Fusion - Ryan and Winston

Fusion has been undergone in the past, but now scientists are looking into how people can harvest this energy which requires extreme heats.  The ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) that the United States, Japan, Russia, and Europe have agreed to collaboratively work on for developing fusion as an energy source, is the biggest push to advance fusion technology in modern times.  Currently, they believe that magnetic fields will be necessary to keep this high energy and pressure within manageable sizes.  Nuclear fission is the current process that scientists use for generating energy because fission can generate immense amounts of energy, including enough for hydrogen bombs.  Fusion, however, is believed to be cleaner, safer, and more efficient as an energy source.

There are two major ways scientists are turning towards to make fusion occur within manageable sizes: magnetic confinement and inertial confinement.  Magnetic confinement uses magnets to get both heat and pressure up to the standards required for basic fusion.  The contents undergoing the fusion must be in a vacuum so outside elements do not interrupt.  Additionally, there are beams to heat the contents while there are also barriers such as lithium sheets that absorb most of the energy that escapes.  Meanwhile, the magnets within the large machine are powerful enough to keep the plasma of elements in a ring shape because plasma is an ionically/magnetically charged state where if there is equal repulsion/attraction from all sides of the machine’s magnets, the plasma somewhat hovers.  Inertial confinement uses less product but also produces less energy in comparison to the magnetic confinement method.  The inertial confinement involves a multitude of highly powerful laser beams honing in on a certain point which gets extremely hot and will undergo fusion.  The chamber in which this would occur would be a hohlraum, which is where the contents inside a chamber are at radiative equilibrium.  Both confinement methods can be used for fusion, yet they may not be large enough to carry out the task, turning iron into gold, Ponyets claims his relatively small contraption can undergo.

In terms of turning iron into gold, fusion may possibly make this a feasible process in the far off future.  Modern technology can only make fusion occur with particles/atoms with low atomic masses because they produce less energy and are less unstable than heavier particles. Gold is a very heavy element, and it is now only rare on Earth, but also throughout the universe.  Astronomers have noticed that many heavy metals can only be produced by the collision of two neutron stars, which are the dense cores of stars that have burnt out of hydrogen.  A collision of that magnitude will result in 1% of its mass turning into heavy metals, such as gold.  Just as fission seemed impossible a century ago, fusion to generate gold seems impossible today.  The process does take place in the universe, so fusion to produce gold may be possible if scientists are ever able to find a way to concentrate and harness that much energy and volume safely.

So, Ponyets’ invention is most likely entirely impossible considering that masses the size of star are required to change smaller massed elements into gold.  Fission is more likely to produce gold from metals even heavier than gold, but iron, which is lighter than gold, would require fusion to change into gold.  Overall, our group has concluded that the technology Ponyets used in Isaac Asmov’s Foundation is not going to be possible in the near future and may never be possible.  Our preliminary findings and thoughts do line up with the information we have recently found.  Iron may never become gold.