this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Couldn't you just put some solar panels next to it? I mean, the sun is basically just a massive fusion reactor (just very far away and kind of inefficient), right? Imagine we built our own sun, right here on earth, that would make solar panels a lot more effective, no?
My guess is: it's more efficient to convert boiling water movement to electricity than to convert photons emission to electricity.
Stars are a lot cooler then fusion reactors.
It's in their outer layers that they produce a shit ton of photons.
Fusion reactors are way hotter (like 100m Celsius) and although they make photons most are very high energy (think gamma, xrays etc).
So what would be emitted as visible light would never be enough to generate enough power via pvc to pay back the cost of generating the fusion reaction in the first place much less the cost of building the plant.
Also pvc is like at best 22%~ efficient. You're losing a lot compared to say steam powered generators which, using ultra super critical hot steam made by a fusion reactor could maybe hit 60% (I believe that is high as you can go).
Asianonmetry has a great lecture on steam powered generators
https://youtu.be/suCEKLCCgzw
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.
Um, it's the heat, pressure, and ionizing radiation of the fusion reaction that would destroy the panels.
Well I solved one problem, so someone else can figure out the rest.
All depends on the frequency of the radiation it is giving off and the intensity I guess. Probably not the same as what we get from the sun, so I'm guessing solar panels aren't suitable
Yep! And fun fact, online encryption relies on basically exactly this technology (radioactive decay, not fusion, but hey it's close enough if you squint). Radiophotovoltaic batteries provide uninterrupted current, which is used to ensure that encryption keys (stored in highly volatile memory for security) are not lost due to a brief power flicker.