China's 'artificial sun' shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds
China's 'artificial sun' shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds
A nuclear fusion reactor in China, dubbed the "artificial sun," has broken its own record to bring humanity one step closer to near-limitless clean energy.
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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.
I'm pretty sure the reason for that is that the sun is actually mostly not hot enough to do nuclear fusion, but has to instead rely on quantum tunnelling. This makes the fusion rate much, much lower. Now while this is good, because otherwise, the sun would burn up far too quickly and kill all of us, it also explains the low power, or energy per time.
Source: Doing my master's in cosmology.
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.
"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..."
Cause maybe they assume scientists are hyping things up like VCs for AI.
In a dishonest world, the honest would be mistrusted more.
It's low in the core too, just not quite that low.
How does nobody else here know that we're talking about artificially fusing some blend of deuterium or tritium? The sun fuses ordinary hydrogen at this point in it's evolution - that's why it's a nice slow 10 billion year burn.
Look up the etymology of the word "sophomore".
Different kind of fusion. Don't forget hydrogen bombs have been around for decades, right? They're just not very controlled and harnessable.
To the sun's credit, it's 4.5 billion years in and it's still got plenty of juice left to go.
