Bang. Energy. Tah-dahhh.

Physicsssssss. My most favourite subjects ever. Not. Why on Earth did I apply for Physics AS? I'd like to switch to Bio but I'm failing it at the moment.

So, this is my attempt at liking Physics more. As I listen to Friday by Rebecca Black. How sad my life is.

Okies, no more putting it off.

Lets review what I already know on Nuclear power.

Pros are -

• It's clean (and lets face it, no one likes a mess).
• It brings good things to an area like skilled jobs and a better infrastructure.
• It's cheap (and right now everyone's very poor... which I don't understand is where all this money has gone. Coz, if everyone's suddenly poor, the money must have gone somewhere. I can just imagine Africa suddenly becoming a new super power with all the squillions of pounds we've lot. Sorry, tangent).

Wow, that wasn't a lot of pro's at all.

Okay, lets look at Con's instead.

• It releases baddddd things into the atmosphere. CO2 causes global warming and Sulphur compounds cause acid rain. It seems whatever we humans do, we're just murdering the planet.
• The products are radioactive which is very very very bad for all living things.
• Those radioactive products are very hard to get rid of. We have to box them up and bury them in a hole.
• Those radioactive elements stay radioactive for hundreds of years. So we could kill our ancestors if we don't kill ourselves. Lovely.
• There's ALWAYS the risk of major accidents like Chernobyl. Not only do people die at the time, by babies are born with mutations and people die of cancer decades after.
• Even though nuclear reactors are cheap, the facilities and cleaning up the site afterwards is very expensive.

Okay. So the purpose of today's blog is nuclear Fission and Fusion.

Fission is what goes on in a Nuclear Power plant. How does it work? Well, its all in the name. The word 'fission' is when nuclei split. So, lots of Uranium or Plutonium is chucked into the reactor. A stray neutron will smash into one of these big atoms and cause it to split. These split atoms are radioactive and a couple of little neutrons are also released. Those extra neutrons might go off and hit some more Uranium or Plutonium.

Here's a picture;

So that's fission over and done with... all that's left is Nuclear Fusion.

As the name suggests, its when atoms fuse together. This only happens with small nuclei and can be seen in stars like the sun. Fusion whacks out a massive amount of energy (loads more that fission) and since we have loads of hydrogen knocking about, it would be awesome if we could use fusion to produce energy on earth. However, fusion only works in really high temperature.

BUT! There may be an answer to the problem. Some scientists have claimed to have proven a type of 'Cold Fusion', but these results are yet to be replicated.

And tah-dah, that's the ins and outs of Fission and Fusion.