How does nuclear fusion actually work and why is it so hard when we already have nuclear fission?
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Fusion works by having the nuclei of two atoms combine together. For small light atoms (lighter than iron), this releases more energy than it takes to cause the fusion.
The problem is that it is very hard to get a large number of atoms to fuse continuously. It is fairly easy to get a tiny handful of atoms to fuse in a laboratory, or to get a fairly large number to fuse for a split second. Getting lots of atoms to fuse in a sustained reaction has proved much harder than anyone initially expected. The only way we have found to reliably cause fusion is to create really high temperatures and pressures. It is very hard to maintain temperatures and pressures this high, especially when there is fusion occuring inside the high temperature plasma, as it really wants to expand and cool down. It is so hot that you can’t contain it in something like a high pressure tank, because it would just melt the tank. So they have to use magnetic fields to trap the high temperature fusion reaction in a sort of force field. But creating a stable magnetic force field is really, really hard.
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