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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room
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To: Dennis Roth who wrote (136484)6/30/2010 1:37:41 PM
From: Sailing2  Read Replies (1) of 206184
 
Dennis, I agree with your appraisal that fusion energy will not happen for decades, if ever, and tend to think it will be "never" as far as commercial energy generation. However, I'm not sure why you would claim our government is not spending adequately to fund fusion development when we've "invested/wasted" tens of billions of dollars in fusion research and development. For example the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the world's largest laser facility has cost billions but to date has failed to meet it's goals.

We are also contibuting billions to the European fusion facility being built in France which has a cost over run triple its initial estimates and serious technical issues.

I'm completely opposed to corn ethanol but you could take the tens of billions of dollars we've spent over the past three decades on fusion, which will not produce a kilowatt of power in the lifetimes of my children and probably my grandchildren, and put them into renewables like wind and solar and be generating an appreciable fraction of our national electricity use by now at reasonable costs for wind and rapidly declining costs for solar. We could have also built a national smart grid with a portion of these funds spend on fusion.

Fusion research and development is another example of hugely wasted and mis-allocated funds as far as addressing the critical energy issues facing our country over the next decade or two. I'm old enough to remember when nuclear energy (fission) was promised to be so cheap they would neet to meter it. Since the late sixties, as you noted, we've been fed the same BS about fusion.

Appreciate your posts. LOL
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