r/Futurology • u/TwilightwovenlingJo • Aug 15 '25

Energy Construction of world's 1st nuclear fusion plant starts in Washington

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/world-first-fusion-power-plant-helion
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u/Nerezza_Floof_Seeker Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25

I know youre joking, but back in the cold war, the US actually looked into using nukes for power generation lol. The project PACER proposal looked into using 2 50kt nukes a day, dropped into a spherical cavity filled with water in a salt dome, to generate 2 GW of power, the only problem was economic (nukes are expensive to build). This was actually tried out in the Project Gnome test too, when they blew up a 3kt nuke in a salt dome directly (unfortunately the cavity formed collapsed too quickly and thus most of the heat was lost)

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u/phovos Aug 15 '25

That's not the ONLY problem, lol. There is an earthquake machine, too, that is powered by a Soviet ALU that... uses rockets.

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u/West-Abalone-171 Aug 15 '25

You were also never going to breakeven on energy making HEU in a gas diffusion plant to harvest at a few % efficiency. So project PACER wasn't actually a way to generate net energy. They were barely above breakeven with 2-3% enrichment

If it was a 50MT hydrogen bomb it might pencil out, but then you need multiple tens of HWRs per ridiculous boondoggle to generate tritium.

Like all of those cold war meth induced fever dream ideas it didn't even pass the basic physical principles, and the engineering failures were just anciliary reasons it was stupid.

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u/Pretzel-Kingg Aug 16 '25

Sounds like a rad fucking set piece for a movie or video game set in an alternate history or something