What is the difference between fission and fusion technology?

Fission splits, Fusion combines.

Fission means to separate. Some elements fission spontaneoously, forming a smaller atom and releasing a particle.

Fusion means to join, and we don't actually know how to do it. Which is awfully embarrassing, because nature does it by accident.

Thanks for your answers, is it possible for the scientist to develop fusion technology in near future?

Must be true. They've been making plans for the past many decades.

Unlikely. The challenge with fusion is that is takes a tremendous amount of energy to get it started and once started, it releases many more times the energy you put into it. This means the slightest miscalculation in your process either shuts down the process or blows you up. We're not that good yet.

We have had working fusion technology since the 1950s. It is called the H-Bomb which uses the energy released by a fusion reaction to destroy everything within a blast radius the size of a large city.

It is very good for blowing things up. We haven't figured out how to harness this power as a source of energy in peacetime.

My Discovery magazine issue from 1984 says that production fusion energy is only a decade away... so much for that prediction.

<putting on my geek hat>

In most cases thermonuclear weapons get half of their energy from fusion reactions and half of their energy from fission reactions.

That is why fallout is still a big problem with thermonuclear weapons.

They can be made pure fusion of course, but it is really inefficient. Giving up the fission half of the yield does not increase the fusion output. You just halve the yield of a weapon of a given weight.

On very high yield scales (measured in gigatons as opposed to megatons or kilotons) pure fusion designs are more efficient than hybrid designs, but no one has tried to make weapons that powerful. Teller wanted to give it a try, but the weenies in the US government wouldn't let him.

Half the energy is from fission??? I don't believe this is true. Can you provide a link to where you got this claim?

It is true that a fission reaction is used to trigger the fusion reaction in a thermonuclear explosion. But I don't think this accounts for anywhere near half the energy.

Link please.

Well, I didn't just pick it up from a site. I know enough about nuclear weapons to teach a course on their design and function.

But I can link you to a site that confirms it:
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Teller.html


I think I can explain it best in my own words though:

Thermonuclear weapons work by using the power of a fission device to compress fusion fuel. This requires a very heavy casing around that fusion fuel.

Fusion fuel releases a lot of its energy in the form of extremely energetic neutrons.

If the heavy casing around the fusion fuel is made of uranium, those energetic neutrons will fission a lot of those uranium atoms and double the yield of the weapon.

If you don't use uranium, the weapon isn't any lighter. You still need a heavy casing around the fusion fuel. But you lose all of the energy that you would have gotten from the fission of the uranium casing.

Unlikely because they are using the wrong approach and refuse to admit it. After all, you can't learn from your mistakes if you refuse to admit you have made one.