Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear fusion is the process of fusing atoms together. All atoms "want" to get to the atomic weight of iron, and so heavier and unstable elements will sometimes break apart [in a process called fission] and lighter elements in the right conditions will sometimes fuse together releasing energy. A nice example of natural fusion is the sun.

In this post though I want to write about harnessing fusion for energy. On paper the benefits of fusion to create electricity are tremendous: There is a huge amount of hydrogen in the sea that we could fuse, if we could get it working fusion could power us for a very very long time and the by product of it all is helium [which is useful, I'll try to post about that soon]. In real life fusion is more complicated: all attempts to create it have failed to get more energy out of the process than they put in [fusion requires a lot of energy to start a chain reaction].

In my opinion fusion could [and probably will be] humanity's main source of power in the distant future, but it is not a solution for our energy problem.