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What is Nuclear Fusion ?

Fusion is the energy source of the sun and the stars. On earth, fusion research is aimed at demonstrating that this energy source can be used to produce electricity in a safe and environmentally benign way, with abundant fuel resources, to meet the needs of a growing world population.
This educational section of the site, offers a brief but simple introduction of Nuclear Fusion, organized in paragraphes, that we suggest to consult in sequence:

  1. Thermonuclear fusion
  2. Stellar thermonuclear reactions
  3. Exothermic nuclear reactions
  4. Conditions for controlled thermonuclear fusion
  5. Magnetic confinement of plasmas
  6. Inertial confinement fusion
  7. Fuels and resources
  8. Conditions needed to realise a fusion reactor

Equally simple, we suggest to have a look of the following short video-clips (in italian):

  1. Fission and Fusion compared
    (together with previous paragraph3)
  2. Magnetic and Inertial confinement
    (together with previous paragraph 5 and 6)
  3. Fusion Reactions
    (together with previous paragraph 7)
  4. Fusion Reactor principle
    (together with previous paragraph 8)
and then of the animated and spoken presentation (in italian): “Turn on the energy of stars”.

Much more detailed and well done descriptions of Nuclear Fusion can be found on Internet (see our links collection), but above all, we suggest a visit of "General Atomics Fusion Education", the "Fusion Energy Education" and ITER web sites.