![]() ![]() ![]() This is why fusion is still in the research and development phase – and fission is already making electricity. sleeping in one placeor split (fission)e.g. The reasons that have made fusion so difficult to achieve to date are the same ones that make it safe: it is a finely balanced reaction which is very sensitive to the conditions – the reaction will die if the plasma is too cold or too hot, or if there is too much fuel or not enough, or too many contaminants, or if the magnetic fields are not set up just right to control the turbulence of the hot plasma. In ethology, a fissionfusion society is one in which the size and composition of the social group change as time passes and animals move throughout the environment animals merge into a group (fusion)e.g. ![]() Unlike nuclear fission, the nuclear fusion reaction in a tokamak is an inherently safe reaction. Most of the fusion reactor concepts under development will use a mixture of deuterium and tritium hydrogen atoms that contain extra neutrons. In conventional nuclear power stations today, there are systems in place to moderate the chain reactions to prevent accident scenarios and stringent security measures to deal with proliferation issues. Fusion could generate four times more energy per kilogram of fuel than fission (used in nuclear power plants) and nearly four million times more energy than burning oil or coal. This chain reaction is the key to fission reactions, but it can lead to a runaway process resulting in nuclear accidents. The result of the instability is the nucleus breaking up, in any one of many different ways, and producing more neutrons, which in turn hit more uranium atoms and make them unstable and so on. It also doesn’t produce highly radioactive fission products. This is the same process that powers the sun and creates huge amounts of energyseveral times greater than fission. It is triggered by uranium absorbing a neutron, which renders the nucleus unstable. The main difference between these two processes is that fission is the splitting of an atom into two or more smaller ones while fusion is the fusing of two or. Fusion occurs when two atoms slam together to form a heavier atom, like when two hydrogen atoms fuse to form one helium atom. Fission and chain reactionsįission is the nuclear process that is currently run in nuclear power plants. Both reactions release energy which, in a power plant, would be used to boil water to drive a steam generator, thus producing electricity. However, fusion is combining light atoms, for example two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, to form the heavier helium. Nuclear fusion power plants will require out-of-this-world conditions temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius to achieve high enough particle density for the reaction to take place. In fission, energy is gained by splitting heavy atoms, for example uranium, into smaller atoms such as iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, to name just a few. The conditions required to start and maintain a fusion reaction make a fission-type accident or nuclear meltdown based on a chain reaction impossible. ![]()
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