Recent content by padawan13

but what would stop all that energy being transferred into lithium atoms?

so what about the designs which involve capturing the neutrons with their 14 MeV of energy and using them to breed tritium. Where does the energy for power production come from?

I read that one of the main problems is transferring the produced energy to a medium and converting the energy to thermal. Apparently even though thermal energy is released in the D-T reaction this energy is directly used to continue the self sustaining fusion reaction. This leaves only the...

well they have achieved fusion with 65% of the input energy being output, but i think it was for a short period of time. Are there any nuclear engineers who are designing fusion plants on this forum?

Yeah, the power output being less then the input is pretty obvious, in my question i was more pointing towards what are the actual problems which cause this inefficiency.

Why can't we use fusion for power generation? What are the problems with fusion power, and what are the limiting factors for construction?

i understand what your saying, why binding energy increases. Where does the energy come from? you say the binding energy, which you also say is the amount of energy needed to break the atom, and sort of counter the atoms attractive force, but i just don't understand how energy can be produced...

if the energy needed to break the atom (nuclear binding energy) increases, then the energy holding the nucleus together (ill just call it the attractive energy) must also increase. If the attractive energy is increasing how can energy be produced?

shouldn't this be the other way around, the total binding energy of the fuels is less then the helium produced. It wouldn't make sense for the binding energy to increase, because then energy would be lost. I understand what your saying, that the greater the difference in binding energy, between...

haha yeah i know its old, i wasn't really expecting anyone to reply, but thanks. So you say that mass is not being converted to energy, but a decrease in mass is accompanied by the production of energy. So where exactly does the energy come from? Is it to do with the strong nuclear force...

please explain it? It doesn't seem logical that in a fission reaction uranium-235 releases less electron volts per nucleon compared to the fusion reaction T-D, when uranium is around 45 times larger, obviously the size of the nucleus is not a factor. Could it be the binding energy of the...