Fusion Power Breakthrough Near At Sandia Labs? 358
An anonymous reader writes "An achievement that would have extraordinary energy and defense implications might be near at Sandia National Laboratories. The lab is testing a concept called MagLIF (Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion), which uses magnetic fields and laser pre-heating in the quest for energetic fusion. A paper by Sandia researchers that was accepted for publication states that the Z-pinch driven MagLIF fusion could reach 'high-gain' fusion conditions, where the fusion energy released greatly exceeds (by more than 1,000 times) the energy supplied to the fuel."
great! (Score:3)
Re:great! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any evidence (real evidence, not YouTube videos of guys in their basements) of any "revolutionary, clean energy technology" being bought out and extinguished by the oil industry?
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Of course not, they buy out and extinguish the evidence, duh!
Re:great! (Score:5, Funny)
I made a working engine that ran off of tap water. Then the oil companies had me killed.
Re:great! (Score:5, Funny)
You were lucky. The oil companies beat me around the head and neck with a broken bottle, sliced me in two with a bread knife, then danced around my grave singing "Hallelujah!"
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of course not. that's part of the conspiracy. that's how you know it's the truth!
the only way it could be MORE truth is if there was evidence directly contrary to the conspiracy, because that'd have to be planted evidence. lack of evidence is just THEM being tricky.
ow my head hurts.
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Large format NIMH batteries are the only one I know of.
In short texaco helped kill the electric car by suing Toyota for the Rav4 electric. Toyota was losing money on the cars and did not want to lose even more by dealing with texaco.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries [wikipedia.org]
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There are patents that were filed by Henry Yunick among others in the early 1980's which had a working model Buick getting ~50 MPG's on the road. The patents were sold to GM which subsequently sat on them for ~20 yrs due to interlocking directorships with Exxon Mobil. They are now owned by a holding corp. I'll dig out the relevant patent numbers shortly, theyre around here somewhere...
Re:great! (Score:5, Informative)
Here:
http://patents.justia.com/inventor/HENRYYUNICK.html [justia.com]
U.S. Patent Number 5,645,368
A race track is disclosed having a tri-oval banked, racing surfacesurrounded by a barrier support material delineating a race barrier support surface at a
U.S. Patent Number 5,515,712
An apparatus and a method for testing internal combustion engines aredisclosed. In the preferred arrangement the apparatus includes a test module supporting an electric
U.S. Patent Number 5,246,086
An internal combustion engine oil change system including an oil filtersupplied with a check valve fill fitting. During an oil change, new oil is
U.S. Patent Number 4,862,859
A method and apparatus for operating an electric ignition, internalcombustion engine that substantially improves the fuel efficiency by utilizing heat normally discharged to the
U.S. Patent Number 4,637,365
A method and apparatus for operating an internal combustion engine thatsubstantially improves the fuel efficiency by utilizing heat normally discharged to the ambient to
U.S. Patent Number 4,592,329
A method and apparatus for operating an electric ignition, internalcombustion engine that substantially improves the fuel efficiency by utilizing heat normally discharged to the
U.S. Patent Number 4,503,833
A method and apparatus for operating an electric ignition, internalcombustion engine that substantially improves the fuel efficiency by utilizing heat normally discharged to the
U.S. Patent Number 4,467,752
An internal combustion engine having a cylinder 16, a cylinder head 10, anda piston 12 slidably mounted within the cylinder for reciprocating movement towards
U.S. Patent Number 4,068,635
A valve is interposed between spaced valve seats of a conduit having end portions communicating with the ends of an internal combustion engine valve
Re:great! (Score:5, Insightful)
And when did 50 MPG become some sort of incredible technological triumph in the first place?
It's actually pretty easy to make a vehicle from the 1980s get 50 MPG via modifications. Machine the engine to incredibly tight tolerances, use super high quality oil, implement some stuff that modern cars already do via computerized fuel injection, strip out the emission controls, preheat gasoline (which is what appears to be done here)...50 MPG is impressive, but not some sort of impossible thing.
In fact, a lot of the patents in that list appear to be carburetor tricks for creating air-fuel mixes. Anyone who thinks they are even slightly useful does not quite understand that a) we've moved past carburetors, and b) the fuel-injection systems we replaced them with already do many of those 'tricks', or don't need them. Fuel injectors are constantly adjusting based on engine temp and all sorts of things, and do not operate by by the crazy method of 'mixing air and gas by hitting a moving metal flap with gasoline' which required all sorts of odd tricks to make things work right.
In short: The guy was right. By correctly varying the air-fuel mixture, much higher MPGs can be reached. It's how we went from 20 MPG in the 80s to 40 MPGs now. The problem is, while _he_ was working on stupid carburetor tricks, other people were inventing fuel injection operated by computers that do all this stuff magically.
And the problem with the _rest_ of the changes, tightening tolerances and whatnot, is now you've made the car 10 times as expensive, as all that has to be done by hand...and the damn engine will blow up at the slightest piece of dirt that gets in, or when the oil pressure drops by 10%, or just rip itself apart when you run out of gas. And oil costs about fifty times what it should.
Any idiot can get rid of a dozen 'inefficiencies' of an automobile engine that actually exist because the thing is designed to operate, and be maintained, and parts replaced, in real world conditions, not a damn clean room. Car companies do not sell cars like that, as they would not make it out of the two-year warranty.
Re:great! (Score:4, Interesting)
Search for any combination of "butamax gevo patent sue suit" etc etc.
These guys are having to fight over obvious refinements of the ABE process for making butanol, you can look it up on Wikipedia or numerous other places.
And when I say "these guys" I mean a company that wants to actually make and sell Butanol, a "green, clean" 1:1 replacement for gasoline with lower emissions versus Butamax, which is owned by BP and DuPont, who has sued them to prevent them from producing fuel.
I hear it is theoretically possible to get a permit to operate a still for the purpose of producing fuel, and you might even be able to use it for road fuel if you're willing to pay the taxes on it.
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Is there any evidence... clean energy technology" being bought out and extinguished by the oil industry?
You are welcome [slashdot.org]
Close, but no cigar (Score:3)
You will never actually reach production with things like this, for the same reason you will never reach a wall by moving in increments of 1/2.
Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox has a resolution. This is more like the Rockefeller Contraction (apologies to Hendrik Lorentz).
Re:great! (Score:5, Funny)
> No, see as you approach feasibility, your likelihood of being bough by a competing producer to be extinguished (see gasoline) becomes multitudes greater.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but do you have a reference?
My own suspicion is that as you approach feasibility, government grant money tends to increase, but if you *achieve* practical feasibility, grant money evaporates. Therefore, to maximize funding, you must asymptotically approach feasibility.
But I'm willing to hear a different theory.
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Fusion research is most likely somewhat ahead of where predictions made in the 70's said it would be, given the funding (decreasing) it has received since then. The "always 50 years away" thing is a stupid meme.
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Right, but like any long lasting memes, there is a kernel of truth, which, one might say, could be attributed to a number of factors, like, at first not understanding the difficulty, and later underestimating the pace of research.
Also right, we're a lot further along now. We now have knowledge of many techniques that don't work, and a few techniques that *almost* work.
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> What we do know is that Tokamaks don't work.
Agreed. So a way must be found to cut funding of things that have been proven over long periods of time to not work, and start funding promising new lines of research. Good luck with that. Another part of the catch 22 is that the longer something has been funded (and not worked) the more inertia the project has.
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Re:great! (Score:5, Insightful)
All they have to do to make profit is make it cheaper then current forms of electricity. This will not be back yard inventor stuff where every home is powered by one built out of spare parts. It will be something sitting on a large site with power transmissions lines coming to it that is selling the electricity on a market. If it costs more to make then current forms, it will not be used. If it costs less, it will be implemented.
But what's the timeline for "low cost" energy? (Score:4, Interesting)
And how low cost will it be actually?
Let's assume that the Sandia technique/technology results in sustained net-positive fusion by the end of 2013. The results are so positive that a small-scale concept plant that will push to the grid gets built, by, say 2020.
This works well enough and there's enough refinement that a full-scale 8 GW plant can be built. By what, 2035? This plant is so successful that by 2050 there are maybe 4-5 more built an in operation.
So we have a lead time of 2050 for less than 50 GW of power. Considering total production is something like 1300 GW, it hardly seems like a threat to anything or a source of the vaunted "free" energy.
Even if you manage increase production by a factor of 10 to 500 GW capacity, what will fund the grid expansion to deliver all this free energy? Will the cost of electrically powered stuff go down -- or up, now that "everything" is made to run on electricity and the demand for rare earths, copper and other related materials goes way up?
Re:But what's the timeline for "low cost" energy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Large scale is very dumb. Make 25KW units and put thousands of them across the city. Cheaper, easier, and reliability of the grid goes up dramatically.
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"Large scale is very dumb"
Well, small scale units are just big magnets with a cold beryllium cylinder at the centre. They're not power plants.
In order to get this type of fusion to work, you have to input a few dozen times the world's power output for a few nanoseconds, contain the core as it is heated to 6 billion degrees kelvin in under a microsecond, manage 2.7 megajoules of xray radiation, contain an atomic-bomb scale EMP, shape one of the strongest magnetic fields in the galaxy as it collapses and ens
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Stop right there!
The word "sustained" appears neither in the summary or the article.
Anyway, I think it's best to talk about the implications of their experiments only after they've been done.
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Let's assume that the Sandia technique/technology results in sustained
Stop right there! The word "sustained" appears neither in the summary or the article.
Hence starting with "let us ASSUME ..."
You think someone will buy Sandia? (Score:3)
Do you know who they are? The .gov address might give you a clue but it is Sandia National Laboratories. They are one of the DoE's research labs. It's where they do research relating to nuclear weapons, among other things. This isn't something the oil companies have any sway over or ability to grab.
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You will never actually reach production with things like this, for the same reason you will never reach a wall by moving in increments of 1/2.
You mean you won't reach production because you're too fucking stupid to realize that "an infinite number of intervals of diminishing size" is completely different from "an infinite distance", even after it's been explained to you dozens of times by multiple people over the course of more than 2000 years?
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Re:great! (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't that mean the people own the technology developed - so if anything does come of this - who is going to tell the taxpayer who funded this that he can't go build one for himself or sell the power he can make off of his unit?
Or give him any authority to tell his neighbor not to do the same should his neighbor want to do likewise?
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Yes, it will be reduced all the way to "twenty minutes into the future".
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Or
Two Minutes to Midnight
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Irwin Allen notwithstanding, fusion reactors don't spectacularly detonate.
Re:great! (Score:4, Funny)
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I don' care who you are, that's funny there.
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I once filled a balloon with 2:1 hydrogen/oxygen mix, and applied a candle-on-a-very-long-stick. It's great fun. Not much of a flash, but one really loud bang.
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Is that you Eddie [wikipedia.org]?
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You're saying that Channel XXIII will buy them out?
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Some basic math says 20-50*~6; which makes for 120-300 years away.
It's good to see someone being realistic instead of just pulling numbers out of the air.
I know nothing of physics, but... (Score:5, Informative)
...I just want you guys to know that "Sandía" means "watermelon" in Spanish.
Oh, also: I hope this leads to a new, efficient and clean type of energy.
Re:I know nothing of physics, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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So this new fusion tech is not only going to be green (at least on the outside), but also delicious? Sounds like a win to me!
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That's because this project is green on the outside and in the red on the inside.
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"Why is there a watermelon there?"
"I'll tell you later"
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I love it when people bring up that movie - it's one of my favorites in the SciFi genre, introduced to me by my NT4 MCSE instructor.
Yes, it was one of the only practical things I learned in that class that I didn't already know.
Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Stop hating. "cold fusion" != "fusion" (Score:2, Interesting)
All the previous vaporware and false claims about fusion are about "cold fusion". This is not the same thing. Accusations of being vaporware would only be valid if the word "cold" appeared in the summary, which it does not.
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Even warm fusion has fun poked at it for being constantly "fifty years away".
Re:Stop hating. "cold fusion" != "fusion" (Score:5, Informative)
Which it hasn't really been for a decade now, and wouldn't have been like that if fusion had been receiving the funding it deserves. Of all non-service industries energy has the lowest research funding to revenue ratio, and super-majority of that has been towards fracking and ethanol.
This is a self-perpetuating myth if ever there was one. My money's on FocusFusion to beat sandia to net+ though.
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Nuclear energy research has been funded the same way the internet was funded, the usual way research gets publicly funded in the US (or for that matter, elsewhere): The promise of military applications.
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We got some VERY big bombs out of that deal.
Re:Stop hating. "cold fusion" != "fusion" (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I remember when we had the MIT fusion research Slashdot Interview, and they showed the graph that was presented in the 70s showing how soon they could have fusion given various funding levels.
The saddest part was of the various scenarios like "fusion in 10 years", "fusion in 20 years", there was a "fusion never" line where funding was never sufficient to yield breakeven fusion, and then there was overlaid a new "actual funding" line which was significantly lower than that. :(
P.S. Personally my money is on Sandia, but that's just because the old Z-Machine was the most fucking awesome thing ever. EVER. [sandia.gov] I admit this is not a rational scientific argument, and that a working Z-pinch fusion device would not look like that at all, but come on!
Re:Stop hating. "cold fusion" != "fusion" (Score:4, Informative)
Here is the interview, [slashdot.org], and Here is the graph [imgur.com].
Funding fusion power is probably the best thing we can do for the environment right now.
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near end of 2013? (Score:4, Insightful)
so uhh.. call us in a year if it works, ok? that the parts which are known to work do work isn't really news you know.
Tubes Eaten Away (Score:5, Funny)
How much energy goes into the production of the liner tubes, which are apparently eaten away throughout the course of the fusion reaction? Obviously this is all preliminary research, but I still think I'm missing something.
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We're saved!!
Tubes? You mean the Interwebs? (Score:2)
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And presumably they can construct the liners for less (both in terms of money and energy) than they feel they will eventually be able to get out of the fusion reaction. It's not like every other method of producing energy doesn't have som
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You should read the article. Passing such a high current through the tube causes it to ionise.
Re:Tubes Eaten Away (Score:5, Informative)
Time for a world famous /. vlm engineering estimate.
The tubes are vaporized by the magnetic crunch. Optimistically they're getting a thousand times the power out as in, or far more than a thousand times the power it takes to vaporize the tube (because most of the power is going into squashing the contents, otherwise whats the point...).
I'm sure they're using beryllium because of its legendary stiffness, not because they love toxic dust. Lets say they use aluminum in a later model. Both light low Z metals of decent strength although beryllium is better. If beryllium oxides were not so toxic we've have airplanes made out of it, not just space satellites and the occasional exotic RF transistor ceramic heatsink. But I digress. Off the top of my head it costs about 5 KWh as an order of magnitude engineering estimate to electrorefine a pound of aluminum. It takes immensely more energy to vaporize a pound of aluminum. An hour in a 5 KW ceramics kiln might melt a pound aluminum... but vaporization is much harder. I'll estimate incredibly low and say you can vaporize a pound of aluminum with only 5 KWh. LOL this is probably 1 or maybe even 2 orders of magnitude low, but its best to be extremely pessimistic... I'm not counting the machining energy or transport, both of which will be much smaller.
So I'd feel fairly confident that a pound or so of aluminum tube, costing about 5 KWh to refine, should generate about 5000 KWh when the deuterium inside the tubes gets squooshed. Not bad.
Another crappy engineering order of magnitude estimate is you gotta burn a pound of coal to make a KWh. And you can earn a tidy profit burning coal to make electricity, for better or worse... WRT materials handling transport and mining/ore/coal processing and storage standpoint, those are not an issue as long as you can get more than one KWH out of a pound of the "stuff", since it's clearly no issue with coal at a pitiful KWh per pound. This thing is getting 5000 KWh out of a pound of aluminum tubes (well, once they're filled up with D2).
No as a first approximation I'm not seeing any fundamental issues with the tubes. This isn't like using up 2 barrels of crude oil to grow and refine 1 barrel equivalent of ethanol. The tubes will be a substantial fraction of the operating expense. Not as significant as jetfuel to a airline, or coal to a powerplant, but more significant than say, the cost of in flight cookies to a airline.
Re:Tubes Eaten Away (Score:5, Informative)
Finally a chance to play god (Score:2)
Betteridge's Law of Headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Betteridge's Law of Headlines (Score:5, Informative)
A simulation shows that experiments scheduled for next year could work.
Not exactly. This was an actual experiment showing that previously done simulations were correct. They needed to figure out the correct thickness to make the liners to balance implosion speed with vaporization due to extreme current, the simulations said this was a sweet spot, and the experiment said that indeed this would work.
Of course this is just one more step in the design - simulate - experiment cycle, but still, at least it is about a real result.
Also, I'm just glad to be hearing about further progress from the Z-Machine folks at Sandia since I hadn't in quite a while. So even though it's not the final goal, it's still good news.
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I hereby introduce Maxwell Demon's Law of Headlines: Whenever a headline ends in a question mark on Slashdot, there will be no shortage of comments mentioning or implicitly referring to Betteridge's Law Of Headlines.
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Are we trying to make a meme out of this?
Or vagina?
The most beautiful science (Score:5, Informative)
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The photos of the Z machine have to be seen to be believed, and even then, it is grade A sci-fi: http://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/ [sandia.gov]
Middle right photo - Pretty sure I've seen that room before. Shortly thereafter I was hitting head crabs with a crowbar.
obligatory xkcd (Score:2)
Great! (Score:2)
Now I don't have to start becoming a farmer after all. Not that it is a bad thing but starting it at mid 30 seems late in the game.
Considering that factor of 1000 sounds like a great EROI should be possible, much better than this puny cold fusion stuff.
Now if they could get rid of this metallic liner they are talking about made out of a potentially scarce resource the whole thing
could look perfect once they get beyond the simulation stage.
And we should have it working... (Score:2)
Scientific Breakeven, not Fiscal (Score:5, Interesting)
The Tokamak's have been scientific breakeven for more than a decade, ITER is supposed to achieve fiscal breakeven. What's the difference? Scientific breakeven means you extract more energy than you put into it, but you don't actually try to collect any of the energy. Fiscal breakeven is that added step where you actually try to collect the energy and use it.
See Fusion has this problem in that it's pretty easy to trigger fusion, it's not easy to keep it going and it's damn near impossible to collect any energy from it because all the stuff you have to start the fusion is in the way of collecting any of the energy and all the neutron and alpha particle emissions tend to destroy any materials you put in there to collect the energy.
This is EXACTLY the point of ITER, it's supposed to test the actual engineering of real world (not laboratory) fusion at an economic scale. This testing is costing a lot of money (US contributions are in the $2 Billion dollar range, total economic input from all the partner nations is 25X that amount).
Re:Scientific Breakeven, not Fiscal (Score:4, Informative)
Tokamak's have just reached Q~1 if J-60 were to switch from deuterium to a D-T mix. This is to say that the amount of fusion power being generated is on par with the amount of heating power applied. This is a little short of the "scientific breakeven" you describe, as it does not include power for magnets (and other equipment, but that is much smaller). A more useful goal is a Q~5, since the neutrons carry away about 80% of the power, a Q~5 is would mean the alpha particles left behind in the plasma will be providing about as much as heat as external sources. To account for other inefficiencies, a more practical Q would be a little higher.
ITER's goal is to achieve a Q of 10 for shorter duration plasmas, and to get a Q of 5 for long durations that would be more indicative of a steady state reactor continuously running. These are all in terms of fusion power within the reactor vs. heat applied. ITER will not produce any electricity from the fusion power, it will not be a test of "fiscal breakeven" as you describe it. The plan would be for the successor to ITER, potentially DEMO, to actually produce electrical power and work towards determining economic feasibility and dealing production issues in an actual industrial, instead of research, setting.
I don't see what is so difficult here. (Score:4, Funny)
The apparatus works (Score:2)
But why is that news? They tested it empty, fuel won't even be added until 2013, and analyzing the results of the actual experiment might take even more.
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Because they exceeded the breakeven point with fusion, which is the second most important achievement other than eventually achieving huge energy returns on energy invested. That's the biggest news in fusion since the hydrogen bomb generations ago.
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RTFA, please:
Just in time for the Warp drive (Score:2)
I believe (Score:2)
because I am an idiot and a slow learner.
Energy and..... defence? (Score:2)
an achievement that would have extraordinary energy and defense implications.
Says a lot about the times we live in (or the short sightedness of TFA) when the second biggest benefit of a breakthrough in fusion would be fucking weapons.
I'd be looking forward to a revolution in energy usage and a massive increase in living standards for the entire planet myself, but hey.
Types of fusion and funding (Score:2)
'Unlimited' energy would be such an amazing thing (eclipsing even say lithium-air battery tech, 200" OLED screens, super conductors, or cheap-as-peanuts aerogel) by an order of magnitude or two. If a quarter of the money that went into the Defense budget went into fusion, we'd all be laughing
Nope, False Alarm (Score:2)
This is actually the denoument of the final season of "Breaking Bad." An multi-million anonymous donation from a mysterious "Senor Heisenberg" leads to sustainable fusion research all to late to redeem the hapless Walter White and his family.
One critical line in the story (Score:4, Informative)
That line gave me pause. To make it it practical it would have to operate for at least 6 to 12 months before the lining was changed since you'd have to go into cold shutdown and be off line for weeks. It doesn't sound like they are even close to that kind of durability. This type of issue is what has kept fusion in the lab. They passed break even a long time ago but they only got slightly more power than it took to sustain the reaction so it'd be like building a nuclear plant to power a house. They've really got to get the durability of the liners to exceed 12 months and the lasers to last even longer or the amount of energy you get out won't justify the expense. I'm a big fan of fusion I'm just also a skeptic, I've been following since the 70s. One added benefit of fusion would be an attractive waste bi-product, Helium.
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When they talked about "liners" they are talking about the material that is crushed by the magnetic fields. It's the "bullet casing" to the nuclear slug.
I suspect they're talking about something like this:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/100128-coslog-hohlraum-466px-10a.jpg [msn.com]
Re:Vaporwareized? (Score:5, Funny)
Two flying cars?
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What do you call something that smashes things together but doesn't exist?
A headline! Juuuuust kidding, it's not a headline. It's a PR press release. Look how every sentence is phrased in the future tense and says might or will or could.
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captcha: thighs
I think you're doing that wrong.
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tell me when it's done
I expect you'll know when it happens.
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Wait a sec.... so american "engineers" can manage to get 400 BHP out of a six liter now?
Another few decades of practice and they might make a car worth owning.
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You know how it is...
20 years away?
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Re:No! (Score:5, Insightful)
20 years ago we could produce controlled energy from fusion, but it required a bigger input than output, and only lasted for milliseconds.
Now we can produce controlled energy from fusion, at ratios a little greater than unity, for tens of seconds.
~20 years from now (timetabled for 2035) we will hopefully have a proof-of-concept commercial fusion reactor feeding electricity into the grids.
There's an element of truth in the "power of the future, and always will be!" gag, and it has been a very long hard slog, but advances are being made, albeit slowly compared to the development of fission energy production. That said, the first steam engine was made in ancient Greece, but didn't become a large scale commercial venture until the industrial revolution, and compared to that fusion research has happened in the blink of an eye.
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Newton was right. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Not to worry, citizens, fusion is still $DECADES away!
Re:It's "MLIF", not "MILF" (Score:5, Funny)
Although both terms are hot... one is several million degrees hotter than the other
Both take 40 years to begin production.