My sophomore year in college, I found myself chatting at tea
time in the Institute for Advanced Study, just in the
shadow of Princeton Universities campus.
This facility is where brilliant minds like Albert Einstein,
Charles Oppenheimer, and Emily Noter studied.
My IQ certainly did not warrant an invitation into the
prestigious facility. However, I did share the same
exact name as a brilliant political science researcher
there, Danielle S Allen. How we met is a story for
another time, but what struck me at this tea time for geniuses
was the wide array of studies. I listened to the various
researchers talk about their backgrounds, and one scientist
introduced himself and said he worked at the Princeton Plasma
Physics Laboratory. Princeton has a plasma lab?
I asked. Well, no.
The Department of Energy has a plasma lab.
Princeton just manages it. And that's when I learned about
the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a National
Laboratory owned by the Department of Energy.
Today on Naked Nuclear, we're going to be talking to Doctor
Arturo Dominguez, PPPL's lead science education officer.
We'll be talking about the mysterious history of PPPLA
crash course in what plasma and fusion actually are, and a
completely free course that's giving students from around the
world a front row seat to fusion energy.
So first, is it bad that I had no idea where PPPL was located
before this episode? Or that it's run by the
Department of Energy? No, we are hidden.
We are hidden away and historically a bit on purpose
because we are, if you know the area, we're actually across from
Route 1. So it's if you're going to walk
it, you better carve it out in your calendar.
And it's actually pretty tough to get here and crossing to
Route One if you're walking. But yeah, we're hidden away
close, about 3 miles away from the main campus, yes.
So why is there a hidden plasma physics lab 3 miles away from
Princeton's campus? We actually started as a secret
project called Project Matterhorn by our founder,
Professor Lyman Spitzer of the Astrophysics department at
Princeton University. And we started right after the
Second World War. And this is a good time for
people to to get a sense of what the Department of Energy labs
are because of Oppenheimer. If you've seen the movie
Oppenheimer, you know that during World War 2, the
government undertook the plan to construct and build these labs
that brought in really smart minds from all over the country
to work on big projects. And for World War Two, it was
working in big projects related to the war.
But after the war, a lot of labs were founded and became
incorporated from the Department of Energy to tackle big science,
to tackle the science that really can't be done at a
university level. That has to be like very big
projects. So for example, at in
Oppenheimer, they highlight Los Alamos National Lab, which was
where where Oppenheimer was situated, but also Oakridge,
which is in Tennessee. And I believe they touch upon
Lawrence Livermore with the folks over in, in California.
So those are, you know, the biggest labs or some of the
biggest labs. There's actually 17 Department
of Energy labs and we are one of the smallest.
We are Princeton Plasma physics lab.
Again, as I was mentioning, we started as a secret project
called Project Matterhorn, which was trying to understand and
harness the power of fusion, right?
And while there was a dual defense and energy mission of
the lab, when it started, very quickly it transitioned towards
what is now PPPL, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab to focus
solely in energy. We became public in the early
60s. So so we've been the Prince of
Plasma physics lab since the early 60s.
Bringing us into today, obviously they do plasma
research, but what does that research look like?
As the name suggests, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, we are all
things plasma, right? So OK, so let me step back a
second. Plasma is we commonly know it as
the 4th state of matter. You have solid, which is a
coldest. You heat a solid up, you get
liquid. You heat a liquid up, you get
gas. If you heat up a gas up enough,
you get a plasma, right, which is different from a gas because
the particles in the plasma, a lot of them are ionized, a lot
of them have separated the electron from the nucleus of the
atom. And so as opposed to a gas in
which all the particles or 99.99% of particles are neutral,
in a plasma there's enough charged particles that it
behaves like an entirely new state of matter, In this case,
plasma. More than 99% of the visible
universe is plasma. So understanding the universe
really requires understanding plasma.
And so the big three missions of our lab are to develop the
science and technology for fusion energy, which is really
what we'll talk about the most today and really the biggest
mission of our lab. A second one is utilizing
plasmas for microelectronics and Electro manufacturing.
So these are what we typically call low temperature plasmas,
which is really a misnomer because they're pretty hot, but
none the less they're much colder than than fusion relevant
plasmas. But these are related to, for
example, the processes that you need to make semiconductors.
If you know about Moore's law, right?
This law that tells you how quickly the progress in in
transistor technology has evolved since the invention of
the transistors. And it's an exponential rise
from like the 80s, the processes that have led to Moore's law,
all of them have had to do with plasma, right?
Because in order to control the processes that you need to make
the nanometer scale details of semiconductors, You can't do it
by having a, a really good pulse.
You, you have to do it with, with advanced techniques.
And plasmas are really important part of that.
So we have a whole area which has been growing in recent years
that really dives into this area of microelectronics and closely
connected quantum information science like utilizing plasma
techniques for quantum computing, for example.
That's a whole realm that has been growing especially
recently. And the third mission of our lab
is what I started with understanding the universe, so
the plasma universe, so understanding astrophysical
plasma processes, what determines the rate of solar
flares and coronal mass ejections?
Because the sun is made out of plasma, and every once in a
while it has these explosive bursts that are plasma
phenomena. So one of the big missions that
we have is understanding this phenomena and understanding what
scales and what parameters dominate these phenomena.
So we can understand it much better and maybe even help us
protect our electrical grid, right?
So it's to that level. So as I said, understanding the
universe requires understanding plasmas, and that's one of the
big missions we have. The fascinating part about this
type of research is how it scales from the microscopic to
macroscopic nanometers to light years.
So how did Doctor Dominguez get his start in plasma?
Yes, that's actually one of our pitches.
It's understanding the universe from the nano to the
astrophysical. All of this has to do with
plasmas. Yeah, I started studying physics
in my native Bogota, Colombia. I'm actually from Colombia.
I was excited about physics in school.
I was actually, I got hooked by a brief history of Time, right?
This was when you talk to a bunch of physicists, you know,
that one brief history of time always comes up.
I got really excited about physics there.
And so I started studying physics in the National
University of Columbia, but then I transferred to the University
of Texas at Austin, Holcomb Horns.
I'm contractually obligated. So I finished my undergrad in
physics at University of Texas at Austin and just
serendipitously, I needed a job and I wanted to, you know, work
in a lab. And there was a professor that I
had good chemistry with, Professor Ken Gentle at the
University of Texas at Austin. And he just was a plasma
synthesis. So I, I worked in his lab.
I barely knew anything about plasmas.
And I worked on helping construct A reactor like a, a
fusion experimental reactor at the University of Texas at
Austin. And when I started learning
about it in my last couple of years of undergrad, I got
hooked. I mean, the, we'll talk a little
bit about fusion, but but the mission of fusion and what can
come about once we develop fusion, it's really something
that you want to dedicate your life to.
So I got excited about it and did a senior thesis on fusion,
and I was able to do my graduate work at MIT, where I worked in
the in the Plasma Science and Fusion Center on a magnetic
fusion device that was called Alcator CMOD.
I worked on a instrument that detected density and the plasma
using something similar to radar.
We would send electromagnetic waves into the machine and once
they bounced back, you could analyze them and get to know
about what's happening in the machine.
I was learning and, you know, got excited about fusion, but I
was also getting excited about outreach.
When we are at the PSFC Plasma Science and Fusion Center, all
grad students were required to give tours and to participate in
outreach activities. And so when I started doing it,
I like really saw my calling and I got excited about it.
Would give a lot of tours, would participate in outreach
activities. And when I was about to
graduate, there was an opportunity here at the lab to
work in this department that I now run, the science education
department to do a postdoc in science education.
And it was either this or working on instruments on what
we call diagnostics for fusion. And yeah, I decided to go in
this round and I've never looked back.
And I got to say, it kind of connects to one of the big
thrusts that I have in our department, which is I want
students to at the end of their undergrad to be in plasma and
fusion. Not because randomly a professor
was, they had good country with a professor, but because they
actually learned about plasmas and fusion and and like just got
hooked because of the science. And this will connect to what
we'll talk about of the intro course.
I really want students to find out about what we do early
because plasma and fusion just isn't really taught.
Even in R1 schools and schools that are really big at the
physics level, there are very few schools actually dive deep
into plasmas and fusion. So one of the missions that we
have is to try to reach the future workforce and getting
them to get excited about plasma and fusion early on.
Well, PPPL has a two week introduction to plasma course.
Let's see how this offering came together.
I inherited this course or the previous versions to this course
from a program that was called a National Undergraduate
Fellowship. And this was run out of PBPL
since the 90s. And so this was an internship
program that would position students all over the country.
And they would start with a week in person class, of course,
taught by different professors in the field to learn the basics
of plasma and fusion, right? And it was pretty in depth.
It was about 30 students would get to attend every year, a one
week intensive course. When I joined very early on, the
enough program was stopped and I was connected to a bigger
program out of the Office of Science, the Department of
Energy's main funder of this research called Sully Science
Undergraduate Laboratory Internship.
So if you know about internships, the big one that
people know about are Reus. These are funded by the National
Science Foundation, NSF. Sully is kind of the sibling of
our use, but coming out of the Department of Energy, that's the
main internship that we run. And so connected to that, we
decided to continue this course. Enough had already been
defunded, so we continued it out of Sully.
But what I decided to do very early on to remember this was
2015, very early on, was make it hybrid.
I wanted to stream the lectures live and upload them into our
website so that we could democratize it some more and get
more people to benefit from this.
And so we did this. And lo and behold, five years
later, this hybrid technology really served us during the
pandemic. We revamped the course to make
it fully virtual in 2020 and open to to everybody.
We opened it up, we made it fully virtual.
We did it to satisfy both the West Coast and East Coast.
So we did two weeks of afternoon sessions in the east, in the
East Coast. So noon to 5 Eastern, which, you
know, was like 9 to 2 Pacific for two weeks and fully remote.
And it started building a following.
We started getting folks signing up from all over the world.
And from a typical year where we would have 30 to 40
participants, now in, you know, 2324, we are having 1000
registrants from all over the world.
We upload all the lectures and open the Zooms for questions.
So it's a really open venue for folks to learn about the work
that we do here at the lab and in the fusion and plasma
ecosystem of the US. That's a big idea.
One of the unique attributes about this course is the hallway
discussions, where students can ask questions and make
conversation with industry leaders and fusion researchers
all across the country. Originally an in person course
for DOE interns, this evolved into a free online summer course
attended by over 1000 students worldwide.
It features 27 guest lectures from across the US fusion
ecosystem designed for curious undergrads with STEM interests,
even if they haven't studied plasma.
But how does Doctor Dominguez and the PPPL team recruit so
many top instructors for the class?
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Now back to the show. I'll give you even another
detail. I try to have, for the most
part, a full new roster every year, right?
Keep in mind these are like 27 lectures.
So I do spend, you know, the majority of the spring just
going to people that I've either met or that I know from
conferences or from, you know, from different venues to give
these lectures, right? And so it is, it's literally
plenty of years that have been in the field, learning the
people that I've known from them and then recommendations from
past speakers. And so it's great to have like
senior scientists and folks that are really well established in
the field. But I, I really try to get the
opportunity to highlight early career folks.
And so when you see I, my only rule of thumb is that they
should be either early in the industry or, or past PhD.
So, so postdocs or early career researchers at companies, but
that's it, right? And that they, you know, are
passionate about it and, and we'll give pedagogical lectures.
So we have a lot of repetition of topics.
Of course, we always have sort of an introduction of plasma and
plasma waves and turbulence. So I, everybody knows some of
the slides that you're presenting now you will get from
a past speaker and you will be expected to pass on to your next
speaker if necessary. But I do encourage everybody to
put their own spin on the talks and to focus on what is really
important for them, right? So it is, there's a lot of
Evergreen topics within the lectures, but there's also every
year I have a couple of completely new topics.
It's exciting. It, it really, I try to reflect
the evolution of the fusion and plasma ecosystem in the US.
It's not stagnant. It's actually, it's actually
growing and evolving continuously.
And I really want this course to and I really put a lot of effort
for this course to be have its finger on the pulse of what's
happening in the in the ecosystem.
So far, we've learned that PPPL's free summer course isn't
just a lecture series, it's a full blown ecosystem.
From foundational plasma physics to real world applications in
semiconductors and space weather, the course gives
students a rare glimpse into the beating heart of fusion
research. It's intentionally designed for
accessibility, with speakers who know how to teach and a
structure that welcomes students who might not have prior
exposure. One of the coolest innovations
is the Hallway Talks, informal Zoom breakout rooms that mimic
the kind of side conversations students might have after class.
And it's often in those unscripted moments that students
start to ask the really big questions.
But how do you create a course series that meets the need of
numerous students? That's a really good question
and I think the answer is multi fold.
Number one, we have 10 years of lectures uploaded, right.
So when in doubt, go back to one of any of the previous ones and
take a look at the level of the content.
And so I definitely encourage folks if they don't, if they're
not sure, just take a look at the lectures, certainly guidance
to the speakers. To focus on, to gear it towards
undergrads that are excited about STEM, that maybe have
learned some electromagnetism, that no calculus, maybe pre
calculus, that kind of that level and to, to tailor the
presentations to that audience. I definitely don't go to a
graduate level talk, right. And in that regard, actually
going back to the speakers that I, that I ask for, if you go to
senior scientists, unless they're really pedagogical, they
will give past presentations, right?
And they will give past presentations that are typically
for graduate level, because that's the topics, right?
So many times I've had to like, you know, go back and say this
lecture was very over the top, like, you know, give feedback to
the speaker. So so that's that actually is
some guidance that I give the the speakers make sure that it
is for that audience for a mid undergrad, maybe somewhat
advanced undergrad excited about Stan, but maybe doesn't know
everything. And so when you look at the
lectures, the way I've kept it broadly is we start out with a
very big, like big picture. What is fusion?
Why is it important? Why do we think it's
revolutionary? Then we have two days, three
days in which we try to go slowly and you know, in quotes
from the basics of plasma to a little bit of like waves and
turbulence and magnetic confinement.
A little bit more like a physics series of lectures.
And then about a week of talks that are much more specific to
the different topics, right? Like different ways that we try
to do a fusion, the different approaches for fusion,
astrophysical plasmas, low temperature plasma.
So someone more disconnected and less physics based, definitely
more big picture in each one of these topics if they're basing
anything on physics to try to leverage the the lecture that
we're giving at the beginning of the first week of the course.
In our previous Student Spotlight with Ryan Zerpa, we
learned a bit about fusion energy.
But let's hear it from the expert What is fusion energy?
Yes, absolutely. And, and again, this was
literally the reason I got into fusion was because as an
undergrad, I, I, I got excited about it from the work that I
was doing there. Yes, plasma, as I said, is the
4th state of matter. And if you think about the sun,
right, and all the stars in the middle of the stars, you have
matter in the state of plasma because it's so hot and so much
pressure that all of the electrons have been ripped off
the atom. Most of the matter inside a star
is is hydrogen and some helium, but very small atoms.
The sun and the stars are so hot and under so much pressure that
when you think about heat, it's at a microscopic level.
It's really particles moving very quickly in all random
directions, right? So every once in a while, the
two positively charged nuclei of hydrogen, which is really just a
couple of protons, one proton and one proton, they by chance
are going towards each other, right?
Most of the time they're just going to deflect because they're
both positively charged, right? So they don't want to get
together, they'll just deflect. But if the conditions are just
right, they're pointing towards each other at the right speed,
then they will get so close that another force takes over.
So the repulsion is electric repulsion.
When you get really close, you get dominated by the nuclear
strong force, right? Which only acts at very small
scales and is always attractive, right?
So if the conditions are right, the nuclear strong force takes
over and that releases energy. Once you combine the nuclei of
these two hydrogens, you release energy.
And that release of energy is fusion energy, right?
And the release of energy, you know, there's a whole process in
the stars where it's got a bunch of different interactions, but
ultimately the releases in kinetic energy of the
byproducts, right? And by the way, that's the the
reason we have life here on Earth is because of fusion
happening in the sun. So the objective of this field
since it started has been to reproduce that here on Earth.
We always call it to have a star on Earth or or a bottle, a
magnetic bottle of a star on Earth, right?
That's the idea is can we reproduce that process here on
Earth and harness that energy? That's been the main idea of
fusion. So it turns out that protons,
which is the fuel of the sun is not energetic enough.
It doesn't have enough bang for your buck.
So we use isotopes of hydrogen, we use deuterium and tritium.
And so it just to remind folks, an isotope is, is a nucleus that
has the same number of protons but different number of
neutrons, right? So isotopes of hydrogen, they
all have one proton because it's hydrogen, but they have
different number of neutrons. The typical hydrogen from H2O
has no neutrons. Deuterium, which is one of the
big ones that we use, has one neutron and tritium, which is
the other one that we use, has two neutrons.
So it's one proton, 2 neutrons. So the main fuel that we're
trying to use here on Earth, and because it's it's the one that
we can get energy at at more reasonable conditions is
deuterium and tritium. I'd love to have a whiteboard
right now, but unfortunately your listeners can't see me.
If you think of a deuterium atom, that's a nucleus, that's
one proton and 1 neutron, and you think of tritium, that's one
proton and two neutrons. When that reaction, when they
combine, if you have the conditions just right and they
combine, you have this unstable helium 5 nucleus because it's
the two protons and the three neutrons.
But then they rearrange and fly out into a helium 4.
That's two protons and two neutrons and a free neutron.
So if you think about, if you do, if you, if you think about,
you know, take out your play dough and, and, and make or your
marbles and make it. If you think about determine
tritium coming in and a helium 4 and a neutron coming out, it's
the same number of protons and of neutrons.
There's nothing, there's no change there.
All we did is rearranged them. But just by rearranging them, it
releases a lot of energy, and the energy comes out as kinetic
energy of our products. That's what we want to harness.
You heat it up enough so that you make the reactions happen,
but then it flies out as helium and as neutrons.
And the objective is harness that energy, that kinetic
energy, and turn that into electricity.
I've described, very roughly, a fusion reactor, right, that's
harnessing that energy and turning it into electricity.
It's always a bit tricky without 3 full whiteboards, 8 colored
markers, and a strong cup of coffee to explain some of the
scientific concepts on the podcast.
Many of the images in our head about fusion reactors come from
Hollywood, Star Trek, and the Marvel Universe.
So what does the process of creating electricity look like?
Is it the same tea kettle concept from the fission side or
is the build out something completely different?
So yes, this is excellent. So I've described the reaction
itself, but I haven't really told you why it's amazing.
I mean that the real amazing part of fusion is that when you
think of what I just described, deuterium and tritium, this is
hydrogen. These are the smallest atoms in
the world and in the universe. You know the hydrogen atom?
You can get deuterium from the ocean, right?
Deuterium is easy to get. It's a pretty plentiful isotope
of H2. OI don't remember, it's like one
out of every 50,000 H 2 OS is actually HDO, so you get it out
of there. So it's pretty plentiful.
Tritium is harder. Tritium is short term
radioactive and it doesn't exist naturally on Earth, but we can
get it out of a reaction with lithium, which is pretty
plentiful. And so we have enough lithium
and seawater in the world for hundreds of thousands of years
of fusion energy at, you know, the rate that we have.
And if we can get the lithium from the seawater, which is an
active field of research, we can get it for millions of years of
energy. So when you see fusion in, you
know, in Star Trek or in these things, it's because it is an
energy of the future. It is something that that's like
a next step in energy production.
So it's very plentiful. It doesn't create any greenhouse
gases. The byproduct is helium.
It doesn't have any greenhouse gases.
Tritium is radioactive, but it's short term radioactive and you
don't produce that much. So it's qualitatively different
than fission, but you still have to learn how to deal with that
with all those advantage and the fact that it's nuclear, the fact
that that you can get from very little fuel, a lot of energy, it
just makes for like an idealized source of energy.
So that's why you really, really fusion cells itself when you
learn about it. It's such an amazing source of
energy, but it's super hard. We need to get fusion reactors
in magnetic confinement fusion, which we haven't really talked
about, but in a fusion reactor, it's about 10 times hotter than
the center of the sun. That's the ideal conditions for
this, and we can get to that. We get to that in a regular
basis. But getting to those conditions,
making them stable enough to harness the energy, and then
developing all of the technology that turns to that kinetic
byproducts into electricity, these are still challenges that
need to be solved. It's been decades, but it's
because it's such an intricate set of challenges.
But I think all of us that are in the field are convinced that
once we solve these challenges, it'll really be a revolution for
energy in the world. I mean, if you think of Iron
Man, that little heart, that's supposed to be a fusion in Iron
Man. But I wanted to understand how
do students interact with these concepts and what do they
struggle with visualizing? This is a great question.
So the students that I really interact with long term are the
interns that stay in our lab, right?
And so they do get a cross section of the different topics
that are being seen. And so I would divide this
question into two. One is during the course, when
we're having such a broad range of students from all over the
world participating, what stands out?
I think one thing that stands out is access to this, right
during the week and during the two weeks that we do the course,
we get a lot of folks from all over the world saying, you know,
this is really exciting, we want to get in, How do we get
involved, right? And so one answer for
international students for the US is that it is, it isn't
trivial to be able to come to the US and do the work.
So, so there's a lot of that. There's a lot of of how do you
get access to the forefront of this technology and research?
So I think there are a lot of international groups that are
doing this work and many of which we collaborate with a lot.
That's one way of saying, you know, there's, there's
collaborations all over the world.
But another thing that ends up being both for the online folks
as as well as the folks that end up working in the, in the lab is
really the intersectionality of topics.
This field has been historically dominated by plasma physicists.
I'm a plasma physicist or nuclear engineers, right?
Those are the two that have really been the 2 fields that
are focused on fusion. When you describe what it takes
to build a plant, right, it is physicists, it's chemists, it's
Mechanical Engineers, nuclear engineers, material scientists,
mathematicians, computer scientists, economists, civil
engineers. This is a full industry that
we're developing, right? So getting that big picture
mindset, I think is a challenge. I think a lot of students come
in with a very narrow view of what they want to do.
And we get them excited about fusion and then say, but by the
way, this is a humongous field, right?
So I think that's both a challenge and an opportunity,
right? Because it gives us a chance to
go out and talk to broad ranges of audiences and say, you know,
this thing that could change the world.
We need everybody for this. We need many types of students
and many types of workers for it.
So you can be a part of this. That's sort of the other side of
the coin is we need folks from all over the academic spectrum
to join us. And I got to say, in recent
years, there have been some courses, some folks that are in
the pedagogy space that have spent the whole semester with a
group of students literally developing a concept, a fusion
concept from the basic plasma physics, materials, neutronics,
turning the neutrons into electricity, all of that.
I think it's such a valuable experience to have the students
get this holistic view of what it takes to develop a plant.
And so, yeah, I totally agree. It's this, it's this holistic
vision of these challenges. Yeah, especially in the magnetic
side. I haven't really gotten into
different approaches, but when you think of what I described of
the fusion reactions creating hot or energetic neutrons or
energetic helium, that really is your kettle, right?
And so everything else is how do we turn that random kinetic
energy into electricity? That's a huge challenge, right?
It's both sides. It's how do we make a kettle
that works well? And then how do we get that very
specific type of energy that comes out into electricity,
right? And so there are things that we
can borrow from the established electrical sectors, right?
Specially from fission, How to, you know, how to get the
electricity into the grid, the turbine, all of that, right?
But there's a lot of challenges that are very specific to
fusion, right? We have this flux of energetic
neutrons at 14 Mev, you know, a very specific range of, of
energies that has never been available, that we've never
made. We've never had any experiment
that makes that amount of energetic neutrons available.
So we need to learn a lot about the materials about what's going
to happen to these components before we can actually build a
final product. So yes, so it's long way of
saying it's a lot of challenges. It is an expensive tea kettle,
but it's it's a very complex 1. For students looking to knock at
the opportunity of fusion breakthroughs, where's the door?
How do you get involved in fusion research?
So thank you, yes, so we at PPL do run these workshops and and
summer schools and all that that we try to make them as
accessible as possible. So really your best friend is
Google, Google us and look for summer schools or summer
courses. If you can pause and rewind your
podcast, our main site for this, for the course that we're
describing right now, the two week course at the beginning of
the summer is Suli Sul i.pppl.gov.
Remember, it's three psandits.gov, so suli.ppl.gov
and then when you go in, you can see the latest course, but then
you can go in and browse many years of courses.
But yeah, take a look at at at some of the resources that we
have. I just finished, for example,
hosting a graduate summer school.
So this is a little bit more advanced, but we are going to be
posting the videos and the slides of many of the talks up.
And this was on microelectronics and quantum information.
Remember, we're talking about the second mission of our lab.
So that was this focus. So one thing that we're, you
know, I've already mentioned it, but that we're super proud of is
the fact that that especially for the intro course, we put
almost every lecture, both the slides and the video available
in perpetuity. So if you go back, you can see
the whole thing, look at the slides and be able to
participate. Now it doesn't replace
participating live because when you're alive, we also have
something like the hallway discussion.
We did this during the pandemic and we just kept it.
We give everybody a 30 minute break between lectures, but at
the end of the lecture, we close the official one, but we go to a
private Zoom for anybody that just wants to keep engaging with
the lecture. Kind of like a hallway
discussion after the lecture that ended up being one of the
the most popular parts of it because you as a participant
aren't going to be interested in all the talks, but there are
some that you're particularly interested in.
So this is an opportunity for having a, a more intimate
setting with the speaker and, and it's been very popular.
So anyway, that just a pitch to go visit our site, but enroll in
next year's and the speakers are always so keen on doing it.
They they love it as well because it's where you get
really the excited ones, right. This is super selfish on our
part. We need workforce like we can't,
we are envisioning the future in which there will be a lot of
fusion plants that require a lot of experts.
So this is really like us trying to bring people into our field.
So certainly, certainly that's part of it.
And any further advice for students?
I would say I didn't have any of these resources when I was
growing up. There is so much out there.
If you want to find it, there's so many resources available
online for whatever field you want to get into.
So definitely look into it and get excited about it.
Feel free to send emails to folks.
Many people will ignore you, but some won't.
And, and it'll be a, a way to, to get in and really, we start
getting into this, into these fields that really need a lot of
people to get excited about. So thank you so much, Danielle,
for reaching out and yes, excited about sharing this with
everybody. I'm very easy to find.
If you can find me and send me an e-mail I I might respond.
Vision may be the ultimate clean energy dream, but it's also an
enormous human capital challenge.
Doctor Dominguez reminds us that while most people associate
fusion with plasma physicists and nuclear engineers, the
future of fusion will rely just as much on data scientists,
material experts, Mechanical Engineers, welders, and even
economists. That broad ecosystem means
there's a role for almost every discipline, but only if students
know these pathways exist in the 1st place.
That's why early exposure matters.
It's about showing students that fusion isn't science fiction,
it's a career they can step into.
So how do you get started if you're hearing about this for
the first time? What if you're a student in high
school or college, or even someone mid career looking to
pivot into our future facing field?
What resources are out there and how can you plug into the fusion
community no matter where you live?
Let's break down the entry points to get involved.
Whether it's through PPP, LS, Introduction to Fusion Course,
the Department of Energy's Sue the Internship, or summer
schools like Fusion Week, the doors are open and they're more
accessible than ever. In fact, Doctor Dominguez
emphasizes that much of the course's success has come from
its Open Access approach. All lectures are archived,
speakers stay after to chat, and students can explore the
material at their own pace. What's more, it's not just AUS
centric program, it's reaching students globally who might not
otherwise get exposure to this field.
And that accessibility is critical if fusion is going to
become not just a technology, but a truly global industry.
So whether you're a student, a teacher, or someone who just
finds this stuff fascinating, you now have a clear on ramp
into one of the most exciting areas of science and technology,
and all it takes is a little curiosity and click on the
correct websites. We're not just teaching fusion
because it's cool, we're teaching it because we need you
to build it. If you've ever dreamed of
helping build A star on Earth or you're just fusion curious,
definitely check out the course. It's free, it's global, and it
might just change your career. If you enjoyed this episode,
share it with a student, a professor, or someone who thinks
nuclear is the bee's knees. Until next time, stay curious.