Yep, corruption is certainly a marker of authoritarian governments. Running bribes through partial ownership of private companies is probably a common mechanism. Presumably, the people at TAE think they are better off, so the market is valuing the government connection at $500 million.
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People are saying nobody knows nuclear fusion better than the Trump kids.
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If they develop efficient nuclear fusion they will earn my respect.
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Well, now that we got rid of Biden inflation, it should be affordable again.
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The fusion breakthrough will always be happening next month, as long as the money keeps flowing.
The amount that has been spent makes my head spin. I have been waiting my whole life for a nuclear fusion breakthrough but expect I will go to my grave still waiting.
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They keep this charade going to get more money.
Back in the day (mid 00s) when I went to study Nuclear Engineering in the US, I ended up deciding on studying Plasma Physics at the graduate level (the next step in this type of career choice was fusion-based research at Ph. D level)
The problem has always been the same: you use up more energy in the fusion process vs what they extract from it. Even the vast improvements in materials science over the past 20Y has not cracked this problem beyond a few milliseconds.
I did laugh out loud when I saw the Trump grift machine going into fusion based VC funding. I bet lots of taxpayer money is headed their way now.
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that is the real energy machine that fusion should be modeled after. infinite capacity and output
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I believe that the first time I heard the word “energy” used as an economic concept was in 1969. The story was that cheap fossil fuels were a necessary condition for modern lifestyles. But, fossil fuels were getting harder to extract. They would inevitably get more expensive, ordinary people wouldn’t be able to afford them, and society would collapse. Our only plausible hope was limitless clean energy from fusion.
For a while, I was optimistic about laser ignition. I thought the inherently small scale was neat. But, it fizzeled. Other projects didn’t do any better.
It turned out that while governments were funding massive fusion research, the Chinese were simply making solar panel manufacturing more efficient. It seems to me that 80% of humans live in places where solar is already the cheap, clean energy source of the future. Fusion just didn’t make it in time. (and, of course, Trump gets elected and the US gets all anti-solar)
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National Geographic had a long article in their November 2025 issue on the multi-country funded International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project in France. I was blown away by the billions of dollars in funding and the personnel involved in this quixotic quest. I am only a layperson but I just can’t see how this can be a worthwhile activity given the energy required to make fusion possible. There are better alternatives.
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One reason might be that scientists might be more interested in working on fusion instead of solar. Solar is pretty much a known quantity but fusion is cutting edge science with nobel prizes for whoever gets there first.
We can’t use solar power. It’s not manly enough so it doesn’t work right like nuclear and coal power does. /s
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I am in favor of funding fusion. As far as i am aware, there are only (admittedly hard) engineering challenges to making it work. And the payoff is very large. But i understand it as basic science to be funded by governments, not innovation to be funded by venture capital.
We should also be investing in solar as well, and now. We are not. But i don’t think that is because of fusion research.
When you say investing, do you mean in research, or in installation, because we are installing lots of solar right now.
I suppose i mean to have government policies that favor investment in solar. My understanding is that we are not doing that, or are reversing what we have done. Instead we seem to be targeting additional oil in venezuela.
my post did kind of mix up comments on government policy with comments about private capital investment.
Time for someone to simply leak the whole story via “social” “media” or whatever. If it’s so important, it needs to be published. No need to be loyal to CBS anymore.
Oh,. I’m sure there is some “CBS owns this story, so CBS can do what it wants with it” stuff.
It’s already out there. I don’t know how rapidly CBS will get the various versions taken down.
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US Democracy is very much in danger from these people.
David Ellison is just a puppet of Ellison Sr.
And you should be very concerned about his views because he is 100% in favour of an authoritarian surveillance state.