Top all-time · #14877
Lorenzo Venneri
Personal blog · lvenneri.com/blogsciencehealthhardware
Lorenzo Venneri's personal blog at lvenneri.com covers science, health and hardware. Since 2022, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Con-Fusion”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Lorenzo Venneri's posts cover nuclear reactor design, laser fusion and birth rates. HN commenters link them as references for their points, with little comment on the writing itself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Con-Fusion2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-07-14
- /blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-07
What Hacker News says?
Fusion is generally touted by many as an energy "Holy Grail." Indeed, it appears to have similar qualities, being both perpetually elusive and miraculous, able to solve all mankind's problems. Media reporting tends to discuss the benefits of fusion with misleading and false statements and no discussion of fusion’s negative attributes. The financial and practical perspective of fusion based power is missing. I've wri…
Comment linking /blog/ConFusion
on “More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade”Submitted Con-Fusion as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThis is not true. Fission reactors have to deal with decay heat, not fission reactions when cooling is lost. This can be managed. Fusion reactors also have decay heat. In new reactors like the Micro Modular Reactor, it's actually less decay heat than a fusion power plant. Please please read my post : https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion#financial-risk-of-powerp...
Comment linking /blog/ConFusion
on “More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade”Submitted Cancer Treatment on a Budget as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOne morea article worth reading about the con-fusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion
Comment linking /blog/ConFusion
on “More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade”Submitted How do nuclear reactors work? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI tried to describe this problem in further detail in a post called con-fusion. Kind of sad to see money burn like this. https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion
Comment linking /blog/ConFusion
on “More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade”Submitted Reduced Distortion Eye-Ware as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI like the railgun analogy. I think you can stock up on other fusion cost arguments through my article, Engineering and Economic Challenges of Fusion: https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion
Comment linking /blog/ConFusion
on “Seven Dyson Sphere Candidates”Submitted The Strategic Fat Stockpile as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis actually happened in August and September of 2023 and it’s great validation for High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) at larger scales. I hope they have the guts to also do a full loss of coolant test. I’ve also heard the these two reactors have been turned off for quite a while due to issues with the primary heat exchangers, temperature fluctuations, and uneven cooling - characteristically disadvantages o…
Comment linking /blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball
on “Chinese pebble-bed nuclear reactor passes "meltdown" test”Submitted Silicon Carbide Sic Mug Using Additive Manufacturing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI worked on this and host it on my site as well where it's not parceled up into bits and pieces. Have to thank Bartosz Ciechanowski. Learned a lot from his code and approach. https://lvenneri.com/nuclear_reactor_explainer
Comment linking /nuclear_reactor_explainer
on “Building a Reactor”My own partisan comments on the pebble bed class of reactors ( https://lvenneri.com/blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball ) for those interested in a deeper yet still qualitative comparison of pebble beds and prismatic cores - the main types high temperature reactor. Long story short : pebbles offer significant disadvantages compared to prismatic geometries, summarized by this donald duck clip: https://youtu.be/shvwSBGDmE0 .
Comment linking /blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball
on “How the first fourth-generation nuclear power plant works”The person you are criticizing clearly understands the issues far better than you do. You should read up a bit, instead of just making shit up. https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion
Comment linking /blog/ConFusion
on “Laser fusion facility heads back to drawing board”one solution to maintain stable population despite low birth rates is to selectively birth women. japans 1.3 babies per women would more than sufficient. read about it here: https://lvenneri.com/blog/sexratioed
Comment linking /blog/sexratioed
on “Japan PM’s solution to dire birthrate has already been rejected by young”