In recent years nuclear fusion breakthroughs like NIF’s energy gain, Europe’s Joint European Torus (JET) sustained energy pulse, and private UK-based Tokamak Energy’s improved heating have been scraping away at the requirements for nuclear fusion, but Diem said that right now they’re not much more than science experiments. Continued pressure on this plasma then forces it to undergo fusion. Originally designed by Soviet scientists in the late 1950s, tokamaks work by using magnets and a vacuum to compress and heat up hydrogen atoms until they transform into a plasma. Many other government and private projects alike, including France’s highly anticipated ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), use tokamaks to heat up their star fuel. Even if new fission reactors can overcome these pitfalls, the energy source is still finite. The downside of this approach is that using radioactive atoms as the reactors’ energy source results in dangerous waste products and can also be susceptible to dangerous meltdowns like those that took place at Chernobyl in the 80s and Fukushima in 2011. Depending on their size, nuclear power plants like these have an annual generating capacity of roughly 500-1000 megawatts, equivalent to up to the power of 1.3 million horses per plant. This energy is then used to heat water and create steam in order to turn turbines which create electricity. Nuclear fission is at the heart of nuclear power plants around the world and works by breaking apart the atoms of radioactive elements like uranium to create a burst of energy. While both reactions are nuclear, meaning they both involve energy changes at the center of atomic nuclei, they are actually polar opposites in many ways. If nuclear fusion has so much potential, it may seem unclear why its counterpart, nuclear fission, can’t go toe-to-toe.

Fusion vs fission energy