• Question: What happens in nuclear fusion?

    Asked by 424prtb47 to Jackie, Michele, Oliver on 19 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 19 Mar 2015:

      Nuclear fusion is when we ‘fuse’ or collide two light atomic nuclei (like Hydrogen or Helium) to form one heavy nuclei. This process releases a lot of energy and is what powers the stars and our sun 🙂 Because all nuclei have a positive charge it is difficult to fuse them together – they are like two repelling magnets and so it takes a considerable amount of energy to force them together! One way of doing this is to accelerate them to high speeds so that these repelling forces can be neglected and the attractive nuclear force takes over – and then fusion happens!

    • Photo: Oliver Brown

      Oliver Brown answered on 20 Mar 2015:

      Yep, exactly as Jackie says 🙂 Another method is to combine the fusion material in a very tiny pellet and then a fire a *really* high power laser at it. The problem is that the lasers take more power than you get out at the moment… It’s being worked on though!

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