Fission is what is currently used in nuclear reactors today, and it basically consists of atoms breaking apart and releasing energy due to their bonds being broken.
How is fusion such an efficient energy source? I would imagine that to create atoms, large amounts of energy would have to be pumped in to make bonds.
In: Physics
There’s an interesting curve called the [nuclear binding energy curve](https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/nuclear_binding_energy.gif); it shows the relationship between the mass of an atom and how much binding energy it has per nucleon (proton or neutron). It shows that lights atoms, smashed together, have more binding energy per nucleon that the parent atoms; this energy difference is released. Conversely, if a very heavy atom is split, its daughters will also have more binding energy per nucleon. This is because nuclear binding energy rises as you get more nucleons, but it has an extremely short range and is “saturable” (each nucleon can only pull on a finite number of others). If you start with a few nucleons, adding more has them all pulling on each other, and they’re more tightly held. But as an atom gets bigger past about 56, the nucleons on one side of the nucleus are too far from the ones on the other side to pull on them as hard. Once you get to big atoms, 100 and 200 nucleons big and bigger, some of the nucleons are barely being held in at all.
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