I agree. I’m very much for more research into fusion. I’m still somewhat skeptical of it ever being ‘infinite cheap energy’. But even if it never becomes a ‘good energy source’, the advancement of knowledge is valuable. So its not like I think fusion is a scam overall.

But I think this particular company is.

That is what I think the owner is doing here. Scamming venture capital firms for a tech that cannot work.

And I mean, its not like I have any proof. I can’t read minds; maybe he is a true believer.

But this company feels like those companies back in the 80s that sold tickets to mars, for the rockets they were ‘just about to build’; a scam.

This isn’t a research firm. This isn’t trying to find the exact settings and layouts to make fusion possible. If the article can be taken at face value, this is a company to make a commercial fusion plant. And I find that, in 2023, patently absurd.

I hope it works.

But I’m skeptical enough to say that I think this is a scam. We’re closing in, research wise, on getting fusion to generate more power than it takes to run. Which is awesome!

But its still a far trek from that figure, to producing enough power to be practical (I’ve heard it said you really need to aim for 10x more production than input, minimum, for it to make any sense).

And that is still a trek from making a fusion plant competitive with existing grid power.

I’m skeptical if this plant they’re building will even generate power, which is like three steps away from making commercial sense at all.

You are, of course, correct.

But even so, costs are costs. It doesn’t matter if you’ve achieved communism, and are in a moneyless, stateless existance, you need labor and materials to build nuclear, and labor and materials to maintain it (along with other infrastructure).

And, I’m not anti-nuclear; it does make sense to use sometimes, in some amounts. Its just very very costly for what it provides.

But frankly, even only accounting for current tech, wide spread nuclear just doesn’t make that much sense compared to renewables + storage and large grids interconnects.

I mean, Methamphetamine is extremely similar, pharmacologically, with Adderall. Desoxyn is the ‘medicine brand name’ for meth, to treat ADHD.

Biggest difference between Crystal Meth, the street drug, and Desoxyn, the medicine, is dosage. A Desoxyn tablet is about 100x less methamphetamine than you’d take to ‘get high’. (not to mention, pills have a slower release than smoking it).

And yeah, there are other differences between Adderall and Meth; for the most part, Adderall is safer, less addictive, and less ‘makes you high’. So there’s very few people still using Desoxyn, but it is still out there. For reasons that aren’t really understood, Methamphetamine does work to treat a few people’s ADHD for whom Adderall doesn’t do much.

(and, for that matter, there are a pretty huge array of different amphetamines to treat ADHD and similar things, that are all subtly different in not very well understood ways, made messier by the fact that pharmaceutical companies making sure to push out a new drug, that might just be a new mix of existing drugs, every 10 years, for patent reasons. But Desoxyn is basically a ‘last resort’ to throw at the wall, if the patient hasn’t responded well to any of the others.)