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Fusion powers stars and produces virtually all elements in a process called nucleosynthesis. The Sun is a main-sequence star, and, as such, generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In its core, the Sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen and makes 616 million metric tons of helium each second.
The history of nuclear fusion began early in the 20th century as an inquiry into how stars powered themselves and expanded to incorporate a broad inquiry into the nature of matter and energy, as potential applications expanded to include warfare, energy production and rocket propulsion.
The first Soviet fusion bomb test, RDS-6s, American codename "Joe 4", demonstrated the first fission/fusion/fission "layercake" design, limited below the megaton range, with less than 20% of the yield coming directly from fusion. It was quickly superseded by the Teller-Ulam design. This was the first aerial drop of a fusion weapon.
The Joint European Torus (JET) magnetic fusion experiment in 1991. Fusion power is a proposed form of power generation that would generate electricity by using heat from nuclear fusion reactions. In a fusion process, two lighter atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus, while releasing energy. Devices designed to harness this energy are ...
Articles dealing specifically with using this process to produce useful power are contained in the subcategory Fusion power. Articles about nuclear processes that are speculative or poorly understood (like cold fusion ), or whose potential for power production is remote (like muon-catalyzed fusion ) are kept in the main category.
The proton–proton chain, also commonly referred to as the p–p chain, is one of two known sets of nuclear fusion reactions by which stars convert hydrogen to helium. It dominates in stars with masses less than or equal to that of the Sun , [ 2 ] whereas the CNO cycle , the other known reaction, is suggested by theoretical models to dominate ...
Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear power plants.
Toroidal machines can be axially symmetric, like the tokamak and the reversed field pinch (RFP), or asymmetric, like the stellarator.The additional degree of freedom gained by giving up toroidal symmetry might ultimately be usable to produce better confinement, but the cost is complexity in the engineering, the theory, and the experimental diagnostics.