Fusion Energy Production

Abstract

Nuclear fusion energy is a good choice as the base load energy in the future with many advantages, such as inexhaustibility of resources, inherent safety, no long-lived radioactive wastes, and almost no CO<inf>2</inf> emissions. During the past six decades, the fusion energy research has made a great progress with the goal of producing fusion energy output in this century. In this chapter, the principle and advantages of fusion energy are briefly introduced in Section 1. The fundamentals of fusion, including plasma and confinement condition, are briefly introduced in Section 2. The systems of fusion, are illustrated in Section 3, including the approaches to controlled fusion energy by magnetic confinement and inertial confinement, the blanket system that is the key component for converting nuclear fusion energy to thermal energy, and some prospective fusion reactor concepts and fusion-fission hybrid reactor concepts. The performances of fusion energy and fusion-fission hybrid energy are described in Section 4. The results and discussion of fusion system and some key technology are shown in Section 5. The future direction and closing remarks of the promising fusion energy are described in the last two sections. Some further information about fusion can be found in Section Further Reading and Relevant Websites. © 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.