4min chapter

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating cover image

Laser Fusion: Is it Hype? Professor Charles Seife (#283)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

CHAPTER

The Energy Source of the Future

Fermi and the Manhattan Project proved that you could do this in a controlled fashion in a pile. And for political reasons, Edward Teller wanted to have these shitty busting bombs rather than just the ones which would devastate downtown Hiroshima. So he figured out a device that used a fission bomb to generate enough x-rays to cause pressure to implode a secondary full of light elements. The big one was I.V. Mike in November 1951. It's not so great if you want to generate energy and put it on the grid. That happened in the early 1950s first with what's called a boosted reaction where you kind of increase the power of a fission reaction by

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