Fusion Power Question

[Hakim]

Hopefully some of the heat will be used directly to warm up houses through remote heating.

Today huge amounts of energy are wasted in nuclear powerplants because the heat generated in the core are only used to produce electricity, then some of that electricity are used to produced heat somewhere else.

 

[Urederra]

It will, but not significantly. Not as much as continuing to emit CO2.

Prove it.

What makes a house warmer? Lighting a candle, or closing the windows?

Bad analogy. It is not a candle what they are going to build if they (hopefully, don't take me wrong) discover how to control fission. They will build hundreds of fission plants.

 

[El_Machinae]

Prove it.

I could take you through the math of watts hitting the surface, due to the sun, and then show the total watts of heat released by each fusion plant, and then show how the total waste wattage of our production would be insignificant for a long time. But there's no real point, since you've made up your mind on the CO2 thing.

I will just point at Irish Cesaer's stat that 10,000 square miles of captured sunlight would be sufficient to power the United States.

 

[Lotus49]

Solar power is naff in England you'd probably get enough power to get a 40 watt bulb to run for a few weeks, if you were lucky

That's why I like the microwave approach. Have the solar panels out in orbit, and then beam the power down to earth. Just put the receiver station in a remote location, and establish a permanent flight restriction zone around it.

But yeah, all the energy we could ever want, is right there - the natural fusion reactor that is 'the Sun'. I say take advantage of it. 'Effectively' - that is.

 

[History_Buff]

"Planet's Primary, Alpha Centauri A, blasts unimaginable quantities of energy into space each instant, and virtually every joule of it is wasted entirely. Incomprehensible riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from this eternal river of wealth."
-CEO Nwabudike Morgan : The Centauri Monopoly

A nice theory, but due to to the limitations on our current space technology, it resides only within Video Games