Toronto to Quebec City is 800 km for 18 million people.

Washington to Boston is 630 km for 50 million people.

Some twisty bits on the Boston end, mostly for historical reason, but the NYC to Washington part is just as flat and straight as Toronto to Montreal, and that's only 325 km compared to 550.

No contest.

> High speed rail is quickest way to mobilize an army

It is quite possibly the worst way to mobilize an army. A single bomb destroys the entire network. Forget bombs, someone with a crowbar can do the same.

And we know it's terrible, because the entire Russian army was based on rail logistics. Remind me how that's been working recently?

"while preserving the ship's legacy as a symbol of American innovation and engineering"

Very fitting, "look at this symbol of US innovation, a ship that arrived the decade after it was needed, sat in the docks for decades, and then we dumped it in the ocean"

Why bother? Just make another executive order.

Stop feeding the trolls.

> they keep a lake of molten material nearby created by the reactor heat output

Its a terrible idea.

First off, you can do this with any power source. You could, for instance, put an electrical resistance heater in the same lake, pump power into it from the grid, and then use that as storage. And the number of people doing that? Zero.

Why? Because the efficiency of the conversion back to power from heat is a function of the temperature of the working fluid. You can keep the temperature up for little cost when no one is using it, but as soon as it hits the turbine, boom, the temperature starts going down and your efficiency goes with it.

So when people run the numbers, and they have been talking about this since before I was born and that was a *long* time ago, it just never works out. It costs less to just build another power plant, especially these days. Now that battery costs are plummeting, it seems *extremely* unlikely anyone will build one.

So, then why was TerraPower talking about it? That's because of a particular problem NPPs have, that they cost a whole lot up front and then have low operational costs. So the absolute last thing you can afford to do is ramp down output, you're still paying the interest payments but getting no income. So their idea was that you build the plant smaller than the load and pump its output into the salt 24/7, and then when the load goes down you keep pumping it so the effective capacity factor remains high.

Now that might work, but again, it would work for any NPP. And how many NPPs have molten salt storage? Zero.

In this case the primary problem is that you are adding a whole lot of complexity and money to the already expensive up-front costs and then trying to make that back by selling a little extra peak power. But the power company can just build a gas plant for a tiny fraction of that cost and get the exact same result.

The idea simply isn't a good one.

> The grid had quite some transmission losses

The total loss in the USA is about 7% and falling year over year. Most of that loss in the last mile on the lower voltage sections.

No, not, it does not have large transmission losses, especially for large users that get high voltage feeds.

> Your grid is older and crustier than most and you seem to have little motivation to do much about it

Little profit in grid ops. Thus little investment.

> Perhaps you're already at the point where people put generators next to their sheds because the grid is too unreliable?

Works in Kenya.

> However, saying that therefore it isn't copyright infringement

I saw no such claim by the OP or follow-ups.

> is a non-sequitur

Pot, kettle?

> 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?