Harnessing a different kind of nuclear energy...?

Question

If what I've read is accurate, protons are composed of 3 quarks, two up and one down. They are held together by the strong nuclear force, the same force that holds protons together in a nucleus, correct?

Well, atoms can decay, in that the force holding together the protons can be overcome, thus causing protons to be emitted.

But according to my last question, protons have never been witnessed to decay, so therefore, the energy holding them together as an entity must be greater than that between protons in a nucleus, right?

Basically, what I'm REALLY asking, is:

1) Would it be possible to harness the energy that holds together a single proton?

2) How strong is the strong nuclear force that holds them together, relative to the strong nuclear force that holds multiple protons together?

3) Would it ever be possible to build an engine that utilizes this energy?

Thanks...

Thank you for the replies!

@Sam D,
I'm a bit confused. Uranium 235, which is used in nuclear fission reactors, has a half life of 700 million years. So clearly, we need not wait for the decay to occur naturally, when we can make it decay almost instantly. Right?

Also, I've thatched together some information, which I believe answers some aspects of my question.

1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark-gluon_plasma
Quark Gluon Plasma - it's the stuff that existed before the formation of baryons (protons and neutrons), so basically, it is the product you'd get if you "melted" a proton. According to wiki, the temperature required to create this plasma would be approx. 1x10^12 Kelvin.

Also, I talked to my friend about this, who recommended the following:
http://einstein.unh.edu/nuclear/overview.html

A research project which hopes to "determine whether the quark-gluon plasma occurs, and characterize its properties.".

He also said fusion would most likely have a higher output of energy.

Answer 1

1) As far as we know, no. The strong nuclear force only applies within nanoscopic scales, so we couldn't really use it in this way.

2) The strong force that holds nuclei together is usually referred to as residual strong force. It's kind of a side effect of the strong force holding the nucleons together. A radioactive half-life is really translating a small-scale probability into the large scale. Basically, if an element has a half life of 100 years, that means on the atomic scale that in 100 years, there is a 50% chance that a single atom of this element will undergo radioactive decay. What happens is that in these large nuclei, the nucleons are moving about, mashing around. Occaisionally the nucleus can be configured in such a way that enough protons get near each other on the edge of the nucleas that their mutual repulsions overcome the residual nuclear force holding them together and some of the nucleons get ejected. On the small scale, you can't know exactly when this will happen, only guess based on probabilities. However, on the larger macroscopic scale, you're often dealing with billions of atoms so it becomes easy to say that half the material will have decayed at this 50% probability point in time.

3) Probably not. I can't say for sure, because I don't think anyone can answer that definitively. However as far as we know there is no way for us to influence or utilize the strong force, other than in a second-hand way by colliding subatomic particles together.

Answer 2

Protons are either believed not to decay, due to them being the lowest-mass baryon, or if they do decay (as required by some grand-unification theories) their half-life must be on the order of 1.0E+35 years. (according to experiments conducted at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan . . . or roughly seven trillion-trillion times the current age of the universe. So if you had a single molar mass of hydrogen (which is just a proton and an electron,) you'd have to watch the sample for an average of 332 billion years just to see one of the protons decay . . . if it happens at all.

However, a more reasonable range of proton half-lives appears to be somewhere between 1.0E+32 and 5.0E+33 years. At the lower end of that range, you only have to wait a mere 332 million years, on average, for a proton to decay.

With nuclear energy, it's these events that produce the energy (either decay events in nuclear fission, and fusion events for nuclear fusion.) So the more decays you have at a given point in time, the higher the power output. Since the average time between decays for a proton is measured in hundreds of millions, to hundreds of billions of years . . . the effective power output of such a reactor within human lifetimes is going to be effectively zero.

Answer 3

because the forces contained in the nucleus of an atom are the most helpful forces in conventional physics for this reason any element appropriate to them will contain truly some power, so the uranium nuclei chop up into 2 smaller nuclei and neutrons which have a lot less mass than the unique uranium nuclei and that mass is became into power, the neutrons that got here out will be going very quickly and could reason different fissile textile so different uranium atoms to undergo fission causing a chain reaction so all you want to do is determined a number of and in a really short area of time truly some power will be released it really is largely the atomic explosion

Answer 4

Do a search on the CERN LHC project....

Once you read the basis and possible outcome for that research, you'll be able to answer those questions for yourself.

Answer 5

Do you actually think you'll find someone on Yahoo smart enugh to answer that question?

Maybe

Answer 6

i think like nuclear fusion or cold fusion, or antimatter explosives