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I guess that's somewhat game-changing. This, however, would be much more game-changing (if we can get confirmation once and for all whether it's real or not): http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reacto...
"Partners in industry and goverment". Translation: 10 years to product (but hey, prototype in 5) so please give us lots of dough. It's the technology of the future and always has been.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I've heard, the reactor actually outlives the ship, no?
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I know there are some very smart people at skunk works who've done incredible things in the past but humans have cried wolf so many times on fusion it's sort of hard to just accept until they've actually built a working reactor, shown it and had it independently verified.
That being said, if they've genuinely cracked it, the game changes so much as to be unrecognisable.
Here is more on the tech, including a drawing: http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compa...
I know there are some very smart people at skunk works who've done incredible things in the past but humans have cried wolf so many times on fusion it's sort of hard to just accept until they've actually built a working reactor, shown it and had it independently verified.
We should be throwing more money at this...
I don't know much about fusion. It seems that the breakthrough they're talking about is that reactors are ~10x smaller. Why is this a big deal? Square footage is plentiful. I thought the problems are safety and how much energy it could produce.
>U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle. I don't think so.
This article is the cognitive equivalent of parrots squawking, because they don't even understand why the news actually is news.
People calling this a "typo" are giving too much credit. It could be a mistake, but the whole point of having an editor is to catch typos and mistakes! And it's a simple, short article!
> could be ready for use in a decade. That's the standard issue joke. "Nuclear fusion has been just ten years away for the last fifty years" It is so common as a joke I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.
Compare this with ITER, where they still don't know what material some fairly critical components can even be theoretically made of. It's just night and day.