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Cake day: January 12th, 2025

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  • It can be done and has been researched. See Project Plowshare.

    People who say we can’t build fusion reactors are only partially correct. (And no, I do not mean that we can build tokamaks that are net energy negative.) We can build energy-positive fusion reactors, and we’ve known how to do so since the 1950s.

    The idea was that you would build an enormous underground chamber. Then fill it with salt. Then detonate a small hydrogen bomb inside the chamber, instantly boiling the salt. You then run the salt through turbines to generate electricity. You power a city by setting off a nuke every one and awhile.

    The results of this work were that yes, it seems possible to build a power plant that runs off of hydrogen bombs. We do in fact know how to build a fusion reactor today. The problem? Simple economics. This method just isn’t cost-competitive with traditional electricity sources.

    This should serve as a cautionary tale for those hopeful for the future of fusion or advanced fission concepts. It doesn’t matter if you manage to build a tokamak that returns net energy. Ultimately it’s just a cool science experiment. What DOES matter is if you can do it cheaply. And this is actually why I’m skeptical of fusion as a power source. Even if we do ever manage to make non-bomb fusion plants produce net energy, they would struggle to be cost competitive with renewables+batteries.