Fallout permanently has a problem with having it's cake and eating it too. Shelves are stocked and everything's still ruined and burned 200 years later since they wanted a post apocalyptic looking wasteland but also wanted 'restarting of society' factions akin to the initial two games. They wanted a resource war where people were desperate enough to end the world, but also wanted sci-fi tech that would ruin the concept of energy scarcity entirely. In short: Fusion is so messy for the same reason nuka-cola bottles are still in most vending machines. The writing was not focused on making things real as possible and the more they try to make it seem that way it all falls apart.
True, but it’s more of an issue with the Bethesda era, since at least the other Fallouts were more concerned with creating something new from the ashes of the old. Like the games themselves, Bethesda is stuck in the same mindset ever since the release of 3. 3 has no right to look like the apocalypse just happened, when the war took place over two centuries ago.
@@breecegriffith5896what are you talking about my guy, this has literally always been a problem with fallout. You literally have giant plasma rifles in the first game
@@breecegriffith5896 Every single building or piece of technology in New Vegas is pre war. The main story is about delivering a 200 year old chip to a 200 year old guy so he can activate a 200 year old robot army in a 200 year old bunker to take over a 300 year old dam. There is absolutely no progress in New Vegas.
@@LucyWest370 he's talking about how fallout 3 was supposed to be set less than a century (citation needed) after the war, and instead they set it 200 years after to have to brotherhood and super mutants
The Big MT had just created and was about to release technology that controls and reshapes matter itself the day the nukes went off too which makes fallout all the more ironic, they were THIS CLOSE to a post scarcity society
If you instead consider that perhaps we stole the tech from aliens fusion cells and then instead of miniaturization they actually tried to upscale it to power vehicles, power armor and industrial applications. This would explain the struggle, they were able to copy the small fusion cells by basically replicating the LEGO pieces copied from the alien fusion cells. But without understanding the math or science. Makes sense that they had to struggle to upscale it.
I like this theory, especially since energy ammo could power the alien blaster in the old games and the F3 plasma pistol was all but confirmed to be alien tech in Mothership Zeta.
not really as then you would chain a whole bunch of the small ones together to gain the larger output. the only reason you wouldnt bother with that approach is if you already had a larger more efficient alternative which they did for fusion so this furthers the idea it is all a "fusion washing"scam similar to how Greenwashing is a thing with large companies today
Small reactors are in fact easier to make than big ones. Even the nuclear kind. So having small fusion systems available but not large ones makes perfect sense even from a real world perspective.
A great example is in fact modern natural gas power plants. They are not singular or even two or three but instead can number into the dozens of turbines per plant simply because the small trade off's in efficiency are usually worth it for a much easier to build and maintain unit.
I think RadKing confused technology scaling with manufacturing scaling. You often hear of lab research in to say carbon nanotubes being possible, but very very difficult to scale to manufacturing scale.
He's hoping that's where he's going and you're going to make him Godzilla. You just need to print him out a cityscape background for his tank when he gets home so you don't ruin his illusion XD. "It just took a few hours to kick in!"
I think the use of "fusion" for cells and cores is a misnomer, stemming from Mass Fusion the manufacturer. That would mean every "fusion core" and "microfusion" cell is actually a fission based product, with true fusion being cutting edge, rare, and extremely large. Mass fusion either lied to consumers for marketing, or didn't correct anyone before the bombs fell. Nvm, you got that after 15 minutes 😂
What if Mass Fusion got their hands on some alien tech to show off the prototype fusion tech to the US government to get funding, then realized they oversold their product and had to resort to selling fission as "fusion cores". Or maybe it was alien tech after the "fusion cores" were being sold that allowed for fusion reactors to be a thing. The blue glow of alien power cells is the same as the blue glow of fusion reactors, whereas "fusion cores" match the red glow of fission reactors and rarely the green glow of plasma weapons.
My take on their limitations compared to larger scale fusion generators is that cells don't have the cooling power for extended use so burn out after quickly generating a large (for their size) amount of power, and Cores can run for a long time but their coolant degrades.
28:30 You can make a fission-based V8 engine. The trick is that you need not an internal combustion engine, but a V8 steam engine. It may sound weird, but V-shaped steam engines are not so rare. For example the Heisler-type steam locomotives used a V2 steam engine. So just put 4 of those next to each other, connect the intake manifold to a nuke-heated boiler, and connect the exhaust headers to a radiator or heat exchanger.
Finally, something to do with the Nuclear heater I've had sitting in the attic for a decade. For clarity, legal reasons and the algorithm's immunity to humor's sake; The former was a joke.
Just my 2 cents: the reason why fusion cells/cores were invented before Mass Fusion got its large fusion reactor in Boston operable might be analogous to IRL battery development. The first lithium batteries required rare earth minerals that are in short supply. Newer designs can go without them altogether. Sooo ... maybe the first designs were created using resources or some sort of tech (recovered, non-recreatable alien tech?) which became so valuable that the Fallout US sought other ways to create a fusion reactor. And it took Mass Fusion until 2077 to come up with a viable solution, just to be ready when Atom paid Earth a bombastic visit.
This theory awnsers pretty much every question I can think of. This is kinda the way I was thinking too. Minus the batteries but a real life example is a great touch.
There's also the simple fact that even in the real world building small reactors is way easier than building big ones. Even more so with the nuclear kind. When dealing with fusion a literal tiny sun it makes just as much sense to start small as they did with nuclear reactors in real life. If something goes horribly wrong you want it to be a small thing when that happens. Once the technology is proven you move to expand it and enlarge it for other purposes
For a long time it was easier and more affordable to effectively power a phone with batteries than to put them on a house (IE for solar power systems) or to power a golf cart or children's rideable car than a full-size car. As much as there are technologies that are difficult to miniatureise and easier to make at a large scale (we don't have proper nuclear reactors that can fit in a shipping container let alone a car) there can also be technologies that are easier to make at small scales and harder to upscale for greater purposes. Everyone carries a phone with a battery in it, but to store generated power for a city, you may be better off with pumped water storage.
If Mr. Handys run on fusion cores, then how does Bethesda explain the large fluid cans labled "Mr. Handy fuel?" Were they for the robot's flamethrowers or was the one in the tv show just a fusion powered prototype?
It is possible the micro fusion cell was invented first because they could only get material to fuse in a small space then later figured out how to do it at an industrial size scale. That's actually how most things are developed. It's just that most people only hear about the things being touted by advertising from companies to use their service. This lead to the idea being introduced to the zeitgeist that things start at industrial scale then get miniaturized. Early computers were small like a briefcase but weak, hence they were scaled up to giant house size machines to increase their computational power to a worthwhile amount which they rented out until people figured out how to miniaturize it with the invention of microchips.
PS: we've had the ability to build battery banks and solar for industrial scale use but it was cost prohibitive till recently. Could be the same thing with micro fusion cells, industrial scale arrays would have made electricity to expensive for people to afford but an individual could afford to buy the occasional micro fusion cell like how people could afford to buy batteries for a remote but wouldn't be able to afford to power their entire house with them.
could also be different form of fusion.. perhaps the (micro)fusion cells are really just a capacitor pack and minute amount of fuel, which are used by an inertial confinement system to generate power within the weapon or device. basically drawing power from tiny nuclear explosions. this would help explain why they're expended after a single shot. while the big reactors everyone struggled with needed continuous output, so were largely focused more on a tokamak, Stellarator, or other non-inertial confinement style system where you are keeping a mass of plasma continually at ideal pressure and temp. though i'll admit like the idea that Fusion cores and most of the big 'fusion' plants were actually 'Fusion(tm), a product of mass fusion corporation" and actually just various forms of fission reactors or fission batteries. it would be an excellent extension of the fallout series's satirical depiction of pre-war corporate greed, disregard for public safety, and focus on form over substance.
they'd need like one throwaway line about "plasma instability at scale" justifying fusion being more common at smaller sizes. though still doesn't make since that there wouldn't just be tons of the small reactors running together to power cities.
also fusion breeder reactors are totally going to be a thing. neutrons from fusion turning lithium into tritium, that then needs to be filtered out of the lithium containing material and both getting put back in the reactor.
I reckon the small reactors have some kind of regenerative hydrogen and coolant reserves, so enable the fusion core to go past the safe generating capacity it can reach on its on.
Sure there would be. Politics and war. Have the focus of the use of fusion be for defense technologies and you have an in built excuse. Why build that civilian plant when the RED MENACE might invade that town. We will need the resources for the reactor to make tools to FIGHT THE RED MENACE. Seriously in universe the world is unhinged and that is a perfectly valid excuse..... And yes each time I typed RED MENACE I tried doing a Liberty Prime voice as is correct.
I always felt that the fusion cores were a battery and drawing from real world examples, if you was to make a fusion/nuclear generator you would need a huge amount of power just to start it up, which is why when you remove the cores the generators run for awhile, but I imagen without that core when they need to cycle or undergo matinance they are unable to start back up without that core or a core worth of power.
fallout 76 added a "fusion core recharger" to their atom store for the CAMP system.. which while certainly meant to be more just a gameplay conceit to let people use power armor more, would honestly fit the idea of 'fusion core as a battery' pretty well.
@@glitterboy2098 True true, and if people don't trust atom store saying its not cannon, the legendary perks absorbing energy attacks to charge the core would.
I'm sure the Fusion is Fission in disguise theory is actually in FO4 somewhere? I've heard the theory before but this is the only FO channel I subscribe to. The Fusion Cells/Micro Fusion Cells can easily be chalked up as a dialect difference. As for why they can't scale it up, it could be that at larger scales the process becomes unstable and that's the stumbling block they were struggling to overcome.
It was from the Mass Fusion company directly. They marketed their technology as clean fusion power, but in reality they were selling extremely dirty fission generators and hauling off tons of nuclear waste to hide it from the public.
@@saladinbob Its not a theory. One of the terminals - I think in the Mass Fusion building? - flat out state that all of the fusion tech is actually fission based and they just use the term fusion for branding sake. This theme is all over the place in FO4. Even in the first buildings you are likely to go to, like the first likely Red Rocket station where you find Dogmeat. The techs there were dumping all of their nuclear waste in a hole under the station, and this was all despite that very same station winning awards for clealiness and enviromental friendliness. They are all just a bunch of liars and frauds, doing everything they can to survive in a world that is figuratively and then literally crumbling all around them.
I always thought that fusion generators were both powered by and charged fusion cores' energy. This would explain why the generators are still running, up until you take out the core, and why the core depletes energy after some use. Great video, as always. 👍
Maintaining consistent lore over a generational span of years (27 here) seems to be a task fit for a handful. The way Bethesda has changed, if not outright retconned some aspects, is proof of that claim.
Bethesda owes channels like yours so much, keeping fallout and tes alive all these years, if they don't send huge care packages out to you and fudgemuppet, camelworks etc. whenever their next huge game comes out I will be genuinely upset. Series would not be half as popular as it still is if passionate people like you didn't make content on it.
@@pl-boostcreepAnd that's extremely insulting from them. If you have fans who love the game but want to extend it, it's imo something else than "forcing" fans to fix your buggy mess of a game, because otherwise it wouldn't even be half as good. Thanks Todd.
It might be worth mentioning that the power plants in Appalachia have fusion core processors connected to them that when powered up will manufacture endless amounts of fusion cores as long as power remains on. So I would say it's safe to say that these so called fusion cores are a ruse unless these processors have some unknown tech turning fission into fusion held within.
My headcannon is that (micro)fusion cells use a type of miniature fusion-boosted fission reaction like irl boosted fission bombs, but not (usually) as explosive. fully self-sustaining fusion reactions are hard, but it's (relatively) easy to make radioactive hydrogen fuse in brief bursts (like, with lasers and stuff), and those bursts can be used to multiply the power output of a uranium core. if you set up a uranium core, and fuse some hydrogen inside it (maybe with lasers and stuff?) you could have a very powerful miniature reactor that only had to be periodically fueled with hydrogen. this would explain why they can last for centuries inside a vault generator with a hydrogen supply, but have a limited power capacity in man-portable applications (like lasers and stuff).
plus those generators could have additional cooling systems that the core itself lacks, allowing it to uncheck its standard safeties and generate additional power. Untethered from a generator system, the core might overheat quicker and so shut down for safety reasons. Coolant may have degraded over time hence the lessened run time.
This is a good topic. The thing I still find so silly about the Fallout universe is that wheels are almost completely absent. Other than Securitrons and the Highwayman, you never see so much as a shopping cart being used in the world. More people get around by vertibird than bicycle.
I think we could have stuff like Tameable Animals for riding and making carts and a Vehicle Workshop(think the Power Armor Workbench but for vehicles) for restoration of the husks around the Wasteland and making new vehicles from scratch. I think it can work well with this.
My headcannon is that micro does not refer to the cell but to the fusion energy produced. They could build bigger reactors but they still only produced the same amount of energy no matter the size, so they tried to make the container smaller rather than the amount of energy produced bigger, creating the microfusion cell. Just waiting for Rad to say the exact same thing in the video or to entirely disprove it now. Edit: Maybe fusion cores contain more hydrogen fuel which is why they last longer (outputting pore power in total) and kinda explains why Preston calls it a battery and why they can last for so long. If a microfusion cell was used in the place of a fusion core it could still power a building but for only a second until it runs out of hydrogen fuel?
more important than fuel might be coolant. I reckon MF/F cells burn out after use because they have very limited cooling capacity, and standalone fusion cores carry more coolant, but it degrades over time, explaining the limited use in power armour.
1:47 2 years ago I remember reading a research facility in the USA was able to produce more energy output than the input. It was a small amount (4% more energy) but still, it's a breakthrough.
If you read the Mister Handy design document written way back in 1997, it states that they were partly sold on their inclusion of a "238B nuclear power unit," so you have to think that that means it has a nuclear reactor or a nuclear battery inside. Ni mention of Fusion Cells; The Mister Handy was first released in 2037.
If I were to guess, it's that most of the "fusion" tech seen isn't true fusion power but weird form of plasma reactor/plasma engine and it's just marketed as fusion because most are none the wiser (or they're just fission like Mass Fusion pulls). The few that would have access to true fusion tech would be Vault Tec and its subsidiaries. This would also explain why the Enclave wouldn't have fusion power and how Mass Fusion only figured out fusion tech just days before the Great War. Hell it could explain the Fusion Cores degrading real time as it would be more likely be a plasma battery that was kept topped up by the generators (though take that with some salt since it's a new retcon). True fusion power could be only available to Vault Tec since they're known to be shady as hell with their......testing. TLDR: They're probably just plasma reactors/batteries marketed as fusion tech and Vault Tec were probably the only ones with them.
One possible explanation for why they had microfusion and struggled to get to macro fusion could be that they reverse-engineered the alien fuel cell into thefusion cell at the same time as they reverse-engineered the alien blaster into the plasma pistol. They would lack the full technological understanding that might have allowed the Thetans to make fusion tech at any scale, only having examples of the micro stuff. It might also explain the lack of a listed discovery date/discoverer, as it would likely be classified as all hell.
My theory is that fusion cores and cells work like the fusion bombs the have fusion reaction creating newtrons that are used to bombard uranium to generate energy as in a fission reaction and part of the energy is used to sustain the fusion itself, this would be done since maybe a fusion reaction is easy to make the smaller it is and it would help the miniaturization of energy since if you try to make a fission core it would need a critical mass amount of fissile material so that wouldn't work in small things, this would also explain why the mini nukes can be so small even if there is now way you can fit a critical mass in that thing
Fantastic video! I always appreciate how you dive into the more obscure topics within the Fallout series. After playing these games for over a decade, I never stopped to really think about what a fusion cell is. Your attention to detail and creativity are truly unmatched!
For some reason difficult to explain i really like this types of videos. Maybe is because you show passion researching on the actual facts of a videogame universe and trying to contrast them in order to create a logical narrative.
Gosh I love this channel the fact that a youtubers fallout mascot character supports and dresses like a child of Atom. Who are my favorite fallout faction throughout all the games. Plus the channel is highly educational this channel rocks
You are forgetting about "Cold Fusion". This was all the rage in publications when Fallout was in development. Supposedly a small form factor in the lab that claimed success.
I could be tempted to think of microfusion cells like chemical lasers - efficiency is secondary to dumping a lot of energy, very quickly, and the idea of replacing weapon charges as normal goes all the way back to slings and arrows.
I always figured the deal with Mass Fusion not having true fusion until short before the Great War was because they tried to develop it independently. If fusion was attainable before then I'd imagine it was strictly held onto by Poseidon Energy/The Government since they didn't want China to achieve the tech. So Mass Fusion was trying to redevelop it from basically scratch, while real fusion was mostly reserved for weapons and certain Generators.
@@dinoboy2672 It's possible Mass Fusion got away with the false marketing because the government thought it would make them much more capable of producing real fusion power than they actually were
There's no argument that fusion cores, fusion cells and microfusion cells have a lot of power. But I think there is some discussion whether they are really fusion power or merely fission masquerading as fusion (except for the Fallout 4 reactor). Granted it's all pretty inconsistent. So let's just assume that fusion cores ARE fusion power. That raises a couple of questions. Why does the fallout TV show make such a big deal out of the fusion cell that is the subject of all the factions' greed? And if the fusion cores are fusion, maybe they just need to be refilled with water or some other material to fuse? Maybe they all really are fusion power and the Fallout 4 reactor beryllium agitator and the Fallout TV show fusion are just ways to get significantly MORE power, beyond what you can get from reactors of the time? None of it really makes sense. Good video!
I hate the elders scrolls, dungeons and dragons fuckin Grow up😂haha, but still they have been waiting since Skyrim for a new game, couldn't imagine being a Skyrim fan, Id be going ballistic
Obsidian did great and Bethesda still treated them like shit and didn’t give their bonus for the low metacritic score I think they’re going to take everything down with them. They even managed to piss off Mick Gordon and he left doom they’re not on a good path rn. Imo their inflated egos won’t let them see someone else do “Bethesda games” better than them
After the disaster that was 76, I doubt they'll let anyone but the main studio touch a Fallout game of any size. (Also they probably don't want to get shown up like they did with New Vegas lol)
The fusion cores always made no sense to me. How in the fuck is it going to power a whole ass building for 200 years, but can't power a suit of armor for more than 30 minutes. What the hell is even that?
I assume the microfusion cells / fusion cells naming issue is just because the microfusion cells were all around better and eventually replaced the old fusion cells whatever those may have been, so the 'micro' prefix was no longer needed to distinguish them. Like how everyone just calls cellphones 'phones' now because landline phones are less common.
I think it's a matter of a lot of the tech for some reason requiring a fission reactor, or just decaying source for radiation that somehow primes the fission reaction. The pure fusion reaction where you don't have a radiation source somehow initiating fusion being something that was difficult and rarely used. Maybe they need a neutron source because for some reason their fusion is using H-4 or something and fuses it to whatever its partner is right at the moment that it absorbs the neutron. So the common fusion reactors are powered by fission reactors, all of them technically being both but being advertised purely for the fusion reaction. I've also always thought that microfusion cells aren't a net increase in power, or at least not a notable one. That making the cell itself takes somewhere around as much energy as you can get out of them. So functionally it's like building a battery, it's a useful product, but you aren't generating power just packaging it. Still a lot of weird discrepancies in the tech though. I think they could explain it, but probably don't want to come up with the answered needed because it's easier on the writers to keep things vague. They could easily claim that they discovered fusion occurring in an experimental small scale fission reactor and the development of the tech didn't progress well, because they didn't have a good understanding of how it worked, and were mainly working off of experimental iteration of the device rather than uncovering the underlying principles. Or maybe they were just replicating poorly understood alien designs and the advancements in the tech of the small scale fusion were in getting closer to recreating the original than figuring out how it actually worked. Either way they might be inclined to take things I don't think it's a priority for the writers to explain.
I believe the fission vs fusion situation with fallout is what they showed where Mass “Fusion” doesn’t actually use fusion but markets it as fusion technology, possibly to corner the market or marketing strategy. Smaller components like the fusion cells or cores could simply be batteries for portable storage and able to store large amounts of energy for generators in buildings or vaults. Actual fusion generators seem to be very large and difficult to work properly so it makes more sense that fusion cores and cells are fusion in name only.
is it possible that fusion cores & cells are nuclear decay batteries? a lot of leftover nuclear waste will continue to decay and produce heat/waste/energy for centuries to come, it even powers a lot of mars rovers and satellites since its reliable for so long and outputs so much power. so im wondering if the fusion reactors produce grid power and the cells/cores are just waste batteries
A possible solution I can see for the miniaturization paradox is the lack of consumer protections. Conventional fusion “donut” reactors actually produce a lot of radioactive material from a rare material that becomes irradiated by the process. The reactors can last a long while with replacing the material, in the fallout world, maybe they found a way to have short lasting ones that fall apart from the lack of the material. The mass fusion plant may be the much rarer type of fusion reactor that electromagnetically accelerates atoms into each other and directly harvests the energy released rather than from a steam turbine. The lack of consumer protections and different methods of fusion may solve the miniaturization paradox.
A way to make sense of the problem of scalability could be that because of the amount of resources it takes to force a fusion reaction, the smaller the fusion is the cheaper and more realistic. As it scales up it becomes more and more challenging. By the time the bombs dropped Vault Tec and the US Military had gotten fusion to the point of being able to power a bunker. It was only on October 22nd 2077 that Mass Fusion was able to get the fusion to work well enough to power a whole city (Boston).
my take is, that the large fusion reactors that they have trouble with are your classical fusion reactors like we are building. The fusion batteries, do use fusion but they are based on cold fusion. In it they have a "candle" that produces vast amound of muons made from exotic isotopes that can still have a runaway reaction and are presumably made with fission waste products. that's why they are called batteries instead of generators. They are muon catalyzed fusion batteries
It's possible that the fusion found in Fallout works off of the same magical pseudo-science many other aspects of the games do, and for whatever reason is much easier to maintain in smaller applications. Maybe it's either very difficult to keep a large reaction at low enough power to be safe or they're harder to start and keep from fizzling out, like how you can start a lawnmower with a pull cord but you're going to have a really fun time cranking a semi truck's motor by hand just due to the sheer immensity. Also, if I were to assume, fusion cores probably have some sort of catalyst in them which allows them to run pretty much infinitely by recycling their fuel, but when too much power is drawn too quickly they can be depleted.
It makes you think the fusion core had to be pretty cheap to be so many different places. It is one of the most common thing to be found in the wasteland.
I would actually suggest potentially some form of catalytic induced fusion for the small cells. Somethinf that works on the small scale for limited time use.... but which doesn't scale up into fusion as we understand it. It also might explain fusion cores slowly going out. You could even tie it into the eldritch in-lore, being actual magic and a faustian bargain that directly led to the war.
i too had assumed that fusion cells, and cores were simply named wrong and were something along the lines of miniturised thermoelectric generators that use the heat generated by nuclear material to generate electricity, we already have the technology to do something similar in the real world. the fact that the cores on the weapon atoms judgement seem to be leaking nuclear material would seem to support this idea.
I think the main takeaway about all this Fusion Confusion is that what characters IN UNIVERSE call "fusion" may not necessarily be real fusion. Don't forget that Mass Fusion was basically defrauding the entire Commonwealth of Massachusettes by calling fission power "fusion".
Personally, I would consider Fusion Cores and Fusion cells just a marketing name, while probably being tiny RTGs or fission reactors in the case of "Fusion cores"
the thing about the resource war wasn't that there wasn't enough energy but rather the actual material scarcity. they didn't have energy to matter conversion so clean cheap energy would only go so far to avert war.
We have no clue what was necessary for fusion reactors. It could very well have been, the resources needed to make fusion reactors/ fusion cells were still very scarce on earth.
25:57 I think the reason they just don’t look at cars is that they are 200 years old. With all the weather in fallout like rad storms I think it would be in even worse condition then u can imagine. if you add the fact that there was a nuclear detonation nearby the electronics would be absolutely shot to high hell (we know that the cars don’t have shielded electronics due to the survivalist) The cars would be written off quickly and the generators would of been scavenged/ damaged due to the remaining survivors/ critters.
Love the video and I agree, this lore makes absolutely no sense no matter how you splice it. Just wanted to point out a couple not picks I spotted real quick: First, fusion is still radioactive. That incident neutron radiation during the fusion process is intense and will "activate" sorounding material making basically everything in a fusion power plant radioactive including the coolant. Breeder reactors don't produce more fissile material than when they start, that just produce a more useful form of it (ie producing plutonium from uranium). Your not making energy though. Lastly, fission is actually more power dense then fusion technology and can last significantly longer. After all, rtgs (radio-thermal generators) are used on space crafts and remote regions specifically because they provide power for centuries with zero maintenance. My bet is that these "fusion cells" are actually just highly compact well shielded rtgs.
given the warning on fusion cells, I think they're not really fusion but just a super dense battery, like the FO universe equal of a lithium iron/ion, and Mass Fusion itself is likely still trying to make fusion but also just a "Battery" company till they can make a big breakthrough into the true fusion field, I can see cores and cells maybe holding a charge of fuel that reacts to create energy when inserted, kinda like a tritium MRE heater but more potent
“Breeder” fusion reactors are actually a concept. Lithium can be used to absorb waste fusion radiation, causing it to undergo fission to produce fusion fuels.
10:56 prehaps the specifics on how to create it was not made available to public sectors like energy companies (that weren't affiliated with Enclave like Posiden Energy). 20:48 also, I think that is just a gameplay feature, not an in-universe mechanic. You don't hear Brotherhood members complain about having to constantly recharge/replace their fusion cores, after all.
I've always assumed the amount of fissionable material in the center of a MFC is quite small... Like pea sized small, the rest of the bulk of the cell body is shielding.
Calling the Fusion and Micro Fusion power cells may simply have been a marketing tradename that no one expected to be real. Much like calling batteries today Lightning Brand and no one would expect them to be really as powerful as a lightning bolt.
The Aliens!!!! Crashed zetan ships, weapons of unearthly origin to examine, leaps in technological understanding of microfusion tech related possibly,,, they needed a power source for the giddy up buttercup and seeded the information of microfusion into the minds of humans
Just to let let you know we do have a fusion reactor and it has output more energy out than in. It's still a prototype but has been repeatedly shut down and restarted with no issues
A hypothesis i have is that fusion cells and cores are named after their company of manufacture. Much like kleenex tissues or creasent wrench. It's far from a perfect theory, but it's food for thought.
I am A BIG FAN of your channel and fallout as well as it’s lore and enjoy these lore videos but some things are best left alone and not looked too deep into from a gameplay perspective you’ll always find contradictions with lore and gameplay
Fallout permanently has a problem with having it's cake and eating it too.
Shelves are stocked and everything's still ruined and burned 200 years later since they wanted a post apocalyptic looking wasteland but also wanted 'restarting of society' factions akin to the initial two games.
They wanted a resource war where people were desperate enough to end the world, but also wanted sci-fi tech that would ruin the concept of energy scarcity entirely.
In short: Fusion is so messy for the same reason nuka-cola bottles are still in most vending machines. The writing was not focused on making things real as possible and the more they try to make it seem that way it all falls apart.
True, but it’s more of an issue with the Bethesda era, since at least the other Fallouts were more concerned with creating something new from the ashes of the old. Like the games themselves, Bethesda is stuck in the same mindset ever since the release of 3.
3 has no right to look like the apocalypse just happened, when the war took place over two centuries ago.
It's my cake I'll eat if I wanna 😅
@@breecegriffith5896what are you talking about my guy, this has literally always been a problem with fallout. You literally have giant plasma rifles in the first game
@@breecegriffith5896
Every single building or piece of technology in New Vegas is pre war. The main story is about delivering a 200 year old chip to a 200 year old guy so he can activate a 200 year old robot army in a 200 year old bunker to take over a 300 year old dam. There is absolutely no progress in New Vegas.
@@LucyWest370 he's talking about how fallout 3 was supposed to be set less than a century (citation needed) after the war, and instead they set it 200 years after to have to brotherhood and super mutants
Mass fusion CEO: Mr. House built it in a cave with a box of scraps all I'm asking is you make it bigger.
Scientists at mass fusion: I'm not mr. House.
The roboticists of Big MT (poor Dr. 0) felt the same way.
The Big MT had just created and was about to release technology that controls and reshapes
matter itself the day the nukes went off too which makes fallout all the more ironic, they were THIS CLOSE to a post scarcity society
If you instead consider that perhaps we stole the tech from aliens fusion cells and then instead of miniaturization they actually tried to upscale it to power vehicles, power armor and industrial applications.
This would explain the struggle, they were able to copy the small fusion cells by basically replicating the LEGO pieces copied from the alien fusion cells. But without understanding the math or science.
Makes sense that they had to struggle to upscale it.
that is a pretty neat theory
I like this theory, especially since energy ammo could power the alien blaster in the old games and the F3 plasma pistol was all but confirmed to be alien tech in Mothership Zeta.
not really as then you would chain a whole bunch of the small ones together to gain the larger output. the only reason you wouldnt bother with that approach is if you already had a larger more efficient alternative which they did for fusion so this furthers the idea it is all a "fusion washing"scam similar to how Greenwashing is a thing with large companies today
This was my thought as well.
That, or, given the cosmic horror underlieing, some sort of eldritch force/magic thing.
Small reactors are in fact easier to make than big ones. Even the nuclear kind. So having small fusion systems available but not large ones makes perfect sense even from a real world perspective.
A great example is in fact modern natural gas power plants. They are not singular or even two or three but instead can number into the dozens of turbines per plant simply because the small trade off's in efficiency are usually worth it for a much easier to build and maintain unit.
I think RadKing confused technology scaling with manufacturing scaling.
You often hear of lab research in to say carbon nanotubes being possible, but very very difficult to scale to manufacturing scale.
Listening to this while driving my gecko to the vet and he perked up in his carry case when he heard "welcome Atoms child"
Should i be concerned?
No. He is one of us. Atom shall now him with great stature and strength.
Atom's embrace shall gift your Good Boy with fire breath.
@napalmsavage7717 he's probably used to hearing it if u watch this channel enough, so maybe hearing it in the car or something was a curiosity to him
He's hoping that's where he's going and you're going to make him Godzilla. You just need to print him out a cityscape background for his tank when he gets home so you don't ruin his illusion XD. "It just took a few hours to kick in!"
Probably recognized the voice from you watching the videos. My dogs recognize CaseOh and Markiplier.
I think the use of "fusion" for cells and cores is a misnomer, stemming from Mass Fusion the manufacturer. That would mean every "fusion core" and "microfusion" cell is actually a fission based product, with true fusion being cutting edge, rare, and extremely large.
Mass fusion either lied to consumers for marketing, or didn't correct anyone before the bombs fell.
Nvm, you got that after 15 minutes 😂
Yeah, our boy RadKing is not gonna let us down on something simple like that. This man could make his own Fallout game with the knowledge he has.
@@adamk.7177 he's the modern fallout bible
What if Mass Fusion got their hands on some alien tech to show off the prototype fusion tech to the US government to get funding, then realized they oversold their product and had to resort to selling fission as "fusion cores".
Or maybe it was alien tech after the "fusion cores" were being sold that allowed for fusion reactors to be a thing. The blue glow of alien power cells is the same as the blue glow of fusion reactors, whereas "fusion cores" match the red glow of fission reactors and rarely the green glow of plasma weapons.
@adamk.7177 he does get a few things wrong here and there but yeah
My take on their limitations compared to larger scale fusion generators is that cells don't have the cooling power for extended use so burn out after quickly generating a large (for their size) amount of power, and Cores can run for a long time but their coolant degrades.
28:30 You can make a fission-based V8 engine. The trick is that you need not an internal combustion engine, but a V8 steam engine. It may sound weird, but V-shaped steam engines are not so rare. For example the Heisler-type steam locomotives used a V2 steam engine. So just put 4 of those next to each other, connect the intake manifold to a nuke-heated boiler, and connect the exhaust headers to a radiator or heat exchanger.
Finally, something to do with the Nuclear heater I've had sitting in the attic for a decade.
For clarity, legal reasons and the algorithm's immunity to humor's sake; The former was a joke.
Just my 2 cents: the reason why fusion cells/cores were invented before Mass Fusion got its large fusion reactor in Boston operable might be analogous to IRL battery development. The first lithium batteries required rare earth minerals that are in short supply. Newer designs can go without them altogether. Sooo ... maybe the first designs were created using resources or some sort of tech (recovered, non-recreatable alien tech?) which became so valuable that the Fallout US sought other ways to create a fusion reactor. And it took Mass Fusion until 2077 to come up with a viable solution, just to be ready when Atom paid Earth a bombastic visit.
This theory awnsers pretty much every question I can think of. This is kinda the way I was thinking too. Minus the batteries but a real life example is a great touch.
There's also the simple fact that even in the real world building small reactors is way easier than building big ones. Even more so with the nuclear kind. When dealing with fusion a literal tiny sun it makes just as much sense to start small as they did with nuclear reactors in real life. If something goes horribly wrong you want it to be a small thing when that happens. Once the technology is proven you move to expand it and enlarge it for other purposes
For a long time it was easier and more affordable to effectively power a phone with batteries than to put them on a house (IE for solar power systems) or to power a golf cart or children's rideable car than a full-size car. As much as there are technologies that are difficult to miniatureise and easier to make at a large scale (we don't have proper nuclear reactors that can fit in a shipping container let alone a car) there can also be technologies that are easier to make at small scales and harder to upscale for greater purposes. Everyone carries a phone with a battery in it, but to store generated power for a city, you may be better off with pumped water storage.
I thought lithium batteries were made with lithium--
This makes sense
If Mr. Handys run on fusion cores, then how does Bethesda explain the large fluid cans labled "Mr. Handy fuel?" Were they for the robot's flamethrowers or was the one in the tv show just a fusion powered prototype?
Its for flying.
Its like Back to the Future Delorean , the plutonium is powering the time circuits , but the car runs on gasoline
@scrapdog2844 handy fuel is just pure ethanol, all handies are alcoholics
I kinda want RadKing to lead a development for either a Fallout fangame, or a total conversion/overhaul mod. I wanna see Fallout through his eyes.
Hell, maybe even a modlist for F4 or Fallout TTW!
A modlist would be fun especially when we already have a charcter build.
It is possible the micro fusion cell was invented first because they could only get material to fuse in a small space then later figured out how to do it at an industrial size scale.
That's actually how most things are developed. It's just that most people only hear about the things being touted by advertising from companies to use their service. This lead to the idea being introduced to the zeitgeist that things start at industrial scale then get miniaturized.
Early computers were small like a briefcase but weak, hence they were scaled up to giant house size machines to increase their computational power to a worthwhile amount which they rented out until people figured out how to miniaturize it with the invention of microchips.
PS: we've had the ability to build battery banks and solar for industrial scale use but it was cost prohibitive till recently.
Could be the same thing with micro fusion cells, industrial scale arrays would have made electricity to expensive for people to afford but an individual could afford to buy the occasional micro fusion cell like how people could afford to buy batteries for a remote but wouldn't be able to afford to power their entire house with them.
could also be different form of fusion.. perhaps the (micro)fusion cells are really just a capacitor pack and minute amount of fuel, which are used by an inertial confinement system to generate power within the weapon or device. basically drawing power from tiny nuclear explosions. this would help explain why they're expended after a single shot.
while the big reactors everyone struggled with needed continuous output, so were largely focused more on a tokamak, Stellarator, or other non-inertial confinement style system where you are keeping a mass of plasma continually at ideal pressure and temp.
though i'll admit like the idea that Fusion cores and most of the big 'fusion' plants were actually 'Fusion(tm), a product of mass fusion corporation" and actually just various forms of fission reactors or fission batteries. it would be an excellent extension of the fallout series's satirical depiction of pre-war corporate greed, disregard for public safety, and focus on form over substance.
>Fusion exists
>Still goes to war over oil
Oil is used for more than power. Look up petrochemicals and origins of common products, you might be surprised by how many uses we have for them.
@@kingofhearts3185 if you have fusion you can make your own oil by just reversing chemical reactions cuz at that point you are post energy scarcity
they'd need like one throwaway line about "plasma instability at scale" justifying fusion being more common at smaller sizes. though still doesn't make since that there wouldn't just be tons of the small reactors running together to power cities.
also fusion breeder reactors are totally going to be a thing. neutrons from fusion turning lithium into tritium, that then needs to be filtered out of the lithium containing material and both getting put back in the reactor.
I reckon the small reactors have some kind of regenerative hydrogen and coolant reserves, so enable the fusion core to go past the safe generating capacity it can reach on its on.
Sure there would be. Politics and war. Have the focus of the use of fusion be for defense technologies and you have an in built excuse. Why build that civilian plant when the RED MENACE might invade that town. We will need the resources for the reactor to make tools to FIGHT THE RED MENACE. Seriously in universe the world is unhinged and that is a perfectly valid excuse..... And yes each time I typed RED MENACE I tried doing a Liberty Prime voice as is correct.
I always felt that the fusion cores were a battery and drawing from real world examples, if you was to make a fusion/nuclear generator you would need a huge amount of power just to start it up, which is why when you remove the cores the generators run for awhile, but I imagen without that core when they need to cycle or undergo matinance they are unable to start back up without that core or a core worth of power.
fallout 76 added a "fusion core recharger" to their atom store for the CAMP system.. which while certainly meant to be more just a gameplay conceit to let people use power armor more, would honestly fit the idea of 'fusion core as a battery' pretty well.
@@glitterboy2098 True true, and if people don't trust atom store saying its not cannon, the legendary perks absorbing energy attacks to charge the core would.
I'm sure the Fusion is Fission in disguise theory is actually in FO4 somewhere? I've heard the theory before but this is the only FO channel I subscribe to. The Fusion Cells/Micro Fusion Cells can easily be chalked up as a dialect difference. As for why they can't scale it up, it could be that at larger scales the process becomes unstable and that's the stumbling block they were struggling to overcome.
It was from the Mass Fusion company directly.
They marketed their technology as clean fusion power, but in reality they were selling extremely dirty fission generators and hauling off tons of nuclear waste to hide it from the public.
@@saladinbob Its not a theory. One of the terminals - I think in the Mass Fusion building? - flat out state that all of the fusion tech is actually fission based and they just use the term fusion for branding sake.
This theme is all over the place in FO4. Even in the first buildings you are likely to go to, like the first likely Red Rocket station where you find Dogmeat. The techs there were dumping all of their nuclear waste in a hole under the station, and this was all despite that very same station winning awards for clealiness and enviromental friendliness.
They are all just a bunch of liars and frauds, doing everything they can to survive in a world that is figuratively and then literally crumbling all around them.
@@saladinbob that originates (I think) in the plutonium wells in concord
Interestingly enough, it seems like Fallout Bibles Fusion Cells sound almost like Fusion Cores when you consider their listed uses
I always thought that fusion generators were both powered by and charged fusion cores' energy.
This would explain why the generators are still running, up until you take out the core, and why the core depletes energy after some use.
Great video, as always. 👍
Maintaining consistent lore over a generational span of years (27 here) seems to be a task fit for a handful. The way Bethesda has changed, if not outright retconned some aspects, is proof of that claim.
Bethesda owes channels like yours so much, keeping fallout and tes alive all these years, if they don't send huge care packages out to you and fudgemuppet, camelworks etc. whenever their next huge game comes out I will be genuinely upset. Series would not be half as popular as it still is if passionate people like you didn't make content on it.
Bethesda philosophy “ The fans will fix it “
@@ATOMIC_V_8 Todd couldn’t even send out the proper pre-order and premium edition items fan paid for. Lol
Can’t forget Drewmora (formerly Drew from Fudgemuppet)
@@pl-boostcreepAnd that's extremely insulting from them. If you have fans who love the game but want to extend it, it's imo something else than "forcing" fans to fix your buggy mess of a game, because otherwise it wouldn't even be half as good.
Thanks Todd.
@@the_rose_dragon6816 of course
It might be worth mentioning that the power plants in Appalachia have fusion core processors connected to them that when powered up will manufacture endless amounts of fusion cores as long as power remains on. So I would say it's safe to say that these so called fusion cores are a ruse unless these processors have some unknown tech turning fission into fusion held within.
I remember the days back when I had a camp that had 20 of these and 20 ammo plants. I couldn't sell the shit fast enough.
My headcannon is that (micro)fusion cells use a type of miniature fusion-boosted fission reaction like irl boosted fission bombs, but not (usually) as explosive. fully self-sustaining fusion reactions are hard, but it's (relatively) easy to make radioactive hydrogen fuse in brief bursts (like, with lasers and stuff), and those bursts can be used to multiply the power output of a uranium core. if you set up a uranium core, and fuse some hydrogen inside it (maybe with lasers and stuff?) you could have a very powerful miniature reactor that only had to be periodically fueled with hydrogen. this would explain why they can last for centuries inside a vault generator with a hydrogen supply, but have a limited power capacity in man-portable applications (like lasers and stuff).
plus those generators could have additional cooling systems that the core itself lacks, allowing it to uncheck its standard safeties and generate additional power. Untethered from a generator system, the core might overheat quicker and so shut down for safety reasons. Coolant may have degraded over time hence the lessened run time.
My Brother in Atom I cannot fault your headache from the attempts at sifting fact from myth.
As always your content is appreciated. Thank you.
This is a good topic. The thing I still find so silly about the Fallout universe is that wheels are almost completely absent. Other than Securitrons and the Highwayman, you never see so much as a shopping cart being used in the world. More people get around by vertibird than bicycle.
The first game had brahmin carts made out of truck beds put on wheels.
4 says 'the fuck's a cart, stack it all on the animal"
I think we could have stuff like Tameable Animals for riding and making carts and a Vehicle Workshop(think the Power Armor Workbench but for vehicles) for restoration of the husks around the Wasteland and making new vehicles from scratch.
I think it can work well with this.
Fallout fusion is just magic. It does whatever it needs to.
But yeah, the lore isn't quite... consistent around them.
Lore isn't consistent, it's typical Bethesda.😂
Nuclear stuff has been very 'comic book' for long time going back to Fallout 1 in some ways
The Microfusion cells, Fusion cells and Fusion cores isn't fusion, is just a battery. A good, strong and capable of a big explosion battery
"Fusion induced existential crisis." 😂😂😂
Quality content! Thanks
15:52 The fusion core holder is as stable as the series.
My headcannon is that micro does not refer to the cell but to the fusion energy produced. They could build bigger reactors but they still only produced the same amount of energy no matter the size, so they tried to make the container smaller rather than the amount of energy produced bigger, creating the microfusion cell. Just waiting for Rad to say the exact same thing in the video or to entirely disprove it now.
Edit: Maybe fusion cores contain more hydrogen fuel which is why they last longer (outputting pore power in total) and kinda explains why Preston calls it a battery and why they can last for so long. If a microfusion cell was used in the place of a fusion core it could still power a building but for only a second until it runs out of hydrogen fuel?
more important than fuel might be coolant. I reckon MF/F cells burn out after use because they have very limited cooling capacity, and standalone fusion cores carry more coolant, but it degrades over time, explaining the limited use in power armour.
1:47 2 years ago I remember reading a research facility in the USA was able to produce more energy output than the input. It was a small amount (4% more energy) but still, it's a breakthrough.
You should make a video on Red Rocket lore
And possibly what a Fallout Texas could be like but just a wonderful video
Brothers, brothers, let's not argue. Atom loves fusion and fission equally.
Sunny and fia
I think a huge contribution to the confusion created in-game, is caused by the writers not knowing how any of that works themselves
If codsworth is still running 200 years later, there must be a fusion core
If you read the Mister Handy design document written way back in 1997, it states that they were partly sold on their inclusion of a "238B nuclear power unit," so you have to think that that means it has a nuclear reactor or a nuclear battery inside.
Ni mention of Fusion Cells; The Mister Handy was first released in 2037.
I appreciate your videos. I've given up on Bethesda writing, but you bring valuable insight to the table.
If I were to guess, it's that most of the "fusion" tech seen isn't true fusion power but weird form of plasma reactor/plasma engine and it's just marketed as fusion because most are none the wiser (or they're just fission like Mass Fusion pulls). The few that would have access to true fusion tech would be Vault Tec and its subsidiaries. This would also explain why the Enclave wouldn't have fusion power and how Mass Fusion only figured out fusion tech just days before the Great War. Hell it could explain the Fusion Cores degrading real time as it would be more likely be a plasma battery that was kept topped up by the generators (though take that with some salt since it's a new retcon). True fusion power could be only available to Vault Tec since they're known to be shady as hell with their......testing.
TLDR: They're probably just plasma reactors/batteries marketed as fusion tech and Vault Tec were probably the only ones with them.
No, it just works, RadKing. Our lord and savior says it, so it must be so.
16x the energy
One possible explanation for why they had microfusion and struggled to get to macro fusion could be that they reverse-engineered the alien fuel cell into thefusion cell at the same time as they reverse-engineered the alien blaster into the plasma pistol.
They would lack the full technological understanding that might have allowed the Thetans to make fusion tech at any scale, only having examples of the micro stuff.
It might also explain the lack of a listed discovery date/discoverer, as it would likely be classified as all hell.
My theory is that fusion cores and cells work like the fusion bombs the have fusion reaction creating newtrons that are used to bombard uranium to generate energy as in a fission reaction and part of the energy is used to sustain the fusion itself, this would be done since maybe a fusion reaction is easy to make the smaller it is and it would help the miniaturization of energy since if you try to make a fission core it would need a critical mass amount of fissile material so that wouldn't work in small things, this would also explain why the mini nukes can be so small even if there is now way you can fit a critical mass in that thing
Maybe Fusion work like 40k Ork tech just think of it working makes it work?
Fantastic video! I always appreciate how you dive into the more obscure topics within the Fallout series. After playing these games for over a decade, I never stopped to really think about what a fusion cell is. Your attention to detail and creativity are truly unmatched!
Man I been waiting for a mug to drop fr, finally
For some reason difficult to explain i really like this types of videos.
Maybe is because you show passion researching on the actual facts of a videogame universe and trying to contrast them in order to create a logical narrative.
Gosh I love this channel the fact that a youtubers fallout mascot character supports and dresses like a child of Atom. Who are my favorite fallout faction throughout all the games. Plus the channel is highly educational this channel rocks
When I first saw the TV show I thought cold fusion was just their big macguffin but the fact it was an established lore since Fallout 2 is awesome.
I believe we already achieved more power than in in fusion. Not a lot but already there.
I feel like the reason the lore on fusion is a mess is: The loremasters don't actually know the difference between fission and fusion.
I enjoy these videos, and I like how he does them in character, like a wiseman who with patience of a preacher.
Next episode. "The Desks of Fallout"
yt shorts: japans in 2050
nuka world: builds fusion reactor while japan microwaves an egg sandwich
21:20 haven't heard that name in a long time
You are forgetting about "Cold Fusion". This was all the rage in publications when Fallout was in development. Supposedly a small form factor in the lab that claimed success.
double figures now day 10: trash of fallout pt 2 when?
We need a part two, a part three, a commentary video, and finally a two hour movie.
Fine, I'll do it myself
make it a movie trilogy
You failed your luck check man. Better luck next time
@@peircekimberly1007 *reloads autosave from just before the convocation*
I could be tempted to think of microfusion cells like chemical lasers - efficiency is secondary to dumping a lot of energy, very quickly, and the idea of replacing weapon charges as normal goes all the way back to slings and arrows.
I always figured the deal with Mass Fusion not having true fusion until short before the Great War was because they tried to develop it independently. If fusion was attainable before then I'd imagine it was strictly held onto by Poseidon Energy/The Government since they didn't want China to achieve the tech. So Mass Fusion was trying to redevelop it from basically scratch, while real fusion was mostly reserved for weapons and certain Generators.
@@dinoboy2672 It's possible Mass Fusion got away with the false marketing because the government thought it would make them much more capable of producing real fusion power than they actually were
Love your content keep it up, King.
There's no argument that fusion cores, fusion cells and microfusion cells have a lot of power. But I think there is some discussion whether they are really fusion power or merely fission masquerading as fusion (except for the Fallout 4 reactor). Granted it's all pretty inconsistent. So let's just assume that fusion cores ARE fusion power. That raises a couple of questions. Why does the fallout TV show make such a big deal out of the fusion cell that is the subject of all the factions' greed? And if the fusion cores are fusion, maybe they just need to be refilled with water or some other material to fuse? Maybe they all really are fusion power and the Fallout 4 reactor beryllium agitator and the Fallout TV show fusion are just ways to get significantly MORE power, beyond what you can get from reactors of the time? None of it really makes sense. Good video!
I wish Todd lets others work on Fallout so we wouldn't be forced to wait years after the release of Elder Scrolls to get another Fallout game
I hate the elders scrolls, dungeons and dragons fuckin Grow up😂haha, but still they have been waiting since Skyrim for a new game, couldn't imagine being a Skyrim fan, Id be going ballistic
i wish he stop saying the show part of the game time line.
Obsidian did great and Bethesda still treated them like shit and didn’t give their bonus for the low metacritic score I think they’re going to take everything down with them. They even managed to piss off Mick Gordon and he left doom they’re not on a good path rn. Imo their inflated egos won’t let them see someone else do “Bethesda games” better than them
After the disaster that was 76, I doubt they'll let anyone but the main studio touch a Fallout game of any size.
(Also they probably don't want to get shown up like they did with New Vegas lol)
@@skeeter3969You are not an adult.
The fusion cores always made no sense to me. How in the fuck is it going to power a whole ass building for 200 years, but can't power a suit of armor for more than 30 minutes. What the hell is even that?
*in German* 1, 2, 3. Thank you to the commenter who told me what the guy on the PA is saying.
I assume the microfusion cells / fusion cells naming issue is just because the microfusion cells were all around better and eventually replaced the old fusion cells whatever those may have been, so the 'micro' prefix was no longer needed to distinguish them. Like how everyone just calls cellphones 'phones' now because landline phones are less common.
I think it's a matter of a lot of the tech for some reason requiring a fission reactor, or just decaying source for radiation that somehow primes the fission reaction. The pure fusion reaction where you don't have a radiation source somehow initiating fusion being something that was difficult and rarely used. Maybe they need a neutron source because for some reason their fusion is using H-4 or something and fuses it to whatever its partner is right at the moment that it absorbs the neutron. So the common fusion reactors are powered by fission reactors, all of them technically being both but being advertised purely for the fusion reaction.
I've also always thought that microfusion cells aren't a net increase in power, or at least not a notable one. That making the cell itself takes somewhere around as much energy as you can get out of them. So functionally it's like building a battery, it's a useful product, but you aren't generating power just packaging it.
Still a lot of weird discrepancies in the tech though. I think they could explain it, but probably don't want to come up with the answered needed because it's easier on the writers to keep things vague. They could easily claim that they discovered fusion occurring in an experimental small scale fission reactor and the development of the tech didn't progress well, because they didn't have a good understanding of how it worked, and were mainly working off of experimental iteration of the device rather than uncovering the underlying principles. Or maybe they were just replicating poorly understood alien designs and the advancements in the tech of the small scale fusion were in getting closer to recreating the original than figuring out how it actually worked. Either way they might be inclined to take things I don't think it's a priority for the writers to explain.
I believe the fission vs fusion situation with fallout is what they showed where Mass “Fusion” doesn’t actually use fusion but markets it as fusion technology, possibly to corner the market or marketing strategy. Smaller components like the fusion cells or cores could simply be batteries for portable storage and able to store large amounts of energy for generators in buildings or vaults. Actual fusion generators seem to be very large and difficult to work properly so it makes more sense that fusion cores and cells are fusion in name only.
"but this is just a theroy, 'a fusion theroy'" nice omage.
is it possible that fusion cores & cells are nuclear decay batteries? a lot of leftover nuclear waste will continue to decay and produce heat/waste/energy for centuries to come, it even powers a lot of mars rovers and satellites since its reliable for so long and outputs so much power. so im wondering if the fusion reactors produce grid power and the cells/cores are just waste batteries
I always viewed fusion cores as a disposable battery and the name was a company labeling them as fusion for branding purposes
A possible solution I can see for the miniaturization paradox is the lack of consumer protections. Conventional fusion “donut” reactors actually produce a lot of radioactive material from a rare material that becomes irradiated by the process. The reactors can last a long while with replacing the material, in the fallout world, maybe they found a way to have short lasting ones that fall apart from the lack of the material. The mass fusion plant may be the much rarer type of fusion reactor that electromagnetically accelerates atoms into each other and directly harvests the energy released rather than from a steam turbine. The lack of consumer protections and different methods of fusion may solve the miniaturization paradox.
Great video to see before sleep
A way to make sense of the problem of scalability could be that because of the amount of resources it takes to force a fusion reaction, the smaller the fusion is the cheaper and more realistic. As it scales up it becomes more and more challenging. By the time the bombs dropped Vault Tec and the US Military had gotten fusion to the point of being able to power a bunker. It was only on October 22nd 2077 that Mass Fusion was able to get the fusion to work well enough to power a whole city (Boston).
love the longer vids
Would you be interested in looking into some of the game sided mods like fallout London frounter or the tactics spinoffs
my take is, that the large fusion reactors that they have trouble with are your classical fusion reactors like we are building. The fusion batteries, do use fusion but they are based on cold fusion. In it they have a "candle" that produces vast amound of muons made from exotic isotopes that can still have a runaway reaction and are presumably made with fission waste products. that's why they are called batteries instead of generators. They are muon catalyzed fusion batteries
It's possible that the fusion found in Fallout works off of the same magical pseudo-science many other aspects of the games do, and for whatever reason is much easier to maintain in smaller applications.
Maybe it's either very difficult to keep a large reaction at low enough power to be safe or they're harder to start and keep from fizzling out, like how you can start a lawnmower with a pull cord but you're going to have a really fun time cranking a semi truck's motor by hand just due to the sheer immensity.
Also, if I were to assume, fusion cores probably have some sort of catalyst in them which allows them to run pretty much infinitely by recycling their fuel, but when too much power is drawn too quickly they can be depleted.
It makes you think the fusion core had to be pretty cheap to be so many different places. It is one of the most common thing to be found in the wasteland.
I would actually suggest potentially some form of catalytic induced fusion for the small cells. Somethinf that works on the small scale for limited time use.... but which doesn't scale up into fusion as we understand it. It also might explain fusion cores slowly going out.
You could even tie it into the eldritch in-lore, being actual magic and a faustian bargain that directly led to the war.
i too had assumed that fusion cells, and cores were simply named wrong and were something along the lines of miniturised thermoelectric generators that use the heat generated by nuclear material to generate electricity, we already have the technology to do something similar in the real world. the fact that the cores on the weapon atoms judgement seem to be leaking nuclear material would seem to support this idea.
Danse is such a tightass about everything... He may be a fusion reactor
i remember reading somewhere that we have started to get more power out than we put in, its just not enough to be profitable yet
Fun fact, IRL we actually have the same issue of creating things on a small scale and then having trouble recreating it on a larger scale.
Wake up babe, new RadKing just dropped
I think the main takeaway about all this Fusion Confusion is that what characters IN UNIVERSE call "fusion" may not necessarily be real fusion.
Don't forget that Mass Fusion was basically defrauding the entire Commonwealth of Massachusettes by calling fission power "fusion".
Personally, I would consider Fusion Cores and Fusion cells just a marketing name, while probably being tiny RTGs or fission reactors in the case of "Fusion cores"
the thing about the resource war wasn't that there wasn't enough energy but rather the actual material scarcity. they didn't have energy to matter conversion so clean cheap energy would only go so far to avert war.
We have no clue what was necessary for fusion reactors. It could very well have been, the resources needed to make fusion reactors/ fusion cells were still very scarce on earth.
Perhaps large scale fusion in the fallout universe was just much harder. Or maybe the material used were not available in large quantities.
Fusion was the friends we made along the way
25:57 I think the reason they just don’t look at cars is that they are 200 years old. With all the weather in fallout like rad storms I think it would be in even worse condition then u can imagine. if you add the fact that there was a nuclear detonation nearby the electronics would be absolutely shot to high hell (we know that the cars don’t have shielded electronics due to the survivalist) The cars would be written off quickly and the generators would of been scavenged/ damaged due to the remaining survivors/ critters.
Love the video and I agree, this lore makes absolutely no sense no matter how you splice it.
Just wanted to point out a couple not picks I spotted real quick:
First, fusion is still radioactive. That incident neutron radiation during the fusion process is intense and will "activate" sorounding material making basically everything in a fusion power plant radioactive including the coolant.
Breeder reactors don't produce more fissile material than when they start, that just produce a more useful form of it (ie producing plutonium from uranium). Your not making energy though.
Lastly, fission is actually more power dense then fusion technology and can last significantly longer. After all, rtgs (radio-thermal generators) are used on space crafts and remote regions specifically because they provide power for centuries with zero maintenance. My bet is that these "fusion cells" are actually just highly compact well shielded rtgs.
3:15 damn so we’re about to do the Fallout universe ~25 years earlier 😂
given the warning on fusion cells, I think they're not really fusion but just a super dense battery, like the FO universe equal of a lithium iron/ion, and Mass Fusion itself is likely still trying to make fusion but also just a "Battery" company till they can make a big breakthrough into the true fusion field, I can see cores and cells maybe holding a charge of fuel that reacts to create energy when inserted, kinda like a tritium MRE heater but more potent
“Breeder” fusion reactors are actually a concept. Lithium can be used to absorb waste fusion radiation, causing it to undergo fission to produce fusion fuels.
10:56 prehaps the specifics on how to create it was not made available to public sectors like energy companies (that weren't affiliated with Enclave like Posiden Energy).
20:48 also, I think that is just a gameplay feature, not an in-universe mechanic. You don't hear Brotherhood members complain about having to constantly recharge/replace their fusion cores, after all.
I've always assumed the amount of fissionable material in the center of a MFC is quite small... Like pea sized small, the rest of the bulk of the cell body is shielding.
There should be a video on The Children of Atom. Describing their lore and religion
Calling the Fusion and Micro Fusion power cells may simply have been a marketing tradename that no one expected to be real. Much like calling batteries today Lightning Brand and no one would expect them to be really as powerful as a lightning bolt.
I am filled with conFUSION by this video
The Aliens!!!! Crashed zetan ships, weapons of unearthly origin to examine, leaps in technological understanding of microfusion tech related possibly,,, they needed a power source for the giddy up buttercup and seeded the information of microfusion into the minds of humans
Just to let let you know we do have a fusion reactor and it has output more energy out than in. It's still a prototype but has been repeatedly shut down and restarted with no issues
A hypothesis i have is that fusion cells and cores are named after their company of manufacture. Much like kleenex tissues or creasent wrench. It's far from a perfect theory, but it's food for thought.
[Squidward on the floor pose] FUUUUUSIONNNNN
I am A BIG FAN of your channel and fallout as well as it’s lore and enjoy these lore videos but some things are best left alone and not looked too deep into from a gameplay perspective you’ll always find contradictions with lore and gameplay