> 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

> The last "debunking" of Polywell **I saw on YouTube**

Well there's you're problem right there.

Here is what a "debunking" actually looks like:

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

Long and short: the reports made by EMC2 about stable virtual electrodes were wishful data interpretation, and it appears to be impossible to make them work without absolutely massive amounts of recirculating power which would make it effectively impossible to use for net power production.

Note that the University of Sydney was one of the main centres of IEC research. From what I can see, after this publication there has been little ongoing effort.

*sigh* this dumb chart again. Sorry, here we go...

The chart you are pointing to was produced in the early 1970s. At that time, the tokamak had recently been introduced and was the first device that clearly outperformed the Bohm diffusion limits and seemed to be free of instabilities even at working conditions. The Soviet systems were small and did not have auxiliary heating, so the US quickly took over leadership by applying money. They built a series of machines in the early 1970s, quickly surpassing the Soviet designs, and then started the design of a much larger system with the specific aim of confining a plasma stably long enough to heat to power production conditions. That design was PLT, and was under initial construction when this chart was produced.

If PLT did work, then what was needed would be three more machines. The first would increase the size and ensure that power scaled with size and magnet power as expected and no new problems arose. The second would be much larger machine that would run on D-T and produce actual net power. Finally they would add all the bits you need for an actual power plant and that would also be a commercial unit like Shippingport.

If you look at the lines, you can see the three machines. This is most clear in the green line, but also visible in the blue and yellow. The first bump on the green line is the completion and experimental runs on PLT. After that, starting in 1980, you see the construction and operation of the larger follow-on, which emerged as TFTR. The last two are the D-T system and commercial demonstration units.

The blue and yellow lines are the same development programs, just different timelines. The blue one, for instance, is based on starting the next machine before the last one is finished its experiments. This assumes that some problems will be built into the designs that will need to be fixed while they are under construction and thus you will need money to fix those and so they will cost more in total.

Notice that this entire plan is based on the assumption that the tokamak worked. And when PLT came online that certainly looked like the case. So construction of TFTR began. And that failed. And that's why the graph goes flat in the early 1980s, it was clear that there was no point building the next machine until the problems seen in TFTR were figured out.

At that point the entire graph became meaningless. Throwing money at the problem would not have sped it up. You can't pay people to be smarter.

So no, this graph does not tell us we have not spent enough money on fusion. It says we did not really understand tokamaks in the early 1970s.

> So where we gonna get more Tritium? In juicy irony, we're going to have to build old fashioned fission reactors to supply it.

Google "lithium blanket tritium".

The JASON's report is actually pretty readable.

We will need the fission reactors to supply the startup load, and that will be a close-run thing, but not insurmountable.

> Dr Michel Laberge of General Fusion not physicist-y enough for you?

The ink jet guy with precisely zero plasma physics or fusion background? Correct, he is *not* physicist-y enough for me.

Let's talk about GF, given it's the home team for me. GF's entire pitch is that they are simply updating a device called Linus that was built in the early 1970s. Linus didn't work, they claim, because they didn't have the necessary computer controls that would be needed to keep the collapse uniform. So Linus eventually gave up. But now, years later, that problem is gone and with all of these fancy ASICs we can make the collapse perfect.

So I tracked down some of the guys that worked on Linus. One of them sent me photographs of perfectly uniform repeatable collapses. He then went on to describe what *really* happened. One of the issues for Linus was that as they compressed the plasma, it would squirt out the ends of the confinement area. Around the same time, the first field-reversed configuration (FRC) work was being published. This was perfect, because an FRC is in the form of a cylinder and they could inject it into the centre and it would keep the plasma confined while it collapsed. But as they started running the numbers, they noticed that the FRC itself seemed to do everything Linus would, but without all that Linus. So they stopped working on Linus and went all-in on FRC.

GF formed in 2003, at which time they claimed they would hit breakeven in three years and would have a demo machine in five. They have continued to make similar claims every time anyone asks, two decades later. They have built a series of their collapse machines, not one of which can actually perform fusion. They have also built a couple of small fusion machines, none of which uses their collapse system (they are MIF machines instead). So, two decades into their five year plan, they still have nothing other than theoretical models. GF *does not have physics*.

To clarity, let's take a counterexample. In physics terms, CFS's design is a bog-standard tokamak. All they are doing is changing the magnets. There are decades of experiments on this layout, the physics is very well understood, and there is every reason to believe that it will work when it is turned on. Tokamak Energy is only slightly less firm, as the spherical tokamak approach has not pushed into the same operational regime as the traditional tokamak layout that CFS is using. But they do have a series of successful machines like START and MAST-U to draw on, and its run by the team that built those.

GF has *zero* experimental evidence that their machine will work when it is turned on. They have not performed a *single experiment* that matches their proposed system, and those few MIF experiments they have run are *many* orders of magnitude away from operational parameters. The same is true for TAE, Helion, FLF and many of the others. Some of these concepts, like TAE, seem to have no way they could possibly work even in theory. Others, like NT-Tao, make absolutely no sense whatsoever and appear to consist entirely of technobabble.

Bussard pitched several completely different designs over the years. All of them shared one quality: they don't work.

> There are currently 43 companies that are researching fusion through private investment.

The only two private companies that have any hope of making a working reactor are CFS in the US and Tokamak Energy in the UK.

The first is an offshoot from a major research university, the other is an offshoot from the government-run nuclear research labs. Both are using a design originally developed in the Soviet nuclear labs, and then developed mostly by the US and European nuclear labs.

The other 41 companies (using your number) are largely hopeless concepts with charismatic leaders who can get people to give them money because they're going to Save the World Any Day Now! They all lack one common ingredient: actual physics. And some... well come on... have you seen NT-Tao's machine? Google it. It's an LG microwave oven.

>As it is, it's a reminder that the public sector does not have a great record in this area...

You claim, *on the internet*.