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/
The organization I am most excited about is https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/
I don’t see why fusion research couldn’t be analogous.
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.
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.htm...
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.
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.
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.
This containerized fusion concept is planned to have the capacity for one unit to power a small city or a naval ship, many megawatts.
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.
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.
If just one of them had a startup bone in his body, we would see a small fusion reactor startup making consistent progress that seems amazing. It's not happening.
It's a situation that is apparently very difficult to understand for many people. You work on a classified program and you understand the situation. Nobody goes off and decides to turn their classified knowledge into a business.
I get the value of the myth, people instinctively acheive what they believe is doable. It's just a myth though.
And until a working fusion reactor is build, it is indeed a fundamental physics problem, with all the energy involved, which is not at all completely understood since we are in quantum mechanic level down there.