A study of fusion energy

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to identify the best potential method to adopt nuclear fusion as an alternative energy source and investigate the various current technique used to achieve nuclear fusion.

Presently, the progress of achieving fusion energy use techniques such as magnetic confinement, inertial confinement, inertial electrostatic confinement, magnetized linear inertial fusion and magnetized target fusion. For each confinement method, devices are built based on the confinement concept. The devices will be elaborated in this report. The implementation of various confinement method such as reactors and type of lasers can also be found in the report. Key conditions for instance the Lawson triple product, nuclear binding energy curve, coulomb barrier and other conditions stated in the report must be met to achieve fusion. Numerous pair of fusion fuels can be used for collision to ignite fusion. However, each pair have different amount of energy released and different output products.

Scientists are still in midst of researching the ways to achieve a greater output power with small amount of input power. If necessary conditions and challenges are met and overcome, nuclear fusion will bring enormous benefit to provide a safe and sustainable energy source to humanity. This report will discuss the different techniques and the conceptual devices scientists have discover to make nuclear fusion possible and which method has the highest possibility to achieve success. This project will be a research into nuclear fusion and it will not cover the aspect of building a prototype.