There's lots of interesting fission reactor tech out there. Liquid sodium, thorium, "breeder", and they certainly solve the solid waste issue far better than the current generation.

But any kind of fission is a hard sell these days, specially anything that can (or potentially) produce enriched materials usable for "other purposes".

Fission certainly scales, but gets fiendishly complex as you do so...sort of like the last generation piston engines for airliners. They put out the power, but were nightmarish in complexity.

Fusion, on the other hand, is turbine like in simplicity if you get the tech right. Fuel is everywhere, scales well, and no pesky emissions or solid waste products that someone could do bad things with.

If what they say is true, and (sooner, rather than later) you could just drive a semi up, plug it in, and start chugging out the megawatts, then that is not only a game changer, but really, a revolution that will change human society forever. Just the socio-economics alone will re-write international relations as we know it. It also opens up the solar system to cheap (relatively) exploitation.

I would expect a novel solution would come from in the industrial complex like LM/SW but we've seen this show many times before. Sometimes all it takes is someone to put the tech pieces together in a new way....like the fascinating story like how the polymerase chain reaction was turned from a complicated novelty to something so ubiquitous that it's absence would now be almost unthinkable.

That said, what LM put out was light on details and rich in promises, so I'll remain skeptical until people start paying to have crude oil hauled away as waste.

Nu