press release: NUCLEAR FUSION
5/4/16 by:Dionyah Thompson
Lyman Spitzer at Princeton
In 1991 in the U.S he developed a magnetic confinement device called a stellarator, while Edward Teller was working on the hydrogen bomb over at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The former Soviet Union was also performing significant fusion research using the theoretical work of I. E. Tamm and A.D. Sakharov in developing the tokamak
In 1993, Princeton’s Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) device, using a deuterium and tritium fueled plasma, produced 10 MW of power. By 1997 JET seized the world record for fusion power by producing 16 MW of power. In 2005, construction of another experimental reactor (ITER) was announced, which is designed to produce several times more fusion power.
The fusing of two atoms together takes not only incredible pressure, but intense temperatures, which makes creating and controlling this reaction very difficult on earth (while not so difficult on the sun). One advantage of fusion over fission is that the by-products are much less hazardous. While wroth with difficulty, many still believe that fusion is the energy of the future. As a final note, the theoretical “cold fusion” would greatly alleviate the environmental difficulties associated with regular hot fusion.
Comparisons/differences
Nuclear fusion and nuclear fission are different types of reactions that release energy due to the presence of high-powered atomic bonds between particles found within a nucleus. In fission, an atom is split into two or more smaller, lighter atoms. Fusion, in contrast, occurs when two or more smaller atoms fuse together, creating a larger, heavier atom