Questions tagged [fusion]
The fusion tag is used for questions about nuclear fusion, both the basic process at a physical level and it's use as a potential energy source.
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Cause of energy release in fusion [duplicate]
For the fast few months, I have been scratching my head for this problem which I have faced while studying fusion.
In a hydrogen fusion, two hydrogen (for instance ) fuse to form a helium nucleus. I ...
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Why the Tokamak Fusion Reactors need to be so big if electromagnetism works better for small distances?
I'm probably asking something dumb, but for the little I think I know, I assume that the bigger the electromagnetism field, the bigger the energetic requirement.
I'm assuming that the square cube law ...
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Nuclear fusion mass defect and energy production
In researching the topic of nuclear fusion, I have a few doubts related to the mass defect, 'negative' potential energy and resultant energy released as a by-product of nuclear fusion.
When two ...
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Can fission and fusion happen together
Like making up them together first splitting in the term of fission then adding them up.
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Can Jupiter turn into a star if it radiated off enough heat?
Since a star heats up when it radiates more heat (via gravitational compression), and since that's also how protostars turn into stars, I was wondering what are the chances of Jupiter reaching the ...
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Heating Plasma in Inertial confinement fusion
How is the plasma heated in ICF? I know in MCF in the ITER tokamak uses external methods such as NBI but how in inertial confinement fusion is the plasma heated to the temperatures which allows ...
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Fusion energy origin
In fusion , I have understood so far that two light nuclei fuse to form a heavy nucleus. The nucleons in the light nuclei experience lesser binding energy as compared to the nucleons in heavy nucleus ...
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How are Inertial Confinement Fusion reactors and Hypersonic Projectile fusion reactors going to generate continuous energy?
Perhaps I have not investigated enough, but all the recent (and older) news articles about the Ignition Facility in northern California and the First Light reactor in the UK fail to state how they are ...
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Does pressure increasing or decreasing due to temperature have an impact on the Sun Core's "Thermostat"?
Firstly, thank you for reading this post.
I have a question regarding how the Sun regulates its nuclear fusion rate in its core. This is commonly known as the Sun's thermostat. This is a homework ...
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Understanding a Gsponer formula about mi
I'm reading over one of Andre Gsponer's papers on nuclear weapons. I'm confused by section 3.2, particularly formulas 3 and 4. (3) states:
$$ \eta_\mathrm{fission} = \frac{\rho R - \omega_c}{\rho R} $$...
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How will "Fusion Power" deal with it's waste heat?
in application of Fusion power, even if it were doable at present, given the multi-million degree operation, how does such a system dispose of waste heat if plasma is magnetically confined?
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Fusion Rate and Luminosity in Stellar Model
In astrophysics textbooks one of the differential equations to solve in stellar model is
$$\frac{dL}{dr}=4\pi r^2 \epsilon$$
where $L(r)$ and $\epsilon (r)$ are the luminosity and fusion rate per unit ...
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How long would muon half lifes half to be for Muon catalysed p-p fusion to viable?
I was reading about Muon catalysed fusion and how the "alpha sticking problem" is a mjor barrier to viability, but when you fuse two protons together you get deutrium instead, which still ...
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Which is more: Energy released by nuclear fission or fusion? [closed]
The energy released by one fission reaction is 190MeV and the energy released by one fusion reaction is 24.7MeV. Then by my common sense 190>24.7 so energy released by fission>fusion but the ...
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What is the energy density of Lattice Confinement Fusion?
For quite some time I've seen this video explaining it and this news/article that NASA detected lattice confinement fusion and it always made me quite curious about the actual veracity of these claims,...
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Question about weak decay in p-p fusion
I'm trying to write a very simple simulator of nuclear fusion (with very limited prior knowledge, as I'm finding out), and I'm having a very difficult time understanding p->n conversion.
I believe ...
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Can neutron magnetic moment be used to slightly deflect the neutrons to not hit the tocamac lattice at a really small angle?
Can neutron magnetic moment be used to slightly deflect the neutrons to not hit the tocamac lattice at a small angle? So part of the moment is spent to change its velocity vector orientation?
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Why fusion reactor is not made of high-temperature superconductor?
As we know, there is several kind of high-temperature superconductors discovered. However, when I learned that current tokamaks and stellarators just mainly use Niobium-tin superconductor (which is ...
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Tokamak and Lithium "blankets"
I am working on planning out nuclear fusion for a fictional world, and I am wondering if two ideas are able to work together, or if they contradict each other.
So Dueterium-Tritium fusion releases ...
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Mass defect and nuclear binding energy
Nucleons bound in the reactant nuclei have low binding energy and when they fuse together , the nucleons are bound more tightly as coloumb force is also increasing. Since energy is required to tightly ...
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What does change in volume during solidification and fusion depend on? [duplicate]
Why do some matter expand while others contract when they change their state from solid to liquid and vice versa?
For example, ice, brass, bismuth, antimony etc. expand when they turn from liquid to ...
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Nuclear energy and Nuclear fission
It is mentioned that the lesser the total mass of the nuclei, greater would be the binding energy per nucleon.
I do not seem to understand this..
As per my understanding of binding energy, it is the ...
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Is there an online resource for fusion outcomes of various elements at various energy levels?
I'm looking to find a chart of nuclides, their potential fusion products and measured energy levels, in a similar vein as NuDat 3, but for fusion.
It doesn't need to be cleanly formatted like NuDat, ...
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Which overheating equipment terminated the record-breaking fusion reaction at the JET reactor?
It has been reported in Nature that in December 2021 the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor near Oxford in the UK sustained a 5 second fusion reaction and produced a new record for fusion ...
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Can a taser be used to power a fusor?
On the electricity side of the fusor, it seems that one needs 20+kV, 10mA. Off the shelf tasers can provide 40kV, 5mA. So could 2 tasers in parallel (with a rectifier) provide enough power to run a ...
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Will helium produced during a Nuclear fusion go back to Hydrogen?
I don’t know whether I’m right or wrong, but my argument is that, When hydrogen is converted into helium during fusion, a large amount of energy is produced roughly of order of 18Mega eV(At least that’...
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Is the speed of ejected particles proportional to the mass of the supernova star?
Is the speed of ejected particles proportional to the mass of the supernova star? Has the nuclear explosion more power if the supernova object has more mass? In simple words is it true that there is ...
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Where do the Neutrons for fusing Hydrogen to Helium in the Sun come from?
The sun works by fusing hydrogen to helium (at the moment). While hydrogen is a single proton (I'm ignoring electrons here... not sure if they are relevant since it's probably a plasma anyway) helium ...
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Internal energy bound configuration in nuclear fusion [closed]
I have read that
when a reaction occurs in which the products of the reaction are in a
less energetic state than the reactants, the kinetic energy of the
products is increased over that of the ...
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Fission is to Cyclotrons as Fusion is to _________?
Using a cyclotron we can trigger fission in a controlled way.
My question is similar to cyclotrons, do we have a mechanism in which we can trigger fusion from a physics (non-chemistry) perspective ...
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China's "Artificial sun"
So I heard in the radio today about China's "Artificial sun". There is this hype about it having 5x the temperature of the core of the sun.
It is, as I suspected, a fusion reactor. I admit I ...
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How small/large can a sun/star be?
I have zero knowledge about astronomy (I often mistake it with astrology) so my question might be a bit naïve. But what are the limits for stars to be stable? I guess you can't up or downscale our ...
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Alternatives to Steam Engines [closed]
Since the 18th century, humankind relied on steam engines to convert heat into electricity on mass scale even in fission and fusion （in the future） power plants.
However, this process involves several ...
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Why is internal energy of nucleons ∝ to binding energy? [duplicate]
In fusion , as two light nuclei fuse , the relative binding energy experienced by each nucleon is increased and hence the internal energy of the nucleons is decreased which by E=mc² causes a decrease ...
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Nuclear binding and internal energy [duplicate]
A section of some article:
When you cool a body at rest its internal energy decreases. Since energy is related to mass, here $E=m_0c^2$, where $m_0$ is the rest mass, the rest mass of the body ...
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Strong nuclear force in fusion
I have read that there is an increase in the amount of the binding energy from the reactant nuclei and the product nucleus during nuclear fusion and this causes the decrease the internal energy (...
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Why is energy released when nucleons come together to form a nucleus?
Binding energy is defined as the energy required to split a given nucleus into it's individual protons and neutrons. But why when nucleons are combined they release energy? What is the origin of this ...
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Doubt about the explicit toroidal and poloidal components of a confined plasma in Tokamaks
Introduction
Since the magnetic field is solenoidal: $\nabla \cdot \vec{B} = 0$, it is possible to decompose it as:
$\vec{B} = \vec{B}_{T} + \vec{B}_{P} \tag{1}$
where $\vec{B}_{T}$ is the Toroidal ...
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Bound energy configuration
I read - "The resulting bound state represents a lower energy configuration that what existed before, which means that when the binding occurs, energy is released, and the bound particles remain ...
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Is any fusion or fission happening at the center of Earth? [duplicate]
High pressure, temperature same as the surface of the Sun, solid iron inner core, liquid outer heavy elements core - got it. But are nuclear reactions happening there?
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Why there is no reaction Deuterium + Deuterium $=\rm {}^{4}He$?
Why there is no reaction like
$D+D={}^{4}He$
specified here and in other places like this?
Apparently
$2\times2.0141-4.0026=0.0256$
is positive. What is the problem with this reaction?
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Origin of Nuclear fusion energy
What causes the mass of the two reacting nuclei to convert to energy and if it is for a purpose then why is it released. What is the source for this cause (if there)?
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Is it possible securely detonate a hydrogen bomb inside a very, very thick iron armor to get the armor only rise its temperature and not break apart? [closed]
Is it possible securely detonate a small hydrogen bomb inside a very, very thick iron armor, preferabely a sphere, to get the armor only rise its temperature and not break apart? Would it be a hazzard ...
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Anomalous muon magnetic moment and muon catalyzed fusion
I have recently been giving thought to the idea of muon catalyzed fusion, specifically for the purpose of using it in a story concept. I would normally propose this kind of question to the world-...
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$\mu$ Catalised fusion energy
How can i calculate the energy that i get from $\mu$ fusion. I want to know how much energy can we get from a deuteriom-triton-muon fusion.
I know that it comes from the masses being different. So i ...
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After Todd Rider's thesis, why are companies still working on aneutronic and non-equilibrium fusion?
Todd Rider's thesis (Fundamental limitations on plasma fusion systems not in thermodynamic equilibrium) clearly states in the abstract that:
...In virtually all cases, [the] minimum recirculating ...
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Does lattice confinement fusion need proton tunnelling to work?
As Lattice confinement fusion (LTC for short) is triggered at relatively small temperatures as compared to more traditional Tokamak methods, it reminded me of the need of quantum tunnelling for ...
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Energy in nuclear fusion - mass change vs potential energy explanation
Trying to understand how the energy related to nuclear reactions. In particular why particular fusion of small nuclei release energy. So far, there seems to be two explanations which I have ...
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Why does it take hours or even days to turn on (or power up) the large, powerful superconducting magnet in an MRI machine or fusion reactor?
Sorry I can't (yet) provide any links, but I have read in the past that turning on an MRI machine from scratch can take many hours, even days, because of the time it takes to get the powerful ...
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(Cold?) fusion by combining protons and electrons?
How does one remove electrons from hydrogen nuclei?
Using a tokamak?
In any case, do we really need millions of degrees centigrade of temperature to get an electron to fuse with a proton?
To make a ...
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