NPR Talks About Fusion

...and, not surprisingly, the ITER project in France is not only sucking all the money out of the room, it's getting all the media attention.  $12-billion to get "close" to the actual goal of producing actual electricity.  Follow the link to listen to the report:

Researchers Seek to Recreate Fusion Power.

Morning Edition, August 20, 2007 · In southern France researchers are working on an idea for producing essentially limitless power without greenhouse gases. They're building a massive machine that will recreate what usually only happens in stars or the sun — fusion. That's where two atoms become one, and release energy.

David Kestenbaum's report begins by saying "There's a joke about fusion:  it's the energy source of the future, and always will be."  Except, without it, there probably is no future.

Comments

[Peter G Kinnon]

"David Kestenbaum's report begins by saying "There's a joke about fusion: it's the energy source of the future, and always will be." Except, without it, there probably is no future."

From a quite different angle my recently published book "Unusual Perspectives" presents an argument that predicts the realization of abundant nuclear fusion energy power being an INEVITABLE consequence of strong observable patterns.
And probably within a couple of decades!

A short description follows:

Using skeins of understanding drawn from a variety of apparently disparate fields of knowledge which include Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, Cosmology and Information Technology, this significant work weaves a fabric which displays striking patterns relating to the overall nature of the process that we call "life".
These patterns not only underline the seemingly inevitable chance-mediated evolution of organic life-forms with which we are familiar, but also strongly suggest that the concept of a "life process" can be usefully extended to include precursors, such as stellar/supernoval nucleosynthesis, and products, such as the current exponential growth of technology. This present progression is seen to have underlying "free-market" mechanisms very closely analogous to those of Darwinian evolution. Extrapolation of this very clear trend results in a very counter-intuitive but quite compelling vision of the future. A future that, because the process is exponential, might be upon us in but a few decades. A future dominated by a new endogenous life-form. A future in which humankind, if not ready to make the radical adaptations required, may well perish.