How Are We Going To Get To Fusion Without Doing Fission?

How Are We Going To Get To Fusion Without Doing Fission?

Fusion which fusing two nucleus together. We can fuse all the elements in the periodic table up to the element Iron. After element iron fusion still possible but it will take a lot of energy more than it gives out.

The easiest element to fuse is what comes first in the periodic table which is Hydrogen. Fusion will require more and more energy the further we move along the periodic table, so for example Helium fusion will require more energy than hydrogen and Lithium more than Helium because Helium has 2 protons compared to only 1 in Helium and Lithium has 3 protons compared to Helium. So we should begin fusing with the easiest element which is Hydrogen.

Technology has bad and good sides. I should add all technology has bad sides and good sides. Uranium nuclear fission is a good technology too if used in a good way. Dropping uranium bomb over a city of 100K people is not a good use of this technology. We are all fearing atomic technology now and really halted the development of nuclear technology because of the 1945 monstrosities at cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Our world needs a lot of energy. We human beings burned wood to get energy, than we discovered coal which had more energy per kg, later we discovered more energy dense material like petrol. Still these are all chemical energy which limited how much energy we can get per kg. We need more energy dense material. There isn’t any chemical dense material than petrol as a fuel. We need to look smaller than chemical bonds which is atoms  

The next step on the agenda is to look inside the nuclear. There is uranium, platinum, radium. We choose the last and easiest element in the periodic table to split which uranium. According to E=mc². Matter is energy, since atoms are matter so atoms are energy. Where is this energy inside the atoms then? It must be somewhere in them. We can try splitting them, or combining them. In fact we do get energy by splitting atoms or combining atoms, very enormous indeed. The energy inside atoms all can trace back to inside stars, exploding stars and to the Big Bang. I guess it is because of this energy why nuclei has a very long shelf life. I billion years or more.  

Einstein says every kg of matter should give us 9E¹⁶ Joules. E=mc² = E (J) = m(kg) x c² (300Mm/s x 300Mm/s) = 9 Peta Joules or 9000 Tera Joules, this is 25,000 Giga Watt/hours. As you can see it is enormous. But it is just impossible to convert all of this energy to other forms with 100% efficiency, if we can get 1% is enough for us. This energy is same whether, the atoms are 1 kg of carbon or 1 kg of uranium. All atoms has this same energy per kg in them, some atoms require a lot more energy to get out though.

We currently can get 4.032¹¹J out of 1 kg of uranium through fission, this is 0.000448% conversion of the possible energy inside 1kg of uranium. But with fusion 10 times more efficiency possible, 4.032¹²J can be extracted, this is 0.00448% of conversion efficiency of the possible total energy inside 1 kg of matter.

Fission is the first step in the nuclear energy ladder. Second step is Fusion which we get more energy Still we if need more energy. Next one in the ladder making anti-matter and colliding with matter which will create incredible energy than any fission possible.

We cannot jump to fusion technology without learning through the fission technology first. We are not doing the fission at the moment and that’s the problem. Everyone want to shut down nuclear reactors. Because we fear it. Hiroshima made us fear. But we use this technology to go to Mars by now. Inter planet travel is possible with fission technology.

You see energy is limitless! It is limitless in a sense it’s not infinite but it is because it is that much that we human beings will never get to the limit of it, even for trillion years.

If you have 250°C of heat in your hand you get to have a fire. 

If you have 1500°C of heat in your hand, you get to melt iron. 

If you have 1.6M°C of heat in your hand you get to have fission bomb.

If you have of 13M°C of heat in your hand you get to fuse hydrogen atoms.

If you have 100 Billion °C of heat in your hand you get to make gold. 

You see you need heat or energy input. Room temperature fusion will work. Heat vs time, it would take a lot of time. How much time will take now I calculate that. Burn time is the time it takes to power steam engines in power stations which used to generate electricity which is @250°C.

1 kg of coal = 8 kWh, burn time: 15 minutes @250°C.

1 kg of petrol = 24 kWh, burn time: 45 minutes @250°C.  0.576

1 kg or uranium fission= 112 MWh, burn time: 4 months @250°C.
1 kg of hydrogen fusion = 1.12 GWh, burn time: 4 years @250°C.  

So 1 kg of hydrogen fusion will power turbine engine for 4 years 250°C. It will take 4 years to generate 1 kg of hydrogen fusion at 250°C. If room temperature is 25°C, It will take 40 years to generate 1kg of hydrogen fusion. At steel melting temperature 1500°C 1kg hydrogen fusion will take 8 months. If we want shorter time we just increase the temperature.

We need to get the temperature a bit higher. The highest temperature achieved on earth is 4 trillion °C but that was inside the LHC. It is very costly and not the heat it generates does not last very long.

So heat is money and needs to be affordable. We are looking hydrogen fusion per kg costing us less than $26.9M±20% to generate, this is $0.024 per kWh. If this was petrol we would use nearly 50 million litres of petrol or 314,465 barrels. At $90 a barrel it cost $28,301,886.79.  So 50 Million Litres of petrol has the same energy as 1kg of hydrogen fusion in this conversion.

Once we familiarize ourselves with fusion, the next step will be creating anti-matter and combining it with matter. Anti-matter is just opposite of matter. In a normal matter you have positive proton, negative electron. In anti-matter proton negatively charged, electrons positively charged. When matter and ant-matter collide it creates enormous energy. And not just that it will much more efficient to convert this energy to other forms than fusion. I think with anti-matter finally we would be able to achieve very sizeable possible energy locked inside atoms.

We learned to develop a language first, then we learn to run, then we invented bicycle, bicycle developed into tricycle that developed into cars, then to planes. It’s not possible to jump bicycle to planes. It is fission come first, we have a lot to learn from it then we move on to fusion then we move to anti-matter. What particles coming out. What gamma rays are there? Are gamma rays more heavier the nuclei? We can only answer these questions and many more questions and improve our fission efficiency by building more of it. We need to a lot to understand from fission. We only fission uranium so far. We need to develop lots of this technology. We try other elements as well. Then we will know and we will know how to fuse atoms. It looks so difficult today because it’s impossible to the jump. It more possible to fission plutonium atoms than fusing hydrogen at the moment. Because we have a lot we don’t know about fission.