I bet it looks like a bunch of blue balls

We can't make it so large that its own gravity will contain the reaction mass, so it has to be kept inside a very strong magnetic field created by huge magnets. You can't put solar panels inside the reaction chamber, they would get destroyed.

I fell like it should be possible to make solar panels that don't contain iron, nickel, or cobalt.

Fusion is still five years off, right?

N+5 years off, where n is the current year. We'll get there one day!

Jesus Christ, I imagined some kind of Matrix scenario when you said human trials.

It's going to be a hell of a lot faster with all those oil wells burning

Am I a joke to you?

To me, and apparently the Greeks!

It is not known whether the aeolipile was put to any practical use in ancient times, and if it was seen as a pragmatic device, a whimsical novelty, an object of reverence, or some other thing.

And even then some solar works by boiling salt... Or water.

You could maybe catch lightning and store it. That’s not boiling water … what’s that? It is boiling water?

That's just the effect of fusion. It regrows hair.

Yeah, water is fuckin' sick. Thermohydraulics is awesome.

https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/rads-watts too.

But yeah, steam turbines are remarkably efficient and if you are designing a reactor today, you definitely assume one of them will be used.

The oil crisis isn't quite that bad yet.

If phase changes weren't so badass we would be so fucked, lol.

Worry not, the implanted power systems I know of generate at peak a few nanowatts. Enough to tricklecharge an extremely low power device or run some very very very efficient digital hardware, but no way you're harvesting that power for anything more useful. It'd be far more practical just to have the humans chained to bicycle generators...

I wouldn't be surprised, it it turns out, when the most efficient way to turn lightning into electricity, was to redirect it into a boiler, instead of harvesting it directly

Um, it's the heat, pressure, and ionizing radiation of the fusion reaction that would destroy the panels.

IIRC, most of the people that actually work at ITER don't expect to live to see commercial fusion.

We've achieved controlled ignition several times, but there's a lot of steps still between that and delivering fusion power to your local grid, and I don't think I would trust anyone to give a concrete timeline.

I really thought Polywell Fusion would be the trick, but Australians (and probably the US DoD) have good evidence it doesn't "scale" in a way that will give a energy-positive/fuel-negative cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell#University_of_Sydney_experiments

all my homies boil water

Well I solved one problem, so someone else can figure out the rest.

Some types of solar are also just boiling water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

I was so hoping helion was going to work. They were trying to recapture the pulse in magnetic confinement when fusion pulsed. Eliminating steam would be awesome.

no no no, it's

𝑅𝑛=𝑅0(1−𝑓)𝑛

years off.

We keep getting closer, but by smaller increments.

spinning a wheel.

So hamster power?

Hydro as well.

Humanity invents the most advanced tech ever… still ends up boiling water 😂

I swear we are going to be travelling to other planets and the biggest issue is going to be how do we stop water leaking into space from our steam turbines.