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Depressing that it almost never looks like this anymore due to climate change. Last time was a year ago, before that it was six years without the water level hitting spill height.

edit: this is what it looks like most of the time.

They1/Them1, They!/Them!, $he/h$r …

Worry not, the implanted power systems I know of generate at peak a few nanowatts. Enough to tricklecharge an extremely low power device or run some very very very efficient digital hardware, but no way you’re harvesting that power for anything more useful. It’d be far more practical just to have the humans chained to bicycle generators…

Yeah. Unfortunately even rechargeable pacemakers are extremely rare - almost all of them just expect that you’ll have to replace the battery every several years (I think the average is 5?), which in the long run isn’t terrible but still. Rechargeable batteries self-discharge far too much and as a result require quite frequent recharging so are far from ideal for implantation, although not having to undergo regular surgery to replace the battery is obviously a highly desirable outcome. The idea with internal power generation is to bridge the gap between the two and allow a person to go for far longer without the need for invasive surgery (there’s a whole sidebar here about rechargeable battery chemistry not being ideal for implantation) but without the drawbacks inherent to rechargeable batteries.

I think the idea was to provide a redundant method of charging in case you’re unable or forget to recharge it externally. But ideally yes, it would be entirely internally powered so you wouldn’t be tethered to the grid.

edit:

A more promising approach is this which is, somewhat unglamorously, just a small turbine implanted into the heart that is spun by bloodflow. oh, no, this is a different study than the one I was thinking of! This uses a flexible generator that generates power from the deformation of the Vena Cava. Fascinating, I’ll have to dig thru it.

Walter.

Real answer: The sheer amount of neutron radiation thrown off by fusion would mechanically erode the panels. This is why the Lockheed Martin fusion reactor they claimed to have built is complete BS - their design ignored the requirement to shield their superconductors from the neutron radiation, allowing them to be placed far closer to the reaction (and thus vastly lower the power requirements). While it could have theoretically worked briefly, it would have eaten itself into radioactive dust astoundingly quickly.

I’ll admit I’ve been out of the field for a couple years so my information is going to be outdated, but I believe the issue with using MHD for continuous stimulation is that it generates tiny amounts of power - enough to trickle-charge a pacemaker, but not enough to keep tickling the brainstem with the frequency needed in DBS. Hopefully there have been/will be improvements to the tech that I am unaware of!

Yep! And fun fact, online encryption relies on basically exactly this technology (radioactive decay, not fusion, but hey it’s close enough if you squint). Radiophotovoltaic batteries provide uninterrupted current, which is used to ensure that encryption keys (stored in highly volatile memory for security) are not lost due to a brief power flicker.

That’s the most common proposal for MHD generators - once it goes thru the MHD proper you use the waste heat to drive a conventional powerplant. Unfortunately MHD requires the production of plasma to be effective, and plasma just does not like to exist, so the engineering practicalities make it… unlikely to ever be even remotely viable outside of incredibly niche applications (although non-plasma MHD has been studied, and I believe there are even some human trials, to power implants in the body like pacemakers and I remember reading about nervous-interface devices in mice that used arterial MHD on to generate the microcurrent needed)

There’s also Direct Energy Conversion, Radiophotovoltaics and Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, but none of those are practical for large scales (and only DEC works with fusion, hypothetically)