4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment

Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by loudmax on Thursday July 10, 2025 @07:34AM (#44519822)

At some level all fossil fuels come from the sun. Fossil fuels come from biomass accumulated over millions of years. The energy that went into gathering all that carbon and hydrocarbons came from the sun.

Take it a step further and nearly all our energy comes from nuclear fusion, with the exceptions you noted.

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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by myself248 on Thursday July 10, 2025 @08:14AM (#44520124)

I refer to my solar panels as nuclear power, just to mess with people:

I use a gravitationally-confined fusion reactor, and pull power out of it by allowing the radiation to excite unbound electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor substrate. It's dangerous; even miles away from the reactor itself I can't expose myself to the radiation for too long or I get a painful skin reaction, and that might lead to cancer someday, but hey, it's cheap and quiet and I don't pay for the nuclear fuel!

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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by kibwen on Thursday July 10, 2025 @11:48AM (#44522323)

> I refer to my solar panels as nuclear power, just to mess with people

Solar is actually fusion power, which is way cooler than any fission plant that puny humans have ever constructed.

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