The authors have institutional credibility, as well as a lot of ARPA-E and private funding. Additionally, their approach mostly builds on prior work in a manner that suggests the proposed mechanism is quite plausible, although at an extremely low TRL as you can imagine.
The economics do seem to check out, provided that (1) fusion energy achieves an economic net positive, (2) the engineering considerations required for this approach don't make the design of the whole plant implausible due to the narrow windows for tritium sustainability anyway, and (3) there aren't some fundamental physics issues that arise making the whole pathway impractical (such as simulations for the (n,2n) cross-section for mercury being too optimistic).
https://thebsdetector.substack.com/p/government-funded-alche...
The authors have institutional credibility, as well as a lot of ARPA-E and private funding. Additionally, their approach mostly builds on prior work in a manner that suggests the proposed mechanism is quite plausible, although at an extremely low TRL as you can imagine.
The economics do seem to check out, provided that (1) fusion energy achieves an economic net positive, (2) the engineering considerations required for this approach don't make the design of the whole plant implausible due to the narrow windows for tritium sustainability anyway, and (3) there aren't some fundamental physics issues that arise making the whole pathway impractical (such as simulations for the (n,2n) cross-section for mercury being too optimistic).