Re:NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most...
by maaku on Friday January 03, 2014 @01:37AM
(#7004455)
Well anyone with photovoltaics can demonstrate working economical fusion power at a certain large scale. At least there is an existence proof at the extreme there, which QC does not have.
This is rather like commercial fusion research; it has not yet been shown to even be possible to economically use fusion for power generation, yet it has not been proved impossible either. Contrast this to nuclear fission research, which at this point is more like engineering; modulo lawsuits and administrative compliance, we could probably take a pretty good guess at what it would take to, say, bring a commercial thorium reactor online.