Reply To: General thought on old coal mines.

[Brian H]

tcgibian wrote: This article raises an issue which I would like to see discussed further.

How much attention should be drawn to the work at Lawrenceville at this time? There exist powerful interests out there who would not be happy to see a safe and inexpensive means to generate electricity be developed. I refer to the resource monopolists who control oil, coal and uranium. They are looking forward to the time when they will be able to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us for ever scarcer resources which we cannot live without.

The government is not necessarily our friend. There is no way we could raise the financial muscle to outbid the resource hounds who already have so much influence in Washington. It is only a question of time before these vampires seek to flex their muscles and make a potential competitor vanish. Do we really want the Department of Energy looking over our shoulder? The usual sequence of events in the past has been: support, control, obliteration.

So far Focus Fusion has struggled forward successfully on private support, support with no strings attached. Shouldn’t this effort continue in the same way?

I suggest that Focus Fusion supporters should avoid direct confrontation or even too much publicity and remain as a guerrilla army, ready to spring up fully formed and unstoppable when the time is right.

TCG

I’m strongly in agreement, but it’s hard to resist tooting and blowing horns in the face of so much arrant ignorance and wrong-headedness in control of things.

And Eric is, despite his overall anxiety about being sidelined or swallowed and stifled, etc., rather trusting of the Bureaucracy and its masters and minions (not to mention somewhat deferential towards Big Science which has heretofore scorned his theories and findings.) I fear for him and FF if they get involved before viability is established with hard results.

I have previously expressed my faith here in the consequences of an “Existence Proof” of the DPF/FF model’s workability, since scientific and engineering history teach that once people know something is possible, they have had MORE than half their work done for them, and will push through to match or exceed the original discovery in short order. So that’s the “Big Picture” protection I hope will be in place before the Medusa-like effects of government involvement take hold.