Nuclear Fusion: Energy of Future

Abstract

The huge increase in demand for energy is predicted to be needed from developing countries for expeditious urbanization. With environmental desideratum for low or zero CO2 emission sources and that leads to head toward sustainable energy. One such energy in recent advances in high energy plasma physics is nuclear fusion—the energy source of the sun and the stars—which may provide a backbone to a future sustainable energy system. Fusion will be available as a future energy option by the middle of this century and will be suitable to attain an exceptional role in providing a sustainable, secure and safe solution to tackle global energy needs, if harnessed properly. In the fusion process, light atoms such as isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) are fused at extremely high temperatures (150 million °C) and high pressures (atoms must be within 10–15 m) to form a helium atom, a neutron and lot of energy. At high temperatures where nuclei and electrons are no longer bound together, it is called plasma, the fourth state of matter. Fusion engenders complex technologies and still needs progress in various fields such as superconducting magnets, high heat load materials, and the materials which are able to withstand high neutron flux, remote handling devices, and plasma heating techniques. One of the major difficult tasks in the research of the fusion is to maintain plasma temperature. Impurities can cool the plasma and ways have to be found to extract them. The problems of plasma heating, confinement, and exhaust of energy and particles, plasma stability, alpha particle heating, fusion reactor materials, reactor safety, and environmental rapport will be reviewed, and scientific and technological feasibility of a fusion energy source for peaceful purposes will be elucidated. In this paper, we will mainly focus on how energy can be generated through fusion and it can be the energy of the future.