Reply To: Iconography

[Brian H]

Tasmodevil44 wrote: Jimmy T, you hit it right on the nose in comparing tokomak to a big money devouring black hole. I think President George Bush wasted 3 billion on the ITER (although I may be wrong). Someone once joked that the Russians gave us tokomak so that we would not succeed.

When it comes to top candidates, I think the cube – shaped device of magnetic coils by Bussard and his team showed great promise. It was already producing something like 20,000 times more fusion reactions than the best Farnsworth fusor device. But then the Pentagon killed funding just as it was starting to show great promise. This is typical of government and your taxpayer dollars at work …. too much stop and go funding instead of anything ever being consistent.

The Bussard device is called the Polywell, and the Navy is funding it fairly heavily. Check out http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/iec-bussard-fusion-has-gotten-8-million.html and http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php .