BRIAN POTTER
Construction Physics
June 26, 2024

Today all nuclear power reactors are driven by fission reactions, which release energy by splitting atoms apart. But there’s another nuclear reaction that’s potentially even more promising as an energy source: nuclear fusion. Unlike fission, fusion releases energy by combining atoms together. Fusion is what powers the sun and other stars, as well as the incredibly destructive hydrogen bomb.

It’s not hard to understand the appeal of using nuclear fusion as a source of energy. Unlike coal or gas, which rely on exhaustible sources of fuel extracted from the earth, fusion fuel is effectively limitless. A fusion reactor could theoretically be powered entirely by deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen with an extra neutron), and there’s enough deuterium in seawater to power the entire world at current rates of consumption for 26 billion years.

Fusion has many of the advantages of nuclear fission with many fewer drawbacks. Like fission, fusion only requires tiny amounts of fuel: Fusion fuel has an energy density (the amount of energy per unit mass) a million times higher than fossil fuels, and four times higher than nuclear fission. Like fission, fusion can produce carbon-free “baseload” electricity without the intermittency issues of wind or solar. But the waste produced by fusion is far less radioactive than fission, and the sort of “runaway” reactions that can result in a core meltdown in a fission-based reactor can’t happen in fusion. Because of its potential to provide effectively unlimited, clean energy, countries around the world have spent billions of dollars in the pursuit of fusion power. Designs for fusion reactors appeared as early as 1939, and were patented as early as 1946. The U.S. government began funding fusion power research in 1951, and has continued ever since.

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https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusion-power