It is an important milestone. But to have a commercially viable fusion reactor, you'll need a factor of 50-100 more energy out than in to make up for inefficiencies in electricity generation using this kind of scheme.
The real story here is that this facility allows the US to do nuclear weapons research without violating the nuclear test ban treaty. If the goal was to develop a commercially viable fusion reactor, the $3,500,000,000 spent so far could have been put into projects geared towards small scale fusion experiments investigating novel confinement schemes.
Finally someone that's actually in the fusion field. Could you say whether or not the NIF research represents a practical path towards a fusion based power source? My understanding is that it would at least be capable of capturing some much needed high pressure empirical data necessary for validating theory.
On a side note concerning the NIF funding, the US gov will spend huge sums of money studying Nuclear weapons (including their disposal) regardless of the NIF project. If it is at all possible to combine that research with other fields then really it's a perk. I'm not justifying the expenditure, simply attempting to frame the situation in a different light.
Finally, as a fellow scientist with funding woes, I feel your pain.
This is definitely true, and the BBC totally omitted these facts. The official NIF announcement[1] tried a little bit to cover their tracks. They posted some flashy numbers about the total energy output from neutrons, but nestled in the bottom of the page is the total energy dumped into the entire system:
1.7 megajoules.
In comparison, the fusion power produced was a paltry 8 kilojoules, which they compare to the "energy required to form the plasma".
For this technology to be actually effective, there needs to be a multiplier of several thousand. As other commenters have mentioned, this is mostly just nuclear weapons development.
"50-100 more energy out than in to make up for inefficiencies in electricity generation using this kind of scheme."
Completely true. Theoretically, the NIF target has enough fuel to produce 10-20x the amount of laser energy driving it. Once things work, it isn't a huge step to get to an energy gain (energy_out/energy_in) of ~50. That said, the real world is always more complicated and NIF has yet to ignite.
I wonder, what more do they need in nuclear weapons? Smaller size? Harder detection? Bigger contamination radius?
Somehow, I am sure, if people start a nuclear war, even the WWII's initial nuclear weaponry will be enough to destroy ourselves, knowing how many countries can now chime in with their own.
"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a mission of strengthening the United States’ security through development and application of world-class science and technology to:
Enhance the nation’s defense;
Reduce the global threat from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction;
And respond with vision, quality, integrity and technical excellence to scientific issues of national importance."
A good place to start if you want to understand the purported rationale for the NIF (stockpile stewardship), I suggest reading and understanding this light introduction to modern nuclear weapons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
(the rhodes books, Making of the Atomic Bomb is required background reading, as is Dark Sun, if you want to get into the backstore).
In particular:
The NIH experiment recapitulates many of the design aspects of a thermonuclear weapon, but does so in a highly controlled lab environment.
I'm a biophysicist. I know a fair amount of engineering, although I'm not a weapons physicist. Nonetheless, after years of reading about the NIF and various fusion projects I've come to believe that there is little justification for their expenditure. In particular, we can do stockpile stewardship without this device, more cheaply, nor does NIF present an economically viable method to production of power at a large scale in even the most rosy predictions.
I still think the experimental design is cool, but I can't see this as a rational expenditure (HUGE opex and capex) compared to other investments we could be making.
Most likely scenario I see in 20 years is that china will be mass-manufacturing small, safe fission reactors and making a mint selling them to the rest of the world. That's got far less reqiurement for massive capex and opex. It's just that the western nations decided to go stupid about fission because OH GOD NUCLEAR MUTATIONS and stop investing in building more reliable, safer, and smaller plants.
The NIF is probably more useful for coming up with new fusion bomb designs than for stockpile stewardship, as you say, but what makes you say hot fusion can never be economically viable? The sun is proof that nature can do this on a grand scale! It may be a long ways off, but "a long ways" becomes "never" without experimental work like the NIF. Yes, the U.S. is probably doing this primarily to create new weapons just as the space race was really about developing ICBM's. However, the fundamental science being done has huge long-term potential. It's a sad, but true fact that, sometimes, scientists have to use the megalomania of states to fuel research that has the potential to benefit all of humanity.
Fission power is a separate matter. The single most important thing that most people still do not understand is that power grids have almost zero capacity for storing energy. That means most alternative energy sources, such as wind or solar, can never exceed a certain percentage of the grid's production capacity or it will become unstable. On-demand energy generation is still needed, and there's absolutely no reason to fear nuclear power while we're still using coal power, which is far more deadly in every sense! It's not just the West that has this fear either. Look at Japan's recent nuclear shut-down[1] (from 30% of their grid to 0%, replaced with fossil fuels), and tell me that isn't going to influence China!
> It's just that the western nations decided to go stupid about fission
I have many highly intelligent friends who subscribe to your view. Unfortunately they forget that fission is only as safe as the weakest link, and the consequences of failure are severe, especially when near a water source.
My fave quote from the article: "None of our instruments could measure it - it was way off scale. We cleaned up everything and we still couldn't get the dose down."
You called out the need for more reliable, safer, and smaller plants. I would argue that there needs to be a significant improvement before fission is publicly acceptable.
Thought experiment... begin the experiment with the assumption that the "system" can produce and sustain 2000 brains capable of safely operating a nuke plant. You can build 1000 slightly less safe but bigger plants, or 10000 smaller slightly safer small plants, but you've still only got 2000 usable nuke level brains to staff them. Either half the big brains are going to be unemployed, or 80% of the only very slightly safer plants are going to be run by morons. Don't amuse me with deus ex machina about automation; I'll counter by changing my thought experiment to only 2000 nuke-capable sysadmins are available or whatever.
I think you're unfairly dismissing magnetic confinment, the limited supply of fissionable material, and the unprecedented issues that accompany the management of dangerous material (or anything for that matter) for 10,000 years.
Fusion research is worthwhile. Of course it's not the only path to sustainable energy, but it's one of the most promising.
This is awesome news - I visited the NIF a few months ago and they seemed a little downtrodden when asked about results.
I bet they're all cocky now!
They also told us that the lasers they use, if built with modern tech today, would actually only be the size of a 40' cargo container (as opposed to like 100K sq-ft building), and cost like 1000x less. Pretty epic...
If we invested in fusion power like we did water power less than a century ago, I can only imagine the possibilities...
This is so cool. I almost can't believe that such incremental tech development would be applicable to fusion research. But there you have it. Now we just have to throw a few more billions at the problem. If the costs really have come down this dramatically, it is very promising indeed.
Too bad shovel ready money wasn't spent on more long lasting impact projects like this. Where has all that money gone from the drawn down of the wars? Where is the investments going in alternative energy?
Well that last is easy, groups who contribute politically, hence solar and wind. They receive far too much in ways of support whereas hard science projects like this with incredible payoffs are pushed off because they don't payback in political contributions.
There are a myriad of ways to finance such an ambitious project through clean energy taxes but unfortunately they suffer the changing whims and needs of politicians. Yeah certain industries would go by the way side with this type of power available but many of them have big money invested in energy creation and distribution many would simply shift some columns in their spreadsheets and still balance out.
Considering the deficits the US runs, just in a day or two of deficit spending is more than what this facility budgets for this research.
> Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission.
That was so disappointing to read. Don't we have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet 10x over already? Why would that still be the focus instead of inventing new sources of virtually unlimited energy??
Producing net-energy is a different story than collecting net-energy. NIF just blows up a canister with a pellet and takes forever to reload a shot. On the other hand, an at-least-as-promising technology like Dense Plasma Focus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus) is still receiving minuscule funding. I'm hoping to be able to meaningfully support DPF and other fusion technologies soon. DPF has my attention so far because of its scaling characteristics.
What does producing energy mean if not collecting it? The conservation of Energy tells us that we are not actually producing any energy, rather we are converting energy from the mass of the reactants (hopefully into electricity). If you consider the energy converted from mass to be produced, then it is impossible to do nuclear fusion without producing net-energy (as long as you stay on this side of lead).
8 kJ out from 1.7 MJ (1700 kJ) in. At the end of the month they were able to get 14 kJ. I believe they are referring to the energy released within the hohlraum.
Also, if you are interested there are privately funded companies doing this, General Fusion (http://www.generalfusion.com/) and TriAlpha Energy (secretive and funded by the Russian govt., but in California). The VC fund I work for has invested in GF and obviously we think there is promise :)
I remember this being announced a while back, but I didn't understand why it was significant if the energy in was less than the energy out. This article helps to clear it up.
The missing piece was that I didn't understand how this reactor works. I thought they just blasted a lot of lasers directly at the hydrogen isotopes. Instead, it seems like that use the lasers to shoot something else, which then creates a lot of x-rays which actually start the reaction.
The significant thing here is that the energy produced is greater than the amount of energy coming in from the X-rays, but not the lasers which power those X-rays.
Is that correct? (Not surprisingly, I'm not a physicist!)
Lasers gets fired at the inner surface of a cylinder (called a hohlraum). The laser heat the surface of the hohlraum which then emits x-rays. The x-rays then deposit energy on the surface of a spherical capsule (this is the "energy absorbed" number).
You start with ~2,000 kJ of laser energy, but some of that gets "backscattered" and never makes it into the hohlraum. Other energy is spent heating the walls of the cylinder. Additionally, some of the x-rays leak out of the hohlraum and do not drive the capsule implosion. After all these losses are taken into account, only about 15 kJ is absorbed in the capsule.
Not really well-informed enough to comment on details, but it's fantastic to see the field is still moving, even if slowly. Proud that we are still funding this kind of research.
"Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission."
tl;dr - Another article about the US nuclear weapons research facility at Lawrence Livermore, AKA NIF, and its sideshow 57th priority.
On a related note. It's been really sad to see the US slowly lose its edge in plasma based fusion tech, specifically tokamaks, which seem to be the only credible long-term method of sustaining a fusion reaction for power-plant purposes.
Just a couple quibbles from a former NIF scientist.
NIF is much higher on the priority list than that. LLNL is already in the doghouse due to NIF failing to ignite on schedule. As goes the 5 giga-buck NIF, so goes LLNL (and the management knows it).
Technologically, I'd put inertial and magnetic fusion about the same place. Even if the physics works, neither has a chamber first wall material that can stand up to the huge neutron loads that a power plant will create. Economically, both are hosed. Fusion wants to be big. Most reactor designs are for >1,000 MW. Electric companies are mostly interested in plants in the 50-400 MW range.
On the article itself: why did it take 6 paragraphs of text to finally mention what the milestone was? I hate this style of article writing, and it's usually a good bullshit-signal for any story. That's a shame, because it looks like this is the Real Thing (in a small way).
Great, but I don't see how these extremely expensive nuclear fusion projects will ever beat price/kW of coal without heavy subsidies. My bet is that dense plasma focus is the future of cheap, clean power. Only time will tell though.
Coal isn't cheap, it just has the desirable property that more than half its costs can be easily externalized rather than being paid by the people who use the power.
Much of the cost of these projects likely results from the research nature of them. Once we get a viable model, we will likely be able to produce a cheaper plant because 1) we know what we are doing, and 2) now that we know it works, we can build it bigger.
"the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel" means it is at least 4 orders of magnitude away from being useful.
Since we still depends on nuclear power for decades to come, it is much cost effective to invest safer and cleaner nuclear fission reactors. The kind of fast reactor that can burn down nuclear waste so we don't need to build nuclear waste storage system, which nobody knows how to build anyway. That would give us power supply for several centuries (along with renewable energy). Too many countries wasted too much money on fusion reactors for decades, while we are still running nuclear reactors designed/built more than 30 years ago. Just wrong priority order.
What would be the impact of a 'fusion economy', assuming realistic evolution of the technology for the purposes of commercialisation? (i.e. I'm assuming "Mr Fusion" powerplants on top of one's DeLorean aren't ever going to be practically feasible).
What would such a world look like? Does it promote world peace; through greater energy security for nations, would less reliance on fossil fuels for baseload electricity generation have a significant impact on price of air travel/sea cargo?
Fusion changes everything. Cheaper electricity makes transporting materials basically free. And projects like desalination become possible = no one remotely close to an ocean ever lacks clean drinking water again.
it is unlikely that fusion energy will be cheaper than current tech. however, it does not emit CO2, is not a proliferation risk, and cannot have a nuclear meltdown.
> the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel
So what? What if the fueld didn't absorb anything? What do they mean by "absorb", anyway? This article is lacking in details, peer-reviewed literature, or even the names of scientists willing to stake their reputation on this claim.
If reliable fusion technology were developed, would the government share it with the public or would it be kept hidden away?
Sadly I'm not joking. I think there's a 50-50 chance that any cool science that gets development by the U.S. government just becomes a classified DoD missile project.
The development of fission technology seems like a fine case to consider. I doubt we are more paranoid and militaristic now than we were during the height of the cold war. Maybe we are, but I really don't see it.
Glad to hear that this is continuing at LLNL despite the shutdown. Too bad no politician is going to use this as an example of why gov't investment is not a bad thing.
[+] [-] sam|12 years ago|reply
The real story here is that this facility allows the US to do nuclear weapons research without violating the nuclear test ban treaty. If the goal was to develop a commercially viable fusion reactor, the $3,500,000,000 spent so far could have been put into projects geared towards small scale fusion experiments investigating novel confinement schemes.
Like the one I was working on, http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DPP07/Event/71002 whose funding has since been cut and has been mothballed.
[+] [-] acadien|12 years ago|reply
On a side note concerning the NIF funding, the US gov will spend huge sums of money studying Nuclear weapons (including their disposal) regardless of the NIF project. If it is at all possible to combine that research with other fields then really it's a perk. I'm not justifying the expenditure, simply attempting to frame the situation in a different light.
Finally, as a fellow scientist with funding woes, I feel your pain.
[+] [-] cyanoacry|12 years ago|reply
1.7 megajoules.
In comparison, the fusion power produced was a paltry 8 kilojoules, which they compare to the "energy required to form the plasma".
For this technology to be actually effective, there needs to be a multiplier of several thousand. As other commenters have mentioned, this is mostly just nuclear weapons development.
[1] http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/politics_and_polic...
[+] [-] mrterry|12 years ago|reply
Completely true. Theoretically, the NIF target has enough fuel to produce 10-20x the amount of laser energy driving it. Once things work, it isn't a huge step to get to an energy gain (energy_out/energy_in) of ~50. That said, the real world is always more complicated and NIF has yet to ignite.
[+] [-] pjlegato|12 years ago|reply
I'm sorry your project was defunded, but that in itself is not evidence that the facility is actually a sham.
[+] [-] TylerE|12 years ago|reply
E.g. 1MW basic plant that drives a 1.5MW plant that drives a 2.25MW -> 4 -> 6 -> 9 etc, however many stages you need.
[+] [-] tsenkov|12 years ago|reply
Somehow, I am sure, if people start a nuclear war, even the WWII's initial nuclear weaponry will be enough to destroy ourselves, knowing how many countries can now chime in with their own.
[+] [-] viraj_shah|12 years ago|reply
Enhance the nation’s defense; Reduce the global threat from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction; And respond with vision, quality, integrity and technical excellence to scientific issues of national importance."
https://www.llnl.gov/about/whatwedo.html
[+] [-] MichaelMoser123|12 years ago|reply
Now wikipedia says that imploding bubbles create some high energies;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_sonoluminescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion
Maybe if you shoot up Deuterium bubbles in compressed water and push in some ultrasound waves ....
[+] [-] volokoumphetico|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dekhn|12 years ago|reply
In particular: The NIH experiment recapitulates many of the design aspects of a thermonuclear weapon, but does so in a highly controlled lab environment.
I'm a biophysicist. I know a fair amount of engineering, although I'm not a weapons physicist. Nonetheless, after years of reading about the NIF and various fusion projects I've come to believe that there is little justification for their expenditure. In particular, we can do stockpile stewardship without this device, more cheaply, nor does NIF present an economically viable method to production of power at a large scale in even the most rosy predictions.
I still think the experimental design is cool, but I can't see this as a rational expenditure (HUGE opex and capex) compared to other investments we could be making.
Most likely scenario I see in 20 years is that china will be mass-manufacturing small, safe fission reactors and making a mint selling them to the rest of the world. That's got far less reqiurement for massive capex and opex. It's just that the western nations decided to go stupid about fission because OH GOD NUCLEAR MUTATIONS and stop investing in building more reliable, safer, and smaller plants.
[+] [-] beloch|12 years ago|reply
Fission power is a separate matter. The single most important thing that most people still do not understand is that power grids have almost zero capacity for storing energy. That means most alternative energy sources, such as wind or solar, can never exceed a certain percentage of the grid's production capacity or it will become unstable. On-demand energy generation is still needed, and there's absolutely no reason to fear nuclear power while we're still using coal power, which is far more deadly in every sense! It's not just the West that has this fear either. Look at Japan's recent nuclear shut-down[1] (from 30% of their grid to 0%, replaced with fossil fuels), and tell me that isn't going to influence China!
[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/14/us-japan-nuclear-s...
[+] [-] nikatwork|12 years ago|reply
I have many highly intelligent friends who subscribe to your view. Unfortunately they forget that fission is only as safe as the weakest link, and the consequences of failure are severe, especially when near a water source.
I'm not talking about crumbling old soviet-era reactors or even older Japanese ones. Witness Australia's only nuclear facility: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/01/2914548.htm?si...
My fave quote from the article: "None of our instruments could measure it - it was way off scale. We cleaned up everything and we still couldn't get the dose down."
You called out the need for more reliable, safer, and smaller plants. I would argue that there needs to be a significant improvement before fission is publicly acceptable.
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
Thought experiment... begin the experiment with the assumption that the "system" can produce and sustain 2000 brains capable of safely operating a nuke plant. You can build 1000 slightly less safe but bigger plants, or 10000 smaller slightly safer small plants, but you've still only got 2000 usable nuke level brains to staff them. Either half the big brains are going to be unemployed, or 80% of the only very slightly safer plants are going to be run by morons. Don't amuse me with deus ex machina about automation; I'll counter by changing my thought experiment to only 2000 nuke-capable sysadmins are available or whatever.
[+] [-] drjesusphd|12 years ago|reply
Fusion research is worthwhile. Of course it's not the only path to sustainable energy, but it's one of the most promising.
[+] [-] nickpinkston|12 years ago|reply
I bet they're all cocky now!
They also told us that the lasers they use, if built with modern tech today, would actually only be the size of a 40' cargo container (as opposed to like 100K sq-ft building), and cost like 1000x less. Pretty epic...
If we invested in fusion power like we did water power less than a century ago, I can only imagine the possibilities...
[+] [-] marvin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drjesusphd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jormundir|12 years ago|reply
Make fusion, not war.
[+] [-] angersock|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|12 years ago|reply
Well that last is easy, groups who contribute politically, hence solar and wind. They receive far too much in ways of support whereas hard science projects like this with incredible payoffs are pushed off because they don't payback in political contributions.
There are a myriad of ways to finance such an ambitious project through clean energy taxes but unfortunately they suffer the changing whims and needs of politicians. Yeah certain industries would go by the way side with this type of power available but many of them have big money invested in energy creation and distribution many would simply shift some columns in their spreadsheets and still balance out.
Considering the deficits the US runs, just in a day or two of deficit spending is more than what this facility budgets for this research.
[+] [-] Raticide|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devx|12 years ago|reply
That was so disappointing to read. Don't we have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet 10x over already? Why would that still be the focus instead of inventing new sources of virtually unlimited energy??
[+] [-] knappador|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DennisP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gizmo686|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtap|12 years ago|reply
Direct from the source http://1.usa.gov/1e4Na9Q.
8 kJ out from 1.7 MJ (1700 kJ) in. At the end of the month they were able to get 14 kJ. I believe they are referring to the energy released within the hohlraum.
Also, if you are interested there are privately funded companies doing this, General Fusion (http://www.generalfusion.com/) and TriAlpha Energy (secretive and funded by the Russian govt., but in California). The VC fund I work for has invested in GF and obviously we think there is promise :)
[+] [-] Mizza|12 years ago|reply
I remember this being announced a while back, but I didn't understand why it was significant if the energy in was less than the energy out. This article helps to clear it up.
The missing piece was that I didn't understand how this reactor works. I thought they just blasted a lot of lasers directly at the hydrogen isotopes. Instead, it seems like that use the lasers to shoot something else, which then creates a lot of x-rays which actually start the reaction.
The significant thing here is that the energy produced is greater than the amount of energy coming in from the X-rays, but not the lasers which power those X-rays.
Is that correct? (Not surprisingly, I'm not a physicist!)
[+] [-] mrterry|12 years ago|reply
You start with ~2,000 kJ of laser energy, but some of that gets "backscattered" and never makes it into the hohlraum. Other energy is spent heating the walls of the cylinder. Additionally, some of the x-rays leak out of the hohlraum and do not drive the capsule implosion. After all these losses are taken into account, only about 15 kJ is absorbed in the capsule.
[+] [-] breckinloggins|12 years ago|reply
Is there anything new this round? Perhaps some new results from post-experiment data analysis? The article isn't really clear on this point.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rozap|12 years ago|reply
"Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission."
Admittedly that is phrased in an odd way...
[+] [-] guimarin|12 years ago|reply
On a related note. It's been really sad to see the US slowly lose its edge in plasma based fusion tech, specifically tokamaks, which seem to be the only credible long-term method of sustaining a fusion reaction for power-plant purposes.
[+] [-] mrterry|12 years ago|reply
NIF is much higher on the priority list than that. LLNL is already in the doghouse due to NIF failing to ignite on schedule. As goes the 5 giga-buck NIF, so goes LLNL (and the management knows it).
Technologically, I'd put inertial and magnetic fusion about the same place. Even if the physics works, neither has a chamber first wall material that can stand up to the huge neutron loads that a power plant will create. Economically, both are hosed. Fusion wants to be big. Most reactor designs are for >1,000 MW. Electric companies are mostly interested in plants in the 50-400 MW range.
[+] [-] pslam|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnator|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpedela|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
Coal isn't cheap, it just has the desirable property that more than half its costs can be easily externalized rather than being paid by the people who use the power.
[+] [-] germano|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gizmo686|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moca|12 years ago|reply
Since we still depends on nuclear power for decades to come, it is much cost effective to invest safer and cleaner nuclear fission reactors. The kind of fast reactor that can burn down nuclear waste so we don't need to build nuclear waste storage system, which nobody knows how to build anyway. That would give us power supply for several centuries (along with renewable energy). Too many countries wasted too much money on fusion reactors for decades, while we are still running nuclear reactors designed/built more than 30 years ago. Just wrong priority order.
[+] [-] jimmcslim|12 years ago|reply
What would such a world look like? Does it promote world peace; through greater energy security for nations, would less reliance on fossil fuels for baseload electricity generation have a significant impact on price of air travel/sea cargo?
[+] [-] dreadpiraterob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrterry|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drjesusphd|12 years ago|reply
So what? What if the fueld didn't absorb anything? What do they mean by "absorb", anyway? This article is lacking in details, peer-reviewed literature, or even the names of scientists willing to stake their reputation on this claim.
The BBC should know better.
[+] [-] manimalcruelty|12 years ago|reply
How does this stack up against the more conventionally theorised techniques?
[+] [-] unreal37|12 years ago|reply
Sadly I'm not joking. I think there's a 50-50 chance that any cool science that gets development by the U.S. government just becomes a classified DoD missile project.
[+] [-] jlgreco|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
Because just imagine how terrifying the world would become from a superpower that didn't have to fear the radiation aftermath.
Fusion research seems like just a complete cover up.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|12 years ago|reply