The bulk of the session, in which Musk shared the stage with Y Combinator head Sam Altman, was far - ranging and bizarre,
twisting from nuclear fusion versus fission to Mars colonization.
This form of energy is
created from nuclear fusion reactions that take place at millions of degrees Celsius, but Mr. Fusion appears to work at room temperature.
A $ 12 billion worldwide attempt to generate
power from nuclear fusion was signed into existence today by ministers from the project's seven international partners — China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States.
Suns and stars maintain a range of temperatures strictly due to a equilibrium between the outward pressure of the energy
from nuclear fusion and the inward pressure of gravity.
This is how, half a century ago, John Cockcroft, one of the great nuclear pioneers, began an article in this magazine on the prospects for generating useful energy
from nuclear fusion.
At the ITER project in Cadarache, France, scientists are trying to generate power
from nuclear fusion, which requires heating plasma to many millions of degrees.
Stewart C. Prager, the director of the Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, here offers a fresh defense of continued substantial support for research on extracting usable energy
from nuclear fusion.
Smil expresses his exasperation at «techno - optimists [who] see a future of unlimited energy, whether from superefficient [photovoltaic] cells or
from nuclear fusion.»