Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[Tulse]

asymmetric_implosion wrote: If LPP makes a breakthrough, the people financing the project own it, not the people that invented it. FF will get absorbed by the 1% as a tool and things will continue.

I mean this as no reflection on the outstanding job the LPP folks are doing, or the technical difficulties they have faced, but it looks like if FF works, the end product will be relatively simple and straightforward to build. I don’t think it will be possible for the technology, once proven, to be kept under wraps — others will re-create the devices, and the research costs necessary to do so are very modest*. You wouldn’t need a General Electric to be able to do the work, a much smaller company or NGO could potentially follow LPP’s lead, especially given how transparent they have been to this point. If it works, FF will be nearly impossible to suppress.

*That’s what I find so frustrating about the resourcing of LPP’s research program — it is absurd that such a promising technology isn’t getting loads of funding, especially since it seems that only a relatively modest amount of money and time would be necessary to demonstrate whether it is possible or not. The LPP folks are doing tremendous work on what is essentially a shoestring, especially compared to far more complex and less promising alternative fusion technologies (not to mention Big Fusion efforts like ITER).