We already know the nuclear fission process, and it's the method we use in our nuclear plants around the world. But a new way of generating nuclear energy is emerging that may be a little different from what we know. Today I will explain to you how nuclear fusion works.
What's up engineering lovers, my name is Igor Felipe and today's chat will be about nuclear power plants, or rather, about nuclear power plants that use nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion promises to be the future of humanity in terms of energy, not least because the comparison we have with nuclear fusion is our own sun, which has been performing this process for a long time. But why will it be a future solution and not a present one?
Nuclear fusion is the most promising energy source in the entire Universe, from massive stars across space to tiny reactors here on Earth. There are currently three main approaches being studied, with all three increasingly closer to the break-even point needed for energy production. However, major challenges still exist, and we are unlikely to see a commercial merger anytime soon.
When it comes to generating energy, physics offers us many options. With simple mechanics, you can produce electrical energy with the current of water or with a set of propellers to capture the wind. But there are more sophisticated solutions, like nuclear reactions, where the bonds between neutrons and protons inside an atomic nucleus are broken or fused to release energy, and then that energy is put into action.
While mechanical work freely takes advantage of existing environmental resources such as hydro and wind, we have reliability and scalability issues as well as their own environmental impacts. Chemical reactions, on the other hand, are leveraged by all forms of life, are more reliable and cause little environmental impact. However, nuclear power is unique.
It is literally hundreds of thousands to millions of times more efficient, in terms of fraction of mass converted to energy, than all chemical reactions. But how does this nuclear fusion reaction work? It is strange to think that a small building block of matter, the atomic nucleus, holds the greatest potential for releasing energy.
While electron transitions in atoms or molecules normally release energy on the order of 1 electron-Volt, nuclear transitions between different configurations release energies a million times greater, on the order of 1 Mega-electron-Volt. There are two ways to release energy through a nuclear reaction: First, by separating heavy nuclei in fission reactions, or by fusing light nuclei in fusion reactions. Both types of nuclear reactions can release a lot of energy, where lighter elements release energy by fusion and heavier elements release it by fission.
If you want to know more about the nuclear fission process, I'll leave a card for another video where I explain the fission process, because in this one I'm going to focus on the nuclear fusion process. Fusion offers the potential to release even more energy than fission as we have already seen in comparing energy released in electron volts. It occurs in all stars and is the primary reaction that powers our Sun.
In principle, if we can control nuclear fusion as efficiently as we control fission reactions, extracting energy as needed, it could replace all other forms of energy generation as the dominant source of energy on the planet. But there are currently three main concerns when it comes to energy sources. The first of these is availability.
We want that energy to be available when we need it and when we need it less, we don't want to waste it. It is the same, as we do with hydroelectric plants. When we have more demands, we open the floodgates and increase the flow in the turbines and when we don't use as much, we simply close the floodgates.
The second factor is Ubiquity. But what the hell is this? Ubiquity means being present everywhere at the same time.
So, for our purposes on Earth, wind and solar energy are ubiquitous, as the winds and the sun will always exist. And the third point is sustainability. When we burn fossil fuels, we release pollutants that affect the planet.
When we produce nuclear fission reactions, we produce radioactive byproducts, some of which have a short half-life and others that will persist for many generations of humans into the future. These three reasons underscore why nuclear fusion power is the dream of sustainable energy. If we can control the rate of a fusion reaction, we can harness it to produce energy on demand, with virtually no waste.
Its fuel, like hydrogen and its isotopes, is incredibly abundant here on Earth. And there is no “depletion” of nuclear fusion fuel, not for billions of years. And while nuclear fusion can produce small amounts of radioactive products like tritium, there is never any risk of reactor meltdown or long-term environmental damage.
Compared to solar energy, which requires mining for rare elements and using chemicals, nuclear fusion is the more sustainable energy option. Of course, this is all based on an assumption that we as a species have not yet reached: that we can break even when it comes to nuclear fusion energy. The balance point we want is to have a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction that produces more energy in its process than what we use to make this process happen.
And to reach that balance, which is our biggest challenge. It is not an easy thing to create a nuclear fusion reaction. We ended up restricting ourselves to working with materials like hydrogen, deuterium, helium-3 and other stable light elements and isotopes, and it takes tremendous temperatures and energies for a nuclear fusion reaction to take place.
You also may not want to produce more energy through fusion than you put into the system to make that reaction. Instead, what you need to do is produce energy at a slow enough rate that you can use it to produce energy over time. So far, both problems remain unsolved together, but there are three main approaches researchers are taking as they try to revolutionize humanity's relationship with energy.
The first approach is magnetic confinement fusion. The fuel of nuclear fusion is not just atoms, but the atomic nuclei of atoms. One approach to nuclear fusion is to completely ionize atoms, stripping their electrons, until only atomic nuclei remain.
By creating this superheated plasma of atomic nuclei that can fuse together, the idea is then to bring these nuclei together, overcoming the electrically repulsive force between them, to start fusion reactions. The most successful approach here was to confine this superheated plasma using powerful electromagnets, bringing the atomic nuclei together inside a cavity known as a Tokamak. Tokamaks have been researched for decades and produce fusion reactions within them all the time.
The main difficulties with this approach are keeping the plasma confined so it doesn't collide with walls and extracting the energy produced by the reactions to create usable energy. If you remember the movie Spider-Man 2, where he fights Doctor Octupus, you may remember that in the movie he portrays exactly about the production of energy by nuclear fusion being controlled by electromagnets. The second approach is inertial confinement fusion.
Instead of playing around with magnetic fields, why not try the brute force approach? That's what inertial confinement fusion tries to do. Upon taking the sample of material to be melted, a series of high- powered lasers on all sides are fired at the sample, rapidly increasing its temperature and density until a nuclear fusion reaction can be triggered.
Although it requires the storage of a tremendous amount of energy for the “laser shot”, it is possible that the fusion reaction generated will release even more energy, allowing us to one day go beyond the point of equilibrium. This approach, like that of magnetic confinement fusion, has also been around for decades, producing fusion reactions all the time. Despite recent advances bringing us closer to the ultimate goal of breakeven, the same two problems remain.
Although we are producing ever-increasing amounts of energy through this method, it requires that we first store a huge amount of energy in a series of capacitor banks and then release that energy all at once. That is, we don't have a self-sustaining reaction, just a single explosion, and then we struggle to gather and harness that generated energy. And the third approach is the third way approaches.
This is where many private initiatives where some are legitimate, some suspicious and others that are unquestionable charlatans are getting involved. As it turns out, fusion is not as difficult to do, but it is remarkably difficult to get as close to the equilibrium point as inertial confinement or magnetic confinement fusion. As with most ventures on the fringes of conventional science, there are legitimate researchers working on the technologies behind these dreams, but there is also a lot of wishful thinking and a lot of promises that are highly unlikely to come to fruition.
So far, unfortunately, no one is particularly close to breaking even, and when it comes to the feasibility of the process, you only have to ask 3 questions. “Can you produce more energy than you need to put in to make the reaction happen? ” “How much of the produced energy can you harness to produce usable energy?
” “And how close are you, quantitatively, to breaking even? ” These are the questions we need to ask every time a facility or company claims that nuclear fusion power will be available and ready to use in just a few years. The main current method we have for producing energy around the world remains the 18th century technology of fossil fuel combustion, which is easily the biggest cause of rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere.
The nuclear fission which is the current technology we have to replace this old technology is fraught with consequences as it has been globally maligned by many due to fear of nuclear waste, war and more. When it comes to the Universe, there is no more fascinating and life-sustaining reaction than nuclear fusion. When light elements melt, the new molten element is lighter in mass than the initial reactants, and this fusion reaction releases energy proportional to the difference in mass as per Einstein's famous formula (E = mc2) that correlates energy with mass.
It is literally in the heart of every star. In terms of energy availability, fuel source and environmental impacts, nuclear fusion is by far the best choice of all options. Unfortunately, little investment was made in this technology and some people end up taking advantage of ideas and miracles, promising dreams without even approaching the famous balance point.
If there's one promising technology worth investing in, it's nuclear fusion power. It is the most promising way to mitigate the current climate and energy crisis. But it's not today's technology, and it's unlikely to become tomorrow's unless we change the way we fund and conduct basic research and development here on Earth.
And you, do you think nuclear fusion is the future of planet earth or is it just another dream? Comment below I want to know. Here on the side there are two videos and the video where I explain about nuclear fission is the one above, so check it out.
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