Could This Lump Power the Planet?

[bowener]

But other scientists warn me that this is all just a high-tech fantasy. They say Moses is full of a certain kind of non-nuclear fuel, and that I should not believe anything he and his colleagues tell me. "They're snake-oil salesmen," says Thomas Cochran, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has tracked the NIF project from its inception in 1997. Cochran says the NIF laser is still not powerful enough. Even if it were, he says, "these machines are just going to be too big, and too costly, and they'll never be competitive." Other critics, like Stephen Bodner, a Ph.D. physicist who was director of laser-fusion research at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., until his retirement in 1999, say Moses's team has downplayed such technical problems as its inability to focus NIF's laser on a tiny target.

I think this man is a little upset or jealous, whatever it is he is not thinking clearly. I fail to see where the machines upfront cost will ever be too expensive for (basically) an endless supply of cheap energy. It will make more energy than it uses to create the reaction, and depending on what the $ amount charged for electricity is, any investor should be able to make their money back hand over fist as this becomes the modern standard for energy.