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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

The US military is very much interested in fusion, as an energy source.

The Desert Storm conflict cost something like $1T (yes a Trillion dollars) just for gasoline.

There was on this site a description of a military effort to create a low-yield fusion generator that would fit on a military truck. It only had to fuel a mobile camp, not a city. If I recall, it was something like the Lockheed plan, to create a vortex (not a torus) to stuff the fuel through a constriction and get some kind of fusion yield. Wasteful, but not as wasteful as $1T

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That seems wildly high? The figure widely quoted for the total cost of the Gulf War is $60B in 1991 dollars, or $137B today, so clearly the gasoline costs alone can't exceed that number. It's only the extremely prolonged conflicts like the War in Afghanistan that get into the trillions of dollars total.

$1T would be too high for Iraq War where the costs run $1T to $3T. The higher numbers are total long-term costs, not just the war fighting. There are lots of costs to war instead of just fuel; the people cost more.

Yeah way too high.

Here's an estimate of the costs of air conditioning tents in the mideast conflicts: https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-...

Setting aside the wildly suspect 1T claim, I’m not convinced by the argument. Fusion power plants are fixed large-scale facilities. In a war zone you need mobile power sources. I could see a fusion reactor powering a ship and maybe powering temporarily shore-based facilities. AFAIK the military is looking at solar for mobile power in forward deployments though which makes sense. Unless the argument is that fusion is used to generate transportable fuel (hydrogen, efuels etc). But then that argument is weird because the military would be doing that with fission today which actually exists and it has to expensive field experience with and supply chains supporting.

> Fusion power plants are fixed large-scale facilities.

Large scale facilities really are not all that interesting. They concentrate cost, danger and impose lots of logistical limitations.

Consider the Lockheed Skunk Works project - it's supposed to be portable.

I've read that the US military has looked into small fission generators. They expect logistics to be very difficult near the front if there is a war with a 'near-peer' (China or maybe Russia) and hope to reduce fuel logistics.

I've never heard of them looking into similar fusion reactors. Why would they? Nobody expects to build any kind of production fusion reactor for decades, much less one that could be operated by infantry soldiers and in very difficult conditions - e.g., explosions and people shooting at the reactor.

American military would love to squeeze nuclear reactor on every single ship. The conventional escort ships are much slower than aircraft carriers and need constant refueling, to the point they sometimes leave them behind and sail meet another fleet in destination port. It's not really feasible with fission but fusion would make it a lot safer.

So they should be researching LFTR like they did for the nuclear bomber.

> a low-yield fusion generator that would fit on a military truck.

another word for that is "drone target."

Everything in war is a target

True, but a small target that disables all the electronics on the base would have to be considered "high value."

Like, say, the generator they use now.

No, not like that.

Generators are cheap and replaceable, and they can keep spares in the depot.

A fusion reactor sounds like big bucks to me.

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