3 ms·

That's the thing with these type of hyped things. General Fusion is another company that was going to do something 5-7 years ago and has received much funding f

• bottled_poe 11y ago
  Perhaps the funding has produced exactly what was asked for.
  • x5n1 11y ago
    I am not a conspiracy nut, I don't think they actually have anything yet. There was a 90s Keanu Reeves movie called Chain Reaction that had that exact plot but I don't think this is the case here. The opportunity is too big to just sit back because if it can be cracked, someone will crack it soon.
    • haspoken 11y ago
      There does exist such a thing as the Invention Secrecy Act to suppress patents that the government wants to keep secret. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act Quite a few patents every year, and certainly a small fusion generator would be of interest to the government.
      • raverbashing 11y ago
        You just need to warn other countries that may be trying it. Once there is a way things get invented, especially things that don't need a structure around them to be sustainable (like cell phones, for example)
      • x5n1 11y ago
        As I said, if someone can crack it they will. If the US wants to sit on the technology they can do so at a great cost to themselves and the world. We need cheap, safe energy for the world. It has the ability to literally save the world.
• Sodel 11y ago
  I was lucky enough to get a tour of their facility last June. One half was assembling and testing the most colossal plasma injection guns, driven by the biggest capacitor bank I have ever seen in my life. The other half of the facility contained the anemone-shaped plasma compression chamber from all their promotional images. (And far more impressive than the dinky prototype from the article above.) They had a shelf full of cracked steel pistons, and I'm still not sure how they plan to solve that problem when the full-scale machine uses 200 of them instead of just a dozen or so. (An aside, if anyone from General Fusion is reading this: my inventor friend suggested shooting slugs of molten lead into the molten lead core, instead of using the current steel-piston approach.) I guess I'm just saying that between the facilities, and what our host (one of the project managers) was talking about, I'm satisfied that they're not dawdling. These are just some inherently hard problems they're working on.