[ExI] [wta-talk] MIT boffins crack fusion plasma snag

[John K Clark]

"hkhenson" <hkhenson at rogers.com>

That boat has sailed, the world is already awash in hundreds of tons of
poorly guarded Plutonium, and you only need a few pounds for a bomb. It's
only a matter of time till you will wake up one fine morning and open your
favorite newspaper and find that a major city has simply disappeared
overnight. Bummer.

And a boron hydrogen fusion reaction creates no neutrons, just energy. Dr
Bussard claimed with a little tweaking and just a few million dollars his
Polywell reactor could produce just such a boron hydrogen fusion reaction.
He was probably wrong, I would estimate the probability of him being right
at no more than 2 percent (maybe 3), but the implications of him being right
are so huge it's worth a paltry million bucks or so.

He very well could be proven to be dead wrong, time will tell, but even if
he is wrong history will say he wasn't peddling Bullshit, he was just wrong.
It happens even the best of us.

And the trouble with power satellites is that you have to invest about a
trillion dollars before you get your first watt of usable energy, before you
can really know if the idea will work. And don't tell me you have it all
worked out, in a project that large, that astronomically huge, something out
of left field that neither you or anybody else imagined could easily turn
out to be a total show stopper. And then you kiss your trillion dollars
away.

I really really hope my skepticism about power satellites proves to be
wrong, I hope my skepticism about a Polywell producing a boron hydrogen
fusion reaction that produces more energy than it consumes is wrong too.

It could happen, I know it's incredible and stretches credulity to the
breaking point but believe it or not I've been proven wrong before.

  John K Clark