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A comment on Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion. Parent comment

Re:Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion by jeffreymcmanus on Friday May 06, 2011 @01:03AM (#2520056)
The difference between what's going on with fusion today and what was going on when you were a teenager is pretty huge, actually. When you were a teenager there wasn't a gigantic international consortium (ITER) dedicated to making fusion happen in our lifetimes. The US government effort was limited to fringe experimentation; in contract, today, the NIF and France's Laser Megajoule are both aiming for net power out in the next few years. And, perhaps more importantly, unlike in the 80s there are now private startups looking to commercialize fusion processes -- that wasn't even being seriously considered 10 years ago.

Just because there isn't net power out today doesn't mean that an enormous amount of progress hasn't been made.

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Re:Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion by Confusion on Saturday May 07, 2011 @06:47AM (#2523578)
This touches upon another important point: fusion has never received the amount of funding it should have received in order to make true on their claim. It would have been available right now if only countries would have freed up reasonable amounts of funds. The JET project in the UK was extremely succesful and it is completely incomprehensible that it wasn't followed up upon swiftly and strongly. I believe lobbying by those invested in traditional sources of energy has everything to do with that.
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