Power-Positive Fusion Power!

[MLai]

Quite frankly, I am not at all comforted by the difference between "used directly for killing" and "enabling killing."

I don't understand this sentiment, and now it's expressed by more than 1 person.

I mean, did you not know that we already have H-bombs for past 60 years? Granted it's more fission than fusion, but it's not as if H-bombs don't use fusion, or can't kill Earth any deader than 100%-fusion bombs can. The world's military doctrines have already moved on beyond MAD. That principle no longer works in today's conflicts; making a new bomb that also kills all the cockroaches instead of just all the humans offers no military or sociopolitical advantage.

Fusion as military technology is much more useful as power generation. Granted it would be for mega carriers (and jaegers) at first, but that will have direct passed-down applications for civilian sector.

[Mando Knight]

Fusion as military technology is much more useful as power generation. Granted it would be for mega carriers (and jaegers) at first, but that will have direct passed-down applications for civilian sector.

This is my point. Off the bat, fusion reactors will be immensely expensive. Yes, they'll be a major logistic boon when deployed, but unless they make the reactors dirt-cheap to produce, the things will fill exactly the same roles diesel and fission based power generators do, at a hopefully lower environmental impact, replacing the power plants for, say, CVN-81 (because while it'd be cool to have the Enterprise as the first fusion-powered ship, the timing is too tight since it's scheduled to launch in 2025).

[MLai]

This is my point. Off the bat, fusion reactors will be immensely expensive. Yes, they'll be a major logistic boon when deployed, but unless they make the reactors dirt-cheap to produce, the things will fill exactly the same roles diesel and fission based power generators do, at a hopefully lower environmental impact, replacing the power plants for, say, CVN-81 (because while it'd be cool to have the Enterprise as the first fusion-powered ship, the timing is too tight since it's scheduled to launch in 2025).

I'm not even sure about that ("immensely expensive"). Based on the tone of Lockheed Martin's press releases, I'm extremely hopeful.

Due to the disappointing/frustrating history with fusion research over the past decades, I had also developed the impression that fusion would be immensely expensive, or immensely difficult, or immensely epic an undertaking. Something that we can only achieve if we had first straightened out our societies, as only a ST-like utopia can dedicate the resources into making a fusion infrastructure practical.

But the news is saying stuff like "Can fit on a truck!" "5 years!" "We (a major US military contractor, not some physicist in Guatamala) are so confident about it we're letting you know right now!" It oozes a level of gee-whiz optimism and superscience gadgetry that we only got in retro-future sci-fi.

[Sith_Happens]

Off the bat, fusion reactors will be immensely expensive.

There's no way something the size of a truck could possibly be more expensive than a fission plant, and people still build those.

[Shadow of the Sun]

While if this is real, I'd prefer that it wasn't a military thing first, but big technologies tend to get military support and budget first, which tends to give it enough of a funding that they can get through some of the speedbumps.

There are plenty of technologies that were first used or intensively developed for the purposes of (making it easier to) kill people; modern rockets, computers, and nuclear power. It's a pattern that continues to be expressed. It's unfortunate, but I'd rather get clean fusion power rather than not get clean fusion power.

[Crow]

Don't forget that the US Military has rendered more humanitarian aid than most of the major humanitarian aid charities combined. The United States Navy (with their fission-powered vessels) are often the first on the scene when some major disaster strikes.

Please don't make the assumption that because they are going to be building this thing for the military first, that we won't see some great benefits for mankind as a result. I can think of dozens of instances where having a fusion reactor that could be carried on the back of truck would have been really, really helpful to the people we were trying to aid. Diesel generators just plain suck.

[aspi]

It's working pretty darn well for France.

You should read up on the Gerboise Bleue test site in Algeria and the town of Reggane. 30,000 people suffering from radiation sickness is not "pretty darn well".

It's not going to be used to blow up people. That's a horrendous exaggeration, and at any rate the US already has the means to use nuclear fusion to blow people up. It was developed 60 years ago.

I agree with you that what's being proposed here is a different kind of fusion and I don't see the military blowing anyone up with it either. I'm sure they can find a way eventually but that's not what Lockheed is proposing here.

However, you are making no distinction between "blowing people up with fusion" and "blowing people up with fusion and no risk of fallout", but these are two very different pairs of shoes. You can rest assured that the second is something the military would buy in a heartbeat and it would drastically lower the inhibition threshold for using it.

I don't understand this sentiment, and now it's expressed by more than 1 person.

Most of the armed conflicts in the world are due to resources and energy or the result of poverty and low quality of living. Something like (almost) free energy could do a lot to reduce this potential for conflict in the long term if we were available to the public. By making it a priority to obtain it for military use you are at best fighting the symptom, not the cause. Giving such a technology to our western military apparatus will increase and sustain our chances of coming out ahead in such conflict. Working on developing it as a civilian resource will decrease the overall conflict potential and as a result the need for the military to even have it (even if we were to only use it for ourselves at first since we'd lessen our dependence on oil and could keep a bit more distance to certain parts of the world that don't want us around). And it would significantly improve our quality of life in the first world as well - think of how much the world-wide demand of anything that uses electricity would rise.

If the choice is between giving such a technology to an institution whose primary goal it is to keep a status quo or destroy things (i.e. the military) or someone who is interested in building things (i.e. the industry), I know which one I would favor for a benefitial long term effect. I also doubt that the capital that is available for worldwide civilian use is smaller than the US military budget, so I don't agree with the argument that developing it for military use first is a smart business decision.

Don't forget that the US Military has rendered more humanitarian aid than most of the major humanitarian aid charities combined. The United States Navy (with their fission-powered vessels) are often the first on the scene when some major disaster strikes.

I fail to see how giving military aid to someone is preferable to just selling them the technology in the first place.

[Sith_Happens]

You should read up on the Gerboise Bleue test site in Algeria and the town of Reggane. 30,000 people suffering from radiation sickness is not "pretty darn well".

You left out the "for France."

[Jay R]

I'm not even sure about that ("immensely expensive"). Based on the tone of Lockheed Martin's press releases, I'm extremely hopeful.

All press releases for hypothetical new products have pretty much the same tone, so you can't deduce anything from that.

[ace rooster]

This does look cool, but I have to say I am sceptical. It looks like they are using a fairly conventional magnetic mirror type configueration, only more powerfully than it has been done before. This doesn't really get around the problems that are inherent in the design, and using super conducting magnets opens the door to a whole heap more. Making superconductors work well for long periods of time in high fast neutron flux is not something that we have been able to do much work on, as currently the only places such neutron flux exists is in H bombs. Not saying that it is impossible, but no guarentees.

When people start talking about DT fusion as a proliferation risk I will start to pay attention. DT fusion reactions can be used as a powerful source of neutrons, while still breeding enough tritium to be sustainable. Having a neutron source like that makes transmuting uranium 238 into plutonium fairly easy, sidestepping the need for isotope enrichment, which is currently the major obstacle to building weapons. Currently nobody takes this seriously because fusion is still a bit pie in the sky. If they can make a reactor on that scale, then a bomb factory is not much bigger (and consequently easy to hide). This is something I think should be kept in mind, and I think will be talked about more if the experts start to think of fusion as imminently viable.

I think we will get boosted fission long before pure fusion becomes viable. If you don't need to worry about neutron economy then you can get a much higher fuel burn rate, requiring much less in the way of fuel processing at either end, and reactor efficiencies can be an order of magnitude lower. The down side to this is that it means we have to face the questions of security head on, and we can't just pretend that fusion is shiny happy power. This is effectively how an H bomb works anyway, so in many ways it is the only bit of fusion tech we know we can make work.

The reason it would end up in tanks first is not because of suitability, but because the US DOD is about the only entity that would be prepared to pay 10 million dollars for an engine. It would take more work to be viable on the free market.

[Nourjan]

Wonder if they can make it small enough to power, let's say a railgun/laser tank or even small power armour/mechs.

[BannedInSchool]

The reason it would end up in tanks first is not because of suitability, but because the US DOD is about the only entity that would be prepared to pay 10 million dollars for an engine. It would take more work to be viable on the free market.

They also just want it to work. They don't care about making a large profit on their investment, or even if it end product is profitable to operate.

Wonder if they can make it small enough to power, let's say a railgun/laser tank or even small power armour/mechs.

As the USN was funding the Polywell one that makes me think of railgun battleships.

[ace rooster]

Wonder if they can make it small enough to power, let's say a railgun/laser tank or even small power armour/mechs.

Quite possibly, but I for one will not be signing up to have a high energy neutron source strapped to my back. Not even to pretend I am a ghost buster.

Fusion powered laser tanks are certainly a possibility, and do make some sense. The limiting factor for their combat use actually becomes cooling them, and not making them look like christmas trees to infra red cameras. Their main draw is that they would require next to no support, being able to operate almost indefinately even when cut off. With good supply lines they don't have much advantage over ordinary tanks though.

[Mando Knight]

I'm not even sure about that ("immensely expensive").

Well, it depends on how expensive the electronics for the system are. It requires high-temp superconducting magnets to work, after all. And probably fairly high-grade steel. It's not like they're going to invent these things and then suddenly they can mass produce them cheaper than comparable gas turbine engines.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Well, that certainly spawned some lively debate. Let me clarify my statement and explain why my faith in humanity is not necessarily going to be restored.

First off, I believe there is zero moral difference between killing and enabling killing. As a result, it doesn't matter if there is an actual bomb or if it is powering the vehicle launching the weapons, the end result is the technology will first and foremost be used to build weapons of war, which become an order of magnitude more powerful.

The problem here isn't that it will further WMD or MAD scenarios, which it won't. Instead, it will provide the power for precision targeted weapons, which are FAR more likely to be deployed due to a lack of 'damns not given' as long as nothing glows in the dark. For example, one of the major limiting factors in a rail gun is the time it takes to spin up the capacitors to shoot the thing. This gives it an anemic rate of fire, but each shot is extremely powerful. Currently, rail guns are being tested for use in anti-missile doctrine, being able to shoot missiles (and aircraft) out of the air, spending a nickel-iron slug instead of an expensive counter-missile. And a boatload of energy. With a fusion reactor, this limitation largely vanishes. Now you can afford to power a semi-automatic or even fully automatic rail gun. It may not be a weapon of mass destruction, but it can be used to take out anything in the sky. In fact, it may well make ICBMs, even the hyper-velocity versions currently being researched by the USA and Russia, obsolete.

However, this also paves the way for airborne weapons platforms that are already in the design phase. You think having a battleship off the coast for raining down bombardment is a problem? How about a Warthog with a 105 rail gun that can stay up in the air for months at a time? How about the Ford-class Carriers being refitted with one of these, enabling them to mount anti-missile rail guns and MW lasers to be able to more effectively project a threat to opponents? This is the sort of thing that will be the first use for these reactors, before the civilian markets ever get a chance to start playing with them.

Nuclear explosions, as a weapon of warfare, are obsolete anyway. You can get the same payload with zero radiation from air fuel explosives. At a fraction of the cost. Honestly, the reason I'd love to see Molten Salt fission Reactors be employed is that it can use the weapons-grade radioactive materials, and use it to power humanity for the next century or two. Swords to plowshares kind of thing. It gets rid of the nuclear weapons so it isn't a tempting target for terrorists, makes it productive, and also produces some medically and commercially useful byproducts. And honestly, the ONLY reason I haven't been a supporter of getting rid of the nuclear armament is that it is at least more secure where it currently is, so unauthorized third parties are less likely to get their hands on them if they are still in weapons. We need some place for that nuclear material to be spent in a useful manner for us to consider getting rid of our nuclear arsenal.

But the bigger, more fundamental, and underlying problem isn't the fusion reactors. They're just the next iteration of the larger problem: the number one cause of death of humans is... other humans. Until we get the socio-economical problems solved, this will not magically fix the unrest in significant parts of the world. This just gives people more powerful toys to play with. In fact, it may well destabilize the middle east even further when OPEC realizes that it will make their oil monopoly obsolete by providing a power sources with lower recurring costs. Which means the more fractious elements of the middle east are going to be seeing the writing on the wall and try something stupid before that happens.

There are a lot of applications for this kind of reactor. It'll make electric vehicles a lot more economically viable, with the ability to build roads that recharge the vehicles as they drive down it, using magnetic fields to carry the charge to recharge the vehicles as they drive, eliminating the single weakness of electrical vehicles (range) entirely. It will make the energy infrastructure as a whole a lot more stable and a whole lot less expensive to run, using entirely domestic products. We won't be dependent on foreign oil, and arguments and debates about oil pipelines suddenly become obsolete. There are very few downsides to Fusion reactors. They don't produce radiation in the quantities that fission reactors do, you're talking GRAMS of Tritium and Lithium here. As long as you build the generator's power plant to be able to channel any potential explosion downward, it's actually safer to run than a coal or oil burning plant.

But the first use they will be put to is killing humans, either directly or indirectly. It's not that I feel that the military is an inherently amoral institution. I recognize the necessity for a standing army, and I have no qualms with the institution as a whole. But I do lament that necessity as being a fact, and point out that this necessity is the very thing which needs to be addressed for any other scenario to even potentially exist. Until that happens... the first use of these reactors will be to, effectively, kill people.

[Shadow of the Sun]

Quite possibly, but I for one will not be signing up to have a high energy neutron source strapped to my back. Not even to pretend I am a ghost buster.

It's not the Lockheed-Martin model, but the PolyWell was designed with aneutronic fusion in mind, using boron and protons. And while proton-boron fusion has its own technical issues, if they sorted those out and a backpack size model was feasible, it would be safer (emphasis on 'er') than the deuterium-tritium models.

I don't know if the Lockheed-Martin model could be calibrated for proton-boron fusion, since I'm not actually a physicist in any fashion.

[crayzz]

I don't understand this sentiment, and now it's expressed by more than 1 person.

I would explain further, but you don't really address the sentiment, not even to say what you don't understand. Where's the confusion?

The simplest way I can put it is that I don't draw much distinction between doing something and enabling something. I could by you food, or give you money that you can use for food yourself. I can punch you in the face, or pay some big guy or gal to do it for me. There are differences to puzzle out, to be sure, but for the most part, and here specifically, they aren't relevant.

Since it was mentioned repeatedly: yes, I know it's not as bad as actual nukes. No, that doesn't factor in anywhere to any sentiment I've expressed.

—

After a bit of searching, I won't have access to the journal in which the original article was published until, I believe, the beginning of November. I'll have to wait 'till then to dig into this properly.

[The Glyphstone]

Where do you draw the line, though? Even a purely civilian application of the technology will still end up benefiting the military, because a strong military depends on a strong economy/healthy and educated population.

[Mando Knight]

Where do you draw the line, though? Even a purely civilian application of the technology will still end up benefiting the military, because a strong military depends on a strong economy/healthy and educated population.

The economy also benefits from the technology spurred by military funding. The V2 was the basis for the rocket technology of the Space Race which led to commercial satellites, and GPS is a satellite network run by the US DoD. Turbine engines first became widespread in military aircraft before they were common in commercial aircraft (and like rocketry, the designs were heavily influenced by confiscated German technology). Early computers also arose during WW2, used for solving complex problems like code-cracking and aerodynamics (again, for military purposes), and the DoD's ARPANET was one of the earliest computer networks, arising in the '60s, and was the first to run TCP/IP protocols in '82. Fission reactors were first used to produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project, but a Soviet nuclear reactor was used for civilian power supply (in 1954) before the first nuclear-powered naval vessel was launched (USS Nautilus, 1955).

Those are just examples from the 20th century. While not all technology is directly derived from military projects, the resources and motivation of a strong military are hard to beat for a tech company.

[NichG]

I would explain further, but you don't really address the sentiment, not even to say what you don't understand. Where's the confusion?

The simplest way I can put it is that I don't draw much distinction between doing something and enabling something. I could by you food, or give you money that you can use for food yourself. I can punch you in the face, or pay some big guy or gal to do it for me. There are differences to puzzle out, to be sure, but for the most part, and here specifically, they aren't relevant.

Since it was mentioned repeatedly: yes, I know it's not as bad as actual nukes. No, that doesn't factor in anywhere to any sentiment I've expressed.

This is fine, but I think if you follow this to its logical conclusion it means that you have to make some choices that normally people consider to be very difficult, or find yourself in a sort of decision paralysis. This kind of standard means that its very easy to enter into double-bind situations where either way, any choice you make ends up extending to you being causally responsible for the death of a specific group of people. So in order to function (e.g. to do anything other than choosing inaction), you have to at some level be willing to decide who gets to live and who gets to die. In a way, that's a lot more honest than claiming that you aren't making that kind of choice, but at the same time it does mean that things get more tangled.

In this circumstance, for example, if you had the button that would either let this go forward to a successful completion of the technology (but also to its military applications), or cause this military contract to fall through, then either way you decide there are going to be deaths which can be causally connected to the decision. If you let the contract go through, you're enabling the military, but saving the lives of however many people would die from e.g. continuing wars over oil resources, lack of availability of fuel limiting access to other transported goods that would otherwise be readily available, etc. If you block the contract, you don't enable the induced deaths due to military actions, but you also prevent lives from being saved that could have been saved.

So at some point you have to also make a statement like 'its better to prevent one human from killing another than to save the life of a human killed by nature', or 'its better to prevent one human from killing another than to save the life of ten humans killed by nature' or things like that.

[ace rooster]

One of my mottos is "power that cannot be corrupted is not real power". Being able to harness fusion is real power, and as such open to all sorts of abuses. That does not stop it being a monumental achievement that can change the world for the better, but it also has the potential to make the world a very scary place. The same was true of the internal combustion engine, and fire.

It's not the Lockheed-Martin model, but the PolyWell was designed with aneutronic fusion in mind, using boron and protons. And while proton-boron fusion has its own technical issues, if they sorted those out and a backpack size model was feasible, it would be safer (emphasis on 'er') than the deuterium-tritium models.

I don't know if the Lockheed-Martin model could be calibrated for proton-boron fusion, since I'm not actually a physicist in any fashion.

I have not looked at the machine in detail, but it looks to me like a magnetic mirror configueration that would not be able to perform aneutronic fusion. It looks like it uses strong magnetic confinement, rather than the electrostatic that the polywell uses, which causes problems at very high confinement settings required for aneutronic fusion.

The problem here isn't that it will further WMD or MAD scenarios, which it won't.

Oh it really will. It is at least as useful for building a bomb as a fast fission reactor (Which are not common, with security concerns being a major factor), only if it is the size of a truck you can fit it in a garage. If they are cheap enough that they are common, procuring one and hiding it would not be a problem for a small state or group.

[Cikomyr]

Well, that certainly spawned some lively debate. Let me clarify my statement and explain why my faith in humanity is not necessarily going to be restored.

First off, I believe there is zero moral difference between killing and enabling killing. As a result, it doesn't matter if there is an actual bomb or if it is powering the vehicle launching the weapons, the end result is the technology will first and foremost be used to build weapons of war, which become an order of magnitude more powerful.

The problem here isn't that it will further WMD or MAD scenarios, which it won't. Instead, it will provide the power for precision targeted weapons, which are FAR more likely to be deployed due to a lack of 'damns not given' as long as nothing glows in the dark. For example, one of the major limiting factors in a rail gun is the time it takes to spin up the capacitors to shoot the thing. This gives it an anemic rate of fire, but each shot is extremely powerful. Currently, rail guns are being tested for use in anti-missile doctrine, being able to shoot missiles (and aircraft) out of the air, spending a nickel-iron slug instead of an expensive counter-missile. And a boatload of energy. With a fusion reactor, this limitation largely vanishes. Now you can afford to power a semi-automatic or even fully automatic rail gun. It may not be a weapon of mass destruction, but it can be used to take out anything in the sky. In fact, it may well make ICBMs, even the hyper-velocity versions currently being researched by the USA and Russia, obsolete.

However, this also paves the way for airborne weapons platforms that are already in the design phase. You think having a battleship off the coast for raining down bombardment is a problem? How about a Warthog with a 105 rail gun that can stay up in the air for months at a time? How about the Ford-class Carriers being refitted with one of these, enabling them to mount anti-missile rail guns and MW lasers to be able to more effectively project a threat to opponents? This is the sort of thing that will be the first use for these reactors, before the civilian markets ever get a chance to start playing with them.

Nuclear explosions, as a weapon of warfare, are obsolete anyway. You can get the same payload with zero radiation from air fuel explosives. At a fraction of the cost. Honestly, the reason I'd love to see Molten Salt fission Reactors be employed is that it can use the weapons-grade radioactive materials, and use it to power humanity for the next century or two. Swords to plowshares kind of thing. It gets rid of the nuclear weapons so it isn't a tempting target for terrorists, makes it productive, and also produces some medically and commercially useful byproducts. And honestly, the ONLY reason I haven't been a supporter of getting rid of the nuclear armament is that it is at least more secure where it currently is, so unauthorized third parties are less likely to get their hands on them if they are still in weapons. We need some place for that nuclear material to be spent in a useful manner for us to consider getting rid of our nuclear arsenal.

But the bigger, more fundamental, and underlying problem isn't the fusion reactors. They're just the next iteration of the larger problem: the number one cause of death of humans is... other humans. Until we get the socio-economical problems solved, this will not magically fix the unrest in significant parts of the world. This just gives people more powerful toys to play with. In fact, it may well destabilize the middle east even further when OPEC realizes that it will make their oil monopoly obsolete by providing a power sources with lower recurring costs. Which means the more fractious elements of the middle east are going to be seeing the writing on the wall and try something stupid before that happens.

There are a lot of applications for this kind of reactor. It'll make electric vehicles a lot more economically viable, with the ability to build roads that recharge the vehicles as they drive down it, using magnetic fields to carry the charge to recharge the vehicles as they drive, eliminating the single weakness of electrical vehicles (range) entirely. It will make the energy infrastructure as a whole a lot more stable and a whole lot less expensive to run, using entirely domestic products. We won't be dependent on foreign oil, and arguments and debates about oil pipelines suddenly become obsolete. There are very few downsides to Fusion reactors. They don't produce radiation in the quantities that fission reactors do, you're talking GRAMS of Tritium and Lithium here. As long as you build the generator's power plant to be able to channel any potential explosion downward, it's actually safer to run than a coal or oil burning plant.

But the first use they will be put to is killing humans, either directly or indirectly. It's not that I feel that the military is an inherently amoral institution. I recognize the necessity for a standing army, and I have no qualms with the institution as a whole. But I do lament that necessity as being a fact, and point out that this necessity is the very thing which needs to be addressed for any other scenario to even potentially exist. Until that happens... the first use of these reactors will be to, effectively, kill people.

Because necessity is the mother of invention.

And there is no greater necessity than making sure you, or those unser your care, to not be killed.

WW2 was a fantastic catalyst of technological development, which spearheaded an economic boom for the decades to come. Hell, even nowaday we are still building on the innovation WW2 has introduced in our society.

[crayzz]

This is fine, but I think if you follow this to its logical conclusion it means that you have to make some choices that normally people consider to be very difficult, or find yourself in a sort of decision paralysis. This kind of standard means that its very easy to enter into double-bind situations where either way, any choice you make ends up extending to you being causally responsible for the death of a specific group of people. So in order to function (e.g. to do anything other than choosing inaction), you have to at some level be willing to decide who gets to live and who gets to die. In a way, that's a lot more honest than claiming that you aren't making that kind of choice, but at the same time it does mean that things get more tangled.

I can't not think that way, in all honesty. My actions lead to certain possibilities and probabilities; I can no more ignore them than I could ignore the direct results.* It's a whole tangled mess. I just try to do my best, and accept that I could very easily screw up. Of course, I'm not in any position that I need to weigh innovation against human lives, so it's comparatively easy for me.

*I'm simplifying since the matter is tangential.

[Gnoman]

Oh it really will. It is at least as useful for building a bomb as a fast fission reactor (Which are not common, with security concerns being a major factor), only if it is the size of a truck you can fit it in a garage. If they are cheap enough that they are common, procuring one and hiding it would not be a problem for a small state or group.

Not so much as it might appear. Fusion reactors tend to consume a mix of deuterium and tritium, the former of which is not exactly a bomb-usable material, while the latter is only useful in boosted-fission devices or fusion bombs, and can't be used for a bomb by itself, meaning that unlike fission reactors, there is no required material that could be repurposed to build a bomb. While the high neutron flux generated by a fusion plant would help to enrich extra material, uranium is not particularly easy to get, and would become nearly impossible to acquire if fusion was used to a tenth of the potential. Commercial demand for uranium-powered fission reactors would vanish virtually overnight once something like this hit the market, probably resulting in all existing uranium mines being shut down (as far as is known, none of the Nuclear Club are currently building any new bombs. All powers are continually reconditioning and maintaining existing stockpiles, but there is little evidence to support, or reason for, new construction that would require new bombs being built. Quite the opposite, as all Club members are engaged in periodic negotiations to reduce the number of warheads.) With no civilian market, and virtually no military one, uranium fission would become what it was in 1920. A scientific curiosity. Most other uses of uranium are as much a way of repurposing used-up fuel as they are any virtue of the material (the properties of uranium in those applications could largely be achieved with a different material, it's just that DU is pretty easy to get for a country with a nuclear program.) You can't enrich uranium if there IS none available.

[aspi]

You left out the "for France."

Considering that they sent in 300 of their own soldiers to test the effects of radiation: no, I did not. There isn't a single country who participated in nuclear tests and didn't get a bunch of people irradiated or killed, including their own. It's a prime example why military institutions that are in charge of the development of such a technology are actually not a good choice. The military will cut a lot more corners to get things done than a civilian company ever could - even more so in wartime.

Where do you draw the line, though? Even a purely civilian application of the technology will still end up benefiting the military, because a strong military depends on a strong economy/healthy and educated population.

It's a question of priority. Developing it specifically for the military first and accepting that they will get it at some point or benefit from it are very different approaches.

If you're developing for the military you're just feeding a system. If you're developing for civilian use you at least have a chance that it'll change the system at some point down the road. And right now I honestly can't see a single reason why any NATO country would need more of an edge in warfare. We're already so far ahead of the rest of the world in military technology that a bunch of fusion generators are not going to make much of a difference. Civilian fusion generators on the other hand would.

And there is no greater necessity than making sure you, or those unser your care, to not be killed.

Sure. But there are a lot of different ways to go about this. One is killing the guy that's coming for you and your family before he can do so. Another is preventing him from ever wanting to do so. I strongly prefer the second approach, since he get's to live as well and I don't have blood on my hands. But that's not something you can do by force.

[thorgrim29]

I'm reading between the lines a bit here, but it seems to me that 2 of the main goals of asking for investors at this point in the development of the tech.

1: It's still unsure and will require massive investments even if it does work, so they want to spread the risk

2: They want to partner up with an existing energy company. Lockheed isn't an energy company, and right now they don't have the expertise to sell a product like that on the civilian markets. I'm sure the US DoD and whatever other army they are allowed to sell it to will be more then happy to just receive a truck with a plug&play reactor, but the civilian power grids are another beast entirely. They'll probably set up a spinoff or a co-enterprise (not sure if it's the right word in english) to service the civilian markets.

If my analysis is anywhere close to the truth, that means that civilian use of the tech won't be very far behind military use if it turns out to fulfill it's promises. The military reactors will serve as proof-of-concept to civilian markets.

As for nuclear proliferation, the head guy specifically said in the video on the Lockheed website that it's proliferation-free. At this point if anyone can make that judgement it's him right?

[Mando Knight]

If you're developing for the military you're just feeding a system. If you're developing for civilian use you at least have a chance that it'll change the system at some point down the road. And right now I honestly can't see a single reason why any NATO country would need more of an edge in warfare. We're already so far ahead of the rest of the world in military technology that a bunch of fusion generators are not going to make much of a difference. Civilian fusion generators on the other hand would.

NATO actually isn't all that far ahead of their major potential threats (other than NATO ending nastily in a major political SNAFU), and it isn't cost-effective to properly stare down local belligerents in tumultuous areas. And what if one of the other nations does develop fusion generators first? What if someone else builds and powers 100 MW railguns, and leapfrogs NATO? Can/will they back those small aggressor states and make them absolutely intractable and create a real and dangerous threat to NATO's allies?

Human nature won't change because of advances in technology.

But there are a lot of different ways to go about this. One is killing the guy that's coming for you and your family before he can do so. Another is preventing him from ever wanting to do so. I strongly prefer the second approach, since he get's to live as well and I don't have blood on my hands. But that's not something you can do by force.

I hate to bring up Tarkin (Fear will keep the systems in line. Fear of this battlestation!) for this, but the perception of being unstoppably powerful does have the effect of making others less willing to attack you. The ones that still attack you and your allies, no matter how strong, are those who probably won't be persuaded by peaceful measures, either. For that, the ability to economically project the necessary force can be essential to keeping your allies alive, and if technology is on the civilian market first, it's not a question of if the enemy has access to it and weaponized it, it's a question of how much such weaponized technology they already have.

[Icewraith]

TL,DR: If we're going to have the damn things, they may as well work properly and not be more destructive than they need to be. People who build military equipment have primary responsibility for deaths and injuries when their things don't work correctly, not when they do. Responsibility for deaths caused during combat lies primarily with the participants, the chain of command, and the people paying taxes to support the military.

Do remember that if there is going to be conflict, and some kind of weapon is going to be used anyways, developing precision weapons that only kill the intended target reduces collateral damage and effectively saves lives. The target of the attack is effectively already dead with the weapons we've got, but the people in the surrounding building (in world war 2 we were looking at "several city blocks surrounding the targeted building") don't need to die (depending on the nature of the building), and the local area doesn't need to be littered with little bits of cadmium, lead, depleted uranium, propellant, or whatever other nasty stuff was used in the weapon. "Lump of nickel-iron" sounds pretty good in comparison.

I don't know if fusion engines being deployed at the vehicle level is really a possibility. What happens when you shoot one? We also don't know how expensive these things are going to be, and while the fuel might not be in danger of running out, the other bits that make it work may be hard to find.

While it's in theory possible to make it so that nobody lacks resources and has no reason to go steal or fight others for resources, that won't in and of itself eliminate war. We still need ways to keep people who want power for the sake of power from attaining it, we need the general population to be educated enough to resist extremism and racism and classism and every ism in the book, in the forms they now take and the ones they may take in the future, and we need to keep the population of a post-scarcity society from ballooning to the point that it becomes a scarcity society again and we have more reasons to go to war.

Until we get to that point as a global society, everyone's going to want and need weapons. I'd prefer that they not get used, but if it's going to come down to a fight, I know people who serve and have served in the military. If they're not going out there with the best weapons and armor, more of them are going to die. If they're not using the best weapons and armor and have access to the best information, more bystanders are going to be killed by malfunctions, inaccurate weapons, and bad intelligence. If they don't go out and win decisively, fights will drag on and kill more people on both sides and allow disease and starvation to spread. If my side doesn't go out and win fights, its influence is diminished, and I live in a place where I can exert some tiny amount of influence on how it acts and the people in power have to at least take the pains to try and not look like amoral sociopaths. There are a number of sides that do not have those limits on their actions and they have weapons programs as well.

Now, full disclosure, I work in a defense related area. And if the world was such that we didn't need these things, then I agree assisting in their manufacture in any way would be enabling killing. However, that is not the world we live in. The world we live in people are going to die regardless-there's too many imperfect or outright malicious people, too many dictators, and too many weapons already lying around or things that can easily be repurposed into weapons. So, by involving myself in defense, I'm at least making sure that if my friend or neighbor or cousin in the military has to, in the course of his duties, pull a trigger and try to kill someone trying to kill him, the weapon he's using isn't going to blow up in his face. It's going to go where he wants it to instead of going way off-target and hitting a home or hospital or orphanage, especially since certain groups started building weapons emplacements on or near such things to make it difficult to shoot at them without hurting innocents. When it gets there, whatever else it does it's going to render the target incapable of effectively firing back. If this situation is happening, our political and social processes have already failed. Everyone on both sides has blood on their hands from this death. The diplomats weren't persuasive enough, the anti-war folks weren't loud enough, the educators weren't pervasive enough, the people who sat on the fence didn't do anything, and the leaders weren't wise enough to avoid this. But now that it's happening, and someone is going to die, let it not be my friend or neighbor or family member, let it not be some poor uninvolved soul stuck in the middle of this due to fate and geography, let it be the guy on the other side, the guy with HIS weapon pointed at my friends and neighbors and family and quite often at noncombatant bystanders that don't share his political or religious or ethnic background or beliefs.

There is no moral difference between killing and authorizing killing, but there is a huge difference between killing and "enabling killing" by the design, testing, manufacture, and deployment of military weapons and equipment. Everyone who pays taxes to a government with a standing military is "enabling killing". The only blood on the hands of the defense people that isn't also shared by the populations enabling the conflict are the deaths resulting from the failure of the weapon or equipment, not the success. Combat deaths are deaths that would have happened in some other fashion as long as the two sides and people involved were still fighting in some fashion. Automatic weapon, guided missile, poison, knife, hand, rock- there are always alternative methods of killing each other if there are two sides determined to do so. Conflict is not something that the sudden dissapearance of the entire defense industry would solve. People would simply start with rocks and sticks, and then spears, and then rebuild the whole thing from the ground up.

As I said, full disclosure, I work in a defense related area. But, I did have to do a lot of thinking about this sort of thing before I started working, and I think most people who end up working in related fields have to confront this.

[The Random NPC]

So, some people have posted about rail guns, but I was under the impression that the second major hurdle after power was that the barrels get ruined after something like 3 shots. Anyone care to comment?

[Errata]

That depends a lot on the scale of the contract and the size of the penalties.

Who even says they have a contract with a firm deadline that they have to meet, or a contract at all? Those sorts of details aren't disclosed in the press release, you're just guessing, and I don't find it to be the most plausible guess. We don't know if they have a more open ended contract to perform research without guaranteed results, or if they're doing the research on their own dime so far and using this press release as a tactic to solicit government funding.

Companies do R&D all the time, and often it ends up going nowhere. The fact that they have a future date for having their first test reactor and prototype suggests that they don't already have them, which means it's very early days for this research project. No reason to think that the DOD would lock them into firm deadlines and guaranteed delivery on something so speculative and famously unsuccessful as fusion power generation. There's nothing about this to suggest they are deeply invested enough that their whole company is on the line. So far there's a press release with very few details, and if this turns out to be yet more fusion vaporware, then all they've lost is a bit of credibility by choosing to make it public too early in the process. The speculation that there is some critical government contract deadline is nothing more than an unfounded assumption on your part.