Hey, I do that to you all the time!

I basically wrote a chunk of a WSJ article that I'd not read until now, and took a perspective somewhere between extreme skepticism and VC-fueled overhype. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the private sector has taken an interest in the industry, but we miiiiiight be living in a bubble at the moment, and people are gonna lose some capital.

FTA:

“The thing with fusion is, it’s impossible to have an accident; there’s no long-term waste and you can’t weaponize it,” says Christopher Mowry, the chief executive officer of General Fusion, a Canadian startup backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Ehhhh, about the accidents... I guess in the sense that maybe only a lab tech and all your lab equipment could get badly burned in a particularly terrible loss of plasma confinement, it's impossible to have an accident? It's fair to say that a "meltdown" is impossible, that's a fission thing.

Spot on about "can't be weaponized" and "not terribly radioactive byproducts", though.

One more thing I'll add is that the current schemes involve using the generated heat to boil water. Sure, the specific heat of water is high, so it efficiently stores energy, but there's gotta be a better way to output energy directly as a voltage (even AC; a 1/60[Hz] period is basically forever to the fusion regimes of plasmas) instead of going through water to spin turbines. Even if we get room temperature superconductors or other materials science voodoo, there's all kinds of problems to solve. It won't be like "Welp, MIT's VC crew beat us to the punch. Turn it in, team." Job security!