New answers tagged fusion
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Is it possible to build a pure fusion and powerful nuclear bomb
"Powerful" is a relative term. According to the pure fusion weapon Wiki article (helpfully linked by Jim in the comments), a PFB with current technology would weigh about as much as the equivalent TNT yield. I suppose that would not be considered relatively powerful.
As is, I think, well ...
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Fusion happens between light nuclei. It cannot happen in room temperatures and pressures, it needs very high energies in order to strip the electrons from the nucleus and to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion of the positive charges .
The fusion reaction rate increases rapidly with temperature until it maximizes and then gradually drops off. The DT ...
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Fission is exothermic only for heavy elements, while fusion is exothermic only for light elements. Intermediate nuclei, in the iron/nickel range, are the most tightly bound, and so you generally release energy moving in that direction.
Fusing stable elements into uranium would consume energy, as would trying to break helium into hydrogen.
For a more ...
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In short: maybe
All indications to date are that anti-matter behaves exactly like ordinary matter, so anti-hydrogen will fuse. In an anti-star, that should eventually eventually produce either an anti- red giant or an anti-supernova.
However, that last sentence assumes that anti-matter also behaves the same with respect to gravity. Some scientists have ...
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Well, if you search the internet it seems there are kids out there that make the claim of having built a fusion reactor . I watched this link. Note that in .56 minute he gives a small description, and does not claim breaking even, but that he demonstrated fusion. It is a plasma that he obviously creates and manages to fusion some deuterium that is not ...
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Following through to previous news articles such as this one:
“This is my Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion Reactor. It works on the property of inertial electrostatic confinement,” Conrad says.
See Wikipedia on inertial electrostatic confinement.
The actual design is a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor. Note Conrad's last name is Farnsworth which is a ...
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i also thought of the same phenomenon. I am in location where I see lightening almost every day and academically I am an electrical engineer. I found that almost all formulas of Lightening have proved wrong. There had been silent lightening, lightening at lower heights than higher grounds, lightening on flat surfaces than elevated tips. Lightening when ...
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The first iteration -- fission driven fusion -- is exactly what happens in thermonuclear weapons. There the energy released by fission of heavy elements is used to fuse lighter elements (in practice isotopes of hydrogen, maybe with the help of lithium). In staged nuclear weapons design this fusion energy could be used to additionally drive the thermonuclear ...
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The nuclear binding energy goes as displayed there. You can see that if you start with a heavy element (right hand side of the curve) and breaking it into 2 smaller elements (center of the curve), you end up with more energy. Say you want to break it up even more. Then the left part of the curve drops. It means that you will loose energy doing so. As a ...
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While D-He3 fusion reaction rate peaks at smaller energies than D-D (see this picture), and produce more energy (18MeV for D-He3 vs. 3-4MeV for D-D reaction), this is not the main reason why some people think He3 is a 'better' fuel. The main reason is that D-He3 fusion fuel cycle is aneutronic. That is, all fusion products (if we disregard auxiliary ...
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From what I have read in "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" Teller was the first one to express this concern before the Trinity test.
Also quoting from: http://www.sciencemusings.com/2005/10/what-didnt-happen.html
Physicist Edward Teller considered another possibility. The huge temperature of a fission explosion -- ...
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Nuclear physics often doesn't make sense without understanding the underlying quantum mechanics (and then, it often makes even less sense even though the numbers add up ;-)
In a nutshell, Deutrium is pretty stable compared to Helium-3. Helium-3 is more "desperate" to fill the missing neutron than Deutrium is to merge with a twin to form Helium.
In other ...
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