BTW:  I don't know why rational fusion people don't continually rub the
noses of pseudoskeptics in this letter.

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 5:23 PM, James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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!
>>
>>
>

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