editors note: I added the last link shown below. I just thought it might help explain the way the improved Tokamak (ITER) works.
by Pie Guervara
At that time (1970-s -1990-s) magnetic compression fusion (Tokamak) pretty much died and lost most of it’s research funding in the USA. Magnetic bottle fusion was kept alive for basic research but could not create the forces required to get a positive energy yield and create or sustain a fusion process. Neither has ICF until, maybe, recently, at the giant National Ignition Facility. (Heck, I thought Shiva and Nova were huge.)
We (that is we in the USA) have the NIF which has yielded a huge amount of basic physics research and engineering progress fruit but never the goal of clean cheap energy. I don’t know if the physicists at LLNL ever solved the problem of Broullian scattering despite pulse and wavelength tailoring and driver transformations to x-ray using holrahm targets. (This was once classified information but was let out of the bucket decades ago.)
In any case, Tokomak (magnetically compressed bottle fusion) is back. I find it exciting, even invigorating. But then, maybe I am just an idiot. I think funding research of the “counterintuitve morphology” of the genitals of ducks just a plain stupid waste of tax dollars. But, hey, maybe that is just me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
This is an abolutely brilliant post that hints at so much real potential for clean, safe energy.
As you probably know, one of the big drags on our economy has been the dependence on foreign oil (and their inflated prices) and the billions we have shifted to the Middleast, money that is often used against us by terrorist. If we could use laser energy and natural gas we could tell them to “shove it” and create millions of new jobs here and put hundreds of billions of our dollars back into building our economy, not Saudi Arabia’s. -Jack
Jack,
An energy producing inertial confinement fusion or magnetic bottle fusion machine is still a possibility but not a fact.
We may be getting closer. Nevertheless those projects have a bounty of engineering and physics knowledge side production, even if they never produce the goal of cheap fusion energy. I think we will reach that goal.
In the meantime the USA developing and using native resources of carbon fuels seems like a good idea to me.
I could not care less about the counter-intuitive morphology of clockwise penises and counterclockwise vaginas of ducks. I’ll leave that to progressives to wring their hands over. It is more their domain than mine.
But then, I am not a duck farmer. I doubt that even a duck farmer gives a flying hoot.