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Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

A quote from your linked article: "Hopes at the time were high that it could be quickly developed into a practical source of fusion power. However, as with other fusion experiments, development into a generator has proven to be difficult."

Translation: no break-even fusion reaction. If this approach held promise for fusion power research, it would be being explored instead of the millions of dollars in the much more common laser-confinement and tokamak approaches.

Strictly speaking and from a technical standpoint, if it doesn't produce more power than is present for conventional reasons (like electronic current flow), and in spite of its name, it's not a fusion reactor as that term is understood in physics.

It's a nice plasma source, and it produces neutrons -- very useful -- but it's not a fusion power source.

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I never said it was a "reactor", or that it was close to break even - merely that creating a device where fusion reactions do occur is not that difficult.

Read my comment above I say "Nowhere near break even though."

Incidentally, there has been a lot of work in inertial electrostatic confinement - it doesn't look terribly promising and no it is not break even but people do appear to be working in this area:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

As established by arethuza, hot fusion has been accomplished for some time, relatively easily, outside of thermonuclear weapons and stars. That was the claim in dispute. Nowhere in this thread was there a claim about power generation.

> As established by arethuza, hot fusion has been accomplished for some time ...

Let's be clear about what we're talking about. A fusion generator by definition produces more power than it requires. Apart from stars and thermonuclear devices, this has not been achieved anywhere. Without clear terminology, we will go in circles.

Also, the NASA project documents specify and require a net power gain in the fusion reaction:

http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2012_phaseII...

Quote: "an in-depth analysis of the rocket design and spacecraft integration as well as mission architectures enabled by the FDR need to be performed. Fulfilling these three elements form the major tasks to be completed in the proposed Phase II study. A subscale, laboratory liner compression test facility will be assembled with sufficient liner kinetic energy (~ 0.5 MJ) to reach fusion breakeven conditions."

> Nowhere in this thread was there a claim about power generation.

Except in the NASA documents that describe the project under discussion.

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