Nuclear Fusion Vs Fission 💣 w/ Neil deGrasse Tyson

Transcript

many people when they think of nuclear energy they think of nuclear fision which was the energy source in the two bombs used in the second world war very quickly after that we magnified the energy of those bombs by creating a whole other kind of bomb which came to be known as hydrogen bombs hydrogen bombs don't have the radioactive baggage that Fusion bombs do hydrogen bombs are Fusion let's back up Fusion you take a big atom break it and you weigh those two atoms and they weigh less than what you started with where did the mass go eal mc² the mass went to energy you can do the same thing but coming from the other direction you take a very light atom hydrogen fuse it together with another hydrogen atom and you get helium and your product has less mass than you started with once again you get energy but you don't have all of the byproducts we made Fusion for 60 years the problem was we don't have control fusion and when we don't have control Fusion it's called a bomb but when you control it then you can throttle it you can valve it you can put it where you need to and how you want to use it