More energy needed to produce nuclear fusion, than the energy it would supply

Why We Will Never Make A Nuclear Fusion Reactor As Good As The Sun, Business Insider, JESSICA ORWIG OCT 17 2014 “…………..combine four hydrogen atoms and you get a burst of energy that can destroy entire islands and did on Nov. 1, 1952. That day the US tested the first hydrogen bomb on the now-nonexistent Pacific island, Elugelab.……… Clean, limitless energy is the real holy grail. Combine that desire with the awesome power we first saw with the< H-bomb, and we’ve been dreaming of a way to harness nuclear fusion of the sun as a source of clean, endless energy.

But so far, only Hollywood has managed…….. The amount of energy we need to produce the conditions for nuclear fusion is more than the energy we get out. And we’ve been coming up short for decades with little signs of improvement, according to Charles Seife,author of the book “Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking“who has written about the turtle-paced race for nuclear fusion for Slate.

Unfortunately for us, it is incredibly difficult to fuse hydrogen atoms together. It takes extreme pressure and heat, something that the sun’s strong gravitational force does naturally in its core. But we don’t have access to this kind of gravity here on our comparatively tiny Earth, and the only way to manufacture it is to expend a ton of energy to create it.

For about the last 70 years, we’ve slowly developed ways of producing the extreme pressure and heat necessary for nuclear fusion. Today, the most promising methods use containment vessels called tokamaks that can sustain hot plasmas that produce nuclear fusion but require lots of energy and space to function. The other way is using powerful lasers to fuse hydrogen atoms together.

Both of these methods, however, still have a long way to go despite what you might read from the occasional headlines on the latest breakthroughs in new nuclear fusion technology………http://www.businessinsider.com.au/we-will-never-have-sun-like-nuclear-fusion-2014-10

October 21, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized

1 Comment »

Nuclear fusion is NOT clean. The whole containment vessel in which the fusion is carried out – so far very briefly and at no net energy output – becomes radioactive due to neutron bombardment, a process called neutron activation.

In addition it has one of the major problems that you have with nuclear fission. The people you train in Schools of Nuclear Science and Engineering can move effortlessly between fusion power and fusion weapons. There are no Schools of Nuclear Weapons Science and Technology but there are lots of Schools of Nuclear (Power) Science and Technology including one here in Australia that recently got restarted after several decades in the wilderness.

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Comment by Dennis Matthews | October 21, 2014 | Reply

Antinuclear

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