>>14076144>>14076437>>14076454It doesn't take cosmic scale energies and 15 million degrees Kelvin to superheat water or molten salts. We can already do that for less with nukes, geothermal and concentrated solar energy. By the way, at some point the superheating reaches its limit, and thus any input of additional heat just becomes unnecessary and a massive waste.
There's a reason why I call fusion inefficient. That doesn't mean it is impossible, obviously, but that it is constantly damned by the fact that it takes more energy to start fusion than you can extract from it. Every fusion researcher knows this. The demand of energy required by the superconductor magnets and cryogenics facilities just to start the process exceed the energy output that can be extracted by a mechanical heat engine (i.e. steam turbines). This is the main reason why Fusion remains perpetually uneconomical, and of course there's the meme, "always 30 years behind."
But there is a way out of this, and it's through direct energy conversion. But conventional D-T fuel can't be used for that because these reactions only produce useless neutrons. But He-3 or pB11 reactions instead produce protons, which directly produces an electric current - bypassing the inherent inefficiencies of a heat engine. The problems are that He-3 is a scarce resource that's mostly found in the Moon, while pb11 fusion is a lot harder than D-T fusion.
