Some real fusion news: Breakeven achieved!

[K^2]

That sounds like the best cover too a major breakthrough ever.

The info that got released has been thoroughly peer-reviewed.

Science/Technology are few of these fields where you can't hide what you are doing if any information about it is out there. Sometimes, you can hide critical details of how, but even that's temporary. Figuring out some new cool thing out of nearly infinite possibilities is tough. But once you know that something is possible, figuring out the mechanism is easy. The actual science that goes into practical tech is all 50+ years old. Anyone who studies the field would know the applicable basics.

Classifying research can still buy you vital time to get proper leverage out of new tech, but the moment the very existence of this new tech becomes common knowledge, it's just a matter of time before everyone else catches up. Just look at the Cold War era arms race.

With Hafnium, things are pretty clear. It presents no immediate military or economic value because it's extremely expensive to charge it. But the research on how to trigger release is solid, so we basically know how to do that now. In principle, this can lead to a whole new era of incredible technology. I mean, you can build a minivan-sized shuttle to carry crews to and from ISS with all the existing tech using Hafnium batteries for power. We are actually at a stage where we can say that with enough money thrown at it - we can do it. But right now, it is way cheaper to keep building huge towers of kerosene and lighting them up to achieve the same goal. So that's what we'll keep doing until somebody figures out how to excite 178 to the m2 state for at least 1,000 times less than it costs now.

But I do think we'll get there. I'm hoping that somebody figures out how to kill two birds with one stone. Finds a way to use fusion to charge Hafnium directly, leading us to a whole new age of portable power. And, of course, the holly grail of all battery research. Cellphone battery that you wouldn't have to even think about for months at a time.

[Nuke]

id hate to see the military shoehorn in another moratorium on papers covering polywell research. that probibly held things up by about a decade.

[Bacterius]

I don't doubt that it will happen eventually. Historically there have always been naysayers around to claim that such and such technology would never work or that it would not be feasible for several centuries or millenia. And history has taught us that these claims are usually misguided. Things are only impossible until they're not, and science is moving rather quickly today compared to the old ages. And even the so-called laws of physics, while arguably a lot more concrete and unyielding today than they were in the past, though they put limits on what can be done, have often been circumvented or cleverly worked around to meet some kind of goal. There are two kinds of people, those who pick up failed experiments and persevere to make them work, and those who say "it's impossible" and just give up.

The moral of the story, I put very little stock in claims that "it will never happen", and am really looking forward to what scientists will come up with in the next couple of decades to make this technology feasible

[comicbstudeo]

break even is nice but could be better