Reply To: General thought on old coal mines.

[JShell]

nemmart wrote: Why not just power the airplane with FF’s? Just checked some numbers. A 747 burns on average a gallon a second during flight. Jet A has roughly the same energy per weight as gasoline which has 121 MJ per gallon. Therefore a 747 uses 121 MW/hr, which means 20 FFs to produce the juice.

My second thought is that so many of these posts read like FF is an all but done deal. But we should all be a bit more realistic — it isn’t a done deal. So many things could go wrong – from the fusion physics, to the engineering to the economics.

Another aspect that particularly troubles to me: if FF was as close as it sometimes appears, I’d think funding would be pouring in. Think of it this way — what would be more beneficial, FF working or say a malaria vaccine? Organizations like the Gates foundation throw tons of money at long shot, big payoff efforts, like a malaria vaccine. So why hasn’t someone or some organization with deep pockets decided to fund this?

If you ask me, Focus Fusion is so far outside the norm of power generation that most people think its decades away from proving its feasibility, instead of years away . . . if rich folks act in a herd, they haven’t fully heard about Focus Fusion, or if they have, they don’t believe it’ll work. there have been too many cries of wolf regarding fusion in the past. My guess is that Google and other venture capitalists also stayed away because they got their “expert opinions” from pro-Tokamak physicists, who don’t think that FF is viable. Eric Lerner already made plenty of enemies in the academic establishment by publishing challenging the Big Bang theory, which is regarded to be almost unquestionable among many physics Ph.Ds . . . .if I’m not mistaken, one reason why the Hadron Collider was built was to try to detect certain kinds of “dark matter” that “haven’t been observed yet” because they are a mathematical necessity for the Big Bang theory to hold together in terms of universe expansion rates and redshift (ie, they need more gravity to slow the expansion of the universe if the universe expanded from a single point a certain amount of time ago) . . . yet Eric’s theory makes them unnecessary.

Thats my read at least. I’m sure Eric or others can do a better job of telling the story.