A friend of mine just pointed me at this link, speculating that Governor Schwarzenegger is going to announce funding Dr. Robert Bussard's fusion reactor research.
First, some background.
The friend in question is Noel Gorelick, who introduced Dr. Bussard to Google and was official Transparency Monkey for the extremely popular Google Tech Talk "Should Google Go Nuclear?". You can kind of see him, especially at the beginning. Oh yeah he's also the creator of Google Mars and now works there. Not on Mars. Well, not physically anyway. At Google.
Moving on...
If the story is true (which is unclear), that would mean the research will be funded. I can't explain how excited I am by the possibility. Bussard mentions near or at the end of the talk that it isn't really a research deal anymore, they proved what they set out to and now it is an engineering issue to bring the prototype to production at scale.
In many ways I wish Google had been the one to step up to the plate instead of the government of California. Google has the incentive to make it happen (think about their power bill), the bureaucracy of California has incentive to politicize it. Before the Google privacy blowup they actually had the goodwill capital to pull it off, maybe now that's not as true. I tried to imagine at the time what the reaction would be to Microsoft "going nuclear" and decided the critical mass would not be at the atomic level on that one.
Noel also pointed me at a "virtually complete summary" (yeah he talks like that) on Bussard's research at askmar, check it out.
Here is some background on Dr. Bussard's work:
Bussard Fusion Reactor http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2007/03/mr-fusion.html
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2006/11/easy-low-cost-no-radiation-fusion.html
If you want to delve deeper into the technology:
IEC Fusion Technology http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/
IEC Fusion Newsgroup http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/IEC_Fusion/
Posted by: M. Simon | 2007.07.25 at 03:43