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My familiarity with the TOKAMAK containment facilities and the personnel who ran them goes a bit beyond the fringes. Also the laser/compressed deuterium/tritium pellet "reactors" keep getting rediscovered every couple of years, since 1987. There is no evidence-repeat NO EVIDENCE-that any of these projects is in serious danger of producing usable power anytime soon.
Both Discover and Scientific American magazines have been conscientious about reporting any advances or even hopeful pronouncements in this field, due to, among other reasons, the desperate need for energy in the world and the accolades that would befall the scientific community in the event of any real success. True enough, the current political wind blowing around hydrogen as a useful technology is just that--wind. Hydrogen, at best, is merely a way of transforming one sort of energy into another, more portable, sort, adding nothing by way of original power, with the enormous losses that inevitably accompany such transforms, plus a few of its own.
Every form of power you see around you, with the possible exception of nuclear, is, in one way or another, solar power. Yes, of course, it is stored, concentrated solar energy (ie. coal, oil, wood, biomass, ethanol, methanol, hemp oil and other oil seed extracts, etc) but it is solar energy, just the same.
RIGHT now, if we were to utilize all of the available spigots on solar energy, not just the anemic solar cell panels (although they have gotten much better, of late) that most think of when solar is mentioned, we would have adequate power available. I'm talking about proven technology, even crude technology, available right now. Wave power, wind power, solar heating/cooling and panels, as well as many others, are all off-the-shelf do-able, nothing new and startling required.
The internet is a useful tool for locating and consuming virtually all of the current papers on the latest tech as well as new designs, utilizing well understood tech for generating power. Most of these designs have no consumables (beyond lubricants and accumulated wear) and, therefore, are not huge, ongoing profit gouging enterprises, they just work, work well, and pretty efficiently.
Fusion may not be a total dead end, but it is currently airy-fairy, pie in the sky hope-for notions that have no concrete value. I will not dig through my own library for citations, but a little goggling should wise up any but the most obdurate. Ah, yes, and by the way, an opening slam against an organization that is fighting to maintain and preserve something of a healthy environment and which many of us have fought along side of and made sacrifices to try to support is not a particularly endearing way to open an intellectual discussion.
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