Category: Journal

Clean, Cheap Power & Spaceflight

Dr. Robert W. Bussard is a physicist who’s been working in the field of nuclear fusion for decades. He is famous to spaceflight fans as the inventor of the Bussard Ramjet, a concept for fueling interstellar spacecraft in flight from the interstellar medium.

He’s been working on a design for fusion power plants that differs from the usual approach (which has been 30 years in the future for the past 40). Previously unable to publish because of the military sponsorship of his research program, he’s now releasing details of the past decade’s work. See the Wikipedia articles (I happen to have edited some of them :-) for more, including a 1.5 hour talk at Google. The upshot is that his team demonstrated on a limited scale that they understand the concepts, and feel confident that they will scale to designs for powerplants.

What this means: clean, cheap power generation from seawater and borax. The Boron-11 / Hydrogen fusion process used in his design releases no radiation or neutrons (which generate radiation in the surrounding materials). The design can also be used for an incredibly powerful and efficient space drive, that can be used to get to Mars in days, and the outer planets in a matter of weeks.

All for a mere $200 million in research costs. It’s inconcievable to me that some government or large company wouldn’t take a crack at this.

What Goes Around Comes Around

The international courts in the Hague have lately been surrounded by a suspiciously anti-American aura, what with people constantly trying to prosecute Americans from the President on down to individual US soldiers, on the most specious of pretexts.

Now we’ll see what happens when people in actual free nations (including Canada, yay!) bring charges against a leader who gleefully and openly threatens real crimes against humanity, like, say, genocide with weapons of mass destruction:

[Outgoing US ambassador to the UN] Bolton will be joined in tomorrow’s launch of the legal action against Mr Ahmadinejad by a Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, and the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, together with experts from the US, Canada and Israel. A suit will be lodged with the international court of justice at The Hague, which will decide whether to hear the action. The panel said the Iranian president was guilty of inciting genocide “by making numerous threats against the United States, calling for the destruction of Israel and instigating discrimination against Christians and Jews”. His words violate a 1948 UN genocide convention, to which Iran is a signatory, they said.

The “progressives” in the Hague have long been talking the talk. Now can they walk the walk?

Destructive Testing

Sulako links to a video of a destructive test of a 777 wing. They load the wing to over 150% of its design limits before it fails. The end of the wing flexed over 25 feet. So you can feel a little safer when you see those wingtips flexing in turbulence.

The Terrible Scourge of Globalization

In yet another instance of things you know that ain’t so, it turns out that the world’s poor are getting rich faster than the rich. Basically, the economies of developing countries are growing over twice as fast as those of developing countries.

The net result is that the income of developing countries “will continue to converge with those of wealthy countries. This would imply that countries as diverse as China, Mexico and Turkey would have average living standards roughly comparable to Spain today.”

Stupid developing countries! Why can’t they stay down in their gutters so celebrities can adopt their babies and protesters can trash Starbucks franchises in their name?

I blame George W. Bush.

(Hat tip: Instapundit)