Nuclear Fusion
In Our Time: Science
00:00
The Lawson Criteria for Fusion
In the Tokamak that we've been discussing the pressure in the gas, in fact it's not very much different from the pressure in this room because even though something is a couple hundred million degrees the number of particles there is very very sparse. And so that means that the collisions, the head on collisions that you need don't take place very often. It takes I think the criteria is about a few seconds to get more energy out than you put in once you've heated it up to a hundred or two hundred million degrees. If your fusion reaction is dense it takes less time for the reaction to take place and you don’t have to wait as long to get moreenergy out
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