UKC

Lockheed claim to have cracked it.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/15/lockheed-breakthrough-nu...

If this is true, and the technology is actually viable, the world could be about to change in ways we can't even imagine.

In reply to Only a hill:

Nothing in the Guardian is ever true, except occasionally by accident.

In reply to Only a hill:
The skunkworks has turned out some amazing things but I am sceptical. The financial markets seem to be as well as the announcement took a chunk out of their share price.

In reply to Only a hill:


Their approach certainly seems interesting, but what they now have to crack is the funding to prove it.

There are a whole raft of companies and organisations working on reactors with with ~200MW power outputs, ~$US20M price tags and ~2 meter diameter containment vessels. General Fusion (canada), Tri-alpha (USA), Helion Energy + U.Washington (USA), Spheromaks at U.Washington (USA), Lockheed Martin (USA) , EMC2 and the Polywell (USA), Tokomak Energy (UK), Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (USA)

These are backed by different amounts of private (and government with GF) funding between $1M and over $100M. Many of them are backed by, hosted by, run by or interact with people with historic interests in space flight...

Until recently there has been basically zero mainstream press for any of these efforts, and the twin beasts that are Tokamaks/ITER and ICF/NIF are hogging almost all the state funding - and media time - for fusion from almost the entire planet.

I sincerely hope one of these alternative approaches work, as unlike the giant ITER style tokamak they have the possibility of significantly lowering energy costs as well as decarbonising the world, and they could well happen within my lifetime. If one of them really does pan out in the next decade I may live to see images broadcast back from a probe sent to Alpha Centauri.

A very exciting two weeks with the results paper out of the fearsome Z-machine at Sandia as well - http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.155003

In reply to Only a hill:

If this is true then amazing - However I'm suspicious .
I wouldn't expect Skunkworks to be giving us close to free energy when most of the elite owners have their fingers in the oil, gas and warmongering businesses.

I'd like to be proven wrong and it be a new dawn for humanity. Sigh

In reply to MGC:

Agreed.

If we're keeping to Star Trek's timetable then we have a global thermonuclear war to look forward to, followed by warp drive and interstellar travel in about 50 years.

In reply to Only a hill:

"Boffin hypes project to attract funding"

In reply to Reach>Talent:

Really? Let me just call unsubstantiated BS on your comment. Not that it matters, many stocks are loosing chunks at the moment, and it seems pretty uninformed to attribute the 1-day change in share price of a company with annual revenues of $45Bn to a small announcement from a small R&D team.

On October 15th, the day of their press release, stock indices were tanking, for example the Dow Jones fell by 1.05% whilst LMT was up by 0.69% by the end of trading. I note that the Guardian article was published before the trading day finished in the USA, so who knows where they get their random stock figure from at the end.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=LMT+Historical+Prices

In reply to Only a hill:


Thanks for posting - honestly. That's an interesting article.

But they don't claim to have cracked it.

Once again it's "if, maybe, could, could be", and the notorious "10 years from now".

They have not built a reactor. When they build a working reactor, I'll start to start believing them.

Anyway thanks again.

In reply to abseil:

They are betting that if they can get a fusion reactor that fits in a shipping container then they have just solved a large chunk of the militarys fuel supply chain problems forever, and they will be able to name their price until the patent runs out. Worth dropping a few billion on.

In reply to davidbeynon:

Yes, of course it'll be wonderful, but once again, "if". I'm still waiting till they build a working reactor before getting interested!

In reply to abseil:

Simple geometrical scaling rules favour big reactors if you are going the low density/high confinement time route.

All I can say is that if they get it working then they certainly aren't going for ignition.

In reply to davidbeynon:

Thanks a lot for your reply.

One thing I noticed was that the Guardian headline says "Lockheed Announces Breakthrough", while the article says "If it proves feasible, Lockheed’s work would mark a key breakthrough...". The two are different things - to me at least.

Thanks!

Signed
Abseil
Total non-expert

In reply to wintertree:

Ok, put it this way: If AstraZeneca put out a press release saying "We've found a fountain of eternal youth in our basement, can we borrow some cash to set up a bottling plant" or if Shell announced "Hey guys, seems we dropped 6 decimal points in our last reserve assessment and it turns out we control natural gas supplies that'll last till 3015, only thing is we have so much that we'll need a few more tankers" what do you think would happen to their stock?
A) It'd go through the roof.
B) Meh, dunno not much.
C) It would drop like a stone.

In laymans terms, people are taking this announcement with a massive pinch of salt and won't move any money till someone shows concrete proof of an actual working prototype.

In reply to abseil:


I agree. I'm still waiting to see something not based on a hyped up press release.

In reply to Reach>Talent:

Yeah. They didn't say they had it. they outlined a possibility and a research program they acknowledge as high risk.

I suspect there will be investment lining up for this - there is for other similar attempts - but such investment doesn't go through shares in the parent organisation.

People are moving significant money into a raft of new, small reactors. Some of them over $100M, and into firms without the heritage and background of LM.

In reply to Only a hill:

They've had this technology for years, but it's been suppressed by the big oil cartels, because put as simply as it can be, if all of a sudden, you release the fact that oil and gas is worth nothing, the markets crash, the futures markets crash, the whole economy crashes,and if you can wade through the shit which comes with it, the reset button needs to be pressed, so its basically slowly slowly drip feed. Therefore it's not a technological breakthrough it's a political solution to quell the voices what are speaking out about what really exists, like the off world colony!

In reply to John Simpson:


It's hard to imagine arms manufacturers being suppressed by anyone. Maybe Lockheed ought to investigate Kickstarter

In reply to Simon4:


That's because the communists at the BBC won't tolerate competition

In reply to nufkin:
They're not suppressed far from it, it's highly classified. Which is so obvious that i can't understand why more people don't get it. As the stealth bomber is the last piece of tech to be de-classified, and in the world of how these things develop, it's probably like a biplane to what they're testing right now.

In reply to Only a hill:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100501.gif

In reply to Only a hill:

It's depressing, but unsurprising, that what would be on of the most important and positive breakthroughs of recent times is met with a dirge of cynicism and general negativity on ukc! Some of you really should try getting up on the other side of bed sometime.

In reply to John Simpson:
Congratulations on becoming the new forum mental, and in such a short period of time too. You must be really proud

In reply to John Simpson:

Of course, what about that thing Tony Stark has in his chest for a start?

Not really. My feeling is that fusion isn't being held up by active conspiracy so much as predictable market-led myopia and successive governments who have seen the obvious but lacked the courage to take decisisive (and expensive) strategic action. It's big, difficult and hugely expensive but unless we discover some really surprising new physics in the next decade, we'll be needing it long before we've made it work.

The tragedy of fracking is not so much the immediate environmental impact but that it gives everyone an excuse, once again, to do nothing until it's too late.

In reply to Bruce Hooker:

I think people are cynical about it because it has been promised as "20 years away" for the last 60 years, and much the same seems to being said here (within 10 years).

If they have made the breakthrough that will actually lead to a commercial reactor that produces more energy than it consumes, fantastic, bring it on!

In reply to Reach>Talent:


When a credible company announces they have made a big step forward to revolutionizing life on earth and their stock price falls 0.6% you have to wonder if our financial system is fit for purpose. There isn't a close enough correlation between actual value (e.g. nuclear fusion or a stem cell cure for diabetes) and financial return. Similarly, the people who have done best financially during the computing and internet revolution have been investing in houses rather than technology.

The whole point of capitalism is to incentivise people to do useful things and it just isn't happening: people are being motivated to buy and hold property and land, work for government to get a generous pension and play financial games two or three steps removed from actual productive business. This isn't an argument for socialism but for innovation in the way we create money and value intellectual property so capitalism can start doing its job again..

In reply to Bruce Hooker:
You should have a look at the article's own 'Reality Check' link before making sweeping generalisations about people on UKC.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

When a credible company announces that it might have made a breakthrough worth hundreds of billions of dollars but can't develop it without some of your cash then the fact that there share price effectively stayed the same isn't really a reflection on anything (and no fan of our financial system BTW)

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


See my earlier post - the stock price rose by close of trading, but even if it had fallen by 0.6% that is a rise against the backdrop of widely tanking stock prices at the moment. It's still meaningless as stocks in the wider company are not closely related to high risk research projects.

I agree with your general sentiment though; but it's not the financial system - private investors are putting serious money into these new fusion projects, for example "Tri Alpha" have raised perhaps $100M in private equity for their fusion research.

The problem is at the government level. Lockheed Martin's own people on this project are openly describing it as "high risk" - so it's no wonder LM won't fully fund it as they're answerable to stockholders who would rather see predictable returns from short term warmongering etc. If we had suitable long term funding from the government to cover high risk research projects such as this, there wouldn't be a problem with short-termism in the shareholder world. The problem is that the governments of the world spend a pathetically small amount of money on fusion research, and that this is compounded by their myopic policies of only funding one potential route to fusion power (three in the USA, but the other two routes are thinly disguised weapons programs.)

Why do we fund fusion research at such a small rate? Take your pick from sheer incompetence, short-termsism, denial, conspiracy theories around oil companies, worries that some non-tokamak reactor could open a route to a "pure fusion" bomb. I'm going with incompetence and short-termism.

In reply to wintertree:


Yes, but if the financial system was working properly they would be. Logically, a practical design for a nuclear fusion reactor should be more valuable than every oil and gas well on the planet. Oil and gas will run out but fusion is practically limitless. So even if there was only a 1 in a 100 chance of Lockheed Martin being on that path it should still move their stock price quite significantly.

I think there is a fundamental problem that the financial system still values things mainly according to their scarcity and that model is completely unable to assign a value to innovations which are useful but hard to keep under control. If someone invents a workable nuclear fusion design but it will take 30 years to deploy it then since patents only last for 20 years the financial system sees that invention as worthless since it is useful but not scarce. The real problem is that we haven't developed a financial system that sufficiently rewards the people and companies driving technical innovation.

If in ten years the bankers were actually convinced that fusion would work they would quite likely not assign much value to those developing it on the grounds that the main patents were running out and the technology would be widely copied but write off masses of value from oil and gas stocks and banks which had loaned money to oil and gas companies. Potentially limitless energy could trigger a financial collapse rather than a boom.

In reply to Dave Garnett:


well they do say, the closest you get to the truth about the Bin Laden situation is Iron man 3


The new physics exists as well as the new tech, it's just once again, classified. Richard Hoagland has done a decent job in explaining the overall theory with his hyperdimentional physics. basically put there's another plane at 90 degrees which models further mechanisms. Obviously if anyone asks me how to explain it I can't because it hasn't been released for public knowledge and understanding.


Yes this is the alternative.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


If there wasn't scarcity, there wouldn't be a financial system?


It could do more than that, it could start to move us out of the age of scarcity that necessitated many of the financial systems we have today?

In reply to Kid Spatula:


Hi, I've been here since late 2003, this is my third profile, I got bored with the last 2 which were, simmo and johnj.

With this award you've made up do i get a prize as well?

In reply to John Simpson:

With such faith in the veracity of the unknown and unknowable I expect your prize will await you in the afterlife. Just keep the faith ...

In reply to john arran:

Thanks John :+) will do.

In reply to John Simpson:


So tell me, John: have all my friends who are at JET, ITER, CERN, et al, been lying to me for all these years? That's an awful lot of people who've never once, after a few drinks, ever let anything slip at all.

Or are they all unaware too? In which case who the hell is doing the real physics?

Wait, no. I've got it. It's the aluminium in the chemtrials making me forget all they've told me, right?

In reply to Jamie Wakeham:


I don't know they're your friends why not ask them rather than asking me to second guess what they're thinking


I don't know what other people think, everyone in physics is doing real physics.


I don't know is it?

In reply to wintertree:


Money has to be scarce but that doesn't mean it needs to be created from debt or that a mechanism can't be found where governments create money when the true wealth of society is increased by new inventions or artistic works and provide that new money to the organisations and people creating the value.


It's more likely that the same thing will happen as happened when technology vastly increased the availability of computer power: we will cease to value energy and the wealth that a rational system would give to the people and companies who bring us nuclear fusion will instead end up enriching those who own scarce resources like land and buildings.

In reply to John Simpson:

Hilarious or lame. I can't decide

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Oil and gas will run out but fusion is practically limitless. So even if there was only a 1 in a 100 chance of Lockheed Martin being on that path it should still move their stock price quite significantly.
...Potentially limitless energy could trigger a financial collapse rather than a boom.

Actually we already have limitless energy supplies in use and providing large quantities of energy: Hydro-electric. But this energy isn't free and energy from fusion (if it happens) won't be either. It might not even be cheap. The plants, as currently mooted, will be hugely expensive to build and run and will have a design life that will have to be costed into it. There will be some nuclear waste generated. None of this makes fusion a license to print money as it will also have to compete with existing energy sources.

In reply to DubyaJamesDubya:



Limitless? I know it rains a lot, but....


Kind of missing the point. The mainstream ITER and DEMO tokamak research points towards a hugely expensive capital cost and are unlikely to lower the cost of energy. If a system like the LM one pans out, or one of half a dozen other private research projects, then the capital cost is going to be cheap. Not free, but likely very cheap.

The reactor being discussed on this thread would not be hugely expensive. It has a small vacuum vessel, it does not require a giant concrete foundation bigger than any power plant, it doesn't have the incredibly high neutron fluxes of a giant tokamak that necessitate currently non existent super materials.


We'll just have to wait and see. How would a compact, low cost 200MW fusion reactor every comfort with declining oil stocks, fission plants we never got round to building and windmills...

In reply to John Simpson: i don't think that the big oil cartels are controlling, suppressing this technology. Lockheed are American , and you are grossly overestimating how much control us oil companies have over supply. It's to the benefit of the US. For this to work

Whoever gets this to work will be very rich, richer than the oil/gas companies are now

In reply to wintertree:

My response was intended to indicate why LM's share price hasn't rocketed on the back of their press release. As things stand it is a proposal that sounds like a pitch for money. If it is going to cost so little to build why don't they build it, bring it to market and clean up (in all ways)

In reply to wbo:


Oil company and oil cartel is not the same thing.


Yes and no as off the grid power creation ultimately means the grid is no longer needed.

In reply to John Simpson: you're right, they're not. But being energy hungry neither the US or China are in any supply/demand cartels. And even if fusion reactors did exist they're not going to simply replace everything overnight - in the changeover process someone will get rich - watch oil companies rebrand themselves energy companies.

And no grid, at all, really? Have you thought about that at all ? Doesn't make any sense at all.

In reply to wbo:


Yes and this is the point the technology exists, it's build for the future time, which makes any development so far quite insignificant.


Of course I have I've thought about it at great lengths. Centralized power manufacture and lossy distribution makes no sense what so ever operationally, it only makes sense to power hungry corporations, and the current financial system.

In reply to Only a hill: well I don't think the answer is a reactor in everyone's house. More local generation , yes, but you still need a grid

In reply to DubyaJamesDubya:


It could also be because this was already know to those who follow the sector, the news was already "in the price"?

Whatever, the fusion reaction is the answer, it will happen some time. One gets the impression that some "ecologists" would actually be disappointed to see a process come along which allows for pretty well unlimited clean power, goes against the hair shirt style

In reply to Bruce Hooker:


Well of course; bathroom lights left on all the time, people boiling a full kettle for one cup of tea - upon this sort of behaviour the Empire was not built

In reply to Only a hill:

Mrs Num Num and I had fusion food last night. A Big Mac wrapped in a Domino's pizza each.

In reply to John Simpson:


That would be ACE.

Bearing in mind we had a 'crown' for Jude, what do you reckon your trophy would be? I'm thinking you should request lots of tin foil, with hattery involved.

For the record, I don't buy oil companies suppressing renewable or negative-carbon generation: currently, the major western oil suppliers are being so f*cked about by the production regimes, and so squeezed by competition, that diversifying into genuine alternatives would be the only logical choice for morally bankrupt capitalists. If you can imagine a better outcome to pretty much any energy-production scenario, then the evil capitalists will already be on it.

So I'm thinking dome kind of Napoleon hat in bacofoil. I reckon you'd own it....

Martin

In reply to maisie:


Nowt to do with me, silly name calling trophy awarding dickwads should be able to use the 2 brain cells they have and come up with a suitable award.


If only it was that simple, they would, however when the US dollar is also known as the petrodollar, you can maybe understand that oil underpins the global economy, so viable technologies which reduce income into those who run the economy isn't going to be given the green light till the timing is right, as everything will crash.

Also point above reads oil cartels, not oil companies.



Maybe you could wear it your self it sounds like it will suit you <
br>

In reply to John Simpson:


Got one already.....

I think in terms of reductive argument, it comes down to whether you believe that petrochemical companies are so morally bankrupt that they'd disadvantage the world in order to make a lot of money now, or so morally bankrupt that they'd destroy their competition for a longer return on their money. Given that the average financial sociopath can't look further than their own escape plan, I find myself agreeing with your general principle, whilst disagreeing with the notion that suppression of renewables is pursued to keep the market afloat. These people would put babies in a blender to make money, and not lose sleep over it, so notions of keeping the economy going don't come into it.

If anybody wants to look into what happens when an idealistic renewable energy company with a credible product comes into contact with mass capitalism, have a gander at nanosolar.

Martin

In reply to maisie:


I don't know why I keep having to repeat this point cartel not company. The agenda is manipulated at several levels higher than in the examples you have given. The examples happen because surprise surprise they're allowed to.


I haven't heard the term nanosolar, I'll look it up

In reply to John Simpson:

Nanosolar is a company that was destroyed by an influx of asset-stripping management types.

John, you have to understand that we can all picture the cartel situation, but there are good reasons why that falls on its arse. I have a cynical, misanthropic view which begins with the individual and his/her own slide into sociopathy - and builds from there. Plus, clever people can generally see which way the tide is going, no matter how morally bankrupt they are.

All of which explains why my money goes on seeing the world rather than a pension. All of you people putting money into the stock market are doomed - fund shelter, land and energy and you'll be OK.

Are you heading down to the SW at all, John?

Martin

In reply to maisie:


I just read about it, the price reduction from china also played a part.


Well we may have to differ on that, as I've spoken to lots of clever people who can't see the obvious truth that 9/11 was a high tech demolition job. (Which is off topic so I won't discuss that point further on this one). So these same people may not be up to date yet.


Indeed, sooner or later a better system will replace this one.


Maybe next year, I lived in and around Plymouth for the best part of 10 years so I have a lot of good memories of the place.

In reply to John Simpson:


Oh, go one, please do. It sounds absolutely riveting.

In reply to felt:

Noooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!! Even a new aeroplane on a treadmill thread would be more constructive than that.

In reply to Only a hill: i am curious about this cartel you talk about. Would the us and china be in it? Why would china be in a cartel that is actively to their disadvantage? Ditto the us - they have long wanted to be energy independent.

Do you think nuclear fusion is more likely to come from scientists in the us or china, or the producing countries in any cartel?

Forget the term petrodollars - for sure oil is important as it is a vital energy source. Replace that and it becomes less so , except for plastics

In reply to Only a hill: et al

the uk has an experimental reactor which is fuelled by refined water, in Oxfordshire. It has been running at least two decades. the plasma stream it creates as an energy flow is hotter the than the sun. Difficulty is that it takes a huge magnetic force to harness and a further huge consumption of electricity to accelerate the 'flow' via a mircrowave input.

The resource of funding is voluntary annual donation by the non-oil producing nations (funny that), of about £2m each annually. The USA does fund. Opec don't. There are no patents claimed or particular secret to the research being deliberately 'open book'. The facility runs three times an hour. the plasma stream can only run for 7 seconds before the 'harnessing' magnetic field is depleted of energy - drawing off the national grid (about 5% of national supply). the only time the national grid denied supply was during the screening of Brideshead Revisited some Xmas ago. Should the plasma stream contact with any material know to man it would simply melt through it (vaporising it). There is no nuclear waste.
The microwave boost is drawn from two twenty foot iron fly wheels - very Victorian technology, hey!?

A new facility advancing this technology is currently being built in France, enjoying the same funding source, There lies our hope. Of the three derivative water fuel sources, one in particular is thought to be the holy water but is of course the most difficult to create.

Do your research, there's no conspiracy to all this. There is very big hope that this plasma flow can be brought to boil water, to drive a steam turbine and hence produce electricity for all. But for now, for all the energy used to get the technology and learning to where it is today, the energy source has not so much as been able to boil a cup of water in return. still along way to go!

Still, they've got the right bunch on it. One bright spark calculated (using topographical mapping) that if the fly wheels bust their housings, the wheel would eventually topple over some where east of Sandown Park race course (Surrey), having crossed the Thames. And their corporate cricket team hasn't been beaten in the Oxfordshire league in three years. They have India scientists who can get a ball to bounce sideways!

The tour I enjoyed, the science all way-over my head but utopian to witness and learn of.
As for Lockheed, typical a weapons supplier to grab patents - lets wait and see. There lies hope.

In reply to wbo:



Not exactly. WE'll be tied to oil for a long time to come even if we can come up with a clean cheap way of producin electricity. As like it or not it's essential for transport. Whilst electric car development and production is progressing massively the unfortunate reality is right now the batteries aren't that great and require rare elements in their production. Which means we're a long way away from mass electric transportation. Similar applies to hydrogen fuel cells.

Basically in simple terms it means even if the human race solves the electricity production and transportation problem and ends up with a fossil fuel less means of producing energy we'll still be tied to fossil fuels for the foreseeable future whether it's for plastics/chemicals or just fuel in our transport. It's just they may make these activities sustainable if they are being carried out in isolation of all of the other carbon based pollutants we're spewing into the atmosphere right now.

As to the OP's point I'd be inclined to agree with a few other posters in that if it was a real viable concern then the markets would have reflected this in the share price. More here http://io9.com/don-t-get-too-excited-no-one-has-cracked-nuclear-fusi-164801...

In reply to Frank4short:
With "limitless clean green electricity" comes limitless hydrogen. I think if we ever get fusion that would be the logical step for personal transport, and I'd bet it would occur within 15 years of the first commercially available fusion reactor*.

edit: *which at the current rate of progress will be about 3015!

In reply to Frank4short:

I just don't get this line of thought. A small R&D division of a giant megacop announced 18 months ago that they have a high risk fusion research program. They put out a PR wire 18 months later looking for private investment and people bleat that megacorp shares didn't surge now.

The people investing very real money in these alternate reactors are not the same as megacorp shareholders. One are people who can afford to loose $100M on a project with no returns for say 15 years and the other are investors and pension funds looking for regular dividends and a stock price that's hopefully going up gradually.

If you think that investment bankers can judge the scientific merrits of a fusion reactor about which few details are known...

There are good reasons to maintain a healthy skepticism of the alternative fusion groups, but "the markets" is not one. If the markets worked to fund long term research with eventual massive pay offs, we wouldn't have so many government and charitable research councils...

In reply to Frank4short:

To quote the article: Lockheed Martin will need to show a lot more research evidence that it can do better than multinational collaborative projects like ITER. So far, its lack of willingness to engage with the scientific community suggests that it may be more interested in media attention than scientific development.

This is blinkered crap. I often hear it from scientists who have the luxury of being publicly funded and who insist that private companies are not interested in scientific development because they are more interested in the media than engagement with "the" (that is, their) scientific community.

Such utter nativity bordering on spite. These guys at LM do not have access to the government funding on fusion. They are funded by a company. They have to justify their spending to shareholders and management. That is never going to happen if they follow an academic style fully open science approach.

The berk writing the io9 article has the galls to say these people are not interested in scientific development. They work under a different funding model, but an awful lot of high quality science comes out of private R&D. I suspect the PI worked damned hard to sell the idea to LM because he believes he has an approach that will work. I expect his, and his peoples, job or even careers are staked on this scientific development.

I expect better from scientists. It's perfectly valid to remain skeptical about the potential for success of private R&D when information is withheld, but it's petty and churlish to jump to the conclusion that they are more interested in the media than science.

Of course the publicly funded scientists have a total stitch up on research money into ITER (and two thinly disguised weapons programs in the USA) so I am always doubly skeptical when they slag of private R&D for lack of engagement - there is no public funding for them to engage with if they want to explore an alternative to large tokamaks. The paucity of state funding and the ITER stranglehold on that funding leave anyone with an innovative idea no option but to seek private funding. The very same people who force alternative research to seek private funding, which always brings restrictions on wider engagement and publication, those same people then go on to attack them for lack of engagement and publication. Appalling given the importance of fusion to humanity.

In reply to wintertree:


Wow, what an intriguing sentence! Pity it's just a typo.

In reply to Bruce Hooker:


Come on Bruce, the whole post is pretty much on the money, I didn't think your on-line debating skills were so petty, maybe the bastards have ground you down?

In reply to Only a hill:
about as likely as a manned mission to Mars..

In reply to John Simpson:

I wasn't debating, just admiring accidental series of words, getting nativity and spite into the same sentence. A little humour is not totally forbidden... especially as the thread isn't really going anywhere much.

In reply to Bruce Hooker:


Nothing wrong with humour. Well I'm sure you know these threads never go anywhere, the mainstream forum posters won't touch em.

In reply to wintertree:

agreed with that; the pressures and isolation of private industry to pursue the technology and achieve the results.
'appalling given the importance of fusion to humanity'.
you know your onions.

In reply to John Simpson:


Sweet Jesus...

In reply to John Simpson:


It's not hard to do either: the basic Turbo Encabulator technology needed has been around since the 60s and has now reached a high degree of development e.g. youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w&

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


Almost as legendary as the fabled magnetic motor, all you need to do is get your head around the dipole effect and you're laughing free energy from yer shed.

In reply to Bruce Hooker:

A little humour?! I think this whole thread is a massive joke or a troll. Please tell me it is. Otherwise we may need a new forum with a title like Conspiracy Theories for the Misinformed.