For years now, nuclear fusion has been 50 years away from being a viable power source. But recent fundamental advances in engineering reactors mean that we are now only 30 years away. Some of the younger people reading this tweet may even live to see the number brought down to 20
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Every day the sun mocks us with rays of free, almost limitless power derived from a process that our best minds can't copy down here on earth despite having oceans full of fuel. Having to capture that power with solar panels is almost a slap in the face.
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My favorite solar factoid is that the Sun's core, where nuclear fusion takes place, has the same power density as reptile metabolism. Just a big ball of gator meat up there in the sky, mocking our inability to fuse atoms, giving us freckles.
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Replying to @Pinboard
If the power density is that low, does that mean it's a bad idea to try to replicate that mechanism? Like maybe we should leave fusion to the sun because there's just not space for it on Earth?
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There's many things you can try to fuse together. The p-p fusion that heats the sun is so slow ("the average proton in the core of the sun waits 9 billion years before it successfully fuses with another proton") that it's not viable for power plants. But there are other pathways!
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