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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

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.htm...

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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.

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.

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.

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