TAE is a private company and the merger with Trump Media would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies.
Trump Media & Technology will merge with a fusion power company in an all-stock deal that the companies said Thursday is valued at more than $6 billion.
Devin Nunes, the Republican congressman who resigned in 2021 to become the CEO of Trump Media, will be co-CEO of the new company with TAE Technologies CEO Michl Binderbauer.
TAE focuses on nuclear fusion, a technology that combines two light atomic nuclei to form a single heavier one. It releases enormous amount of energy, a process that occurs on the sun and other stars, according to the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
I had to double check this wasn’t the onion …
Mandatory reminder that Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into a trust to avoid conflict of interest accusations.
He also put solar panels on the White House roof. Which Reagan removed.
Hopefully, whoever the next president is will remove the ballroom.
Why would Trump Jr. remove it? (/s, I hope)
Nah. Keep it and redecorate and/or repurpose it. Then rename it to something super woke. Spend as little money as possible since it’s probably coming from our tax dollars to do this shit every four fucking years.
What a sucker! He should have used the power of the presidency to bully his way into a merger with IBM. Surely no one would have objected.
Reminder some European physicist working in nuclear fusion at MIT was just murdered under suspicious circumstances. 😏
A competing entity as well. Curious.
its too sad for me to accept the usage of an emoji on that piece of terrible news. Like if it was a CEO i wouldn’t have posted this comment. Losing a scientist hurts.
And just days after the murder of an MIT nuclear fusion professor…
What’s that now?
The prosecutor’s office said no suspects had been taken into custody
Huh. I guess not being a healthcare CEO really puts a damper on the whole investigative process.
Well, the suspect was just just found dead so they didn’t take all that long
So this is why he was assasinated
I’m sorry, but what the fuck?
You don’t need to apologize.
Ah the days of crazy pills are SO back.
They never left, they are just horse pills now with unclear labeling.
Pardon my French but que le putain est ce merde?
I just posted how I’ve grown skeptical of nuclear fusion.
This site outlines some misgivings quite well: https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/
As one example, the “lack of radioactivity,” an often touted benefit of fusion, is just… not true. In fact, D-T fusion releases much higher energy neutrons than any fission, and that’s inevitably going to degrade the equipment, turn it radioactive, and wreak all sorts of havoc.
Tritium production isn’t easy, nor particularly sustainable.
Many of fission’s “problems” it’s supposed to solve, like storing hot waste or the finite supply of uranium, really aren’t that big a deal, and can be addressed with the extra expense/engineering of breeder reactors or (possibly) thorium reactors if it’s so important.
Proliferation? Fusion reactors are great at producing fissile material.
Other issues, like fission’s required capital investment, are clearly worse with fusion, and don’t seem to be improving. Heck, we don’t even have the capital or political will for newer fission reactors.
Look. I want a fusion breakthough. This was a good avenue to try.
…But now, fusion feels like one of those interesting ideas that turned out to not be so practical in reality (not yet anyway), now transitioning into a grift.
And if Trump Media buying a fusion startup to put it on the market isn’t a red flag, I don’t know what is.
Ah damn, I hadn’t even thought of that but of course they’d be just working on tritium fusion rather than H1 fusion. So not even the power of a brown dwarf, which fuses deuterium. Hydrogen is very abundant but tritium much less so. That might be a game breaker on its own, since the price of tritium will only go up when it is in demand for scaled fusion.
I’ve also wondered if fusion reactors will have a “plasma jet” mode of failure where the magnetic field containing the highly pressurized plasma partially fails and shoots out a beam of plasma that will quickly cut through anything in its path.
I agree that they should keep working on it (though not expecting big things from this particular company, other than maybe nuclear arms production). But it’s starting to look similar to space travel outside of our immediate neighborhood: a nice idea that physics will probably laugh and say not so fast!
H1 fusion is really, really hard.
Yeah, I don’t know about leaks. It may end up that pulses or some “alternate” form of compression than constant confinement works out better, but the physics are certainly hard however you slice it.
Nah, the point is to get a sweetheart deal when they inevitably file for bankruptcy because they are a budding energy company taking big risks on new tech, not a media company hemorrhaging money at an unsustainable rate, silly goose!
There we go. That’s the angle I was looking for. I was curious what the grift was, but now this opens them up to getting energy subsidies and protections.
It’s part of the AI hype train too. Energy is hot in the stock market, with the idea being scale up for all these chip fabs and data centers we’ll need for infinite AI.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because there was a similar energy craze over cryptomining. Though not at this scale.
its probably specifically the neutrons degrading the core chamber, is whats going to prevent any commercial, or even useful advancement of it, because the cost of maintenance,
Yeah, I think we’ll be able to figure out fusion. I just don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of it being cheaper than a bunch of solar panels and batteries. Hell, a big solar farm connected to a big hydrogen generator and hydrogen tank will probably be a much cheaper way of generating power than by using fusion reactors. The big fusion reactor in the sky is just going to end up being much cheaper.
But now, fusion feels like one of those interesting ideas that turned out to not be so practical in reality (not yet anyway), now transitioning into a grift.
2020’s: Time to invest! We’re like 5 years away from fusion reactors, hyper loops, and general AI!
2040’s: Time to invest! We’re like 5 years away from fusion reactors, hyper loops, and general AI!
But hey at least the world now has Ai-powered human-slaying drone swarms thanks to all that VC. 👍
To be clear, I don’t want to hate on tech investment. Fusion has to be tried to see if it works.
But it’s got a lot of tries, more than its fair shair IMO. Imagine if we split all that cash between fission, thorium, solar, laser drilled geothermal, things like that.
Until the last 10 years, fusion barely got any funding in America, and similar levels elsewhere. Here’s a budget projection from decades back that should give some perspective on the inevitable outcome, and why optimism has been so high lately.
As to the radioactivity issue, fusion would irradiate the equipment with isotopes of very short half-life, but the volume would be no more than with fission, and at a much lower radioactivity requiring decades of storage rather than millennia. It also aids in anti-proliferation as a fusion reaction won’t generate significant fissile material under normal operation, unlike fission. So it could be used in countries that aren’t feasible now with strict regulations such as maintaining a minimum lithium enrichment level.
It doesn’t produce waste isotopes directly, no, but the neutron radiation creates new radioactive isotopes within whatever equipment is in range. And AFAIK it’s harder to stop than fission because the D-T fusion neutrons are 14.1 MeV. And separately from that, it degrades the equipment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_embrittlement
Which seems pretty significant when fusion needs so much equipment hugging the reactor chamber. It would complicate cleaning, too.
That changes with other types of fusion, but D-T is all we got now.
As for proliferation… again, it’s a great neutron source. It doesn’t have the same waste, no, but countries can absolutely use it to breed fissile material if they want.
And let’s say, hypothetically, a country goes against regulators and decides they’re going to breed material with their fusion reactor. With some trouble, they can use it to make tritium too. The supply couldn’t be cut off.
Ah, so we’re living in the Final Fantasy Vii timeline? When do they start drafts for SOLIDER?
TAE focuses on nuclear fusion, a technology that combines two light atomic nuclei to form a single heavier one. It releases enormous amount of energy
… theoretically, if it could be achieved. Is this company purely a research company? How can one be a “Nuclear Fusion” company, when there’s currently no such thing as sustainable fusion?
My guess is in the same way companies claim to be Artificial Intelligence companies?
Pretty sure we’ve achieved sustainable fusion. What I think is missing is making it cost effective and scalable.
I think the record is like 22 minutes, not sure if I would call that sustainable yet.
I recall reading an article where we once had a fusion reactor that put out more energy than we put into it, but both I and the author may have hallucinated it
I think that’s technically true for whatever small duration it happened, but we’re a long way off from commercial viability.
it costed 10s of billions just to do that. its probably wont go down anytime soon,. you might as well built several nuclear power plants at that point.
which makes you think its a laundering company, especially since trumps involved.
By developing technologies and licencing the patents.
I guess the news is just madlibs now
How crazy would it be if Trump’s corruption and conflicts of interest are what gets us to invest in cold fusion and make it a practical, scalable energy source.
Doubt it. Probably end up like another one of his casinos.
There’s like a dozen companies already working in fusion reactors. This would only siphon money away from projects that might actually produce something useful
Exactly this. Guarantee at some point down the line there’s a bill or budget passed that allocates a bunch of money to fusion research (“Puuting America on the forefront of vital emerging technologies that will power this great nation throughout the 21st century!”) and then this company, surprise, wins a bid to get allocated a big portion of that funding.
You’re assuming good faith when it’s only about the grift. They don’t care at all if it succeeds, it’s only about what they can skim off the top. They’re leeches, they bleed the host dry and move on to the next victim.
Where on earth did I say any of that? My dude, I am literally describing the nature of the grift.
gets us to invest in cold fusion
I don’t doubt it.
and make it a practical, scalable energy source
Some of us remember that pipe dream the first time around.
Are they just gonna call it “Corruption Inc.”?
