Nuclear fusion

Nuclear Fusion Nuclear Fusion If light nuclei are forced together, they will fuse with a yield of energy because the mass of the combination will be less than the sum of the masses of the individual nuclei. If the combined nuclear mass is less than that of iron at the peak of the For potential R Nave Deuterium-Tritium Fusion The most promising of the hydrogen R Nave Hydrogen Fusion Reactions Even though a lot of energy is required to overcome the These reactions are more promising than the R Nave Deuterium Cycle of Fusion The four can be combined as or, omitting those constituents whose concentrations do not change: R Nave Tritium Breeding which can be achieved by slow neutrons. This would occur if lithium were used as the coolant and heat transfer medium around the reaction chamber of a fusion reactor. Lithium-6 makes up 7.4% of natural lithium. While this constitutes a sizable supply, it is the limiting resource for the D-T process since the supply of The conceptual sketch below is grossly oversimplified since the engineering for handling liquid lithium is quite complex. R Nave Deuterium Source Since the most practical nuclear 15 tons of deuterium. Viewed as a potential fuel for a fusion reactor, a gallon of seawater could produce as much energy as 300 gallons of gasoline. The tritium part of the fuel is more problematic - there is no sizable natural source since tritium is radioactive with a halflife of about 10 years. It would have to be obtained by R Nave Fusion Energ...

Scientists have finally managed to bottle the sun. At 1:03 a.m. PST on December 5, researchers with the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif., ignited controlled nuclear fusion that, for the first time, resulted in the net production of energy. A 3-million-joule burst emerged from a peppercorn-sized capsule of fuel when it was heated with a 2-million-joule laser pulse. Details of the long-awaited achievement, which mimics how the sun makes energy, were revealed in a news conference December 13 by U.S. Department of Energy officials. “This is a monumental breakthrough,” says physicist Gilbert Collins of the University of Rochester in New York, who is a former NIF collaborator but was not involved with the research leading to the latest advance. “Since I started in this field, fusion was always 50 years away…. With this achievement, the landscape has changed.” Fusion potentially provides a clean energy source. The fission reactors now used to generate nuclear energy rely on heavy atoms, like uranium, to release energy when they break down into lighter atoms, including some that are radioactive. While it’s comparatively easy to generate energy with fission, it’s an environmental nightmare to deal with the leftover radioactive debris that can remain hazardous for hundreds of millenia. Controlled nuclear fusion, on the other hand, doesn’t produce such long-lived radioactive waste, but it’s technically much harder to achieve in the first place. In nuclear fusion, light...