Should Google Go Nuclear?

Baldrson writes "One of the founders of the US Tokamak fusion program, Dr. Robert W. Bussard, gave a lecture at Google recently now appearing as a Google video titled 'Should Google Go Nuclear?'. In it, he presents his recent breakthrough electrostatic confinement fusion device which, he claims, produced several orders of magnitude higher fusion power than earlier electrostatic confinement devices. According to Bussard, it did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation. He's looking for $200M funding, the first million or so of which goes to rebuilding a more robust demonstrator within the first year. He claims the scaling laws are so favorable that the initial full scale reactor would burn boron-11 — the cleanest fusion reaction otherwise unattainable. He has some fairly disturbing things to say in this video, as well as elsewhere, about the US fusion program which he co-founded."

Comments

Google Goes Nuclear; Microsoft's Pants=Brown Alert

[Nova Express]

Actually, the headline I wanted to use was "Google Now Officially a Nuclear Power; Microsoft Sets Pants to Brown Alert", but it was too long to fit in Slashdot's headline space...

Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than Iran or North Korea.

Obligatory science fiction refernce: Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned"

Buttons

[Jedi Alec]

I wonder if it'll have an "I feel lucky" button...

Hostile Google AI Takeover?!

[OverDrive33]

Oh this is a bad idea - when skyn^H^H Google becomes fully self-aware - it's going to have it's own incredible power source?!

Re:Google Goes Nuclear; Microsoft's Pants=Brown Al

[RsG]

Brings new and interesting meanings to the concept of googlebombing :-)

Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything?

[Gilmoure]

...this is bad how?

Because it helps further mankind's patriarcic domination of Gaia. A better solution would be to live a life in tune with nature, where people only inhabit the fruited plains of Africa, just coming down from the trees to forage for fruit (that has dropped to the ground; it's wrong to tear plants apart) and being led by matriarchs who aren't repressed by body image or hygiene.

Technology is for people who haven't learned to hate being human. Don't they realize that life would be better if only innocent animals inhabited the earth?