How is energy produced in a nuclear fusion reaction- the kind of reaction that takes place in our sun?

Answer 1

Basically, nucleus give up energy when they get heavier (by combineing several nucleons) until you get to iron (adding nucleons to iron and heavier nucleus costs you energy).
The largest energy output comes from combining hydrogen nucleus and getting helium (fusing helium returns a bit less energy and so on as it gets heavier).
But how to you fuse hydrogen nucleus togetenr? First, there is this electon shell around that prevents nucleaus from getting close enough together to fuse; so the first step is to give enough energy so the atoms are ionized, in the case of hydrogen, that means getting the nucleus naked. Then you have to get two nucleus together, but both of them contain a proton, and that emans you have to overcome the natural repulsion of like charges, this mens getting them hot enough so that they can slam inot one another, and this also requires having enough pressure so that there will be enough hydrogen nucleus around that there would be a good possibility of two of them hitting ona anotehr and fusing.

And that is where it is getting complicated: we are talking about millions of degrees, so evidently nothing material can contain that without melting and evaporating, so one needs either inertial confinement (you heat it up so fast, the hydrogen does not have time to move) or magnetic confinement (since the atoms nucleus have the positive chage of the proton, they will respond to electrical and magnetic fields).

The sun accomplishes the heat/pressure/confinement trick by using its massive gravity; an advantage we do not have in a potential thermonuclear reactor. But very smart people are working on it, hopefully they will figure out something that works.

Answer 2

Basically the gravity and heat from the sun cause hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium atoms. Also some helium atoms fuse with other helium or hydrogen to make other elements too. When this fusion happens energy is released, in the form of electrons. It is actually a very small amount of energy per reaction, but there are trillions happening every second, so the amount of energy is great.

Answer 3

When the element hydrogen is greatly compressed and heated to at least 10-million degrees Kelvin, a reaction begins that converts the hydrogen into helium. This reaction released great amounts of energy.