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! >> >> >
