I’m of the opinion that fusion is already done for classified military use. Exclusive availability of small scale fusion reactors would be a huge tactical logistical advantage.
I remember listening to a presentation by a quantum computing researcher in which he made a joke about the lab’s experience of receiving funding from the NSA (paraphrased): ‘getting funding from the NSA is great. They’re the only funding source that would say “we would prefer that you fail and this technology doesn’t exist - but if it does work, we want the first one”.
I don’t see why fusion research couldn’t be analogous.
This is actually the most plausible scenario for if/when fusion is achieved by any nation state. There is evidence that China is secretly working on fusion reactors and there's no reason to assume that the Russian and US militaries wouldn't do the same.
The first nation to achieve economically viable fusion will have a huge advantage over others. All of these open experiments like NIF are the equivalent of public ML research which is years behind what happens at secret research labs in Goog etc. From a game theory point of view, there is a huge incentive to work on fusion alone and in secret, and not tell anyone about it until long after the desired result is achieved.
Fusion is a similar technological leap to attaining nuclear weapons, and we're only now learning about the extreme levels of secrecy and investment that the US and other nations afforded to those projects.
Lockheed Martin is openly working on shipping container-sized fusion reactors, it does not take a stretch of the imagination to think that the results of such a program would be kept classified quite a while after success.
It would likewise not be surprising if there were other prime contractors working on the same technology.
I don't think they have the ability to keep a secret like that. A couple reasons:
1. The act of keeping the secret makes the tech useless. If it's not incorporated into equipment that could use it (e.g. a naval vessel, an isolated firebase) then what good is it? And if it is incorporated and there's a bunch of 20 year old techs working on it, it's going to leak.
2. I don't think they're that bad of people. If they could save us from global warming with fusion tech, not doing so would be a great tragedy. And historically at least the US military just isn't that selfish. For example, they opened up GPS even when they didn't have to. I think they get that a richer/stronger public means a richer/stronger military.
No, they wouldn't be issuing press releases if this was a black program. You're also not just taking Lockhead's claims at face value, which themselves have not be established with evidence, and going further to imagine that they're lying/slow playing their claims and actually are even further ahead. None of this is motivated by evidence.
Making a net energy producing fusion reactor container sized is a feat, making your first prototype container sized is just starting out. The first tokamak had a radius of 0.7m, so could easily fit inside a standard shipping container.
It's a conspiracy theory so obviously evidence would be nigh impossible to present. Doesn't mean he or she is wrong though. Doesn't it seem somewhat realistic that some technological advances would be kept secret? There is shitloads of less valuable information that is kept secret (only to be discovered later) so it stands to reason that if an extremely valuable advancement was discovered then it might be concealed.
I don't know how a basic understanding of how military technology is developed fits into "conspiracy theory".
I'm not projecting that a sinister cabal of technologists are hiding some great truth, just that the department of defense and defense contractors are obviously developing this technology and that new military tech is usually highly classified. There's no great mystery there.
I'm not suggesting a sinister cabal, I'm suggesting there is a literal conspiracy, a group coordinating in secret. And that group is the government. And the secret would be that highly classified information. In my mind we are seeing things the same, but I can see how the words I put to it might give a different impression.
I really don't like the current "conspiracy theory" understanding in modern usage. It completely screws over the literal usage of those two words together.
If you wish to, please reread my comment without the common connotation of "conspiracy theory" and see if we then agree.
There already are small scale fission reactors. USSR launched satellites powered by them (one even infamously fell on Canada). From military use, why would you need fusion?
Those space based reactors would have a hard time powering a single house, and the highly enriched fuels in a highly mobile platform would be a disaster. Those are about kilowatts.
This containerized fusion concept is planned to have the capacity for one unit to power a small city or a naval ship, many megawatts.
So you imply the DoD did a Manhattan project in peace time for years and nobody suspected a thing?
Anythings possible, sure, but that clearly is conspiracy theory category.
Unless they found a working cold fusion method by chance, it would require a HUGE budget and the best of the best scientists avaiable. Who all need to keep their mouth shut and pretend fusion is still not working. For years. Not likely. Not in peace times.
It would not need be manhattan project size, it’s a precision engineering problem not a fundamental physics problem mixed in with an industrial scale production problem.
There have been plenty of very expensive defense programs that were kept quite secret for a very long time.
I’ve known and worked with people with top secret clearances, they just didn’t talk about their work, it’s not that hard.
And everyone of these scientists is voluntarily giving up the opportunity to move a basic working fusion reactor into the private sphere? They could make billions and become the next GE or Tesla.
If just one of them had a startup bone in his body, we would see a small fusion reactor startup making consistent progress that seems amazing. It's not happening.
A scientist or engineer who left a classified project to do the same thing in a startup would very quickly find themselves in prison. Once you gain access to classified information, it is very very easy to convict you of very many crimes.
It's a situation that is apparently very difficult to understand for many people. You work on a classified program and you understand the situation. Nobody goes off and decides to turn their classified knowledge into a business.
Unless your assange, snowden, goldamns sachs ceo turned regulator or retired military general gone into the private sphere or fbi agent turned security consultant or blackwater pmc agent.
I get the value of the myth, people instinctively acheive what they believe is doable. It's just a myth though.
And until a working fusion reactor is build, it is indeed a fundamental physics problem, with all the energy involved, which is not at all completely understood since we are in quantum mechanic level down there.
