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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

>we desperately need good energy sources.

the question is "are we ready?". With nuclear energy we were on the brink of nuclear war during various periods of time, and the natural limitations of the technology help to limit the access to it. The success of fusion in non-Tokamak devices, something like inertial confinement and mixed schemas, brings the risk of a new class of weapons, something along neutron bomb (or boosted fission) without fission primary, which thus wouldn't be subject to technological limitations rooted in the fission.

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We already have enough firepower with standard nuclear warheads to destroy civilization a few times over. I doubt a bigger bomb would fundamentally change the equation at all.

Not bigger. Easier to get/build, no enrichment.

Honestly, I doubt this is something to worry about. Fusion happens through confinement; it's inherently unstable -- the more energy production, the stronger the confinement is needed (which is provided by a self-regenerating power source in a fusion reactor). This is everything you don't want from a bomb. If the reaction starts getting too hot, your confinement breaks and then the reaction stops. Scaling up the reactor doesn't change this, and it's not like it's viable to fly a reactor with a 100MW startup power source and drop into places anyway.

A fusion bomb necessarily needs a transient, extreme ignition, which I believe can only be achieved with a fission bomb (even with the truly massive fission energy building an H-bomb took a while!).

you're talking about Tokamak like confinement, [electro]static type. That isn't weaponizeable. I'm not sure that electrostatic can produce a space engine too. Regular electric generation at best. No, i meant inertial confinement.

>A fusion bomb necessarily needs a transient, extreme ignition, which I believe can only be achieved with a fission bomb

Inertial confinement doesn't really need much energy. It needs huge power, huge energy density (notice that power != energy). Fission primary is the best way to achieve that of course, yet Sandia Z-machine or LNL NIF lasers achieve power enough for ignition too while not spending any noticeable amount of energy (NIF uses old lasers so it consumes more energy than it would if it was built with today's lasers). Both devices - Z-machine or a NIF-like with the old lasers replaced by modern solid state ones - are already of the size on the scale of 10-20 shipping containers and are capable of burning something like a grain size pellets which creates neutron flux deadly in the area of the size like that LNL NIF building. To me it seems like there are really great chances that either of them would be miniaturized enough to produce a space engine as well as a weapon (to which our civilization doesn't look ready).

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