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France to Be Site of World's First Nuclear Fusion
brad writes "The New York Times (free registration) is reporting that 'France won an international competition today to be the site of the world's first nuclear fusion reactor, an estimated $12 billion project that many scientists see as essential to solving the world's future energy needs.'"
On one hand, people start talking about ways of preventing solar heat from reaching Earth to reduce global warming, on the other hand, people are getting ready to create power plants that will eventually generate gigawatts.
Well, fusion plants are necessary to replace coal/diesel/fission plants but global warming initiatives should simply focus on making everything more power-efficient and low-emission instead of coming up with inconvenient/impossible ideas. (Some european minister said he was shocked at how much power standby electronics use and suggested that people should not leave TVs&all plugged in when not in use... but how many people would unplug their VCR/TV/PC/etc. to save 5-20W per appliance given the inconveniences?)
Fusors are a common source of neutrons; specially seemingly simple arrangements like the Farnsworth fusor (that's right, the same guy who invented TV). The hard thing about fusion is getting excess energy from it.
All joking aside, wouldn't it be nice if SlashDot's main page worked just like the moderation system? Every submitted story would start with a value of 1 and each moderator could push a story up or down one point. Of course, it all comes together when each user sets their own threshhold for front page stories...
I'm guessing this feature has already been suggested for SlashCode implementation. Maybe I should go check...
2) It would appear you are unfamiliar with the facts. France has conducted many many tests in the islands over man years, as well as even planting a bomb on board a Greenpeace protest ship in Auckland harbour (a city of over a million and hardly an uninhabited sandbar) and killing a journalist who was on board ("Rainbow Warrior" ring any bells to you?)
3) You fail to understand irony - clearly a nuclear disaster should not be wished on anyone. But the fact remains that to many of inhabitants of the Pacific the French are the devil's agents, and I will happily lump you in with the devil's tools too based on your support of them in defiance of the facts.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
From TFA:
Greenpeace, for one, stated that "at a time when it is universally recognized that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Greenpeace considers it ridiculous to use resources and billions of euros on this project."
I swear, I think Greenpeace is more concerned about making sure nobody builds any new powerplants than they are about protecting the environment.
They are against new coal plants with modern scrubber technology, they are against fission plants, now they are against this expiremental fusion plant. Do they realize that humanity needs energy to live and thrive? Do they realize that by not building new more efficient powerplants they are forcing people to rely on older, more polluting powerplants more heavily?
It seems counterintuitive to me, it's like they would rather stick their thumb in the eye of corporations than actually help the environment.
Take a look at the science section. They're the top two stories.
Hmm... 3 times have been done before, but never on the FP I think.
c id=12747639 1 15432 c id=12603539
l d=1&commentsort=0&tid=95&tid=172&mode=thread&cid=5 638044
1 13809
d otdupe.html
d upe/
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151936&
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144601&cid=12
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=150292&
Of course there was the April Fools Trupe of yore:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=59193&thresho
And then there are the many dupes by the same "Editor" (Usually Zonk):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144599&cid=12
Ah yes, and then there was the dupe that occured less than an hour after the original. There has been some debate as to whether that was even a dupe or just a Slashvertisement, but for our purposes today we will just call it a dupe:
http://www.andrerestivo.com/weblog/archives/slash
All of this has been documented for your protection here:
http://anti-slash.org/injustices/CmdrTaco/double_
HJ
UCLA has a nuclear fusion reactor (taurus type) on the bottom floor of Boelter Hall, North-East corner. As the parent said, the title is idiotic, as is the body of the story, and the editor certainly is no genius.