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Probably science.

Hey everyone. Welcome to probably science. Matt Kirshan here. I'm still on the road,

still Andy-less in a different apartment, and this is going to be a nuclear fusion episode. We've never done one of those. I'm here with Dr. Damien King, who is, let's say they

get this right, head of neutral beams. I'm the head of neutral beams at the joint European

Taurus. So, starting at the beginning, what is science? Well, science is where you try and find something out, you think of something, and then

you try it and see if what you thought was going to happen is actually what happened,

and then you change your mind based on what really happened. That's actually a superb answer

to a dumb question. All right, so let's talk about nuclear fusion, because this is one of, you work on one of the main,

I'm already thinking there's two or three, there's two main nuclear fusion, experiments or

projects going on in the world right now?

There's two main strands of nuclear fusion, each of which have their own large projects,

magnetic confinement fusion, which I which have their own large projects, magnetic confinement fusion,

which I work on, and inertial confinement fusion, which is a very different type completely,

which there's a large experiment in America. And our experiment in Oxfordshire here is the largest magnetic confinement fusion

experiment in the world at the minute. So, so let's actually start at the beginning of

nuclear fusion, what is it and how is it different from nuclear fission, which is what

the nuclear power plants that we know that around the world

use. So nuclear fission obviously has been around for absolutely a very long time for decades,

and is typically what power generation people think of with nuclear power. So every nuclear power

station you think of is a nuclear fission power plant. And that's

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