Futur Fusion energy explanation

Fusion energy  explanation 

the fundamental currency of our universe is energy it lights our homes grows our food powers our computers we can get it
lots of ways burning fossil fuels splitting atoms or sunlight striking
photovoltaics but there's a downside to everything fossil fuels are extremely toxic nuclear waste is well nuclear waste and there are not enough batteries to store sunlight for cloudy days yet
and yet the Sun seems to have virtually limitless free energy is there a way we could build a Sun on earth can we bottle
a star the Sun shines because of nuclear fusion in a nutshell Fusion is a thermonuclear process meaning that the ingredients have to be incredibly hot so hot that the atoms are stripped of their
electrons making a plasma where nuclei and electrons bounce around freely since  nuclei are all positively charged they repel each other in order to overcome this repulsion the particles have to be
going very very fast in this context very fast means at very heart millions  of degrees  stars cheat to reach these temperatures
they are so massive that the pressure in their cause generates the heat to squeeze the nuclei together until they merge and fuse creating heavier nuclei and releasing energy in the process it
is this energy release that scientists
hope to harness in a new generation of
power plant the fusion reactor on earth
it's not feasible to use this brute
force method to create fusion so if we
wanted to build a reactor that generates
energy from fusion we have to get clever
to date scientists have invented two
ways of making plasmas hot enough to
fuse the first type of reactor uses a
magnetic field to squeeze a plasma in a
doughnut shaped chamber where the
reactions take place
these magnetic confinement reactors such
as the ITER reactor in France use
superconducting electromagnets cooled
with liquid helium to within a few
degrees of absolute zero meaning they
host some of the biggest temperature
gradients in the known universe
the second type called inertial
confinement uses pulses from super
powered lasers to heat the surface of a
pellet of fuel imploding it briefly
making the fuel hot and dense enough to
fuse in fact one of the most powerful
lasers in the world is used for fusion
experiments at the National Ignition
facility in the US these experiments and
others like them around the world are
today just experiments scientists are
still developing the technology and
although they can achieve fusion right
now it costs more energy to do the
experiments than they produce in fusion
the technology has a long way to go
before it's commercially viable and
maybe it never will be it might just be
impossible to make a viable fusion
reactor on earth but if it gets there it
would be so efficient that a single
glass of seawater could be used to
produce as much energy as burning a
barrel of oil with no waste to speak of
this is because fusion reactors would
use hydrogen or helium as fuel and
seawater is loaded with hydrogen
but not just any hydrogen will do
specific isotopes with extra neutrons
called
deuterium and tritium are needed to make
the right reactions deuterium is stable
and can be found in abundance in
seawater though tritium is a bit
trickier it's radioactive and there may
only be 20 kilograms of it in the world
mostly in nuclear warheads which makes
it incredibly expensive so we may need
another fusion buddy for deuterium
instead of tritium helium-3 an isotope
of helium might be a great substitute
unfortunately it's also incredibly rare
on earth but here the moon might have
the answer
over billions of years the solar wind
may have built up huge deposits of
helium-3 on the moon instead of making
helium-3 we can mine it if we could sift
the lunar dust for helium we'd have
enough fuel to power the entire world
for thousands of years one more argument
for establishing a moon base if you
weren't convinced already okay
maybe you think building a mini Sun
still sounds kind of dangerous but
they'd actually be much safer than most
other types of power plant a fusion
reactor is not like a nuclear plant
which can melt down catastrophically if
the confinement fails then the plasma
would expand and cool and the reaction
would stop put simply it's not a bomb
the release of radioactive fuel like
tritium could pose a threat to the
environment tritium could bond with
oxygen making radioactive water which
could be dangerous as it seeps into the
environment fortunately there's no more
than a few grams of tritium in use at a
given time so a leak would be quickly
diluted so we've just told you that
there's nearly unlimited energy to be
had at no expense to the environment in
something as simple as water so what's
the catch
cost we simply don't know if fusion
power will ever be commercially viable
even if they work they might be too
expensive to ever build the main
drawback is that it's unproven
technology it's a ten billion dollar
gamble and that money might be better
spent on other clean energy that's
already proven itself maybe we should
cut our losses or maybe when the payoff
is unlimited clean energy for everyone
it might be worth the risk
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