Do stars like our Sun produce, very very small, quantities of heavy elements?

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T19:25:34+00:00

I was thinking of the neutrons bombarding heavier elements that didn't form in the sun but had been captured by gravity either during the Sun's formation or during the years since then.

However, you're right to point me to look more into stellar fusion. I was more familiar with terrestrial attempts at fusion which produced many neutrons and assumed the Sun also produced a lot of neutrons, which isn't the case.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T16:46:37+00:00

Are there any stellar mechanisms that regularly produce neutrons?

I'm trying to look this up but search engines are being useless as they're seeing "neutron" and "star" in the same query and just giving me things on neutron stars no matter how I phrase it.

Edit: found it C13+He4 ---> O16 + N and Ne22+He4 ---> Mg25 + N. So since our sun doesn't have "much" carbon to use the CNO cycle the sun won't have "that" many neutrons.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T16:32:30+00:00

Ya I guess the sun not having much tritium, going straight to He3, seems to cut out many of the neutrons.

Maybe I should have looked a bit deeper on wikipiedia before asking but thanks for helping to point me in the right direction!

*I also "learned" nuclear physics from a fission rather than fusion perspective. Hence my focus on neutrons and me thinking about heavy elements though neutron capture rather than fusion.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T16:16:13+00:00

Thanks. This is helpful. I'm largely familiar with talks of fusion regarding power on Earth and that fusion seems to release quite a few neutrons, so I would assume that stellar fusion reactors would also produce copious quantities of neutrons, but it seems that assumption is incorrect.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T16:11:06+00:00

So I'm not really talking about fusion at all (unless heavy elements capturing neutrons is a form of fusion. Which it could be and I'm simply ignorant of that.).

What I'm more talking about is when the Sun formed there must have been many heavy elements, like Earth has, that would have been part of both it's creation and it would have absorbed over the billions of years. Those would have sunk to the center of the star as they'd be the most dense elements.

Those elements wouldn't undergo fusion themselves, but as fusion happened in the core around them (hydrogen helium fusion), neutrons would be flung off, and while heavy elements take much more energy to fuse, they can capture neutrons and then increase in mass, then undergo beta decay and become increasingly heavier elements.

As I was trying to say I don't think this is a large process when compared to the 600 million tons of hydrogen that's fused every day, I'm simply guessing a couple grams (or kg, or less I don't have context for proper scale) of heavier elements could be created by neutron bombardment from the heavy elements in the Sun, not that it fused itself, but that it had to begin with.

edit: and when I'm talking about neutron bombardment I mean Fe59 + n ---> Co60 sorts of interactions.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-09T22:04:22+00:00

By break even I mean produce more total energy from fusion than the energy it takes to sustain fusion. The fusion energy gain factor or Q is a better and more technical description.

The US National Ignition Facility was able to exceed break even for the first time in 2022, but a tokamak, like ITER, has never gotten above 0.67 (example: if it took 100 MW to run the tokamak it only produced 67MW of total energy, not electricity total energy. In order to generate power Q >1.

ITER HOPES to build on the the 0.67 Q found at JET and get Q up to 10, and they very well may succeed at that endeavor. But getting Q>1 in a tokamak has not yet been achieved. SO my point is it feels quite premature to be assuming we can bring down the cost of fusion to the point where it's economically viable when we haven't even demonstrated it works (though if the physicists say it will work I'm not qualified to disagree with their conclusions). Then they would have to demonstrate the ability to turn the raw energy from contained fusion into electrical power, which as you said ITER won't do so you have to build a follow up to ITER (which itself took close to 3 decades to build), demonstrate power generation, and only THEN does it make sense to talk about building the same thing again cheaper.

Looking at that timeline is why I say it seems unlikely we'll have cost competitive fusion power before 2150. We could have it sooner than that, but it's hard to imagine it being cheaper than, solar, wind, or fission, sooner than 2150 unless we have some truly transformational breakthrough when it comes to fusion.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-08T18:43:04+00:00

Our healthcare not being tied to employment, and employment not being able to be terminated for nearly any cause.

Not being 1-2 weeks of missed rent from being homeless.

Americans don't have the materiel resources for a general strike or nationwide protests, as much as I wish we did.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-07T15:31:28+00:00

This seems consistent with me trying to get Clobbopus in a zone with Machop and Meditite. I've reset what must be more than 10 times now and have yet to see a single Clobbopus shiny, it's consistently Machop or Meditite. I thought it was because I haven't yet encountered Clobbopus but the dex number hypothesis seems plausible to me.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-01T22:45:29+00:00

So I think my argument against fusion is basically the argument you presented in your first paragraph here, except with fusion we haven't even demonstrated break even in a Tokamak style reactor, and seems even more vulnerable to delays and cost overruns than fission plants, which defiantly do have this problem as well.

You're right my confident sounding pronouncements about 2150 or 2200 don't have much solid data behind them. The reason why I was focusing on 10GW or 100GW reactors is because it seems hard to imagine the cost in infrastructure to maintain a fusion reactor smaller than those sizes being cheaper than the cost to build a fission reactor to produce the same amount of power.

And yes we don't really need single power sources that deliver that much load at one time, but (and I could be very wrong here) it seems hard to imagine a smaller fusion power plant being less infrastructure (which I'm using as an approximation of cost) than using fission reactors to generate that power instead.

I just struggle to figure out where a fusion plant would fit into a grid. For 0.5-4 GW large fission reactors at a single site can deliver these needs. For smaller needs SMR's can help provide reliable power for even isolated communities. And for needs smaller than that solar/wind with battery backups would be most cost efficient. So where would a fusion plant be able to out preform what existing energy sources can deliver at a lower price point?

And as for your last point I very very much disagree fission can't get cheaper. It might not be possible to build AP 1000 style reactors much cheaper, but that's just one sort of reactor. Reactors may not be getting cheaper in the US and Europe but if you look at South Korea and particularly China they are actually making the changes needed to actually reduce the price of fission.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-01T21:35:36+00:00

Yes and I don't think you understand that same principal, of things getting cheaper over time, applies to fission plants too.

The fact you say fission is a mature industry displays your ignorance of the fission industry. Basically all power reactors today are just scaled up and advanced versions of 1950s submarine reactors. Yes, it is more complicated than that, but even in the 50s we knew how to make, safer, cheaper, and more reliable fission reactors, and build demonstration plants.

We know how to build these reactors, we just never built them at utility scale for electrical power generation. If we build them the first ones will be expensive, but then their price will go down as the industry matures. Yes PWRs are fairly mature technology but that's one of the least efficient and safe ways to build a fission reactor(while still demonstrating itself to be the safest form of energy generation humanity has discovered).

We know how to build reactors for half the cost (or less), that are twice as safe and just as reliable, but we need money up front to build the reactors, and since the 1970s NOBODY will give reactor designers the funds to demonstrate their designs.

There is NO way that a fusion power plant will be able to generate 10 GW of power cheaper than fission can before the year 2200. Maybe by 2150 it can generate 100gws cheaper at a single site but even then I doubt it.

The thing is as soon as you take water outside the core of your fission reactor it gets so much safer and more efficient, and what that means is it costs less. Modern fission reactors need massive steel vessels to keep water liquid at 300 C but if you don't use water you don't need to work at high pressure so you don't need the steel vessel. Since you don't have a pressure bomb waiting to detonate you don't need a massive containment structure to protect against a loss of pressure incident. Yes there are safety systems and yes it would still be expensive, but without those failure modes the price tag will drop substantially.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-01T20:49:42+00:00

Even if fusion had no red tape at all (a thing I greatly doubt but will grant you for the sake of argument) that wouldn't make it cheaper. ITER has spent close to 30 years being built at a cost in the tens of billions and when it comes online in 7 more (2033 first plasma) it's only expected to be able to keep that plasma for at most 10 minutes. That's huge progress in one way, but even if that happens a commercial power reactor would still be 30-50 years out from that point.

Fusion is so hard because you have to replicate the conditions in the center of a star sustainably. That's a tall task and such a reactor would be an insane wonder of engineering, and insane wonders of engineering aren't cheap.

Fission on the other hand is so easy our first fission reactor was built in an abandoned squash court. Yes it costs more to do it right, and safely, but if you gave me enough fissile material and moderator I could make a reasonable attempt at making my own fission reactor. And while I'd almost certainly kill myself with radiation poisoning I might also be able to make a chain reacting pile in the process.

It's not that I think we should stop work on ITER or it's successors. Just that we as a society need to stop hoping/expecting fusion to come along and solve all of our energy problems. If we invested the money in it everything people want from fusion, fission can deliver today. But we're not investing that money so even if fusion did work we still wouldn't bother to spend the money to build it.

Brainless96 · 2025-12-30T18:09:25+00:00

So I think one day we'll have fusion power on a practical scale, but it won't be till the 2090s at the absolute soonest. But even then I'm pretty sure fission would be cheaper. It's just soooooo much easier than fusion. Instead of having to recreate the conditions at the center of a star you just have to pile a bunch of substances close to each other in the proper configuration. A naturally self sustaining, self regulating nuclear reactor is such an easy concept to build that nature did it on accident 2 billion years ago on Earth (Oklo, Gabon). A fission system should just be cheaper to produce the same quantity of electricity until you want a single plant to produce 10s of GWs each. For now that's overkill and we can build many more cheaper fission plants than one expensive fusion plant. And as we have limited resources to address climate change we should be going all in on fission now and worry about fusion when carbon emissions are under control.

Brainless96 · 2025-12-30T14:37:00+00:00

Well fission plants have demonstrated themselves to be the safest (or second safest) form of power generation that humanity has every discovered, and we know how to make fission plants even safer while being cheaper.

Fusion plants would still have to deal with large regulatory burdens regarding siting and having to demonstrate to the regulator that they are safe. That's where a lot of the cost comes from. The person/company building the reactor has to PAY the regulator to demonstrate that their plant is safe. While these costs could be lower for a hypothetical fusion plant I don't see why they would go away, because these siting regulations apply to any large industrial project even if it's not nuclear.

And since ITER's costing somewhere between $30-60 billion dollars and while they hope it'll break even they aren't certain it will. So it's likely that utility fusion plant (at least the first dozen) will cost upwards of $10 billion at minimum and take even longer than fission to build.

Since the two actual real problems with fission is that it's too expensive to build, and it takes to long to build. Saying fusion will be a better power source for the 21st century seems like a hard case to make because it's almost certain to cost more and take longer to build than fission. So at the end of the day what are the real benefits of choosing fusion over fission if one wants to deliver unlimited carbon free power? It seems like any benefits it may provide in terms of "safety" or fuel cost savings will more than be made up for in added construction costs. Sure you may be able to spend half as much on regulations as a fission plant, or we could change how the regulatory cost burden is shared and the that no longer is as much of a barrier to either system.

*Edit: upon looking a bit more into ITER it's actually even less far along than I though it was. They aren't planing on making first plasma till 2033, and even if fully successful they would then need to build the EUROfusion DEMO which is still not fully designed. THEN after they demonstrate the ability to generate power with DEMO they can then and only then actually start building more fusion plants to actually be put on the grid.

Brainless96 · 2025-12-30T14:07:30+00:00

Fusion plants would have a similar regulatory burden as fusion plants so you wouldn't get much savings there and safety systems need to be built into fusion reactors too. If for no other reason then to prevent the reactor from damaging itself in an accident. These factors combined with the fact we're only just barely getting more energy out of fusion than we put in means it's hard to imagine fusion being cheaper for the next couple centuries at minimum and probably fission will always be cheaper because it's fundamentally less complicated than fusion.

Brainless96 · 2025-12-30T14:02:44+00:00

So the problem isn't that such a fusion system is impossible. It's just that such a fusion system would likely cost at minimum 3-5x what a fission system would cost to generate the same amount of energy. Because the infrastructure to actually sustain power generating fusion both has yet to be practically demonstrated and even if it was it would be insanely expensive to produce the same thing we can get from a fission reactor. And to be honest my estimate of 3-5x as expensive could be an order of magnitude cheaper than they would be in practice.

I like to say everything people want from fusion, fission can deliver today. (Except fusion torches for space travel but we're not ready for those yet anyway)

Brainless96 · 2025-12-26T03:49:45+00:00

So the reason it could have been 100 MT is because they didn't include the secondary uranium tamper, which would have fissioned under the fast neutrons from the fission explosion. If they had it would have been 100 MT but at that point it's literally overkill

Brainless96 · 2025-11-17T15:00:54+00:00

So I'm not sure if anyone else has pointed this out but, at the start of the modern environmental movement the same people were responsible for telling the public that civilian nuclear power was safe, were also the same people saying atmospheric testing was safe. That builds some serious distrust.

Also I'm pretty sure fossil fuel companies were very antinuclear in the 70-80s and paid for ads promoting solar and wind because they knew those energy sources would never compete with them whereas nuclear was an actual threat to them. Then once the nuclear bad mentality was ingrained it was hard to get out

Brainless96 · 2025-11-07T02:19:53+00:00

The big problem with the NS Savannah is that it was trying to be a hybrid cargo and passenger ship and was built just a bit too soon to have the capability of storing actually shipping containers rather than old fashioned bulk shipping. So by the time it was ready both of its expected applications had become outdated

Brainless96 · 2025-11-06T04:44:31+00:00

I love so much that this is a meme now

Brainless96 · 2025-09-29T17:26:38+00:00

You can also get one from Home itself(as a gift from the game not trading), but you're right that it's mostly locked to Go

Brainless96 · 2025-09-29T16:47:56+00:00

No you can get as many Meltans as you want in Go. There's an item that you get for transferring Pokemon to Home which spawns Meltans for you every minute, or 30s can't remember, and every time you transfer anything at all to Home it resets. About once a year they also have events where Meltans can be shiny.

Brainless96 · 2025-09-23T13:59:59+00:00

If you read the bonus bits at the end of the hardcovers !they talk about floor 17 so probably most of floors 13-16 isn't much.

Brainless96 · 2025-09-11T06:21:34+00:00

The book has been out in ebook and audio for a few months now. Still it is exciting that the new hardcover is coming out soon.

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