Mr. Fusion at last?
Mr. Fusion
Is this what Mr. Fusion will look like?
Admittedly, I’d started off on a completely unrelated topic. I’d spent a long weekend in a “coding frenzy” getting up links to all the GIStemp code and was generally suffering that post frenzy crash / coffee withdrawal letdown; so I’d decided to take a break and explore “strange stuff”.
One thing led to another and I found myself staring at a desktop fusion reactor! Blimey, it’s Mr. Fusion! I’m thinking as I check out the date looking for an early April … But I ended up at L.A.N.L. with this, a real fusion reactor with a reasonable chance of producing net energy.
Golly!
It looks like it all started with the unsung inventor of television, Philo Farnsworth! (Or at least, undersung…)
OK, have a spare kilobuck (or kilo-Euro) and want a fusion reactor in your garage? Looks like you can do it, but a bigger one might cost more… just let me know if you are doing it near me; I need to stock up on lead underwear… And realize that you may only
Musings from the Chiefio 
E.M.
“…just let me know if you are doing it near me; I need to stock up on lead underwear…”
That reminded me of another technology that wasn’t quite ready for primetime. My dad told me about attending a demonstration back in the mid ’50’s where they rapidily brought water to a boil on a microwave STOVE TOP!
They did get microwave cooking right eventually but that’s just another example to add to yours. Sometimes it’s better to ease into a new technology, eh?
And, to anybody else cruising by; got a “not-ready-for-primetime” tech story you can add?
H.R., you’ve reminded me of a long buried memory… I was a couple of years old during that era, and the “wiz bangs” just kind of flowed over me. They are in my brain, but just not linked to anything in particular.
The Monsanto “home of the future” in DisneyLand had a similar set of automated things. A table top that pulled all the dishes in to a hidden dishwasher. Then there was the film we saw in school with cars with a built in nuclear power source… not much discussion of what happened to the nuclear fuel in a crash!
Ah, the future that never was!
That is the Park and Nebel POPS experiment in the picture.
They are now working together at EMC2 on the Polywell.
There is a lot of speculation that POPS can be used to enhance the operation of the Polywell.
BTW Park is one of the premier experimenters in the field of plasma physics. Or so Science Fiction Author Tom Ligon who once worked with Dr. Bussard tells me.
Tom and I were together on the Space Show with David Livingston a few weeks back taking about Polywell.
[audio src="http://archived.thespaceshow.com/shows/1279-BWB-2009-12-22.mp3" /]
Normally the show is an hour but we were having such fun that it ran to about an hour and a half.
http://www.thespaceshow.com/