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From a layman's perspective it really seems like Fusion is getting closer and closer to a reality. The organization I am most excited about is https://www.toka

From a layman's perspective it really seems like Fusion is getting closer and closer to a reality. The organization I am most excited about is https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/ https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/

colechristensen 6y ago
I’m of the opinion that fusion is already done for classified military use. Exclusive availability of small scale fusion reactors would be a huge tactical logistical advantage.
- lokimedes 6y ago
  What have formed your opinion? Do you have any evidence?
  - peteradio 6y ago
    It's a conspiracy theory so obviously evidence would be nigh impossible to present. Doesn't mean he or she is wrong though. Doesn't it seem somewhat realistic that some technological advances would be kept secret? There is shitloads of less valuable information that is kept secret (only to be discovered later) so it stands to reason that if an extremely valuable advancement was discovered then it might be concealed.
    - colechristensen 6y ago
      I don't know how a basic understanding of how military technology is developed fits into "conspiracy theory". I'm not projecting that a sinister cabal of technologists are hiding some great truth, just that the department of defense and defense contractors are obviously developing this technology and that new military tech is usually highly classified. There's no great mystery there.
      - SiempreViernes 6y ago
        Indeed there is no mystery: the article even mentions that the bulk of the effort at NIF is for testing nuclear weapons. Same as it ever was.
      - peteradio 6y ago
        I'm not suggesting a sinister cabal, I'm suggesting there is a literal conspiracy, a group coordinating in secret. And that group is the government. And the secret would be that highly classified information. In my mind we are seeing things the same, but I can see how the words I put to it might give a different impression. I really don't like the current "conspiracy theory" understanding in modern usage. It completely screws over the literal usage of those two words together. If you wish to, please reread my comment without the common connotation of "conspiracy theory" and see if we then agree.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Lockheed Martin is openly working on shipping container-sized fusion reactors, it does not take a stretch of the imagination to think that the results of such a program would be kept classified quite a while after success. It would likewise not be surprising if there were other prime contractors working on the same technology. https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.htm...
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      Making a net energy producing fusion reactor container sized is a feat, making your first prototype container sized is just starting out. The first tokamak had a radius of 0.7m, so could easily fit inside a standard shipping container.
    - DickingAround 6y ago
      I don't think they have the ability to keep a secret like that. A couple reasons: 1. The act of keeping the secret makes the tech useless. If it's not incorporated into equipment that could use it (e.g. a naval vessel, an isolated firebase) then what good is it? And if it is incorporated and there's a bunch of 20 year old techs working on it, it's going to leak. 2. I don't think they're that bad of people. If they could save us from global warming with fusion tech, not doing so would be a great tragedy. And historically at least the US military just isn't that selfish. For example, they opened up GPS even when they didn't have to. I think they get that a richer/stronger public means a richer/stronger military.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
      No, they wouldn't be issuing press releases if this was a black program. You're also not just taking Lockhead's claims at face value, which themselves have not be established with evidence, and going further to imagine that they're lying/slow playing their claims and actually are even further ahead. None of this is motivated by evidence.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Hydrogen bombs don't really work as a reliable power source, you're thinking of fission.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    I can't tell if you're joking, but I'm not confused about my terms nor do I think they are achieving this with thermonuclear bombs.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      And I can't tell, if you are serious by implying the US Army has secretly achieved a working fusion reactor.
      - colechristensen 6y ago
        I mean the DoD and a defense contractor, but yes, I’m serious.
        hutzlibu 6y ago
        So you imply the DoD did a Manhattan project in peace time for years and nobody suspected a thing? Anythings possible, sure, but that clearly is conspiracy theory category. Unless they found a working cold fusion method by chance, it would require a HUGE budget and the best of the best scientists avaiable. Who all need to keep their mouth shut and pretend fusion is still not working. For years. Not likely. Not in peace times.
        colechristensen 6y ago
        It would not need be manhattan project size, it’s a precision engineering problem not a fundamental physics problem mixed in with an industrial scale production problem. There have been plenty of very expensive defense programs that were kept quite secret for a very long time. I’ve known and worked with people with top secret clearances, they just didn’t talk about their work, it’s not that hard.
- missosoup 6y ago
  This is actually the most plausible scenario for if/when fusion is achieved by any nation state. There is evidence that China is secretly working on fusion reactors and there's no reason to assume that the Russian and US militaries wouldn't do the same. The first nation to achieve economically viable fusion will have a huge advantage over others. All of these open experiments like NIF are the equivalent of public ML research which is years behind what happens at secret research labs in Goog etc. From a game theory point of view, there is a huge incentive to work on fusion alone and in secret, and not tell anyone about it until long after the desired result is achieved. Fusion is a similar technological leap to attaining nuclear weapons, and we're only now learning about the extreme levels of secrecy and investment that the US and other nations afforded to those projects.
- weregiraffe 6y ago
  There already are small scale fission reactors. USSR launched satellites powered by them (one even infamously fell on Canada). From military use, why would you need fusion?
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    fuel security could be one reason. it's much easier to find deuterium and lithium than fissile material.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Those space based reactors would have a hard time powering a single house, and the highly enriched fuels in a highly mobile platform would be a disaster. Those are about kilowatts. This containerized fusion concept is planned to have the capacity for one unit to power a small city or a naval ship, many megawatts.
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  I remember listening to a presentation by a quantum computing researcher in which he made a joke about the lab’s experience of receiving funding from the NSA (paraphrased): ‘getting funding from the NSA is great. They’re the only funding source that would say “we would prefer that you fail and this technology doesn’t exist - but if it does work, we want the first one”. I don’t see why fusion research couldn’t be analogous.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  So? It'd be an even bigger benefit to society to make it public. The US military accepted that climate change is a huge threat to stability across the world. They are motivated to prevent the worst of it.
SiempreViernes 6y ago
Hopefully, but the NIF should really stop pretending it's about anything other than developing nuclear weapons. This is after all a research project that has publicly failed to reach its basic science goal for a solid 45 years across four generations of experiments (to compare with the 2 and a bit for tokamak experiments).
- raziel2701 6y ago
  I think they have the problem that if they come out and admit that they're going to invite a lot of protests and negative media, which they don't need at the moment since they're facing a demographic shift in the lab with a bunch of people retiring now. So they need to attract and hire a bunch of people.

colechristensen 6y ago

I’m of the opinion that fusion is already done for classified military use. Exclusive availability of small scale fusion reactors would be a huge tactical logistical advantage.

lokimedes 6y ago
What have formed your opinion? Do you have any evidence?
- peteradio 6y ago
  It's a conspiracy theory so obviously evidence would be nigh impossible to present. Doesn't mean he or she is wrong though. Doesn't it seem somewhat realistic that some technological advances would be kept secret? There is shitloads of less valuable information that is kept secret (only to be discovered later) so it stands to reason that if an extremely valuable advancement was discovered then it might be concealed.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    I don't know how a basic understanding of how military technology is developed fits into "conspiracy theory". I'm not projecting that a sinister cabal of technologists are hiding some great truth, just that the department of defense and defense contractors are obviously developing this technology and that new military tech is usually highly classified. There's no great mystery there.
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      Indeed there is no mystery: the article even mentions that the bulk of the effort at NIF is for testing nuclear weapons. Same as it ever was.
    - peteradio 6y ago
      I'm not suggesting a sinister cabal, I'm suggesting there is a literal conspiracy, a group coordinating in secret. And that group is the government. And the secret would be that highly classified information. In my mind we are seeing things the same, but I can see how the words I put to it might give a different impression. I really don't like the current "conspiracy theory" understanding in modern usage. It completely screws over the literal usage of those two words together. If you wish to, please reread my comment without the common connotation of "conspiracy theory" and see if we then agree.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Lockheed Martin is openly working on shipping container-sized fusion reactors, it does not take a stretch of the imagination to think that the results of such a program would be kept classified quite a while after success. It would likewise not be surprising if there were other prime contractors working on the same technology. https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.htm...
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    Making a net energy producing fusion reactor container sized is a feat, making your first prototype container sized is just starting out. The first tokamak had a radius of 0.7m, so could easily fit inside a standard shipping container.
  - DickingAround 6y ago
    I don't think they have the ability to keep a secret like that. A couple reasons: 1. The act of keeping the secret makes the tech useless. If it's not incorporated into equipment that could use it (e.g. a naval vessel, an isolated firebase) then what good is it? And if it is incorporated and there's a bunch of 20 year old techs working on it, it's going to leak. 2. I don't think they're that bad of people. If they could save us from global warming with fusion tech, not doing so would be a great tragedy. And historically at least the US military just isn't that selfish. For example, they opened up GPS even when they didn't have to. I think they get that a richer/stronger public means a richer/stronger military.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
    No, they wouldn't be issuing press releases if this was a black program. You're also not just taking Lockhead's claims at face value, which themselves have not be established with evidence, and going further to imagine that they're lying/slow playing their claims and actually are even further ahead. None of this is motivated by evidence.
SiempreViernes 6y ago
Hydrogen bombs don't really work as a reliable power source, you're thinking of fission.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  I can't tell if you're joking, but I'm not confused about my terms nor do I think they are achieving this with thermonuclear bombs.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    And I can't tell, if you are serious by implying the US Army has secretly achieved a working fusion reactor.
    - colechristensen 6y ago
      I mean the DoD and a defense contractor, but yes, I’m serious.
      - hutzlibu 6y ago
        So you imply the DoD did a Manhattan project in peace time for years and nobody suspected a thing? Anythings possible, sure, but that clearly is conspiracy theory category. Unless they found a working cold fusion method by chance, it would require a HUGE budget and the best of the best scientists avaiable. Who all need to keep their mouth shut and pretend fusion is still not working. For years. Not likely. Not in peace times.
        colechristensen 6y ago
        It would not need be manhattan project size, it’s a precision engineering problem not a fundamental physics problem mixed in with an industrial scale production problem. There have been plenty of very expensive defense programs that were kept quite secret for a very long time. I’ve known and worked with people with top secret clearances, they just didn’t talk about their work, it’s not that hard.
missosoup 6y ago
This is actually the most plausible scenario for if/when fusion is achieved by any nation state. There is evidence that China is secretly working on fusion reactors and there's no reason to assume that the Russian and US militaries wouldn't do the same. The first nation to achieve economically viable fusion will have a huge advantage over others. All of these open experiments like NIF are the equivalent of public ML research which is years behind what happens at secret research labs in Goog etc. From a game theory point of view, there is a huge incentive to work on fusion alone and in secret, and not tell anyone about it until long after the desired result is achieved. Fusion is a similar technological leap to attaining nuclear weapons, and we're only now learning about the extreme levels of secrecy and investment that the US and other nations afforded to those projects.
weregiraffe 6y ago
There already are small scale fission reactors. USSR launched satellites powered by them (one even infamously fell on Canada). From military use, why would you need fusion?
- leetcrew 6y ago
  fuel security could be one reason. it's much easier to find deuterium and lithium than fissile material.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Those space based reactors would have a hard time powering a single house, and the highly enriched fuels in a highly mobile platform would be a disaster. Those are about kilowatts. This containerized fusion concept is planned to have the capacity for one unit to power a small city or a naval ship, many megawatts.
germinalphrase 6y ago
I remember listening to a presentation by a quantum computing researcher in which he made a joke about the lab’s experience of receiving funding from the NSA (paraphrased): ‘getting funding from the NSA is great. They’re the only funding source that would say “we would prefer that you fail and this technology doesn’t exist - but if it does work, we want the first one”. I don’t see why fusion research couldn’t be analogous.
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
So? It'd be an even bigger benefit to society to make it public. The US military accepted that climate change is a huge threat to stability across the world. They are motivated to prevent the worst of it.

SiempreViernes 6y ago

Hopefully, but the NIF should really stop pretending it's about anything other than developing nuclear weapons. This is after all a research project that has publicly failed to reach its basic science goal for a solid 45 years across four generations of experiments (to compare with the 2 and a bit for tokamak experiments).

raziel2701 6y ago
I think they have the problem that if they come out and admit that they're going to invite a lot of protests and negative media, which they don't need at the moment since they're facing a demographic shift in the lab with a bunch of people retiring now. So they need to attract and hire a bunch of people.