Power from both fusion and fission?

[Jonnyb42]

I haven't thought about it TOO much, but it seems that you should only get power from either fusing atoms or splitting (fissing?) them, but how come both? Wouldn't that mean you could continually fuse and split atoms for continual energy gain?

(My currrent thought against that is, that you can fuse hydrogen to any element, but cannot split heaver elements all the way down to hydrogen.
That "continual" process would end in Iron or something like that?)

 

[Drakkith]

Fusion will only result in net power output up to iron, and fission will only result in net power output down to about iron. This is because Iron and Nickel have the highest binding energy of all the elements.

See here for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy

 

[Jonnyb42]

I see, thanks.