Cold annular fusion realized — the poison-eating reactor and the Concavity

pivotal · Subsidized era (fusion operative; JOI's AEC contribution B.S.)

• When: Subsidized era — annular fusion is the operative energy base of O.N.A.N.; JOI's enabling optics work is B.S. (event 2)
• What: As Pemulis lays it out for the blindfolded Arslanian, "the whole fusion/fission waste-annulation thing in toto you can imagine as nothing but a huge right triangle": the impregnately-guarded O.N.A.N.-Sunstrand waste-intensive fusion facility in what used to be Montpelier, in what used to be Vermont — now the Concavity — pipes its waste to the Methuen Fan-Complex ("right flush up against the Wall and Checkpoint Pongo") and up to the old Loring A.F.B. near Presque Isle, where it is refined, bred into ever more toxic matériel, and looped back as fuel. The conceptual trick that unlocked wasteless-fusion's dead end came from annular medicine: annular chemotherapy — "treating cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer," fringe "anathematic" science a couple decades back — modeled the idea of "bombarding highly toxic radioactive particles with massive doses of stuff even more toxic than the radioactive particles": "A fusion that feeds on poisons," needing only "mind-staggering volumes of toxic material." JOI's applied contribution was optical — the special holographic conversions that let the annulation team study subatomics in lethal environments without being poisoned ("Like an optical glove-box. The ultimate prophylactic."), his "final lasting contribution to state science," memorialized in "the coprolite plaque in Tavis's office" from the A.E.C.; his Sunstrand advertorial films (Annular Fusion Is Our Friend et al., n024) taught the process to the lay public. The reactor is so greedily efficient it "sucks every last toxin and poison out of the surrounding ecosystem," producing the Concavity's runaway fertility and its time-in-flux — hence the E.W.D. catapulting that feeds and contains it. Annular-fusion mechanics live on THIS page; See the O.N.A.N. thread (the Concavity/experialism politics), the E.T.A. thread (the E.T.A. curriculum frame).