Nuclear fusion combines hydrogen atoms into helium and releases enormous energy, but requires temperatures around 100 million °C. Current experimental reactors consume more energy than they produce, though new startups claim to have cracked the net-energy problem.
But first, let's do some Fusion 101.
Energía por fusión, el reto más grande que el hombre haya enfrentado jamás.
To perform fusion, you want to take a couple of atoms, like say hydrogen, and bash them together. If you do this, you get helium and a bunch of energy as a result. The trick is that you need extreme heat to get the hydrogen atoms to fuse. We're talking 100 million degrees Celsius, and you need a way to capture the resulting energy. It's clean, it's super safe, and the reactors can be much smaller than the fission reactors that we use today. The major problem so far has been that fusion reactors consume more energy than they produce. The new wave of startups are betting that they have finally figured this major problem out.
