On Fri, 24 Oct 2014 12:42:10 -0500, F. George McDuffee
wrote:

On Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:38:49 -0700, Larry Jaques
wrote:

snip

They're usually quite large and heavy. I hope it drops, though. I'd
truly love to see fusion (and the resultant near free utilities) in my
lifetime. Right, not holding my breath.

If anything beyond "cold fusion" http://tinyurl.com/2mj7q
NIST should test, and if any real potential, a new Manhattan
Project or Project Apollo to develop and deploy should be
undertaken ASAP.

As you know, magnetic-containment fusion projects have been going on
for a long time. When I co-owned a job shop in Princeton Junction, NJ
(1973 - 1980), just under half of our income came from making copper
connectors and titanium parts for the Tokamak research reactor at
Princeton Plasma Physics. That was part of Stage Two of the project,
financed in part by a $350 million federal grant.

In the time since, billions have been poured into Tokamak projects and
laser-implosion projects. A great deal of data has been accumulated,
including a lot of "unknown unknowns" that cropped up during the trial
runs of those projects.

For Lockheed to be saying now that they've combined several
containment ideas into one small vessel, and that they're confident it
will work, suggests that the accumulated test data is paying off. They
don't shoot off at the mouth over Skunk Works projects. I'm very
hopeful that they have something going.

--
Ed Huntress