It's a different environment than the sun and other isotopes are fused. The plasma is a lot less dense, with a lot less pressure but much higher temperatures. The current technology will not generate other elements. And Gold etc are not created in the sun via fusion. they are generated by a different process involving stellar catastrophies.
Breeder reactors are not "notoriously dangerous", they are just a little too expensive to justify their construction when the uranium is cheap (like it is now). Also, there are proliferation risks. However, these are not engineering problems nor scientific problems, breeder reactors are production-ready and safe.
I've never really gotten the "proliferation risk" in the context of US power production (or China, Russia, or even France, for that matter). We're talking about existing nuclear powers, they already have the capacity to make nuclear weapons. If they wanted more they would make more, for the simple reason that having nuclear weapons is table stakes for being a serious player in geopolitics.
So they are ignoring the laser efficiency as well as the thermal to electric efficiency? If you did the same for a tokamak, stellerator or Bussard, would you get a similar ratio?
Reminds me of solar. That took a century to get to where we are today where the net energy output is much greater than the energy needed to manufacture them.
It being hard and it requiring continual progress does not mean that progress does not occur.
How long has humanity been working on fusion? Wasn't Ivy Mike in the early 50's? Glaciers continually progress too, but it's not obvious on human timescales.
Sauropods, particularly. And while we are at it, pterosaurs, which are not dinosaurs, and mosasaurs, likewise. All are equally plausible, meaning not.
The original article is actually promoting inventing new animals that look like dinosaurs. Or rather what we guess they looked like. We might be able to do that, someday.
Anything that looks like a sauropod would need solutions for all the problems anything sauropod-shaped would necessarily have had, and solved. There is no reason to think our solutions would match what they had, but we could anyway determine whether they were plausible solutions. My bet is on two-chambered auxiliary hearts all the way up the neck. (The null hypothesis is a volkswagen-sized heart and very, very thick artery walls, assuming new circulatory structures were out of reach.)
Sauropods are Saurischian not Ornitishian. But you are right, we want them too.
The vw sized heart was in a dinosaur show when I was a kid. Either David Norman or Bob Baker stood below a brachiosaur and told the audience about the heart. wow 30 years. Time flies.
For those in the back, sauropods, despite appearances, run with the tyrannosaurs and birds, not the triceratopses and hadrosaurs. Or anyway walk. Or did.
My solution to their energy problem is eusociality: big Mama stays put and is fed by the small fry who range far and wide. They also tend her eggs. She eats their first-level output, then they eat her better-digested leavings. The digestion scheme is like rabbits, and addresses the problem that absorbing nutrients through a 2D intestinal wall scales badly to a 3D animal. If she doesn't need to heave her bulk around the forest, her energy needs are lessened. Meanwhile, the small fry don't need to digest everything all the way.
