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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."
No. I don't trust governments with nuclear weapons, why should you entrust them to corporations whose only responsibility and therefore accountability is to their shareholders?
And to elaborate: so much power generated single corporation is more or less equivalent to weapons, considering the effect it can produce on the global economy.
Is this story really about google pursuing anything, or is google's name on it just because the guy gave a talk there? I would suspect the latter (though I haven't watched it yet as Linux fails to initialize my sound card on about 1 of 5 bootups... arghhh!)