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Inside Piston-Powered Nuclear Fusion Company General Fusion
quax writes "Slashdot first reported on the Canadian start-up company that is attempting piston powered nuclear fusion back in 2009. This new blog post takes a look at where they are now, and gives some additional behind the scene info. For instance, a massive experimental rig for magnetized target fusion in the US is currently underutilized, because ITER's increasing costs absorb all the public fusion research funding. Because this Shiva Star device is located in an Air Force base, security restrictions prevent any meaningful cooperation with a non-U.S. companies. Even if U.S. researchers would love to rent this out to advance the science of magnetized target fusion, restrictions make this is a no go."
I ran out of oil once in my car and my gasoline engine did piston fusion into a single block of metal
For what ever reason, "piston powered nuclear fusion" sounds like it belongs in a Steampunk novel or movie!
but in the Zemeckis causality, a genius inventor with no regard for preserving the natural timeline traveled back to 1885, and then abandoned a highly sophisticated laboratory capable of refrigeration and probably other disruptive technologies. In other words, the 2015 we saw in Back to the Future, was heavily augmented by timeline disrupting technology injections in both 1885 and 1955... and 1985 for that matter. Chances are, most of that stuff could not be invented as early in our timeline, because in the BTTF timeline, doc brown and others saw the various technologies in action, years before they were duplicated/invented.
In my opinion this same phenomenon explains perfectly why the JJAbrams Star Trek is perfectly justified in having more advanced ships and transporters than the Roddenberry continuity. 8 minutes of sensor scans of a ship 129 more years advanced than anything ever witnessed would change the course of technology forever.
Actually the EU has a higher GDP than the US, the usual marker for the strength of an economy. Mostly that's due to the greater population (505 million EU citizens compared to 310 million or so Americans) as per-capita GNP in the EU is a bit less since we don't have quite as much raw materials production (oil, gas, coal) which inflates the figures.
The US tried withholding its funding contributions for ITER during the run-up to the off-the-books trillion-dollar war in Iraq after most of the other participants in the project decided it should be built in Cadarache in France, home of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, instead of Japan. It didn't work, America decided to rejoin the project and they're pouring concrete this month in southern France for the reactor vessel's base.