Fusion Power Explained – Future or Failure

The fundamental value of our Universe is energy. Light our homes, grow our food,

power

our computers. We can obtain it in many ways: we burn fossil fuels, split atoms or the sun's rays produce electricity. to everything. Fossil fuels are extremely toxic, nuclear waste is... well, nuclear waste, and there still aren't enough batteries to store sunlight for cloudy days. And yet the sun seems to have infinite, free energy. Is there a way we can build a sun on Earth? Can we put a star on the bottle? The sun shines due to the release of energy. In short,

fusion

is a thermonuclear process, which means that the components must be extremely hot, so hot that the atoms are stripped of their electrons, forming a plasma where the nucleus and electrons fly away. freely.

When all nuclei are positively charged, they push against each other. To overcome this push, the particles have to go very, very fast. In this context, very fast means very hot: millions of degrees. stars do not reach these temperatures. They are large and the pressure in their cores generates heat and squeezes the nuclei until they fuse and fuse, creating heavy nuclei and releasing energy in the process. This is the release of energy that scientists hope to harness in a new generation of

power

plants: energy generated by nuclear

fusion

. On Earth it is not possible to use this brute force method to create fusion.

So if we want to build a reactor that generates energy from fusion we have to be smart. To date, scientists have invented two ways to create plasma with sufficient heat of fusion: The first type of reactor uses a magnetic field to compress the plasma into a ring-shaped chamber where the reactions will take place. These magnetic reactors are insulated like the ITER reactor in France, we use superconducting electromagnets cooled with liquid helium to a few degrees from absolute zero. It means they are expecting some of the highest temperatures the Universe has ever known. The second type, called heating and compression reactions, uses vibrations from a powerful laser to heat the surface of a compressed mass of fuel, causing it to explode, heating the fuel and igniting the fuse.

Around the world it was used for fusion experiments at the National Ignition Facility in the United States. These experiments and others like them in Around the World Today are just experiments. Scientists are still developing the technology even though they can achieve fusion; At this point, doing the experiment costs more energy than they produce in fusion. This technology has a long way to go before it is commercially viable. And maybe it's not. It will be impossible to build a fusion reactor on Earth. But if it is done it will be efficient, since with a single glass of seawater you can produce as much energy as burning a barrel of oil without talking about waste.

This is because the reactors will use hydrogen or helium as fuel. , and seawater is charged with hydrogen. But not just any hydrogen will do: specific isotopes with extra neutrons, called deuterium and tritium, are needed to carry out the correct reactions. Deuterium is stable and can be found in abundance in seawater. However, tritium is a bit complicated. It is radioactive and can only weigh twenty kilograms in the world, mainly in nuclear landfill, which makes it very expensive. Therefore, we may need a fusion body for deuterium instead of tritium. Helium-3, an isotope of helium, could be a great substitute.

Unfortunately, it is also rare on Earth. But here the Moon has the answer. Over billions of years, the solar wind has built up large deposits of helium-3 on the Moon. Instead of producing helium-3, we can extract it. If we could sift lunar dust for helium, we would have enough fuel to last the entire world for thousands of years. One more argument for establishing a base on the moon, if you're still not convinced. Well, you might think that building a mini sun still sounds like some kind of risk. But they will actually be much safer than other types of power plants.

Solar energy is not like a nuclear power plant that can cause disasters if the insulation fails, then the plasma will expand and cool and the reaction will stop. Simply put, this is not a bomb. The release of radioactive fuel such as tritium could pose a threat to the environment. Tritium can bind to oxygen, making water radioactive, which can be dangerous if it leaks into the environment. Fortunately, no more than a few grams of tritium are used at any given time, so a leak will dilute quickly. So we are just saying that the aferm will have unlimited energy at no cost to the environment in something as simple as water.

So what is the cost? We simply don't know if this energy will ever be commercially viable. Even if they work, they can sometimes be very expensive to build. The main obstacle is that this technology is unproven. This is a ten billion dollar bet. And that money can be better spent on clean energy of other types that have already proven effective. Maybe we should cut our losses. Or perhaps, when the profits are limitless and energy is clean for everyone, it could be a risk worth taking? Subtitles from the Amara.org community