this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
622 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59217 readers
2512 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There is 1.4E21 kg of water on Earth. 0.03% of hydrogen is deuterium, a suitable fusion fuel. H2O has an atomic mass of 18 and O has an atomic mass of 16, so Earth has 4.7E16 kg of deuterium readily centrifuged out of ocean water.
D-D fusion converts about 0.1% of mass to energy (4 MeV / c^2 / 4 Daltons). E=mc^2. So we have 4.2E30 (420E28) Joules of fusion fuel ready for us on Earth. We used 2400 TWh of energy last year. If we used this amount indefinitely then we would have 485 billion years of fuel.
Bonus: deuterium depletion would have virtually no environmental effect.
This is the answer we all needed.