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Comment by jackfoxy | Hacker News Reader

I hope some good science and engineering are coming out of this, because American taxpayers have been pouring money down the fusion rat-hole for over 40 years. From my ignorant layman's perspective, I just don't see recovering more usable energy than the energy put in happening. It's been "30 years away" for the past 40 years.

Not everything is a matter of time. I'm not saying man's ingenuity won't figure it out, but the only place nuclear fusion takes place in nature is in stars, and that's powered by the pressure of a huge amount of mass, which can never be recreated on Earth. There has never been a goal-oriented technology project that has lasted this long, spent this much treasure, and produced so few results. Even brilliant people can engage in wishful thinking.

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Imagine a single thermonuclear explosion: one big enough to destroy a large city. The bomb doesn't weigh that much compared to the amount of energy released. A gigantic amount of energy comes from a small amount of mass. The c2 in Einstein's formula is the speed of light squared; it's a really huge number.

As for the wisdom of the NIF as public policy, that's something on which reasonable people can (and do) disagree. I'd only point out that the first government to master the goal of break-even fusion (getting more energy out of the reaction than is put in to trigger the reaction) will gain a _ridiculous_ economic advantage over the rest of the world, to say nothing of the non-economic benefits of energy independence. It's the kind of big bet that rich nations can (and in my opinion should) take.

Would their advantage really be all that big? Modern nuclear fission reactors can produce tons of energy and you can reprocess the fuel, providing what seems to me like energy independence available today.

That is a decent rational, except that whichever rich nation makes the breakthrough (assuming it occurs) will not have a monopoly on the technology (unless it involves mining He-3 from the moon), in which case the rich nation that invested in lunar mining technology will have quite a jump.

It's pretty hard to keep big engineering secrets. As soon as the feasibility is proven, the fast followers will jump on the bandwagon.

"There has never been a goal-oriented technology project that has lasted this long, spent this much treasure, and produced so few results."

The aggregate human quest for eternal youth and/or immortality?

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