On 28 November 2012 16:29, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote:
> > The take-home, though, is that NIF is far, far from practical power > generation. Cold fusion long ago reached this relaxed definition of > ignition. I'll venture a prediction, based on what I've been seeing, that > we'll have practical power from cold fusion long before hot fusion. A > corollary: the huge hot fusion programs will be shut down within a few > years. > Probably a safe prediction, through It is interesting to note that Tri-Alpha now have $140 million in funding from private investors/VC's, including Goldman Sachs. Unlike the government such investors expect results and don't give people money just to look at interesting things. While they have released minimal info to the public it does suggest that they, and their investors, believe that they have a very good chance of making hot fusion work soon enough to pay back some pretty large up-front investment. Polywell is similarly running dark at the moment (hope for a little more light soon) with continued navy funding - suggesting that they are seeing positive results. There is also another privately funded group General Fusion (steam powered liquid imploding liner on Magnetised Target Plasma) that has 10's of millions in funding. I think there is more reason to be optimistic about the prospects of these small left-field players than there is about big ticket ITER and NIF that we know won't work for at least economic reasons (even if their huge technical problems are solved). Yes these little guys have technical hurdles to clear, but at least they have some chance of being commercially viable if those problems can be solved.
