Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
Various authors have also put forth ways to organize all the fusion approaches that have been tested over the past 70+ years. This flow chart above groups the approaches into color coded families, these are: the Pinch Family (orange), The Mirror Family (red), Cusp Systems (violet), Tokamaks & Stellarators (Green), Plasma Structures (gray), Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (dark yellow ...
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 It was quickly superseded by the Teller-Ulam design.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.
In 2024, Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced plans to build the world's first grid-scale commercial nuclear fusion power plant at the James River Industrial Center in Chesterfield County, Virginia, which is part of the Greater Richmond Region; the plant is designed to produce about 400 MW of electric power, and is intended to come online in ...
Nuclear fusion reaction of two helium-4 nuclei produces beryllium-8, which is highly unstable, and decays back into smaller nuclei with a half-life of 8.19 × 10 −17 s, unless within that time a third alpha particle fuses with the beryllium-8 nucleus [3] to produce an excited resonance state of carbon-12, [4] called the Hoyle state, which ...
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 ...
Controlled nuclear fusion could in principle be used in fusion power plants to produce power without the complexities of handling actinides, but significant scientific and technical obstacles remain. Despite research having started in the 1950s, no commercial fusion reactor is expected before 2050.