Fusion
Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)
While our "Daddy Warbucks" politicians pore billions into the ITER fusion project over decades without evident success, the DOE persuades the Navy to withdraw funding from Robert W. Bussard's laboratory. (Aug 11,1928--Oct 6 2007) Robert quit DOE to build a small fusion reactor based on an intense focal point of static electric charge generated by a magnetic cage. Protons released into the field accelerate to the focal point of negative charge with sufficient energy and density to react. This was not a dream but a working laboratory model. Bussard died before he was able to regain the funding that he lost and that is a long sad story.
The DOE's 12 billion dollar boondoggle supports a mammoth thermonuclear plasma machine called the TOKAMAK. Bussard says the Russians gave it to us because they knew it would never work. My cynical interpretation runs a bit different in that I would guess that Big Oil lobbyists, the two biggest in Washington, promote its funding because they too know it will never work. (Sound familiar?)
This lecture, born of some desperation and ill health, is a monument to Yankee ingenuity, daring and perseverance. It is as much a tribute to America as the Tokamak is a monument to bad leadership faulty stewardship and outsourcing our costs and our brain power overseas -- yes and even a bit of greed.
Where is Warren Buffet? Here is an under-rated stock with, would you believe, substantial upside! (ready to explode!)
We all remember our high school chemistry experiment combining H2 and O2 to make energy and water, actually 10 eV, the basis for hydrogen power. (Electron volts, everything is measured in electron volts now days.)
Bustard's fusion reaction, as I'm hearing it, on the same elemental scale, generates 10.4 MeV, with no radiation or radio active waste! The thing actually worked, so well in fact that it blew itself apart but that is only an engineering and cooling problem. Much more engineering is needed to achieve a sustainable running state. This lecture runs over an hour, but we had all better listen.
How much better to have infinite cheap exploitable energy than to have cheap exploitable labor.
Required Lecture!!!! really!
While our "Daddy Warbucks" politicians pore billions into the ITER fusion project over decades without evident success, the DOE persuades the Navy to withdraw funding from Robert W. Bussard's laboratory. (Aug 11,1928--Oct 6 2007) Robert quit DOE to build a small fusion reactor based on an intense focal point of static electric charge generated by a magnetic cage. Protons released into the field accelerate to the focal point of negative charge with sufficient energy and density to react. This was not a dream but a working laboratory model. Bussard died before he was able to regain the funding that he lost and that is a long sad story.
The DOE's 12 billion dollar boondoggle supports a mammoth thermonuclear plasma machine called the TOKAMAK. Bussard says the Russians gave it to us because they knew it would never work. My cynical interpretation runs a bit different in that I would guess that Big Oil lobbyists, the two biggest in Washington, promote its funding because they too know it will never work. (Sound familiar?)
This lecture, born of some desperation and ill health, is a monument to Yankee ingenuity, daring and perseverance. It is as much a tribute to America as the Tokamak is a monument to bad leadership faulty stewardship and outsourcing our costs and our brain power overseas -- yes and even a bit of greed.
Where is Warren Buffet? Here is an under-rated stock with, would you believe, substantial upside! (ready to explode!)
We all remember our high school chemistry experiment combining H2 and O2 to make energy and water, actually 10 eV, the basis for hydrogen power. (Electron volts, everything is measured in electron volts now days.)
Bustard's fusion reaction, as I'm hearing it, on the same elemental scale, generates 10.4 MeV, with no radiation or radio active waste! The thing actually worked, so well in fact that it blew itself apart but that is only an engineering and cooling problem. Much more engineering is needed to achieve a sustainable running state. This lecture runs over an hour, but we had all better listen.
How much better to have infinite cheap exploitable energy than to have cheap exploitable labor.
Required Lecture!!!! really!
Labels: Science
posted by Clancy Hughes | 3/20/2008 03:53:00 PM
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