Five Things to Know About Fusion Energy - 2022

Nuclear Power Industry / Fusion Power Industry

Verma and Adams reported in late 2022 that Fusion energy could very well be the solution to all our future energy problems, but what exactly is it? And how do we make it happen? 

Here are five things to know:

• The largest fusion generator near us is the sun. A seemingly endless supply of power, scientists believe that the fusion energy it creates in just one day could be enough to supply our entire planet’s energy needs for years!
• However, making a sun, an actual star on Earth, is tough. But we’re getting closer! Today’s nuclear power plants aren’t fusion but rather fission. They’re effective, but they create a mess of radioactive waste as a result and need containing to stop them getting out of control like what happened in Fukushima, Japan.
• Very basically, here’s how they both work: Fission is about splitting an atom by slamming something into it, like a neutron or a tiny particle. When the atom splits, a huge amount of energy is released! Fusion is about joining atoms by slamming them together, so they fuse together at massively high temperatures. This produces even more energy — something like three or four times that of fission.
• Fusion energy is also zero emission and way safer than our current nuclear fission power plants, producing waste in the form of helium instead of hard to dispose of radioactive stuff. Fusion power simply stops when it runs out of fuel. And if done correctly, it requires relatively few resources to keep making energy. It uses fuel that is so abundant, it’s easy and cheap to find, like deuterium from seawater and tritium from lithium, which you can get from rocks. It’s also the stuff we have in our batteries.
• A recent breakthrough at a facility here in California has pushed us even closer to making fusion possible, and it’s hoped that soon small quantities of fuel will be able to release huge amounts of energy, potentially enough for us to say goodbye to fossil fuels forever and herald the holy grail of power!

Fusion energy has yet to be successfully achieved because it’s hugely expensive due to the temperatures and pressures required to sustain a reaction to pump out more energy than is currently required to fuel it. So it’s just not viable — yet. But keep a close eye on developments because in the future, we could all be powered by the engines of the universe.