> That's why most fusion plants would involve a lithium lining in order to generate more tritium.

"Involve" as in "it would be really cool to do this and we TOTALLY want to, but no one has actually tried this and we don't really have a good idea how to build it."

This is not a trivial issue or "just engineering". The T is burning itself out in-situ, and the amount that is created is so small that you have to get every bit of it you can. So we can't just leave whatever-it-is-that-makes-the-blanket in place, we're going to have to remove these and mine out the T in a fairly continual process. And then we have to prevent losses all the way down the line, and hydrogen is well known for being lost no matter how hard you try to prevent it. T gets out, as I know living next to a CANDU, and while we can trap most of it getting out to the environment, that's more losses we can't feed back into the reactor.

It's going to take years and years to figure this out, and in the 85 year history of fusion research, *no one has even tried*.

> There was some hope that the Polywell would bring electrostatic to net energy production

There really wasn't, at least among actual researchers. After Rider's thesis it was clear it would not work.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412

That did not stop the internet experts, who immediately concocted a conspiracy between the ONR and MIT that was dedicated to taking down the Polywell.

And then along came those reports from Australia, where research on the concept had continued. They demonstrated that the seemingly positive results reported from the US were actually just bad measurements, and the system basically didn't work at all.

https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/21070

> They're chasing funding, and they're making some pretty fantastic claims to secure it.

That's because a lot of other companies are doing the same thing, and getting funded.

For instance, TAE has been telling everyone they would have breakeven in three years and positive output in five. They have been saying this since 1998.

General Fusion has been saying something similar since they formed in 2003.

Helion claims their machine will run on He3 and be energy positive from the start. They formed in 2013.

Zap had first plasma in their FUSE-Q breakeven device in 2022, and still not remotely close.

The thing all these projects share is that they are all orders of magnitude below the conditions needed for breakeven, and some have not even demonstrated fusion at all, yet they all claim they will be in commercial operation any day now and have received millions of dollars in funding.

So yeah, if CFS doesn't do this, why not?

> The science is more or less settled

No it's not. In addition to the fact that no reactor has actually operated at power-production settings and may be subject to new instabilities, something that has happened 100% of the time we ramped in the past, there are also whole branches of secondary issues we have not even begun to explore.

For instance, CFS's design runs on D-T. T is not available in nature (there's about 12 kg on the entire planet) and has to be "bred" in the reactor. No actual experiments on how to do this have ever been carried out. There's *lots* of physics there.

In the particular case of CFS, the design hinges on a demountable magnet concept. This has never been tried. Lots of physics here too.

> It's the engineering

There's lots of this too.

> and does not scale down well

Yeah, this is completely the opposite of reality.

Fusion scales downward extremely well. Unlike fission, there is no analog of a critical mass. This means you can build a fusor in your den, and any number of people have done that.

The actual problem is that it does not scale **up**. The entire history of fusion follows this pattern:

1) come up with a new confinement arrangement
2) build a small machine to test it
3) small machine works, build larger machine
4) larger machine demonstrates instabilities
5) figure out the source of instabilities, build larger machine that fixes them
6) larger machine demonstrates instabilities
7) goto 5

> Private investment in fusion totally dwarfs government funding these days

No.

ITER is around 22 billion officially, and about 35 real.

Even if we forget all the other countries in the world, the US budget is around $750 million a year, compared to the $2 billion ever.

NIF alone cost more than the entire private fusion cash pool.

I can't pretend to understand the economics of these systems, but I wish Sony would consider doing the same.

My wife's favorite games of all time are the first two LittleBigPlanets, which remain Sony only even though they don't even make consoles for it. Seeing as we only have a Switch, which is perfectly capably of running it, wouldn't it be nice if they relaxed the license and simply sat back and took the money from people who want it on another platform?

I looked for a conversion guide in Google and it offered up this AI answer:

https://imgur.com/a/ejcuokq

We are totally getting our money's worth burning down the planet for this.

> By hiding the comma and period behind a symbol switch

The biggest problem I have with the iPhone keyboard is that the period is not hidden. It's right beside the space bar, and I hit. It. All. The. Time. Trying. To. Type. A. Space. With. My. Right. Thumb.

Entire article is based on a false premise.

The UK has built a total of 19 civilian reactors. This means the cleanup cost of this one site, not entirely civilian I'm aware, adds about 7 billion GBP to the sticker cost of these reactors. That's more than the reactors cost. If we properly accounted for cleanup, none of these would have been built in the first place.

In contrast to the iPhone 4, which was actually different than the 3GS in pretty much every way.

I think you missed it: OZ's post is a joke.

> There is no known or believeable way that a single 80 tonne object was quarried, carried, and then floated (jesuz christ, on wha papyrus?) hundreds of kms

LOLZ.

People have been using water transport for large stone blocks for *all of recorded history*.

Most of the Colosseum was built using stone from a quarry 35 km away in Tivoli. That was 2000 years ago and is extensively documented. Do you think the people in Egypt were dumber than the Italians?

More recently, all of the huge stone buildings in the various capital cities in Europe were built by hauling blocks on barges drawn by horses on the extensive canal systems that stretched hundreds of km without the benefit of one of the world's most famous rivers helping them. This was 200 years ago when we still crapped in a hole.

Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean they didn't.

> There's all kinds of UFO sightings in other countries

Right now, most UFO reports are in Japan.

I cannot find this any more, but back in the 60s (IIRC) someone noticed that UFO reports travel around the world. They peak in the US for a while, then it's Japan and the east, then Europe.

I ascribed this to press attention.

> You will also find that under almost all conditions the synchrotron radiation
> of a p-B plasma exceeds the fusion energy production rate.

And for some time, it was believed it was *all* conditions.

When the new data that came out that showed this *tiny* sliver of positive energy, TAE was like "you see? it will work!"

It's funny that they didn't spend the previous two decades saying "you see? it can't possibly work!"

> No one ever built one because it's stupid

No, because it's uneconomical. A review of the PACER project in the mid-1970s noted that the construction costs of the bombs was about 10 times as expensive as a normal reactor:

https://books.google.com/books?id=4QsAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA18