Fusion and Slug

[RiverRunner]

OK, Slug has really thrown me on the picture for Fusion Power in a Decade.

I get the skunk for skunkworks, the ITER tower, DEMO, and tokamak torus (although it seems to be totamak in the drawing). What is the creature doing the speculating, though? Is that supposed to be a spider in reference to the “spidey-sense” mention in the question? Is what looks to me like a strawberry supposed to be an apple to represent a spherical reactor? Has Signorino been hitting the deuterium too hard?

[gnoitall]

@RiverRunner

OK, Slug has really thrown me on the picture for Fusion Power in a Decade.

I get the skunk for skunkworks, the ITER tower, DEMO, and tokamak torus (although it seems to be totamak in the drawing). What is the creature doing the speculating, though? Is that supposed to be a spider in reference to the “spidey-sense” mention in the question? Is what looks to me like a strawberry supposed to be an apple to represent a spherical reactor? Has Signorino been hitting the deuterium too hard?

I think your identifications of the elements of the picture are right on.

As to Slug, a true artist takes his inspiration where ever it may come from. That’s probably also true of Slug.

It looks to me that every element in that fine illustration comes from a specific word in Cecil’s response, so it’s kosher WRT the time-honored conventions of a Slug Signorino illustration of an SD article. Totes legit.

ETA: Re the spider: only two things can have Spidey-sense: Spider-man, or a spider. Kevin Miller is not Peter Parker, and we don’t need the Straight Dope getting in hot water with the Marvel Comics juggernaut, so depicting the one pondering “fusion in a decade” as a copyright/trademark violation is absolutely not gonna happen. So, by elimination, a spider.

[XT]

@RiverRunner

OK, Slug has really thrown me on the picture for Fusion Power in a Decade.

I get the skunk for skunkworks, the ITER tower, DEMO, and tokamak torus (although it seems to be totamak in the drawing). What is the creature doing the speculating, though? Is that supposed to be a spider in reference to the “spidey-sense” mention in the question? Is what looks to me like a strawberry supposed to be an apple to represent a spherical reactor? Has Signorino been hitting the deuterium too hard?

I figured it was supposed to be an anthropomorphic spider from the ‘spidey sense’ thingy you mentioned (or a really disturbing walrus). At first I thought the skunk was a chipmunk for some reason, then I saw the tail and stripe and it made more sense.

[Senegoid]

Different topic, but same column:

Depends on how long you plan on living. At the rate things were going, the timeline for commercial fusion power was up there with the half-life of radium. Sure, Lockheed Martin’s bid could crash and burn, but current efforts don’t seem noticeably more promising and it’s not my money. So why not?

I googled it so you don’t have to. The half-life of (ETA: the most stable isotope of) radium is 1600 years.

That’s a lot of decades away. (Now: How many decades has it been already that fusion power has been just a decade away?)

Could be worse. According to another Wiki page,

The half-life of uranium-238 is about 4.47 billion years and that of uranium-235 is 704 million years,[6] making them useful in dating the age of the Earth.

[MarcusF]

@Senegoid

Different topic, but same column:

I googled it so you don’t have to. The half-life of (ETA: the most stable isotope of) radium is 1600 years.

That’s a lot of decades away. (Now: How many decades has it been already that fusion power has been just a decade away?)

Could be worse. According to another Wiki page,

Now be fair - commercial fusion power has never been a decade away. It has always been 40 years… In fact I knew a guy who started working on the ZETA device in 1957 and retired from working on JET in 1997 who had spent his entire career with fusion 40 years away