Fusion offers great potential, but it is very difficult and many of the problems associated with it have been downplayed. If tritium is used then you will have neutrons flying around. The neutrons will make the containment vessel radioactive and it will eventually need to be disposed of, which means that there is STILL a nuclear waste problem. Also, if energy usage continues to grow at a high rate, fusion will still have a global warming problem associated with waste heat, so it cannot be considered in the same category as solar power.
Yes it is. There was Farnsworth the TV system inventor. he made the early fusor. Pons and Fleischman were not crooks. When things are better understood these men may be properly honoured.
I don't go for it as a power system as we have lots of gas and oil for that and it is too expensive but it is like saying " what good is a baby" It is what follows that will make the difference. Think of the non stick frying pan, case proven.
Its truly shocking that we do not have operational fusion reactors right now. I mean fusion is the magic bullet. The words "energy crisis" would be meaningless in a society that had fusion. Not only is fusion clear, it is immensely powerful, and uses basically seawater as its fuel. In a fusion economy, it would not even make sense to send you an electricity bill; the postage would be worth more.
Yes, because eventually it's going to lead to practical fusion energy and we can stop burning petrochemicals and save them for use in plastics.
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Development of fusion concept and theory[edit]
Research into nuclear fusion started in the early part of the 20th century. In 1920 the British physicist Francis William Aston discovered that the total mass of four hydrogen atoms are heavier than the total mass of one helium atom (He-4), which implied that net energy can be released by combining hydrogen atoms together to form helium, and provided the first hints of a mechanism by which stars could produce energy in the quantities being measured. Through the 1920s, Arthur Stanley Eddington became a major proponent of the proton–proton chain reaction (PP reaction) as the primary system running the Sun, a theory later verified after Hans Bethe finally showed in 1939 that beta decay and quantum tunneling in the Sun's core might convert one of the protons into a neutron and thereby producing deuterium rather than a diproton. The deuterium would then fuse through other reactions to further increase the energy output. For this work, Bethe won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics.
