[jboy55]

I felt a similar way with the news of the fusion 'breakthrough' around 6 months ago. "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!".

They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.

However, this being a weapons lab, they created the experiment to model the secondary device in an H-Bomb. The secondary is theorized outside the Top Secret world to be a cylindrical tamper of (enriched?) uranium. One hypothesis in the public sphere, is its the primary device's Xrays that cause this to ablate at such a rate and that the inside is compressed to achieve fusion. The purpose of the fusion is primarily for the neutrons it generates, which are used to cause a massive amount of fission in the tamper, producing the majority of the energy. For example, if replace the uranium with another non-fissile material, and you have a "neutron bomb".

The reason the breathless hype annoyed me is that at no point was usable energy the desire of the test. In fact, the test solely was to feed real world data back into the supercomputer models, so that we know how our existing stockpile of weapons would work or even perhaps to find optimizations. We know this mechanism of ablation causing fusion works, we've known for 60+ years, all we're doing is doing it in a lab.

I'm not sure why there is this need to hype these events, like fusion or LK-99 so much. It seems that being a naysayer is reacted to as if the naysayers are explaining a magician's tricks. As if we don't hype these events the public will lose interest, or even our children will drop out of STEM careers.

[EthanHeilman]

> They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.

You are telling me that a US weapons lab just announced a successful path to a laser triggered pure fusion bomb? Yikes!

Not actually sure if it can be used to ignite more fusion fuel, but if they using this to test secondaries then it sounds like it might.

I really hope we get fusion reactors before pure fusion bombs, as pure fusion bombs are going to be a nuclear non-proliferation nightmare. While it might not be easier to built pure fusion bombs than bombs with a fission trigger, controlling the precursors and knowledge is going to be very difficult.

> "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!".

I agree with this statement and it has been true of fusion since at least the early 2000s. Don't underestimate the difficulty of engineering. Safe fission breeder reactors are an engineering problem as well, one which humanity has largely abandoned due to repeated failures.

[jboy55]

I think the most efficient means of delivering so much xrays that kilograms of material can fuse is with the primary stage of an hbomb, which is just an implosion fission bomb. I wouldn't be too worried about this test creating a new weapon.

However... In the early 80s, the SDI initiative aimed to have orbiting satellites that utilized x-ray lasers to shoot down incoming warheads. The theory of these were you had h-bombs in orbit, with long cylinders of a material that would amplify the x-rays from the bomb. You'd point these at the incoming warheads and trigger the bomb and (chefs kiss) you have beams of xrays that would destroy warheads.

One of the major reasons this was skuttled, was that the test they used to find a material they thought amplified xrays was flawed (see below).

With the test-ban treaty, they weren't able to test any other materials. Now we have a facility that tests materials to amplify x-rays...

Sidenote: The test was, explode a bomb in a tunnel, shut the tunnel down with explosives to trap the shockwave, then use the xrays to test materials to withstand x-rays as well as amplify them. Teller thought they had seen amplification and sold the military on the satellite idea. Another scientist, thought it was a secondary thermal effect on Oxygen. There is an interesting story about the back and forth, and the pressure to have another scientist lose his credentials for disagreeing with Teller, that is a good follow on to the Oppenheimer story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur

[EthanHeilman]

> I think the most efficient means of delivering so much xrays that kilograms of material can fuse is with the primary stage of an hbomb, which is just an implosion fission bomb.

I agree with you, if you have fission triggers, you aren't going to want to use lasers. At least with today's lasers.

> I wouldn't be too worried about this test creating a new weapon.

My concern is that NNP has focused on controlling access to fissionable material, so potentially this is a path to h-bomb that doesn't require fissionable material. As lasers get better, secondaries that don't use controlled fission materials become a risk. At what point does the world start having to worry about controlling access to lasers? How does this impact the future research and funding of lasers?

Additionally if you can test h-bombs without tests. This also makes it easier to develop and test a h-bomb without revealing you have an h-bomb. Typically nuclear weapons tests are detectable via seismographs.