The Green Nuclear Energy

Nuclear Power plants

For all the humble life on earth, the sun is the source of almost all the energy of activity, because these energy comes from the fusion nuclear energy released by the thermonuclear reaction in the center of the sun. In fact, nuclear energy is the most promising future energy for human survival and development. Compared with traditional fossil fuels, it is a low-carbon, efficient, safe, economic and inexhaustible new energy.

There are two main ways to obtain nuclear energy: one is heavy nuclear fission, which splits heavy elements such as uranium into light nuclei through neutron action to release a large amount of energy. Human beings have been commercialized for 60 years in the form of establishing nuclear power plants, while China's nuclear power generation accounted for only 4.22% by 2018, and there is still a lot of room for development in the future. The other is light nuclear fusion. Although human beings have been successfully applied in nuclear weapons, controllable nuclear fusion has not yet been realized. It requires 100 million degrees Celsius environment to produce thermonuclear reactions, which is very difficult. In February 2014, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) realized the experiment of controlled nuclear fusion with energy gain greater than 1 for the first time using inertia constraints, which became a major milestone on the road of controlled nuclear fusion (Literature: Fuel gain exceeding unity in an inertially confined fusion implementation, Nature, 2014). In October 2018, the EAST device from Hefei in China, obtained a plasma with an electron temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius and operated for 101 seconds, which is a key step towards the smooth operation of future fusion reactors.

Light and energy is the basic need for the existence and development of human civilization. The fossil fuels on the earth will be exhausted within 100 years, but there are considerable amounts of fission resources such as uranium. If we make full use of them, we can meet the energy needs of human beings for thousands of years, while the ocean contains about 40 trillion tons of fusion resources, namely hydrogen isotope deuterium. If controlled fusion can be realized, such fusion energy released by these deuterium can meet the energy needs of human beings for 10 billion years. It can be obviously seen that fusion energy is the ultimate energy for the future of mankind.

(Note: It is estimated that 1 kg of coal can only make a train run 8 meters; 1 kg of fission material can make the train run 40,000 kilometers, and 1 kg of fusion material can make a train travel 400,000 kilometers, equivalent to the distance from the earth to the moon).