Massive oil deposit located that will provide humanity energy for at least a billion years:

[originalpckelly]

Pssst...where do you think the energy in the oil came from? :P

Yeah, I'd tap that.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Or, Nuclear Fusion Project Success! Energy available for Billions of years!

[Occulus]

6. Star in a bottle.

We badly need fusion power. And you're right- get it right, make it work, and we'll end our energy shortages for the foreseeable future.

[originalpckelly]

7. No, it's not likely. The post is a joke.

It's a fucking huge waste of money, because even if they break even just barely, they still have to figure out a way to have enough excess heat from the reaction to keep it going and power our homes.

We should be spending our money on solar power and the wireless transmission of it. At least we can make excess energy from solar power.

It's probably not doable because we have to waste energy on confining the plasma and heating it, while in the sun it all just happens because of the mass of the gas and gravity.

[Occulus]

8. It's more likely than not, and the method you're talking about aren't the only ones.

The Polywell, for example, very well may work as advertised, but you can only do so much with the money Dr. Nebel's lab has. There are other methods being researched as well, and it most certainly is not a waste of money in any sense when you're talking about the end to our energy woes if it's successful.

Another method of power generation- space-based microwave solar- is rarely even mentioned, but it, too, seems like a good idea with more immediate potential than either solar or wind. That said, we absolutely have to develop fusion power somehow. We'll need that if we want to do even more advanced things later on, such as colonizing Mars or mining the asteroid belt.

[originalpckelly]

12. No, the Polywell will not work as advertised...

it's a scam, because they've never explained away braking radiation. How does that NOT waste all the energy you put into the device?

But at least that waste of money doesn't cost as much as a tokamak-type toroidal confinement.

[Warren Stupidity]

9. We have fusion power. See the picture in the OP.

A joke explained is a joke that died.

[Occulus]

10. I don't joke about new energy.

Sorry. It's too serious an issue at the moment. Every joke adds to public ridicule of the methods themselves, and that's the last thing we need.

I would very much like to steer people away from solar and wind. Yes, they generate useful energy, but not nearly enough to solve the world's energy demands.

Yes, yes, I know, but "if we build enough of them" isn't exactly practical, is it? NIMBY will always rear its ugly head, and for all one might say about "but it's the RIGHT thing to do", some grandmas on family property owned from the 1850s will still not want to see the blades of a wind harvester from their backyard. It's just human nature.

Time is also a matter of concern. If it takes twenty years (an arbitrary example number, to be sure) to obtain regulatory permission to build a wind farm, will the energy generated by that wind farm be sufficient for the needs of the community twenty years after the project was started? I highly doubt that. Now, I know wind farms don't take twenty years to gain approval, but the point remains: do we have time time to set wind and solar up to the point that we can rely on them, for the most part?

I really doubt that.

We need a magic bullet, something that will for now and forever solve our energy needs, and fusion power is that answer. We need to figure this out, no matter the financial cost. This should be a project on which we are willing to spend whatever it takes, for however long a time it takes, to develop and perfect. This isn't simply a project in the interests of national security, but rather a global imperative from which we cannot flee.

Fusion power is our answer. We need this. Badly. We meed to figure this out.

[originalpckelly]

11. Let me put this succinctly:

You think fusion is great, right?
You'd warn people off of solar and wind because they don't produce electricity?

Then, by that logic you'd have to warn people off of fusion, because it hasn't even once in its history produced a net energy gain. Not once.

They've had fusion before, you can do that in your own house, as kids who play around with fusors know. But they can never break even, there aren't enough fusions of nuclei going on in those designs OR ANY OTHER DESIGN, for it to work.
The only successful net energy gain fusion of nuclei was produced by the various Teller-Ullam designs, and you need the energy of a fission reaction to make it work.

That's the problem, you see, with fusion.

For fusion to beat out solar and wind, it would have to produce all the electricity we've managed to actually obtain from the two sources.

And by the way, you don't have to locate the solar panels on earth, you know. :P

There are designs to put them in space, and even at high altitude.

[Occulus]

13. You lost points at the second sentence- I never said that.

By all means continue funding solar and wind developments. It's not as though we can't develop the one while researching the other.

I do see you're firmly in the Todd Rider camp, though. That's a shame, seeing as how he's been discredited since he made his assertions regarding Polywell brem losses; I happen to think his material is suspect, partly due to the fact that he received funding from an office that was rather angry with Bussard at the time. Rider's backstabbing actually led to a data embargo in the lab researching the Polywell.

I'm talking about fusion power, so why did you go and mention a bomb? Bussard was convinced his design would work for peaceful purposes of power generation. While the jury is still out on whether it will work as he was certain it would, I think we should be cautiously optimistic that he knew what he was talking about and continue funding until it's obvious that it's a dead end. Obviously, the Navy doesn't believe that's the case.

I get the impression that you don't want fusion power to work. Is that, in fact, your position?

[greytdemocrat]

2. Solar is great!

I'd love to see the planet use solar to power everything we need.

It just ain't gonna happen tomorrow.

[KurtNYC]

3. but.. but...but

If people just get energy directly from the sun via solar panels and other technologies it will revolutionize commodity and utilities economics

ExxonMobileBPHess are probably working on a giant satellite (to be built with taxpayer funds and guarantees) that will eclipse the earth so that they can sell us sunlight and the energy from it.

[postulater]

4. Sadly, you are right.

"If people just get energy directly from the sun via solar panels and other technologies it will revolutionize commodity and utilities economics."

[pintobean]

5. That thing causes global warming.