I am pretty sure the sun fuses just standard one proton hydrogen. So why do we need to use deuterium and tritium for our bombs?
In: Physics
Technically, you don’t. Practically, however, the required energies are much, much lower if you start at heavy hydrogen than hydrogen-1.
In the Sun, the initial fusion of Hydrogen-1 does not create helium-2 (which is incredibly unstable due to the repelling “electromagnetic force” on protons being able to overcome the attractive “strong force” when no neutron is present). Instead, when 2 Hydrogen-1 fuse they turn into Hydrogen-2, releasing a neutrino and a positron. This requires a lot of input energy and we are not currently capable of doing it on large scales.
The next step is that Hydrogen-2 and Hydrogen-1 fuse into Helium-3, which is stable, and releases gamma radiation as a result. This is where we start for hydrogen bombs, because the input energy required is much lower, and the energy output is quite high. Two Helium-3 then fuse into a Helium-4, releasing 2 Hydrogen-1 in the process, to finish the fusion reaction as completed within the sun. This last step is not done in nuclear bombs at a large scale as the explosion tends to scatter material before it reaches this stage.
Latest Answers