Hacker News Reader

Comment by _justinfunk | Hacker News Reader

My perspective on why this is so contentious is because two things are true: 1) This is one more step on a long road to viable fusion power plants. Every step is important and we've been taking steps like this for a long time and will continue for a long time. 2) This step is being cheer-leaded as the step in order to score political points. Since #2 is happening, it is preventing reasonable celebration about #1.

just my persepective.

View on HN

Except that #1 is basically wrong. The way I read this is, fusion power is STILL 30-50 years away, but at least the well-paid LLNL nerds got NIF to work, a decade late. It was a decade of defeating plasma instabilities with target redesign. What I am somewhat dismayed about is I question whether this tweaking is applicable, in any way, to a practical method of fusion power generation. The results, I believe, are still highly chaotic, with duds intermixed with terrific shots, indicating only partial success in taming the instabilities that lead to the fizzles. But the only way inertial confinement fusion has any real applicability to power generation is if there is another order of magnitude of yield hiding behind the taming of those instabilities.

Don't forget the context where the NIF is foremost a nuclear weapons research facility (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc793622/) so them cheerleading a small step which is very significant for the nuclear weapons research as a purely civilian achievement is extra grating.

If we can learn everything we need to know about nuclear explosions using something that approximates them without having to actually detonate them then this is still a good thing. Nuclear weapons are terrible but advancing the study of nuclear explosions may have many unforeseen uses that we would be worse off without.

> Nuclear weapons are terrible

You hold this view but also that actively performing research and development to support their future use is a price worth paying for maybe getting some unexpected benefit?

How dear a price on the means you willing to pay for an entirely hypothetical end?

If humanity is ever going to advance beyond grubbing around on the surface of this planet then we are going to have to continue to create and master extremely dangerous things. Nuclear energy is one of those, both fission and fusion. If it's possible, we should also find a way to control gravity. The weapons applications of such a technology would be far beyond anything we are capable of doing with a nuclear bomb. Does this mean we should ban all research into gravity? Even something as innocuous as orbital mechanics can create a weapon much more powerful than a nuclear bomb. Get a small rocket engine and enough fuel out to a big enough asteroid and you could obliterate an entire continent and nearly all life on earth. Should we ban space travel and exploration?

Ok, so for space you'd pay any price.

Switching context but the same structure of question: how much dragnet surveillance do you support on the possibility of maybe averting some crime?

They said a lot about the national security (including weapons research) aspect of this during the announcement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com