>>>>Bob Hirsch offered up a mea culpa to me when I last talked with him and admitted to his sin of pushing for scaled up systems while head of the AEC's national fusion effort in the early 70's. In retrospect, he acknoledge it was a bad idea.
He now feels that the money would have been better spent of many smaller, tightly controled, do or die projects and ideas to see if other concepts or variations offered promise on a smaller scale.<<<<<
Boy, that's quite a "mea culpa", since what he's confessing is that literally billions have been poured down a rat- hole. Has Bob Hirsch been talking with Bob McNamara and had a sudden seizure of conscience lately or what??
It's particularly perplexing when you consider that Hirsch probably witnessed more fusion in Farnsworth's lab than any tokamak ever produced - all with funding advocated by Hirsch himself.
OK, .
Tell me Richard, if he had it to do over again, what sort of "scale" do you think Hirsch would advocate? 5 figure experiments, 6 figures? Or does he still think there's little to achieve without spending at least a megabuck?
Remember, folks, Richard Hull is producing fusion on his desktop for "less than the cost of a set of golf clubs."
And, I think that's USED golf clubs...
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Created on Monday, January 22, 2001 1:07 PM EDT by The Perfesser