"It is absolutely impossible for a Fukushima-type accident to happen at ITER," an official documentation insisted. However, that type of uncontrolled chain reaction simply doesn't happen with nuclear fusion. One huge worry with nuclear fission is the capacity for a meltdown, as at Chernobyl or Fukushima. ![]() The main byproduct is helium the inert, non-toxic gas has several uses in industry, which has suffered several shortages in recent years. That said, the quantities of lithium required by nuclear fusion power stations would be relatively small and would of course lead to the production of more energy.Īnd unlike fossil-fuel power generators, fusion reactors don't emit toxins such as carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. Lithium's increased usage over the past few years to produce raw material for electric batteries has raised concerns about the effects of large-scale mining. Lithium is much more easily available than uranium, including from salt flats the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) has estimated that "terrestrial reserves of lithium would permit the operation of fusion power plants for more than 1,000 years, while sea-based reserves of lithium would fulfil needs for millions of years." ![]() Fission requires uranium, a rare substance that must be mined and enriched fusion requires deuterium, readily extractable from seawater, and tritium – which can be made in the reactor itself from lithium. (Furthermore, most fusion reactors emit less radiation than the background emissions in the natural world.)Īt the other end of the process, fusion requires much less fuel than fission and the fuel is much easier to obtain. In 2019, National Geographic described nuclear fusion as the "holy grail for the future of nuclear power." Not only would it produce more energy more safely, it would also produce far less harmful radioactive waste than fission, from which weapons-grade material in spent fuel rods taking millions of years to decay requires extremely careful and expensive storage. What are the pros and cons of nuclear fusion? Harnessing, rather than unleashing, that inherent power will require self-sustaining, controlled "break-even" fusion. Humankind has already witnessed the power of thermonuclear bombs, which produce effectively an uncontrolled release of fusion energy. That's the scale of the task scientists are tackling – as well as keeping the whole thing under tight control. On Earth atmospheric pressure is roughly 1 bar, the interior of a fusion reactor will need to reach 150 million degrees Celsius – 10 times hotter than the Sun's core. Overcoming that innate repulsion happens in the Sun's core because it is under immense pressure of gravity as well as heat – around 15 million degrees Celsius and 265 billion bar of pressure. But forcing two nuclei together is difficult because they're both positively charged, so they strongly repel one another. That’s what happens in the Sun's core, where hydrogen atoms fuse to produce helium and energy. "Thermo" here simply means heat, because that method relies on achieving fusion via extremely high temperatures. There are several theoretical methods to attain fusion, but the one most exciting the modern scientific community is thermonuclear fusion. Eager scientists have pursued the harnessing of nuclear fusion's power-generating capacity for almost three-quarters of a century –the UK Atomic Energy Authority patented a fusion reactor in 1946 – but without reliable success. Each reaction releases energy, which can be harnessed for destruction – the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 were fission, but fusion was behind the second-generation "H-bomb" and can generate vast amounts of power. ![]() In fission, the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei in fusion, two or more nuclei combine. There are two types of nuclear power: fission and fusion.
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