[krisoft]

> not really practical to get meaningful quantities out of it.

It is quite practical. You just pour a big pile of hydrogen out, let gravity compress it until it starts fusing. Initially it will only create helium but near the end of the pile’s life you will get mountains of the other elements too.

Easy breasy. It just takes time and quite a bit of space and hydrogen. Much harder to scale it down of course. But think big and aim for a star as they say.

[mr_toad]

‘Natural’ fusion will only get you as far as iron. Supernovae may produce heavier elements, but the heaviest elements like gold are probably produced in neutron star collisions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis#History_of_nuc...

[adrian_b]

Supernova explosions are good enough to make gold (and most other heavier elements until plutonium) by neutron capture.

Fusion, as you say, produces quantities that diminish very quickly for the elements beyond iron (iron 56 has the greatest binding energy of any nucleus and the binding energy decreases slowly after it), so that the last element that is produced in non-negligible quantities by fusion is likely to be germanium.