[ExI] Written for another list

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Sun Aug 5 13:41:06 UTC 2012


On 5 August 2012 10:59, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> > never-meant-to-be-the-real-thing ITER experimental reactor by a
> consortium
> > of *a dozen* countries while the US alone spent some 80 times more for
> the
> > oil war in Iraq.
>
> This is in the past, and a little bird told me that will
> be over soon. Out of budget.
>

ITER or the Iraqi war? Never knew they had a limited budget for the
latter... :-)


>  > What is the worse bet in the mid-term? What could be achieved with a
> > Manhattan-project kind of push?
>
> Manhattan was 0.4% of GDP during peak, Apollo was 0.4%.
>

Just for the sake of argument: the push towards "renewable" energies comes
from a deliberate alteration of the energy economics, without which we
would be happiliy sailing towards oil peak etc. without even a second
thought about using the sun for anything else than dry our laundry.

OTOH, you say that the real, or at least a main, objection to investments
in fusion energy is that it would not be economically competitive. Why
couldn't we be doing just the same as we did for solar, if we were
persuaded that this is the way to go?

I understand in this respect that, even for tokamaks, if and when DEMO were
completed  subsequent reactors would cost just just 25% of it.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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