Please, wake me up...

Aug 13, 2026 Last reply: 8 hours ago 3 Replies

I must be sleeping.



First was this:



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I thought it was just an accidental brainfart and those startups are all gone with those billions wasted now.



But not so fast -- here is yet another one, from the IEEE Spectrum magazine that was in my mailbox today:



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It is not Daily Mail or some tabloid (or it is?), but IEEE magazine. The ENGINEERING society.



It is NOT about some scientific research or Nobel Prize breakthrough.



No, those are STARTUPS that promise to put Nuclear fusion reactors on the grid by 2030. COMMERCIAL REACTORS. On the grid. Those are STARTUPS, taking billions of financing for that. Commercial reactors by 2030. Putting gigawatts into the grid. The first article even told about one of them having a contract with Microsoft to sell electricity to them if my dementia serves me right.


I can't believe it is for real and in an IEEE magazine. I must be sleeping, please wake me up...



There is still not a single tokamak or whatever that has produced even as much energy as it draws from the grid. Not even starting on net positive. But it doesn't stop STARTUPS -- they are supposedbly building COMMERCIAL POWER PLANTS that will be putting gigawatts into the grid. Free power for everyone, no more awkward clunky solar panels, Solynras (remember that?), ugly wind turbines, those molten salt abominations with fields of mirrors in Nevada desert, no CO2 emission from natural gas turbines, just pure clean energy...



Are all those guys who finance those theranoses and likes morons with more billions of dollars than brain cells? I don't think so -- they DID get those billions from somewhere... There must be something I'm missing behind all that...



I'm definitely sleeping, please wake me up... At least I will be able to cancel my membership -- I don't know why I'm still a member...


An old Russian anekdot:



- Cadets, here is our newest top secret ballistic missile that flies at 10x the speed of light. - Comrade sergeant, but scientists claim that nothing can move faster than light! - Scientists don't know, the missile is TOP SECRET!


As that fusion specialist W.C. Fields said, "Never give a sucker an even break"...

The problem is that if somebody can dream up a magnetic configuration that is stable, even a stellarator can work. The first article's claim was that this had been done - it needed artificial intelligence (or at least a very complicated mathematical simulation in three dimensions) to describe the magnetic field.

The second article doesn't go this far, but claims that occasional episodes of instablity can be coped with.

As you say, it all sounds like bullshit designed to rip money off gullible investors, but this isn't any kind of proof that there isn't a scheme which can work. My father invented a scheme which allowed you to run a continuous paper-pulp digestor counter-current.

The guy who had invented the continuous digestor

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had spent ten years trying to get it to run counter-current, was impressed, but not enough to get Kaymr to pay royalties, though they built lots of copies. I met him in Tasmania when I was about six when he was visiting the first of his continuous digestors to be sold in the southern hemisphere - it was the sixth off the production line.

Inventions are innovations that aren't obvious to those skilled in the art, and sometimes you have to wait a bit until they show up.

<snipped sensible comment>

It has been running for quite a long while with plentiful fusion power always just another 50 years in the future...(for 70 years and counting)

Nuclear electricity too cheap to meter was promised in '54 but never delivered. To be fair to IEEE they do sometimes publish that too:

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