what an incredible achievement. rome wasn't built in a day and real.science takes time and effort. so much effort by these scientists!
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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I'm studying Physics at the moment and Prof. gave us a printout of a textbook last week stating that the internal of the sun generates approximately 150 W / m³ on average. That's about as much as a compost pile, so, not very much. The sun only generates enormous amounts of power because it's so huge. In other words, reproducing fusion on Earth might actually not be very efficient.
Found this article
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.htm
And it looks like it's saying that the energy produced by nuclear fusion (which happens in the relatively small core) divided by the entire mass of the sun, gives you that low number.
Terrestrial fusion power plants are aiming to be sun cores, so that all the hydrogen they put in gets fused, and not just a few atoms here and there.
Why do people assume that scientists don’t sanity check themselves? Genuine question, no offense to the OC here.
Cause maybe they assume scientists are hyping things up like VCs for AI.
In a dishonest world, the honest would be mistrusted more.
"guys, I know we've been working on this for decades, but I've been going over this first-year textbook, and I have some bad news..."
Maybe they miss the sun because of all the smog in the air.
Good job scientists!
I feel like little fusion has kind of missed the boat. It's been "just a few decades away" since I was in school, and that's a good while ago now.
We can already get limitless clean energy from the real sun.
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We should do both
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There is no two.
Here's why it's been so long:
Meanwhile in America
Living in the UK I suspect you have the same problem we have. Plenty of people capable of doing all the impressive shit China is doing (science, infastructure, whatever) and all of them being starved of funding as all the money dissapears into gigantic blackholes of backroom deals where huge amounts of money are spent on vague things that never seem to materialize or even be adequately explained; but whatever they are they sure do generate enormous profits for the cronies of whoevers currently in power.
My country is in this comment and i don’t like it
Anyone here calls paste glue?... Yup, wrong country. And now we got a word that we can use to detect AI.
I just looked up glue eating gifs. And posted the funniest one
Someone needs to bash these scicomm journalists over the head until they stop using the words "artificial sun"
Also, where's the study? Is it even peer reviewed?
Forget artificial suns, let me tell you right now how to make an artificial moon:
- Be a robot.
- Pull down pants.
- Bend over.
- Point robo-crack towards recipient
- Artificial Moon.
0 theoretical hope for fusion energy to ever provide electricity under 30c/kwh. These are hot plasma experiments, which could be used to produce mass HHO from water vapour at just 2200C-3000C, even if endothermic. Can get energy from concentrated solar mirrors or just PV solar if plasma is used. Cooling magnets is a huge energy drain. HHO provide the highest turbine energy gain, though a net gain pathway is just slightly more in reach than fusion.
Yes but do you concur?
Meh, net gain is the point, long cycles well be useful for production. Useful, eventually. Cart before the horse, otherwise.
You know instead of the artificial sun we could use the real one no? I still think fusion is a good investment on the skill tree but not for consumer energy. Also can someone explain why we use solar panels instead of mirrors that heat up water and spin turbines? Almost every other method of producing energy uses that and from my understanding its more efficient and probably cheaper.
Porque no los dos?
Why shouldn't fusion not be good for consumer energy? If they find a way to produce electricity with it the grid doesn't care who uses it.
Why don't we use mirrors to heat water with sunlight and spin turbines with it? We do! But photovoltaic cells are more space efficient and have gotten really cheap. Also you can just plop them on almost any roof and call it a day. Also converting light to heat to electricity is kinda dumb when you can just convert it directly to electricity.
We also use the sun to make tap water warm.
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