"

Article needs review by nuclear physicist(s)
Just skimming the introduction I found three rather significant factual errors which I corrected.  I review those here.

The first point was that the article insisted that fusion occurs between like-charged atomic nuclei, but this limitation is not true.  For example, a nuclear reaction of 12C+16O can proceed through the fusion channel, yet their atomic charge differs.  There are literally hundreds of such cases, and citation would be gregarious and seems unnecessary (but I can link a few articles if anyone disputes this point).

The article suggested that two protons can fuse, and even suggested that such a reaction is governed by the nuclear strong force.  Not true.  p+p->d is a weak interaction, because you must convert a proton into a neutron.  Weak interactions are not fusion.

This error leads to a more general point.  Simply putting nuclei together to make something heavier does not constitute fusion.  A common misconception is that nuclear fusion refers to any coalescence of nuclei, but in nuclear physics, fusion is a specific reaction mechanism.  I will need to confirm, but I believe that, for example, the reactions in the CNO cycles proceed mainly through radiative capture, which isn't fusion.  I can find comments in the introduction instructing me not to correct the ""general"" statement about nucleosynthesis, but the point is that this is generalized so much that it is incorrect.  I can even find comments there saying not to link to the s-process, but the s-process does not involve fusion reactions as far as I know.  There are actually a rather limited number of stellar nucleosynthesis cases that actually proceed through the fusion mechanism, such as carbon burning and oxygen burning.  These are literally the only two examples I can think of off hand that I'm sure proceed via fusion.  All the rest I'm fairly dubious about at the moment, although some of the pp-chain reactions may also be fusion.

Thus, we in fact need likely a whole section explaining the nuclear physics of fusion and what it is and what it is not.

Finally, I noticed that the article suggested humans have never controlled fusion.  This is naff.  There are plenty of nuclear physics experiments which have not only controlled fusion, but made very careful measurements of the properties of the fusion mechanism at many energy scales.  Clearly, the writer wanted to imply that fusion as a source of stable source of energy has never been achieved by humans, so this was changed to reflect that point.

But given that I could find a serious physics error in every paragraph I read so far, clearly this article needs some serious attention Please do not revert my corrections without discussing the matter here or explicit citation indicating that I am incorrect.    "