Aneutronic Fusion Lesson 1 The Astrophysics of Fusion

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Humanity is at a crossroads…there have been many times throughout our history when it was uncertain that we would survive…if things had gone a little differently…a Neanderthal or Denisovan…who didn’t have to workout nearly as much to stay strong…would be typing something like this…and lamenting the loss of their physically weak but apparently smart ancestors…homo sapiens sapiens. There is no guarantee that thousands of millennia from now, some other intelligent species from Earth or elsewhere will be looking at the remnants or our civilization and wonder what happened to us. There are many ways we could take ourselves out. A bioweapon that mutates and is unstoppable…all out nuclear war between the United States and Russia or China…climate shifts that are too severe and too quick to allow enough of us to survive. If we are going to build a civilization that can travel through space and colonize other world’s…giving us a refuge from disaster and allowing our species to satisfy its drive to explore and live free…we must solve our energy problems. Most energy on Earth today is still being produced by the combustion of fossil fuels. These fuels are putting gigatons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat and our planet is warming as a result. We have crossed the point of no return on the Greenland ice sheets…they will now melt completely no matter what we do. We cannot conserve our way out of this…everyone deserves an equal opportunity to live a fulfilled life and have the amenities of what we call…the first world…
In order to feed, house and educate our growing population we must develop a better way to produce energy.
Course: Aneutronic Fusion Lesson: Essential Astrophysics to Understand Fusion
Understanding aneutronic fusion requires an understanding of neutronic fusion…also known as just plain regular fusion…to know how fusion works we should go back to the beginning…the very beginning…
In the beginning there was a bang…it was big…and good in so far as it allowed the existence of our world…
At first there was only pure energy…an extremely dense collection of quarks, leptons and gauge bosons called the primordial soup. The temperature of this soup was a mild ten quintillion degrees or so…you would need sunscreen. Spacetime began to expand faster than the speed of light after only one nanosecond and the primordial soup rapidly condensed into other forms of matter as it expanded and cooled. The quarks joined together to make hadrons like protons and neutrons. The protons, having a positive charge, started grabbing up negatively charged electrons to balance out, and formed the simplest atom in the universe…hydrogen. Now some of the neutrons flying around locked onto protons by the strong nuclear force, which acts between quarks using gluons to transmit the this force. A proton and a neutron in a nucleus make deuterium . Perhaps some nuclei had two neutrons and one proton making tritium, but this atom is unstable with a half life of only 12 ½ years and would have decayed into helium 3. Helium 3 is important to our subject but we will come back to it. Larger atoms didn’t form much at all because of the extreme heat and rapid expansion favoring hydrogen almost exclusively. This left a rapidly expanding universe of massive hydrogen clouds or nebula with about 3% helium. As these clouds cooled their center of mass became the focal point for the gravitational energy created by their mass. When the temperature of the clouds became low enough that the gravitational energy of their mass overcame the thermal kinetic energy keeping them apart, this is called Jean’s mass and is named for Professor James Jeans of Great Britain. When this limit is reached the cloud starts to contract, as it does it heats up as all compressing gases do, but this heat is radiated and lost into space as infrared energy. The cloud contracts, heats up briefly, cools down as it radiates heat, then contracts some more. Eventually the core of the cloud becomes very dense with the hydrogen being compressed at unbelievable pressure and temperatures. The electrons are stripped off the hydrogen atoms leaving bare protons or nuclei of protons and neutrons.
As these nuclei are crammed close enough together from pressure and impact they particles are able to exchange gluons, which are very short range but very powerful, these gluons transmit the strong nuclear force and lock these particles together into a new nucleus…Helium. This helium is not usually helium 3…it is helium 4. This is the type of helium we are most familiar with here on Earth.

Видео Aneutronic Fusion Lesson 1 The Astrophysics of Fusion канала Terran Space Academy