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by chriswarbo 1721 days ago
> We’ve known how to get positive energy out of fusion fuel since thermonuclear weapons in 1952

Indeed, the brute-force approach is to simply detonate a hydrogen bomb underground, tap off steam, then repeat. That was seriously investigated (I believe as part of Project Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare ), but the high cost of the bombs made it uncompetitive with other methods.