No, this has power applications

[tkmorris]

In fact, in the short term, that seems more important to me.

I was at Costco today, pouring gasoline into my van, and watching those numbers tick over higher and higher. Filling your gas tank is a lot lot taking a shower solo; there is nothing to do but muse. So, I'm looking at all that cash flowing, and thinking of the struggle to control the world's oil, and meanwhile I am just BAKING in the sun (I'm in South Florida). It occurs to me for perhaps the 10,000th time that our energy problem is inherently solvable, if we have the will. Hell, energy is all around us. It's simply a matter of harnessing it, and efficiently using it. Sun, wind, the atomic force, even gravity has the potential to yield energy that can be harnessed.

Bussard's fusion plant is just another way to do this. It is far from a comic book, at this point it is a straightforward engineering problem to make it practical. The real struggle will not be in accomplishing it, it will rather be in CONTROLLING the technology. There is more money to be made in selling power than there is in any other industry. Think of how much money Exxon made last year, even last quarter. Believe it, these people will first try to prevent such technology from existing, and when that fails (as it eventually must), they will instead attempt to control it, to package it, and to sell it. It will cost far less to produce, but they will attempt to make just as much profit or more as they do today. That is the real problem. Making the power practical and cheap is just a matter of money, brain sweat, and time. Making certain it is used for the public good is going to be the hard part.

[FogerRox]

1. Right on.