But you are talking about volumetric efficiency - the portions of the sun where fusion is actually taking place are far more efficient than that surely?
I always believed they were trying to duplicate the suns core, not the whole ball of gas.
That's easy enough to calculate. You end up with 46 cubic miles. That's equivalent to 100 foot building 50 miles on each edge.
Much smaller - still pretty large, but doable. Your energy output in comparison to capturing solar energy is now 3 times as much rather than 1/20 as much.
Comments
But you are talking about volumetric efficiency - the portions of the sun where fusion is actually taking place are far more efficient than that surely?
I always believed they were trying to duplicate the suns core, not the whole ball of gas.
That's easy enough to calculate. You end up with 46 cubic miles. That's equivalent to 100 foot building 50 miles on each edge.
Much smaller - still pretty large, but doable. Your energy output in comparison to capturing solar energy is now 3 times as much rather than 1/20 as much.
In which case, I can only assume we are aiming for greater efficiency than the sun. Thanks for your answer!
Jet is 1980's technology and it's already produced 16 megawatts from 200 cubic meters in 1997. http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/JET.aspx Compared to "the center of the sun, fusion power is estimated by model to be about 276.5 watts/m3" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core
Which works out to 290x the energy density of the core. Direct comparisons of the Continent vessel vs the volume of the sun are even higher.
Not to mention getting 5.4 yottawatts from roughly the same volume, if not for the same amount of time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba