Nuclear Fusion
In Our Time: Science
00:00
The Competition Between Protons and Neutrons
There's a competition between the force that's trying to push the positive particles apart, the electromagnetic force. The protons and neutrons together by this other force of nature the strong force are getting pulled together. There's a specific size of nucleus that all nuclei in the universe would like to be. If you like the raindrop size for a nucleus and that's something with 26 protons, 30 neutrons and it's iron. Anything heavier than iron can split apart like a very large raindrop coming down from the sky to go towards iron and release energy usually by throwing off fragments. Things smaller than that can condense together if we can push them together against this electromagnetic force and also
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