Reply #54: I watched Dr. Bussard's lecture at Google

[backscatter712]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=199632184667378...

Yeah, I'm sold on the potential of Polywell fusion. Is it definitely going to work? Don't know yet, but seeing the discussion at talk-polywell.org, hearing the new news, and finding out about the funding of Polywell research by the Obama administration says to me it's quite promising, a lot more promising than the conventional Tokamak approach.

It's certainly worth developing. Maybe it'll run into a dead end, but I have a feeling it might turn into the first viable electricity-producing nuclear fusion reactor. And if they can get Proton/Boron-11 fusion working, it'll be hugely cleaner than even conventional tritium/deuterium fusion, which in turn is a hell of a lot cleaner than nuclear fission. It would literally change the world - we can ditch fossil fuels, we can clean up our carbon emissions and deal with global warming, we can build spaceships that can reach Mars from Earth in a month, we can explore the Solar System.

It's a gamble, but I'll call it a gamble worth playing.