah state batteries blah blah and you think oh yeah whatever graphene batteries yeah show us when it actually comes onto the market but what they've shown here is that they've been able to break past that limit which has been there for about five years uh and shows that there is potential still potential um um a very bright future for for nuclear fusion so yeah what's happening in china i think kind of shows that they're really pushing the limits of what we thought was possible. Yeah. And now coming up with, in all these three areas that we've spoken about, actual revolutions and real progress.

23:37Robert Llewellyn:Yeah, that is extraordinary. And it's also extraordinary. I think partly my cynicism is from, you know, now a long life where I've heard about nuclear fusion. So I went to school quite near the Cullum Laboratories in Oxfordshire, and we went there on a school trip where they were, so this is 50, wait a minute, 60 years ago. Oh. No, 55 years ago. Yeah. About, I would have been about 15. And it was amazing. And they've got the donut thing and it was all about, they explained what you've just said, but 55 years ago, where they were nowhere near doing it. But they did have robotic arms there for moving radioactive material.

24:20Robert Llewellyn:Yeah, really impressive. well human controlled yeah and because it wrote it it wrote our names on a piece of paper and the man who was doing the writing was we have 10 meters away and this arm would come with a pen and go write our names but you know a bunch of school kids but i was blown away by that i wanted one of those arms in my bedroom so i could send it down get a glass of water bring it back up but um but you know that that that was that long ago so my entire adult life has been spent waiting for nuclear fusion to happen and it's we're getting closer i don't know if we yeah it does seem we're getting closer you do hear every now and then it's got you know but i mean what's extraordinary is the sheer quantity of power that they put in yes to the system which is in the gigawatt it's measured in gigawatts isn't it i mean it is phenomenal and then they get you know as well like this i mean it's more than i've ever heard before that's way more than

25:15Elliot Richards:anyone else is over managed um yeah so yeah watch this space um i think i mean there's still lots of development work that needs to be done i'll see if we can get an invite to there i mean that's oh wow amazing you know it's maybe difficult but um is that a government funded project is it or is that a private company no it won't be private it would be right state state right yeah um so yeah Let's see if we can get into there and have a look around and poke around.

25:47Robert Llewellyn:That would be good. Although I might want to stay a bit of a distance when it gets up to full thermal capacity. Well, I mean, the temperatures it's producing is like five times hotter than the centre of the sun. It's just like, what? That's very, very hot. Yes.

26:02Elliot Richards:They call it the artificial sun, don't they? Yeah. Because that's basically what they're doing.

26:07Robert Llewellyn:It's extraordinary technology. No, I mean, it is absolutely fascinating. and I mean my because my gripe is always you know and I was with some very pro-nuclear people the other day who work in the nuclear industry in the UK and I mean I'm I've never been critical of nuclear power I think it's been it you know statistically if you look at it it's that one of the safest forms of energy generation and yet there is that fear because of Chernobyl I think primarily and certainly in Europe but the uh it's they never ever mentioned Sellafield which is in the UK, which is our nuclear waste storage facility, which is, I've been there three times.

26:44Robert Llewellyn:I've done a couple of talks to the engineers there in the past. And they're amazing. And you desperately want those engineers to keep doing it for a long and more generations of them, because there's nothing we can do. The legacy we've inherited from the 1950s and 60s is truly, you know, expensive to look after. And we've got no choice. We have to do it. and that would have been you know particularly now i get angry because private companies build as in chinese and french companies building hinkley points they won't pay for the nuclear waste storage we have to pay for that the numpty taxpayers and that i just go guys you need to sort this out you know this is not good that's my argument really that but with nuclear fusion not fission and that's annoying the terms they could have come up with other terms i get it now I've had to have explained because they sound quite similar.

27:35Robert Llewellyn:Fusion is crushing things together. Fission is burning shit. Oh, okay. I didn't know the difference. You've just... Oh, no. Well, no. I mean, fusion is like where you're fusing things together under a phenomenal pressure, you know, huge electromagnets, and you're fusing tiny little things together, and that creates the heat. But that requires a vast amount of energy to create that thing, Whereas nuclear fission is effectively you're burning radioactive material. You're producing heat, but you are changing the nature of those materials. As they produce that heat, they degrade and they fall to bits and they stay radioactive for a long time.

28:17Robert Llewellyn:So you're effectively – I mean, it's called fusion. A fission. Fission, because it's fissile material. It's burning effectively. Okay. which is what's still going on. I've just heard an update about Chernobyl and the sarcophagus. And the temperature inside is still thousands of degrees and will be for tens of thousands of years. Oh, is it? Oh, yeah, it's still going. Ben put it out. It's contained. It's contained. But, of course, it's in a war zone now, so it's under threat all the time. It's just terrifying. Yeah, it's not fair, isn't it? I think that is the golden rule is when it's working, It's absolutely brilliant.

28:57Robert Llewellyn:And really, it's still the amount of waste. If we look at the coal ash waste that there will be in China, in America, in this country, staggering amounts of it, staggering amounts. And if you look at the nuclear waste, it's minute amounts, but you still don't want it in your back pocket. No, you don't.

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30:31Robert Llewellyn:A thing that was a fascinating opportunity, I was invited to a special dinner last week in London of people who work in the geothermal industry around the world. I mean, this is specifically for the UK case for geothermal energy. and quite a few of the people there were also involved in the nuclear industry, and there seems to be a benign partnership going on there. It's basically, I think there's a collective movement of zero-carbon energy generation academics, engineers, scientists that are now very confident that they're not having a fight or an argument. Well, I know, they go, yeah, fossil fuel is boring.

31:16Robert Llewellyn:It's just over. and this is what we're doing and these are really i mean one of the women who spoke at this thing about the economics honestly this is not i'm not making this up i was there happy healthy fit i sat there and she i had a terrible headache as she spoke because it was so complicated and their economics arguments about it and the how i i can't even do of an impression on it because the language is totally alien to me but it was that if you listen to sort of um a report from a city financial institution on the radio or something and you just go what you know it was it was extraordinary i went oh but then i was worried as she was speaking i go oh god i didn't i've got to find a you know a painkiller or something i don't think i can stay up it was in real pain when she finished i was fine i sort of realized about 10 minutes later oh my headache's completely gone I mean, I can understand things like drilling.

32:15Robert Llewellyn:Yes. You know, pumping fluids down a hole deep into the ground. Forget it. Forget it. Yeah. But it was really, I mean, because there are functioning geothermal plants. So I've just had a look. So there's numerous ones in China in various places where there would be sort of low-grade earthquakes and volcanic activity, like Iceland, like various places in the world. So that, and they're old. 1970, the one I found out. Yeah, that is old, isn't it? Yeah. And they're about 40 megawatt, you know, which was, you know, back in 1970 was huge. That's a lot of it, yeah. It's surprising they have it. Yeah.

32:54Robert Llewellyn:Lots of exercises going on. Yes. Very impressive. I thought he was doing a bit of Tai Chi there, I thought. Yes, I think so. Shall we wrap it up? I think we should wrap it up, yeah. But that was a good little catch-up on a lot of exciting stuff.

33:09Elliot Richards:Yes.

33:10Robert Llewellyn:I mean, the fusion stuff, I'm really, I mean, I think, I'm sure we'll both keep an eye on that topic. It's really, I mean, it's very interesting that after, I feel kind of slightly sad for all the scientists I've met since then, when I was 15 and then more recently, who've been working for decades to do it. And then they go, oh, the Chinese have sort of done it. Yeah. They needed another trillion dollars here to get there.

33:34Elliot Richards:Exactly. I mean, as long as it's humanity, then I'm all for it.

33:39Robert Llewellyn:Yes, no, exactly. Now, that is a very positive piece of technology. Yeah. And I can't see any military use of it yet, but I'm sure I'll be wrong. There'll be a nuclear fusion jet that flies at a trillion miles an hour, and you go, okay. Someone will tell us in the comments. Yes, they will. Oh, I'm sure someone will. Anyway, it looks like you've got a lot on your plate. Yes.

34:02Elliot Richards:We're getting ready for Chinese New Year, so.

34:04Robert Llewellyn:Yes, it's very exciting. Of course, and so it's like school holidays as well. Yeah, basically. Now I understand. Yeah, yeah. We did well. We did well. Well done. Have a wonderful Chinese New Year, and I will see you in the Year of the Horse. Yes, see you in the Year of the Horse. Thank you.