There are other tricky requirements; for instance, most heating of the thermonuclear fuel must come from fast-moving alpha particles (helium nuclei).

Additionally, a few grams of tritium (a by-product of plutonium production reactors and thermonuclear fuel) can increase the overall yield of the bombs by a factor of three to four.

Nearly all small and intermediate-mass stars (below about nine solar masses) will end up as white dwarfs once they have exhausted their supply of thermonuclear fuel.

He claims to have found his mistake in December 1950: he had failed to realize that compressing the thermonuclear fuel was necessary for fusion reactions to proceed.

But then, unlike the Sun, it begins to use its accumulated helium as thermonuclear fuel.

At that point, available thermonuclear fuel is exhausted and the temperature of the star's core, which had risen to some 10 billion degrees, begins to fall.

Ultimately, scientists hope to build a "burning plasma" machine, one in which the thermonuclear fuel will sustain its own ignition, producing an excess of useful power.

No one has yet been able to squeeze thermonuclear fuel tightly enough and long enough to ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction.

In 1946, Teller participated in a conference in which the properties of thermonuclear fuels such as deuterium and the possible design of a hydrogen bomb were discussed.

Once they exhaust their thermonuclear fuel, most stars end up as white dwarfs, typically dense, Earth-sized balls containing mass about two-thirdsthat of the Sun.