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Nuclear Fusion: The Clean Power That Will Take Decades To Master
Topic Started: May 18 2015, 02:07 AM (34 Views)
Webster
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(Digg) Nuclear Fusion: The Clean Power That Will Take Decades To Master

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Nuclear fusion is what powers the Sun and the stars — unleashing huge amounts of energy through the binding together of light elements such as hydrogen and helium. If fusion power were harnessed directly on Earth, it could produce inexhaustible clean power, using seawater as the main fuel, with no greenhouse gas emissions, no proliferation risk, and no risk of catastrophic accidents.

Radioactive waste is very low level and indirect, arising from neutron activation of the power plant core. With current technology, a fusion power plant could be completely recycled within 100 years of shutdown.

Today’s nuclear power plants exploit nuclear fission — the splitting of atomic nuclei of heavy elements such as uranium, thorium, and plutonium into lighter “daughter” nuclei. This process, which happens spontaneously in unstable elements, can be harnessed to generate electricity, but it also generates long-lived radioactive waste.

Why aren’t we using safe, clean nuclear fusion power yet? Despite significant progress in fusion research, why do we physicists treat unfounded claims of “breakthroughs” with scepticism? The short answer is that is it very difficult to achieve the conditions that sustain the reaction. But if the experiments under construction now are successful, we can be optimistic that nuclear fusion power can be a reality within a generation.

-Read more: http://digg.com/2015/nuclear-fusion-the-clean-power-that-will-take-decades-to-master


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