> and use it as engine for space ships

It's a crap space engine, the energy density is way too low.

Fission is perfectly good in space. What, you worry about the radiation?!

> Yes they do. The high temperature superconducting magnets that commonwealth fusion systems have solve the problem.

They do not. The magnets themselves are subject to neutron dislocations as well, and REBCO is worse than simpler magnets in that regard. CFS claims it's not that bad, but that's the mantra of fusion since the 1950s.

It also doesn't solve the *actual* problem that turning off the reactor to get at the deeper bits requires weeks of warming up and cooling down, which means there is no way the thing can possibly be economic. You can't make your interest payments if you're not generating power.

> However, it'll immediately start making the second one ecenomical, because it'll start producing the tritium that they previously had to buy

I'm not clear why you believe tritium is the economic problem. It is not.

> Also, pointing to things like ITER to say that cost-effective fusion is impossible is like pointing to the ISS and saying SpaceX is impossible.

The cost of a fission plant outside the nuclear island - that is all the things like steam generators, turbines, cooling loops, etc. - is about 60% of the total cost. Assuming MIT's ridiculously low estimates of reactor cost, $6.50/We, that makes just those portions of the system about $4/W. A fusion plant is basically identical to a fission one outside the island, you're basically replacing the one heat-generating box with another.

PV systems in the US currently cost about $1/W. With storage, that goes to about $2/W. Feel free to explain how fusion will compete with dispatchable power from PV when the system already costs twice as much as a PV system **before you have even built the fusion bit.**

Before you come up with the first thing ChatGPT tells you, I've worked in the supply-side for a decade, and have been writing about fusion for several decades. I can happily back up all of these numbers with many, *man* references if you don't take my word for it. So please take at least 10 seconds to come up with something cogent that you think addresses these very real facts.

> All these commenters who think they're so smart coming out with the same "Fusion power
> is 20 years away and always will be, har har har!"-quip who don't know a damned thing
> about the field and its progression is so tiring

Well I'm a physicist who has been writing about fusion since my 3rd year E&M thesis in the 1980s, and I say fusion power is 20 years away (at least).

But by all means, explain what makes you an expert on the topic and how I "don't know a damned thing" in comparison.

> I think JET is the only reactor that was ever built so far with the goal of being energy positive

Nope, JET, TFTR and JT-60 were all designed to hit breakeven, and such claims are widely found in 1980s documents. JT-60s original name was "breakeven test reactor". T-15 was also, although finding claims of that is not so easy.

> when we ran out of new magnet technology to squeeze everything in tighter

No, it's when we learned that the performance was nowhere near what we expected and we had no clear way to improve it other than a massive scale-up like ITER.

CFS makes the system physically smaller, but has no real effect on the original physics problems that were found in the 1990s.

Does no one read history any more?

Industrial heat costs pennies per kWh of electric equivalent. There is absolutely no way nuclear can compete for process heat. None. Zero.

Nuclear can *barely* compete on the electricity front as it is, and that's *dramatically* more profitable than process heat.

That's why there is a single example of utility-scale nuclear heat in all of history and that was purely a "first!" on the part of the then-soviets.

Stop reading the nuk-boi propaganda. There is precisely zero market for this.

The Antares design is around 100 kWe, with claims to 1 MW. There are already thousands of 3 to 4 MW emergency portable generators in shipping-container sized trailers around the US today, using Diesel. The idea of hauling some future portable nuclear reactor Ito a disaster zone instead of existing Diesel ones solves what problem, exactly?

Oh I'm sure you'll parrot some more propaganda from the pitchmen about fuel supply and logistics and so forth, but again, there is precisely zero actual market for this. The military... *maybe*, but I'm skeptical of that as well.

> was obviously as hell two birds flying low over the ground

There are numerous birds in the new release as well. This is why the pro-UFO people are dismissing it as much as anyone else.

> I don't have a conspiracy theory to explain it

Oh don't worry, they've got you covered on that part!

> Footage taken over Syria in 2021 shows a mysterious object racing
> away at speed akin to instantaneous warp-speed acceleration

No, it shows the drone losing lock on the object. The camera stops following it, which is clearly evident by watching the motion of the background. The object is moving to the right, which we can see because the background is moving to the left. Then the camera simply stops tracking and you can see the background stop moving. It is at this point that the object "races away" to the right.

The various materials in this collection appear to have been collected but never analyzed. This is not entirely surprising. The collection team's job would be to simply collect and file, they would not offer suggestions on what they are collecting, and probably aren't allowed to (officially). I see no evidence that any of these materials were later examined by an analysis team, so they are simply giving up the raw materials without any attempt to ID them first. I assume this is because the DoW realizes the low quality of these offerings (even the UFO people consider them low quality) and didn't want to waste the time. But now they are forced to release them and are doing so straight from the collection program.

> "Nuclear AI startup" Fermi had hoped to build power plants generating 17 gigawatts

Only a few posts above we see that China has sold 68 GW of PV in the last few months. It's fun to watch this nuclear corpse twitching.

> Nuclear reactors have seen steady improvements, ... making them cheaper to build

The latest design built in the US was the most expensive power plant in mankind's history. It will be followed by the UK's current build. All indications are that the new SMRs in Ontario will take that title away from both.

Nukboi's will invariably point to China when faced with this reality, but that doesn't help us outside of China. Others will point to Korea, but their build outside Korea was a disaster. There is simply no evidence that we can build these things cheaply in "the west".

> Windows is currently the operating system most likely to change things, to break things, to render itself unusable

I'm writing this on a Mac, so I'm not being knee-jerk here, but I think this claim properly needs to be hung on Apple right now.

The latest OS and its moronic "Liquid Glass" effects are almost certainly going to go the way of the cassette tape display in Podcasts, so I expect some breakage in the future.

On the other hand, they don't change the Settings app *every freaking release*...

For those not familiar with the background to all of this, it's mostly a conspiracy theory that recently emerged with force from the UFO field.

It's not mentioned in the "real press", but the original claim was that all of these people were working on various bits of technology reverse engineered from UFOs. The MIB is cleaning up, although MIB in this case is a string of companies like Lockheed or even Raytheon.

The amusing thing is that the people on the list are not related. For instance, the "nuclear physicist and MIT professor" Loureiro worked on fusion projects at PPPL, and there is precisely zero mystery about his death, a disgruntled former colleague went nuts and shot him and other people. Yet he gets lumped into the story along with Hicks, a guy that studies asteroids, "independent researcher" Eskridge that published anti-gravity baloney, and Chavez, a construction foreman. Their only link is that the UFO hoi paloi seem to think these are related "because science".

Much of the basis for the claims of this being so strange has to do with the people simply disappearing from their home without various items like phones or wallets. This is positioned as something odd. However, this is precisely what a high school friend of mine did while suffering from mental illness, he simply walked out of the house in the middle of the winter in Canada without his prized pocket computer (this being the pre-phone era), wallet, keys or anything else, all neatly stacked on the table by the door. At the time I was told this is a common event in these cases.

This sort of thing has been going on for years.

I recall one where they replaced the multi-conductor mega-cables with coat hangers while the audio experts weren't looking. The experts then went on and on explaining how much better it all sounded.

Only in hi-fi do they question whether or not science really works.

This is so overdue.

I once wrote a paper on Mellon Optical Memory, a computer memory system from the 1950s which was never used in production. The only good article on it was in ACM. They charged $24USD for a PDF of the article that was a couple pages long.

> I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people

So... your worst people DID take them up on that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdjf4lMmiiI