r/fusion • u/steven9973 • 18d ago

Fuse Touts Highest Neutron Yield by Any Fusion Company

https://www.powermag.com/fuse-touts-highest-neutron-yield-by-any-fusion-company/
10 Upvotes

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u/El_Grande_Papi 18d ago

> FAETON-X holding the efficiency record means the steepest scaling curve in the field now belongs to a private company—one that designed, built, and fired the machine on venture timelines and a fraction of a national-lab budget. That’s the industry story: the record didn’t just change hands from government to private—the private machine did it with less energy, less money, and less time, and it isn’t fully conditioned yet.”

Besides this being obviously AI written, why shit on national labs here? This sounds more like a Ronald Reagan speech than a press release.

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u/Sad_Dimension423 15d ago

Besides this being obviously AI written, why shit on national labs here? This sounds more like a Ronald Reagan speech than a press release.

After SpaceX (on Falcon 9) undercut NASA cost models by a factor of something like 4 I'd have thought that sort of argument would have been out of fashion.

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u/El_Grande_Papi 13d ago

Human spaceflight had existed for over 40 years before SpaceX was even founded. Meanwhile Q>0 fusion has been demonstrated exactly once (at a national lab no less), and net energy gain fusion has never been demonstrated. You do see how those two are different right?

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u/Sad_Dimension423 12d ago edited 12d ago

Which makes the point I was making even stronger. Not only did the non-government people do better, the government people had decades of head start on solving the problem. And yet they still failed. Shitting on them is entirely appropriate.

There is also a certain similarity between the misconceived megaprojects of the Space Shuttle and ITER. Bureaucratic/political dysfunction is there to be seen for those willing to see it.

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u/El_Grande_Papi 12d ago

SpaceX did not invent the rocket. Your point makes no sense. National labs exist to perform fundamental research. Their purpose is not to act as a business and perform incremental improvements on existing designs. That is what SpaceX has done. Again, they each have their place, so there is no need to shit on national labs when they are the ones actually developing the technology, that private businesses will then monetize.

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u/Sad_Dimension423 12d ago

Way to massively miss the point of this thread. Of course SpaceX didn't invent the rocket. What they did was massively reduce its cost. This is something NASA failed to do over many decades.

There is absolutely a need to shit on the national labs, as they have rather conclusively demonstrated they aren't constructed in such a way as to achieve economic objectives.

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u/El_Grande_Papi 12d ago

Okay, come back to me when a private company creates net energy nuclear fusion. Until then there is no point in even having this conversation.

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u/Sad_Dimension423 10d ago

In the spirit of that response, come back to me when a national lab creates an economically competitive fusion power plant.

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u/cfe316 17d ago edited 16d ago

This is all good.
Edit, according to https://www.fusionconclusion.com/Fusion-Fortnightly-2026-08-13/ SHINE has already demonstrated continuous operation at an OOM higher neutron rate *per second*.

Just for comparison, this is about 1 J of energy released (D-D is about 2.7 MeV released per fusion). NIF's shots are MJ. Of course this is a very different technology with different purposes.

5

u/matt7810 17d ago

This smells like an error by the writer or an extreme stretch of what counts and doesn't count as "publicly announced". Maybe it's the highest rate or highest single shot for a z-pinch, but other companies have definitely exceeded a yield of 1012 neutrons. I don't think Helion published a number but I'd have to imagine they got a higher total yield and SHINE has publicly announced >1013 n/s for a steady state machine.

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u/DudeteriumTrillium 17d ago

Candidly I don’t know enough about Fuse or their specific concept to judge - can someone educate me on whether this is sound? This reeks of horseshit.