The Race for Nuclear Fusion Energy, the Clean Fuel of the Future: Will China Eat America's Lunch?
by Lawrence Kadish • December 5, 2024 at 5:00 am
The clean energy breakthrough everyone has been wishing for finally is here! It may not be quite ready for prime time, but a quiet nuclear-fusion energy race is underway and cannot come soon enough.
The problem is that China seems to be winning it, not the United States or the West.
It is nuclear fusion -- making atoms collide, rather than splitting them, or fission -- when two atoms are forced to combine into one new atom at extremely hot temperatures. "In order for fusion to occur on the very hot gas -- or plasma," notes euro-fusion.org, "the plasma must be heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Celsius [320 million degrees F]. " The sun does it without a container -- their combined new weight comes to less than each atom had separately.
