![]() ![]() ![]() If you get enough radioactive material together in one place, it will spontaneously undergo fission and you can get runaway reactions. Unlike nuclear fission, fusion is hard to do. ![]() GAZETTE: Aren’t there dangers involved in this kind of experiment?ĬOHEN: The experiment itself is not really dangerous. The hope is that we can make this reaction happen on a scale which is controllable enough to be useful for people. It’s the basis of the sun, and it’s the basis of thermonuclear weapons - hydrogen bombs. And as they smash into each other, they release a lot of energy.ĬOHEN: It’s a slightly different reaction in the sun, but that’s also a fusion reaction. They attract each other, just the way the north and south pole of a magnet might attract each other. And when the hydrogen isotopes fuse to make that helium nucleus in the process of them sticking to each other, that releases a lot of energy. They stick to each other very hard, very strongly. Another way of thinking about it is that helium has two protons and two neutrons, and those protons and neutrons are bound to each other. GAZETTE: Why doesn’t it just stay as mass? Why aren’t there just extra bits of mass flying around?ĬOHEN: Mass comes in discrete chunks, and if you add up the mass of a helium and the neutron that comes flying out too in this process, there’s a little bit of a difference. So a little bit of the mass of the hydrogen isotopes that are getting fused together goes into energy, which comes out of this reaction. But how does that create energy?ĬOHEN: Einstein taught us more than a century ago, in his famous formula e = mc2, that you can convert mass into energy. GAZETTE: It sounds like what the scientists did was smash two hydrogen isotopes together to make helium, which has slightly less mass. This process can release huge amounts of energy as the nuclei combine. CohenĬOHEN: Fusion is the process of colliding light nuclei with each other to form heavier nuclei. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. ![]() Cohen, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology, and physics, to explain what happened and why it matters. That is, by focusing 192 giant lasers on a bit of frozen deuterium and tritium, the lab’s National Ignition Facility created a reaction that produced more energy than it used, a threshold called “ignition.” The long-sought result is a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion, with exciting, if still very far off, implications for renewable energy. Department of Energy reported on Thursday. However, the products that formed did not correlate with the properties of elements with higher atomic numbers than uranium (Ra, Ac, Th, and Pa).The Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California last week achieved fusion with a net energy gain, the U.S. The original concept of this nuclei splitting was discovered by Enrico Femi in 1934-who believed transuranium elements might be produced by bombarding uranium with neutrons, because the loss of Beta particles would increase the atomic number. Nuclear fission is the splitting of the nucleus of an atom into nuclei of lighter atoms, accompanied by the release of energy, brought on by a neutron bombardment. The resulting fission products are highly radioactive, commonly undergoing \(\beta^-\) decay. \( \newcommand\) which is even more unstable and splits into daughter nuclei such as Krypton-92 and Barium-141 and free neutrons. ![]()
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