191
Trump Media to merge with nuclear fusion company
(www.nbcnews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
191 points (99.0% liked)
News
37401 readers
1521 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I just posted how I’ve grown skeptical of nuclear fusion.
This site outlines some misgivings quite well: https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/
As one example, the “lack of radioactivity,” an often touted benefit of fusion, is just… not true. In fact, D-T fusion releases much higher energy neutrons than any fission, and that’s inevitably going to degrade the equipment, turn it radioactive, and wreak all sorts of havoc.
Tritium production isn’t easy, nor particularly sustainable.
Many of fission’s “problems” it’s supposed to solve, like storing hot waste or the finite supply of uranium, really aren’t that big a deal, and can be addressed with the extra expense/engineering of breeder reactors or (possibly) thorium reactors if it’s so important.
Proliferation? Fusion reactors are great at producing fissile material.
Other issues, like fission's required capital investment, are clearly worse with fusion, and don’t seem to be improving. Heck, we don’t even have the capital or political will for newer fission reactors.
Look. I want a fusion breakthough. This was a good avenue to try.
…But now, fusion feels like one of those interesting ideas that turned out to not be so practical in reality (not yet anyway), now transitioning into a grift.
And if Trump Media buying a fusion startup to put it on the market isn’t a red flag, I don’t know what is.
Nah, the point is to get a sweetheart deal when they inevitably file for bankruptcy because they are a budding energy company taking big risks on new tech, not a media company hemorrhaging money at an unsustainable rate, silly goose!
There we go. That’s the angle I was looking for. I was curious what the grift was, but now this opens them up to getting energy subsidies and protections.
It’s part of the AI hype train too. Energy is hot in the stock market, with the idea being scale up for all these chip fabs and data centers we’ll need for infinite AI.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because there was a similar energy craze over cryptomining. Though not at this scale.
2020's: Time to invest! We're like 5 years away from fusion reactors, hyper loops, and general AI!
2040's: Time to invest! We're like 5 years away from fusion reactors, hyper loops, and general AI!
But hey at least the world now has Ai-powered human-slaying drone swarms thanks to all that VC. 👍
To be clear, I don't want to hate on tech investment. Fusion has to be tried to see if it works.
But it's got a lot of tries, more than its fair shair IMO. Imagine if we split all that cash between fission, thorium, solar, laser drilled geothermal, things like that.
Until the last 10 years, fusion barely got any funding in America, and similar levels elsewhere. Here's a budget projection from decades back that should give some perspective on the inevitable outcome, and why optimism has been so high lately.
As to the radioactivity issue, fusion would irradiate the equipment with isotopes of very short half-life, but the volume would be no more than with fission, and at a much lower radioactivity requiring decades of storage rather than millennia. It also aids in anti-proliferation as a fusion reaction won’t generate significant fissile material under normal operation, unlike fission. So it could be used in countries that aren’t feasible now with strict regulations such as maintaining a minimum lithium enrichment level.
It doesn’t produce waste isotopes directly, no, but the neutron radiation creates new radioactive isotopes within whatever equipment is in range. And AFAIK it’s harder to stop than fission because the D-T fusion neutrons are 14.1 MeV. And separately from that, it degrades the equipment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_embrittlement
Which seems pretty significant when fusion needs so much equipment hugging the reactor chamber. It would complicate cleaning, too.
That changes with other types of fusion, but D-T is all we got now.
As for proliferation… again, it’s a great neutron source. It doesn’t have the same waste, no, but countries can absolutely use it to breed fissile material if they want.
And let’s say, hypothetically, a country goes against regulators and decides they’re going to breed material with their fusion reactor. With some trouble, they can use it to make tritium too. The supply couldn’t be cut off.
its probably specifically the neutrons degrading the core chamber, is whats going to prevent any commercial, or even useful advancement of it, because the cost of maintenance,
Yeah, I think we'll be able to figure out fusion. I just don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell of it being cheaper than a bunch of solar panels and batteries. Hell, a big solar farm connected to a big hydrogen generator and hydrogen tank will probably be a much cheaper way of generating power than by using fusion reactors. The big fusion reactor in the sky is just going to end up being much cheaper.
Ah damn, I hadn't even thought of that but of course they'd be just working on tritium fusion rather than H1 fusion. So not even the power of a brown dwarf, which fuses deuterium. Hydrogen is very abundant but tritium much less so. That might be a game breaker on its own, since the price of tritium will only go up when it is in demand for scaled fusion.
I've also wondered if fusion reactors will have a "plasma jet" mode of failure where the magnetic field containing the highly pressurized plasma partially fails and shoots out a beam of plasma that will quickly cut through anything in its path.
I agree that they should keep working on it (though not expecting big things from this particular company, other than maybe nuclear arms production). But it's starting to look similar to space travel outside of our immediate neighborhood: a nice idea that physics will probably laugh and say not so fast!
H1 fusion is really, really hard.
Yeah, I don’t know about leaks. It may end up that pulses or some “alternate” form of compression than constant confinement works out better, but the physics are certainly hard however you slice it.