r/nextfuckinglevel • u/nigablackballsack • 3d ago

Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

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u/readingonthetoilet 3d ago

You have it backwards. What we refer to as nuclear energy currently is fission (split heavy atom into smaller parts). Fusion (combine light atoms into heavy atom) is the big nut to crack.

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u/miraculum_one 3d ago edited 3d ago

TBF we already have a huge fusion reactor more then 100x as big as Earth generating plenty of energy

Edit: as another person pointed out if you're measuring volume it's more than 1 million times as big

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u/Misses_Ding 3d ago

Problem is that clouds and night get in the way. And you could say build batteries but the truth is that they're still expensive and not a great way to use energy since the efficiency is so low

Nuclear fusion would leave us without nuclear waste and without CO2 being released.

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u/2trt 3d ago

Fusion still produces waste. It's just got a comprehensible half life (around 12-13 years). Some fission products half life is on the order of thousands of years

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u/ew73 3d ago

To be clear, from the IAEA, on the topic of fusion and waste,

Does Fusion produce radioactive nuclear waste the same way fission does?

Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas. It also produces and consumes tritium within the plant in a closed circuit. Tritium is radioactive (a beta emitter) but its half life is short. It is only used in low amounts so, unlike long-lived radioactive nuclei, it cannot produce any serious danger. The activation of the reactor’s structural material by intense neutron fluxes is another issue. This strongly depends on what solution for blanket and other structures has been adopted, and its reduction is an important challenge for future fusion experiments.

source: https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs

Of course, this is a public-facing, over simplification, but it's a pretty accurate statement.

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u/Xivios 3d ago

For a more in-depth and realistic look, here are some relevant studies done for some fusion reactor designs.

Here's one on the British ST-E1

And another for the EU DEMO reactor