The tech is laughable


Just thought I'd point out, the "fusion tech" is hilariously contemptible.

Shia's "clean fusion" tech is a laughable mishmosh of existing half-working pie-in-the-sky techs.

OTC might be made to work on its own. Why attempt to use it to power a fusion engine seems doubtful. If you're getting enough out of it to power a fusion reaction, it doesn't need fusion to be profitable.

And laser fusion itself is hardly a new tech, it's a good 30+ years old already (see "inertial confinement"). As with the 40+ year old "magnetic confinement" concept, there are substantial engineering issues which have yet to be overcome to the point of breakeven -- that is more energy back than gets put into it to make the fusion happen. Which makes the pointlessness of attempting to power a fusion reaction with the OTC energy. You'd get back less than you were generating in the first place. Why would you not power things with it directly?

P.S., fusion is a nuclear reaction. "Combustion" is a chemical one. Anyone who knows wtf they are talking about, as Shia's character supposedly does -- would never confuse/conflate the two. Of course, the writers, and/or Shia, didn't bother to even ask a bright high school physics geek to read through the tech in question for a few ideas.

reply

It's just Oliver Stone's oversimplified fantasies on how he thinks the world can be fixed

reply

You're completely right except that even people in fusion research talk about "burning" Hydrogen fuel when they mean fusion. It's kind of a horrible shorthand that's stuck and causes endless confusion.

reply