According to Reuters, "
Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project," by Andrea Shalai,
Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade.
Tom McGuire
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Tangent: there are very similar transmission problems with respect to water treatment, and they are just as severe, as there is a whole lot of aging pipeline and undocumented leakage. But there are also efforts on foot to develop modular water treatment facilities that can serve neighborhoods and eliminate a lot of those problems.
Modularity also facilitates installation of all this stuff in the third world. Notice how their cellular communication networks are miles ahead of their land-line networks? That's because you can erect cell towers just about anywhere, cheaply and with minimal infrastructure. So too these mini-plants. The total transformation of people's lives for the better when they have reliable power and clean water is hard to overstate.
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And there's no good way of making a bomb with the reactor, though if you otherwise make an H-Bomb you could combine the deuterium component of the fuel with lithium-6 to make lithium-six-deuteride, the fusible used in hydrogen bombs. But the hard part of making a hydrogen bomb isn't obtaining lithium-6-deuteride, it's making the detonator (a shaped-charge fission bomb which in turn is triggered by a shaped-charge chemical bomb, and requires U-235 or plutonium to manufacture).
So it's safe to export to the Third World.
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