Nuclear fusion is when two small, light nuclei collide and join together to make a heavier nucleus. But both nuclei are positively charged and therefore will repel each other by electrostatic repulsion.

Fusion is what powers the sun. Fission is the splitting of a heavy, unstable nucleus into two lighter nuclei, and fusion is the process where two light nuclei combine together releasing vast amounts of energy.

Deuterium

Helium-3 (He3) is gas that has the potential to be used as a fuel in future nuclear fusion power plants. There is very little helium-3 available on the Earth. Several governments have subsequently signalled their intention to go to the Moon to mine helium-3 as a fuel supply.

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, and the second lightest element. It is estimated that our sun produces 700 million tons of helium per second. Helium has the lowest boiling point of all elements—4.2 degrees Kelvin (that -268.8 Celsius)—just 4 degrees above absolute zero.

Originally Answered: can hydrogen and helium bond together? Hydrogen and Helium cannot bond together. Put aside the inertness of helium (or all noble gases), bond formation is only favored when the final state of the two elements is more stable than their initial state.

Furthermore, hydrogen is approximately 2.5 times less expensive than helium.

Helium has a molecular weight of 4 and, like hydrogen is lighter than air. While helium is not as light as hydrogen, it is inert and non-flammable (unlike hydrogen, which is highly flammable).

Even small amounts of liquid hydrogen can be explosive when combined with air, and only a small amount of energy is required to ignite it. Both its explosiveness and the extremely low temperatures involved make handling it safely a challenge.

To summarise the findings from the paper by Astbury and Hawksworth, they concluded: • Hydrogen does not necessarily ignite spontaneously when released at high pressure. ignite, particularly with respect to electrostatic phenomena.

Pure hydrogen will not kill you. A lack of oxygen will kill you. Breathing pure hydrogen has the same effect as breathing pure helium: a lungful will do nothing worse than make your voice higher-pitched, but a few lungfuls will asphyxiate you from lack of oxygen.

The cost of hydrogen production is an important issue. Hydrogen produced by steam reformation costs approximately three times the cost of natural gas per unit of energy produced. This means that if natural gas costs $6/million BTU, then hydrogen will be $18/million BTU.

The fuel cell stacks are designed to last the lifetime of the vehicle, about 150,000–200,000 miles. At the end of its lifespan, the fuel cell will be disassembled and the materials recycled, similar to what happens with vehicle components today.

Because hydrogen doesn’t occur naturally, it has to be extracted, then compressed in fuel tanks. It then has to mix with oxygen in a fuel cell stack to create electricity to power the car’s motors. That’s true to an extent, but hydrogen-powered cars are not expected to replace EVs.