It's true that here on Earth, if you want to burn something you need oxygen. But the Sun is different. It is not burning with the same kind of flame you would have on Earth if you burned a candle.
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Articles on Nuclear fusion
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People long assumed all the elements we see now were created during the Big Bang. But on May 2, 1952, an astronomer reported spotting new elements coming from an old star and changed our origin story.
As fusion becomes more technically viable, it's time to assess whether it's worth the money because breakthroughs in the lab don’t guarantee success in the marketplace.
In what came to be known as the Thule incident, an American bomber crashed in Greenland, spreading radioactive wreckage across 3 square miles of a frozen fjord. Denmark was not happy.
Euratom is responsible for nuclear non-proliferation, safety, and research.
Fusion power, if it works, offers vast amounts of clean energy and almost zero carbon emissions. A new experimental fusion reactor has come online, and it uses a curious twisted stellarator design.
Fusion development takes time. It cannot be developed in miniature and then be simply scaled up. But we must work now, to make it possible to meet humanity's need for abundant, clean energy.
In the summer of 1946, the U.S. government detonated the first of many atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands. Seventy years of radiation exposure later, residents are still fighting for justice.
Fire has played a vital role in human history, and will continue to. Recent advances in fusion herald the freeing of fire from captivity back into its natural form.
Hoverboards, self-fitting jackets, nuclear fusion generators.... Some of Back to the Future's wacky inventions are closer to reality than you might think.
The nuclear deal South Africa signed with Russia is set to be massively expensive and comes with a fair amount of risks.
Ultra-high powered lasers are the best and even cheapest approach to uncovering the secrets of physics, but with uses closer to home too.
Why don't we have nuclear fusion power yet? Because it involves taming plasmas at temperatures far hotter than the Sun's core. But the good news is that physicists are slowly but surely figuring out how.
Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin’s announcement this week that it could make small-scale nuclear fusion power a reality in the next decade has understandably generated excitement in the media. Physicists…
The latest results from the National Ignition Facility in the US represent the passing of a nuclear fusion power milestone and come after a year of significant progress at projects in France and the UK…
Researchers in the US have overcome a key barrier to making nuclear fusion reactors a reality. In results published in Nature…
It is the received wisdom that nuclear weapons and nuclear power are inseparable. Consequently, any country that builds a civilian nuclear power station is able to build an atomic bomb within a couple…
Top contributors
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Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Plasmas and Fluids, Australian National University
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Director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Graduate Program and Associate Professor of Radiation Medicine, Georgetown University
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Scott L. Montgomery is a Friend of The Conversation.
Lecturer, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
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Senior Lecturer of Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Charles Darwin University
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Senior Lecturer in Nuclear Physics, University of Birmingham
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Applied Radiation Physics Section Leader, Culham Centre for Fusion Energy
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Physicist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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Professor of Physics, Imperial College London
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Target design leader, National Ignition Campaign, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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Head of Physics and Astronomy, Curtin University
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Emeritus Professor, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
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Lecturer at the School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen's University Belfast
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Senior Lecturer of Environmental Policy, Russian National Research University The Higher School of Economics
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Professor of Physics, Royal Holloway
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Professor of Astrophysical Science, former director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University
