My response: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=south-korea-makes-billion-dollar-bet-fusion-power&posted=1#comment-18
18. jabowery <http://www.scientificamerican.com/page.cfm?section=my-account>06:21 PM 1/24/13 >From a founder of the US Tokamak Fusion Program to Congress: The DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant magnetic tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and that is what the program has been about for the past 15 years - a defense-of-budget program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one of three people who created this program in the early 1970's (when I was an Asst. Dir. of the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division) I know this to be true; we raised the budget in order to take 20% off the top of the larger funding, to try all of the hopeful new things that the mainline labs would not try. Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue big-budget support. This worked so long as various Democratic Senators and Congressmen could see the funding as helpful in their districts. But fear of undermining their budget position also made DoE bureaucrats very autocratic and resistant to any kind of new approach, whether inside DoE or out in industry. This led DoE to fight industry wherever a non-DoE hopful new idea appeared. See http://www.oocities.org/jim_bowery/BussardsLetter.html On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Terry Blanton <hohlr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=south-korea-makes-billion-dollar-bet-fusion-power > > South Korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept > design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with > the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory > (PPPL) in New Jersey. > > <more> > > Such a waste. Imagine if they redirected that $1B to LENR! > >
