FUSION

This is not so much a conspiracy theory as a recurring pattern, but since it's Super Tuesday conspiracy theory will do. We teach our children "Monopoly." Monopoly as a business strategy is taught in business school. Yet, monopoly remains a problem for the Federal Trade Commission, the DOJ and economists who depend too much on "laissez-faire" to bring about destructive obsolescence and make way for more productive enterprise. The bean counters of post mature giant corporations have a tradition and skill in "Monopoly" that far out plays the regulators if in fact the regulators are not already bought or politically intimidated.

What's it to do with fusion? You have got to read this article about the Department of Energy, DOE, and think --- Big Oil. We worry about our government being over influenced by foreign lobbyists and special interests; Both the President and Vice-President are oil men, and do you think multi national oil companies put our national interest first. The combined revenue of the leading multinational oil companies equals the annual budget of the US! A year ago that total was barely more than 20% of the budget.

The beauty of Adam Smith economics lies with a self regulating mechanism based on self interest. Greenspan makes a case for the hands off policies with regards to our economy, and I certainly cannot argue with Greenspan. Self interest clearly does not work with public health, what about police, fire protection, water, sanitation and education? There may well be a separate category of public infrastructure that must be guided by community interests and not special interests. Our highways, maybe freedom of the seas are included here too.

Now, with a world threat to the safety of the planet, i.e. the air and the oceans threatened by green-house gases, maybe energy becomes a community --- even national crisis priority.
My point, if DOE is politically influenced in suppressing a promising energy solution, valorized by multi-national oil, somebody should raise a ruckus. We are so politically motivated to privatize everything, here is a private enterprise that worked its product nearly to fruition with skimpy funding. Is this not the American way, Yankee ingenuity at its best, but if this small clean fusion unit is the solution to our energy needs it does not seem worth the risk, not to find out.

Bussard's solution mimics the Sun's fusion generator; only instead of gravity compacting the reagents to the point of fusion, his solution utilizes an extremely negative ball of electrons injected into and concentrated by a magnetic containment vessel to a focal point of extreme negative charge. He calls it Inertial Electrostatic Confinement, IEC. When charged reagents, deuterium, tritium or boron enter the field, they are electrostaticly accelerated, compressed and collide in the center. Bussard's data clearly demonstrates fusion with a yield far in excess of the energy consumed. An apparent feature of Bussard's approach to fusion, not to be missed, is that it appears to be able to generate electrical current directly, at a very high efficiency.

We run the risk of loosing this technology with the death of the author, through unwritten and unpublished papers, or through the loss of data on the recycled hard-drives, reconfigured and sold in estate or liquidation auctions. The failure of disruptive technologies to overcome entrenched monopolies seems a tragedy. It happened with Bukhara Heim with his death and unpublished work, it happened with the bubble and bankruptcies of 2001 and it happens today as entrenched tel-comm companies bid-up the auction for cell phone spectrum to bankrupt the technologically superior small competitor.

How can I say this with any credibility? I can't, I have only investment experience, but I think that what academic economists fail to see is the existence of monopoly when the field seems filled with several very large apparently competing companies. The monopoly can be shared by several with common interests if their market power is sufficient, a cartel or just common interest. Sound familiar, do they sit on one an other's boards? Do they play golf together? Do they play a shell game with M&A, like AT&T? I know very little about oil, but I know that it has got to go. The oil companies have got to reinvent themselves in the public interest or parish. We cannot continue poring our core wealth into these hostile countries, and we cannot afford to continue to pore CO2 into the atmosphere. The opportunities, however, outweigh the disruptive changes that are needed. A local character, Dicky Gregoire, at the coffee table said, "Where there is confusion, there is money to be made." He referred to his excavation business, but I think it applies to Fusion.

It brakes my heart to see our President kiss the ars of some prince in white robes.