helium is fused from hydrogen, releasing huge
amounts of energy....... and the liquid sodium
reactor used liquid sodium as the cooling fluid
for a regular uranium reactor -- a friend at X10
worked on these. -- j

The actual development and deployment of such a technology would be considered extremely disruptive by the global collective of corporate crony capitalists.
It would be opposed like a fictional green metal that was much stronger and lighter than steel. MULTIPLY that opposition by a factor of 100.
I personally think this is more of a publicity stunt than the announcement of a currently viable technology.
Any technology this powerful would be immediately seized and sequestered by the government in the name of "national security".

Such a breakthrough would have to be of a type that could be inexpensively duplicated, and it would have to be released to the broad scientific community at large without advance gov't knowledge.

Watch the movie "Chain reaction" (1996) to get a feel for what I believe would have to happen.

You are spot-on about government and the fossil fuel industry destroying the options of new generation technology. I had the great privilege of speaking with Bill Bottum of Bottum and Townsend years past. I had technology applicable for micronizing coal for injection into power generation boilers....no one would look at it. Bill and I also discussed the "failure" of the MHD project in the 60's, run by Aveco-Everett. So many tools available to quash what would be healthy for a free economy.

You would not believe how many times I've heard: "Well.....it looked good on paper/computer".
This was after I was approached and asked: "Can you make it like this....just not broken?"

It was a blast. Speaking of mixing, the Army Lance Missile used a block of metal with ports bored through it for the fuel. Then there was a plunger that was crammed into the hole on the top to stop the flow of fuel. The hole was like 3" in Dia and the plunger tapered up to like 3-1/2" in Dia. Needless to say it was a one time valve, fused the metal into one piece. The propulsion to cram that plunger into the hole was created from a solid propellant gas generator. When we tested this valve a technician with a high powered rifle had to crouch behind a piece of think steel and shoot it if it misfired, or anytime it didn't go off after they hit the button. The design always befuddled me. We also got to do explosive forming up there at one of the facilities. That was really interesting especially when we blew up things that were not meant to blow up. One night we burned about a ten story test stand to the ground in just a couple of minutes. It's amazing how quickly steel will burn and melt when a little liquid oxygen in added to the fire. The sky over the San Fernando Valley would light up and sometimes the ground would shake. But the roar of those J2 engines was always exciting. We tested the F1's up at Edwards Air Force Base. They were too big to test at Santa Susana. I'm going to dream tonight, this actually brings back good memories and lots of excitement.

I lucked out with that job. My father-in-law (at the time a grounds maintenance manager at Rocketdyne) set me up to get a job in maintenance at Rocketdyne, Canoga Park. When I went to the employment office I forgot to mentioned him or the set up, but got hired as an instrumentation technician for a job up in the mountains at the Field Test Lab. I guess my electronics hobby and electronics correspondence degree helped me get a job up there rather than pulling weeds in Canoga Park.

A couple of weeks later he called me and asked why I didn't show up for the interview he had set up for me. I told I got the job and was working at Santa Susana Test Lab. He was astounded, we laughed about it and had a beer over it the next weekend. He never knew I had the background. I had come out of a job selling electronics and the latest new invention called Stereo Hi-Fi. You could actually get stereo on your radio by tuning one radio to an AM station and one to an FM station prior to that. this new technology could broadcast stereo on FM station by adding this new box to your receiver. It was an exciting time, around 1962(?)

You got to work on the fun stuff! Closest I've been to your field was precision assy. of two valve components for Teledyne (oxy mixing for the Shuttle of some sort). Rotational reference of +/- 1 arc min. on a 1.75 dia. contact surface.....like shootin a barn from the inside!

Yea, I saw that top story, I have not had time to read it yet but, unless the Russian's furnish proof of their claim, its just rhetoric. Why waste time denouncing someone else's claim???? Makes me wonder.

The Russian government no doubt hopes its scientists are right... The Russian economy is extremely reliant upon traditional fuel exports.

This is the one that I subscribe to:
http://world.std.com/~mica/cft.html
Cold Fussion Times -- Many scientific studies and results (including MIT, Livermore, etc...)

Thank you, I had no idea or knowledge of this outside fuel requirement. My experience is only with F1, J2, and others from the Saturn V Rocket, including small thrusters for steering, slowing space capsules, etc.. The big ones only mixed liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to produce thrust, and the smaller used things like Unsymmetrical Di-Methyl Ethel Hydrazine mixed with things like Inhibited Red Fuming Nitric Acid (as in the Army Lance Missile). The Saturn V was is too heavy to lift off at launch until it burned off a few thousand pounds of LOX and LH2, then it's all get up and go, 7.5 million pounds of thrust.

I guess maybe we could use this new ground based energy to produce laser power that an aircraft could receive and use to power it. Set up networks similar to the cellular networks that transmit the energy to aircraft as they need it. It's all way over my head today, but Rocketdyne was a job I really relished. I was so excited about going to the moon. Then we finally made it in 1969 while I was taking a tour in Vietnam. Rocketdyne offered me deferment but I would have had to relocate to Mississippi, I didn't..

They have and wish to control more power... all kinds... "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton

They don't want the average person to have this technology, Why? IT would destroy their profits and force a restructure of the economy. There are several research projects going on around the world , and have been for decades. Here is one example: http://www.researchcoldfusion.com/

Yep... I agree!
The "givernments", want us to believe they have our best interest at heart, but actually its their own interest. They crave power, and we give it them, without even thinking about the ultimate consequences of our actions, votes, etc... The most dangerious thing to us is our attempt to take power away from a government that has already grabed it.

The military industrial complex...

The Government has always influenced which technology is used. The current reactor technology being used by almost every reactor/power station is direct result of the givernments wanting nuclear material that could be used in bomb production. IT had nothing to do with cheap, safe efficient power. There are several reactor designs that have been around since the beginning that were safer and produced higher amounts of energy, they did not produce material for bombs though.

Hello mccwho,
Very interesting. I can't help but think that technologies like this are being suppressed by big energy companies and political cronies... When the government needed a bomb they "threw caution to the wind" and if required would have spent us into bankruptcy to get it into use... The need at the time is a separate question. A power source like these could have inestimable benefit.
Respectfully,
O.A.

I find this much more promising:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/19175...
Cold Fussion never died, the press just tried to discredit it. Reaseach has never stopped and repeatable experiments have been verified at several major reasearch labs, all around the world. This has been going on for many years.

You may find my post, back, to NealS interesting.

Hope springs eternal.....LOL!

But you're not describing an air-breathing reaction engine, which is what an American means by "jet" today. You're describing a rocket engine, one that carries its own oxidizer as well as propellant. The specific energy of such an engine is considerably less, even with fusion.

I posted back to NealS......you may find it interesting.

Regarding "The only way such an aircraft could stay aloft"......
I posted an answer to NealS above. You might find it interesting.

I'll use the J-57 engine aboard a B-52 as example to explain. This is a water injected / thrust augmentation technique for take-off.
8 engines consume 1280 gallons of water for two minutes during take-off. This increases thrust approximately 8%. Average jet fuel consumption for the same time is 110 gallons (8% of water consumption)
By weight, jet fuel is approx 80% of water.
The B-52 carries 48,000 gal. of fuel....it's payload is 70,000 max. The amount of water required to do the same job as combustible fuel, by weight, is approximately 15 1/2 to 1
This exceeds the weight of the fuel capacity and payload combined.
jcabello explained hydrogen fusion and it's by-product; helium. This source is used to produce heat. The heat is used to create steam. To date, we have used wood, coal, associated petroleum products and nuclear fission as a heat source to boil water....turn it to steam and direct the steam across a turbine or into a piston. I hope the above gives a, pardon the pun, "boilerplate" explanation of why the mass of "fuel" could not be carried.
My background for this is 4 years as a jet engine specialist in the USAF.

Airliners, I would say. No single-engine plane will be able to carry the weight of one of those CFRs. We're talking about a load suitable for a tractor-trailer rig--or maybe--just maybe--for a pickup truck. An airliner could fit that aboard easily and would not have to carry jet fuel. But: we're talking about an airliner built for the long haul, and it would have to be built for comfort. It could not be built for speed.