{"id":118,"date":"2010-03-20T00:19:42","date_gmt":"2010-03-20T07:19:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=118"},"modified":"2010-03-20T00:19:42","modified_gmt":"2010-03-20T07:19:42","slug":"fusion-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/fusion-energy\/","title":{"rendered":"Fusion energy"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been said that actually generating electricity from fusion is “always 30 years away” (since 30 years is what researchers have been claiming for decades). I just read a Scientific American article about the enormous challenges fusion has to overcome in order to be feasible, let alone practical, and I think I can now start saying: it’s never going to happen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Fusion is a classic nerd-project. It has that nerdy glamorousness about it — harnessing the fundamental reactions that power the stars. If only everything were uniformly dense, spherical, and 100 million degrees, it would work perfectly.<\/p>\n

The good news is that nearly all renewable energy is really fusion-powered, because it all starts with the power of the sun. Solar photovoltaics and solar-thermal generators obviously use the sun’s energy directly. The sun also keeps the atmosphere circulating, providing wind for wind turbines and rain for hydro dams. It grows the plants used to make biofuels, and it even grew the plants long ago that eventually became fossil fuels deep underground.<\/p>\n

Let’s leave the actual fusion to the stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been said that actually generating electricity from fusion is “always 30 years away” (since 30 years is what researchers have been claiming for decades). I just read a Scientific American article about the enormous challenges fusion has to overcome in order to be feasible, let alone practical, and I think I can now start … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Fusion energy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}