🤯What the heck is Fusion and Fission and why is it important to us?
🎥 Let me first take you to the movies…
Gripping to the edge of my seat, having shivers up my back, and just a pure sense of fear. I literally hid behind my eyes as the sound of speakers blasted in my ears and the crimson smoke struck pure fear in my eyes. The movie Oppenheimer analyzes the most important invention in the past decade - the creation of the atomic bomb and the man behind it. By the end of the movie (spoiler alert!) we see Dr.Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein stand next to each other with a montage of how the world could look like if Oppenheimer’s technology kept being used to harm the earth and it’s humans.
While the debate for nuclear energy can be discovered in a future post - I wanted to first find out what was the science behind it and successfully explain in the easiest of terms, so lets dive in!
🙋🏽♂️ What is Fusion?
Here we are trying to answer “What is fusion?” - Me being me, the first thing to do is to easily do a google search - let’s see what they say:
“Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei, usually deuterium and tritium, are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles. The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of energy.”
Now for a first time reader who may not have a physics background or anything like I did - this is really confusing. I want to be able to understand this concept into terms I get - so the next step would be to put a query in ChatGPT and ask “Explain Fusion to five year old” - Here’s that answer:
"Fusion is like squishing tiny building blocks in the sun to make something new and bright, just like when you squish Play-Doh to make something fun!"
Okay…now this is more like it - something that make sense to me and gives me a starting place to actualize some research. Rather than bore you with how I continued with my research (this could be a long article lol) - I am going to skip to the end real quick and just tell you what it means in my own words:
It’s when two atoms of deuterium and tritium (which are easily found in the water) are combined to form a heavier atom and give off energy!
(I was able to understand by just drawing it out, look below 👇 )
(👀 Spoiler alert for section 3) —> One of the main reasons why fusion is important in today’s age is because it emits zero greenhouse gases to pollute the environment!
Now while this may seem like a very simple explanation - but there is a big caveat here - fusion needs to be in a highly controlled environment for it be successful. That’s why there are so many companies, institutions, and governments are investing a ton of money into the space.
Alright now we have an idea of what fusion is , let’s build on it to answer the question:
🙋🏽♂️ What is Fission?
Well if you understand fusion, you’ll most likely get fission because it’s simply the complete opposite!
In fusion, we were taking two atoms and combining it to become a bigger atom ; whereas in fission we are going to take the bigger atom and have it split into two lighter atoms, but the way it splits is the difference between the two processes.
Here’s what happens in fission: A neutron is going to strike the bigger nuclei (this is either uranium-235 or plutonium-239) and out will come two lighter atoms. Below is the drawing I drew in my notebook to help me understand this concept 👇
After reading this - you still might be a bit confused so lets wrap this all up by jumping back to the play-doh analogy that our A.I. friend made for us!
Fusion is like taking two small pieces of play-doh and combining it together to make a bigger piece of play-doh, while Fission is taking the bigger piece of play-doh and splitting it in two smaller pieces. With this information, let’s ask ourselves Why?
🤔 Why do these processes matter to us?
Quite frankly, it’s because these processes can help shape the future of energy as we know it. The status quo of current energy sources is having a harmful effect on our climate and fusion/fission are the moonshot solutions to these issues. (more particularly fusion than fission though) That’s why the race to the perfection of these technologies is such an important issue to stay updated on. Read the Fusion Race to understand the race of who comes first to fusion.
One fusion company that sparks interest in me is Helion - a company building smaller systems to deliver industrial scale power. They recently got an investment of 2.2 billion dollars from investors to keep iterating on there plasma accelerator! They are currently on their seventh iteration and keep on releasing new updates. Learn more about them here
The Plasma Accelerator 👇
❓ What are your takeaways?
Now, I’m talking to you - were you able to gain a simple understanding of fusion and fission and why it’s important? I personally think there can be more to be discovered about this topic that will be achieved in future posts - but what are you thoughts about this topic?