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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Oh please. That whole "fusion" thing from that facility is a trick to get taxpayers to fund more nuclear weapon research.

We should have finished this instead, what a waste:

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

Take a guess why congress only funded the one useful for weapons.

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Given that hydrogen bombs are fusion bombs such a claim can be leveled at all fusion research. Maybe nuclear weapons research is the way they get the US government to shell out for fusion research, like the optics researchers did with SDI.

Actually, most of the energy in most H-bomb designs actually comes from fission - but the neutrons that cause this fission come from the fusion of the secondary - so fusion is the key component of the whole thing working.

A notable exception to this was the Soviet Tsar Bomba which used non-fissioning tampers in its multiple tertiary (and probably its single secondary) stages - resulting in an explosion of over 50Mt where 97% came from fusion:

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

All research into nuclear energy can be used for nuclear weapons. A nuclear reactor is just a well-cooled bomb that isn't supposed to explode violently (so to speak).

Cool! If we ever have WWIII, I'm going to drop a well-cooled H-bomb that uses laser-based confinement mechanism to not explode violently on my enemies. In fact, I await their preemptive surrender even now.

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