From: "Tom Byrne"
Solar and wind cannot be harnessed in large enough quantities without visual
impacts. No one wants solar panels or windmills in their neighborhoods. even
green Vermont said no to windmills on their mountains. There are also the
problems of calm and cloudy days. Nuclear is the answer. Europe, which
promotes itself as the green continent, gets most of its electricity from
nuclear.
----------------------
Dr Robert Bussard (of Bussard Ram-Jet rocket motor fame)announced the other day that his system for generating power via fusion of either Heavy hydrogen or Boron11 and regular hydrogen had achieved fusion in short duration testing. His system uses a combination of electrostatic and magnetic containment, unlike the current "mainstream" magnetic torus and laser pumped designs.
Google video where he talks to some Google people about it(warning, very long):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606
Paper on it:
http://www.geocities.com/~dmdelaney/Bussard/bussard-fusion-reactor.html
Wiki on the reactor design:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
The unfortunate thing is his research was being funded by the US Navy and his budget was cut, now he needs a scant 200M to continue his test program and build 2 more partial scale machines before building a full scale machine.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 07 2007 - 19:04:35 EDT