With fusion in the news often, I was wondering what makes it special as opposed to simply burning hydrogen with oxygen like a fuel cell does?
Doesn’t both require the uneconomical electrolysis to source the hydrogen in the first place?
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burning hydrogen is a chemical reaction where you cause a minor change to the atoms “soft outer shell” to get a (comparably) small amount of energy.
fusion is a physical process where the “hard core” of the atom changes (by literally FUSING two such cores together) which gives you (comparably) insane amounts of energy.
it’s literally the difference between a campfire and a nuke in terms of power.
but fusion uses the heavy isotopes (=versions) of hydrogen, one of those you can get from sea water, basically by filtering and then yes, using electrolysis or similar processes. but again the energy invested here is orders of magnitude lower than what you can get from the fusion process.
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