As a nuclear fusion ignorant, where is the small print here? What's the catch, drawback, issue that it will make actually nonviable ?
Edit: Fusion makes ~ 10^15 neutrons for every watt-hour of energy released (for the easiest kind of fusion)
- "With a huge research budget, we found a nifty new way to reliably set a few tiny lumps of coal on fire in our lab."
and
- "We can reliably build useful and practical locomotives, ships, and electrical generating plants which are powered by burning coal...and are long-term economically viable in a world which has several other ways of powering locomotives, ships, and electrical generating plants."
Except that with coal, making a far bigger fire is incredibly easy. With fusion, all the $Billions in the world don't seem capable of making even a modestly bigger...
But neither has fusion power shown anything even remotely resembling the real-world promise of fission power - which went from the first major attempt at a proof-of-concept reactor (Chicago Pile-1, Dec. 1942, ~1/2 watt thermal power output) to powering a large, high-performance warship (USS Nautilus, Jan. 1955, ~10MW on the propeller shafts) in just 12 years.
https://www.mpg.de/18250857/jet-fusion-facility-new-world-en...
The plasma was stable and they could have gone longer except instead of superconductors, JET uses copper coils that would melt if they went longer.
Their input energy was about three times their total output. But fusion output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength, and modern REBCO superconductors can support much stronger fields than JET was using.
Meanwhile, a set of 5 30-year-old diesel-electric railroad locomotives can reliably put out ~10MW of usable electrical power (vs. thermal production). Vastly cheaper, with a proven track record and 100% duty cycle. (Generously figuring 3 running, 1 standby, 1 down for maintenance.)
( Wikipedia reference on JET: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#1990s )
After 1997, the only way to scale up was reactor size, and that started with ITER, the 20-story-tall reactor in France. That soaked up a lot of fusion money, has been slow to build, and it's still not running. But more recently REBCO hit the market, and the same scaling laws say a reactor smaller than JET using those should get substantial energy gain. Two projects are building such reactors, and at least one will be ready around 2025.
(In any case, I wouldn't say five diesel locomotives are comparable to "burning a few tiny lumps of coal.")
The "bullet" is fast enough to compress the gas inside the cube, creating fusion.
It works. But in the scenario it does work, a machine is manually opened, loaded, prepared, and then they do the shot. Whole process takes days to prepare.
For it to be viable they need to do this every five seconds.
That is a hard problem to solve. First lights business model is not to solve that problem, but rather producing the "fuel", the tiny cubes with gas inside.
They say there is many details in how they are built which increases efficiency.
But someone still has to figure out how to build a machine that can continuously reload both the fuel and the bullet.
Conceptually, maybe nothing, but we aren't really talking about your average MG-42 here.
Something like ... the difference between folding a paper airplane and designing and building an airliner.