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.
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.
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.
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.
“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…”