Feature image: By Macskelek – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94469485
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Predatory science has refined, honed and polished its techniques for extracting nation-bankrupting sums of money from innumerate and scientifically-illiterate politicians and from the similarly-ignorant and likewise-effete civil servants who control them.
Nowhere is this unprincipled and unaffordable leeching upon the long-suffering taxpayer more evident than in climate “science”, where the gentle and demonstrably net-beneficial warming that has occurred and can be expected to continue at a rate below half the predicted midrange is presented as an actual or potential planet-destroying cataclysm that must be forestalled however disproportionate the cost and however small the resultant benefit.
The profiteers of doom in science, in academe and in the once-learned journals are joined in their folly, fraud and theft at taxpayers’ expense by the gee-whizz merchants, who hand-wavingly put forward preposterous proposed woo-woo “solutions” to the imagined (and imaginary) problem of mildly warmer weather worldwide.
A typical gee-whizz proposal is as blatantly anti-scientific as the supposed problem that its proponents purport to address; it sounds thrillingly techy and Boys’-Own-Paper golly-gosh exciting; it is cripplingly expensive; it is commercially unviable to a spectacular degree; the scamsters who propose it accordingly demand unlimited access to taxpayers’ money; the innumerate classe politique duly hands over boat-loads of other people’s cash; the proposed “solution” does not work and fails completely; and not one of the fraudsters is in any way held to account.
There are plenty of gee-whiz schemes to abate greenhouse-gas emissions. Windmills are a good example. They are anti-scientific in that continuous electrical power is required but they supply it only a quarter of the time, their energy density is low and their unit environmental cost is correspondingly high; they have given Western nations electricity prices six or eight times those of China or India; new wind projects are increasingly being abandoned because the cost exceeds the benefit even after the scamsters have trousered massive, multiple direct and indirect subsidies; they have made no difference whatsoever to the near-linear rate at which anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing has increased since IPCC’s first report in 1990; and the perpetrators of this disaster are laughing all the way to the bank.
Solar power ditto. Think Ivanpah, the solar collector array that fell apart because the panels and their complex heliostats were not weatherproofed, and would not have worked anyway; or Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where a vast solar array was smashed to smithereens within minutes by a single passing hailstorm, and the junked panels – which cannot be recycled – will have to go to landfill.
Electric buggies ditto. The batteries add between 30% and 100% to the weight of a typical vehicle, so that a buggy uses 30-100% more energy than a real auto; the capital cost of buying the thing and the electricity cost of running it are both well above the costs of buying and running a real auto; the three-phase charging network to replace real autos with buggies will cost even more than the buggies themselves; even a small crash tends to destroy the entire battery pack, so that insurance rates not only for buggies but for all autos are rising well above the already savage rate of inflation, making buggies still more unaffordable; the CO2 emissions from the manufacture of the battery packs, the installation of the charging network and the electricity needed to power the buggies mean that net-zero emissions for an individual buggy occur only after a decade of road use; but most buggies do not last that long because the batteries degrade or, worse, catch fire.
All of these nonsensical gee-whiz scams are nothing compared to the outright fraud that is taxpayer-funded nuclear fusion, as a recent piece here at WUWT reminded me. When I worked at 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher sent me to have a look at the tax-gobbling Joint European Torus, a prototype gee-whizz tokamak fusion reactor at Culham, a few miles south of Oxford.
The top brass turned out in force to welcome me and show me round. The tokamak was half-constructed, and Professor Rebut, the director of the project, told me that the vast magnetic coils around the torus would contain ionized plasma as hot as the Sun, which would generate steam for electricity via a heat-exchanger.
I put on my most amiable and innocent face, and mildly asked: “I can understand that the plasma is ionized and the magnetic field can thus contain it, but, since the reaction is nuclear, large quantities of neutrons will be emitted, so how is it that they will not at once fatally and permanently irradiate the plasma-facing components, so that from the first moment of operation it will be impossible to make repairs?”
The faces of the boffins, in response to this killer question, were a picture. They had hoped that, like the rest of the classe politique, I knew no science. And their faces told me that I had asked a question they had not wished me to ask. They mumbled about lining the interior of the torus with a specially-devised cinder-block that would absorb the radiation, and even showed me a sample. But they were not convincing. I recommended that no further funding should be made available to that or any tokamak project unless a) a proper answer to the irradiation question were available and b) the downstream power delivered to the final consumer, after allowing not only for the considerable internal inefficiencies inherent in fusion reactors but also for transformer and transmission losses, exceeded the input power required to run the tokamak by an order of magnitude.
Trouble is, the convention in British politics is that the papers of one administration are withheld from all subsequent administrations. This gives very great power to the civil service, but makes it impossible for politicians to learn from their predecessors. When the ITER project began in the south of France in 2007, several British governments had come and gone. Sure enough, ITER was simply a grander and still costlier iteration of the fatally defective JET design, and the defects I had noticed two decades previously had simply not been addressed.
The recent WUWT article on ITER quoted Scientific American – normally a wholesale swallower of gee-whizz projects – as saying that ITER “looks less and less like a cathedral and more like a mausoleum”.
Scientific American had managed to obtain internal documents from ITER, but only after a freedom-of-information lawsuit had compelled that vast and self-serving bureaucracy to hand them over.
The ITER Council: bureaucracy at “work”
ITER’s spinmeister, Laban Coblentz, blamed the delays revealed in the documents (coyly described as “schedule slips”) and cost overruns on supply-chain delays, faulty thermal shields and off-spec manufacturing defects, as well as an order by the French Nuclear Safety Authority to cease assembly of the reactor in January 2022 on the ground that radiation shielding was inadequate.
So let me tell you what is really going on. It is far, far worse than we are being told. ITER’s lavish website burbles vapidly about “a thrilling human adventure” in a “truly multi-cultural environment” with “every conceivable sporting, leisure and cultural opportunity” in an atmosphere of “diversity and inclusiveness” and “team spirit” in a “supportive and efficient workplace”. Not a word about what is really going on.
Work began on the militantly ugly and disgracefully messy ITER site among the once-beautiful forests of the South of France a few dozen miles to the north-east of Aix-en-Provence as far back as 2007. I have had charge of several substantial construction projects, and neither I nor my clerk of works would ever have permitted such scandalous untidiness as is evident onsite.
By January of this year, more than 15 years after work began, just one of the 18 giant orange-pig-shaped segments of the plasma-containing torus had been put in place in the tokamak pit at the heart of what is supposed – one day – to be the reactor.
After a decade and a half of construction, just one of ITER’s 18 toroidal segments is in place
Why only one segment, after all this time? I did some digging. The reason is that the ITER people have only recently woken up to the fact, gently pointed out by me to the JET boffins back in 1985, that though the giant magnet around the walls of the tokamak can contain the primary plasma, which is ionized, it cannot contain the neutrons that are the intended reaction products, because neutrons possess no electrical charge ex definitione.
Likewise, photons are emitted at such an energetic rate that they, too, can cause considerable damage, not by nuclear radiation but by melting the walls of the chamber.
How, then, can one answer the containment question? The cinder-block nonsense was never going to be sufficient. A fundamental redesign of the tokamak was needed, not only to cope with bombardment of the plasma-facing components (the interior walls of the tokamak) by neutrons and photons but also to handle abnormalities in the primary plasma that might fatally disrupt it, leading to an inadvertent failure of containment and a consequently instantaneous, substantial and destructive release of energy – in plain English, a meltdown.
One difficulty faced by ITER is that it is so much larger than all previous tokamaks. As the late Professor R.V. Jones of Aberdeen University used to say, “In physics, scale matters.” As the reactor ramps up from the warm-up or low-confinement regime to the operational or high-confinement regime, oscillations at the edges of the plasma occur. During these edge-localized transient events, which result from the increased confinement time, the fiercely hot plasma of hydrogen isotopes loses some of its energy as energized particles escape containment and meet and melt the plasma-facing components.
To try to divert these outbursts of high-energy particles away from the walls, it is necessary to install a divertor plate at the bottom of the torus. This plate is intended to tolerate far greater heat and particle loadings than the walls themselves. Various substances have been tried over the decades. Carbon was the earliest, because it does not melt. However, it is degraded by neutron bombardment; it becomes rapidly irradiated by tritium, one of the by-products of the fusion reaction; and it suffers from both chemical and sputtering erosion.
Position of the divertor system at the foot of the torus (Hassanein & Sizyuk 2021)
Next, tungsten was proposed, for it is tougher than carbon. However, it is unstable when interacting with the plasma, and also when highly irradiated. It gives off a secondary plasma of its own, which causes the divertor plate to disintegrate, releasing vapor which can contaminate the primary plasma, and requiring the divertor plate to be replaced. Downtime will, therefore, be considerable.
When power is increased compared with existing low-power tokamaks, and especially during edge-localized transient events, the behaviour of the dense secondary plasma generated from the divertor plate will affect the durability of the plasma-facing interior walls of the torus. At the strike points where the plasma interacts with the divertor plate, even during normal operation the ITER torus will be subjected to plasma fluxes sufficient to vaporize the divertor plate at the strike point, where the initial flux incident upon the divertor plate is focused. Secondly, the ITER divertor plates (when installed) will be too close to the primary plasma. Thirdly, the divertor area as currently designed is too small to handle the highly radiative secondary-plasma generation, evolution and vaporization:
Looking down a segment of the torus towards the too-small area for the missing divertor
One cannot simply replace the damaged divertor plate, since the deposition of a large amount of energy at the strike point as currently designed would generate such intense radiation and scattering of plasma-particle fluxes from the dense secondary-plasma cloud that internal components in the confined divertor area would be damaged. More downtime, and a lot of it.
A temporary fix might revert to the use of carbon rather than tungsten, because carbon is not as radiative as tungsten. However, as noted earlier, carbon has its own problems. Hassanein & Sizyuk (2021), whose paper in Nature on the problems with the existing ITER design may well have influenced the French nuclear regulatory agency in its decision to halt construction of the reactor until the problems have been rectified, suggest that completely different tokamak designs – such as the snowflake or super-X magnetic containment configurations – might offer better protection by distributing the core-plasma particles over a wider area on the surface of the divertor, decreasing the heat loads on the divertor plate.
Left: Princeton’s nowflake tokamak. Right: Magnetic field lines in the snowflake divertor (image by Vladimir Soukhanovskyy).
In the divertor of a Super-X tokamak, the plasma exhaust is spread over a wider area than in the conventional divertor hitherto adopted by ITER (image by UK Atomic Energy Authority)
Or the divertor plates and strike points could be moved further from the core plasma, and a special divertor chamber could limit penetration of the secondary plasma into the operating chamber, contaminating the primary plasma.
Given these fundamental problems with the existing ITER design, it is no surprise that the regulators have ordered a halt to further construction of the reactor, leaving the lone segment of the inadequately-thought-through torus mournfully in place. A further problem is that the entire building around the reactor is tailored very specifically to the existing design. To accommodate the changes suggested by Hassanein & Sizyuk, and particularly if a radically different reactor design turns out to be necessary, pretty much the whole thing will have to be torn down and rebuilt, but only after a new design has been finalized and tested.
While they are at it, they had better make sure that they surround the entire building with a secondary containment structure. At present, the reactor is directly under the exterior roof. Chernobyl ought to have taught the world the necessity of a secondary containment building.
ITER, therefore, is now likely to be decades late and tens of billions over budget. If there were even one sufficiently curious policy wonk working in the government of any of the 35 nations foolishly embroiled in this doomed project, the governments in question would be pulling out their funding at once. Like all gee-whiz moonbeams-to-cucumbers notions, this granddaddy of them all is irremediably failing, at prodigious cost to us all.
Feature image: By Macskelek – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94469485
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Cannot contain and direct any specific amount of energy by using a lesser amount of energy.
There are no known materials strong enough to assist the process.
Since it is a well known fact that Hollywood writers are much smarter than highly-educated physicists, would unobtanium work?
Yes, and at virtually no cost. But please send carrying charges.
Uuobtanium would work, but it would have to be double secret unobtanium.
Unobtainium-386.
Everyone who has watched Avatar knows that Unobtainium is only found on planet Pandora.
So all we have to do is find Pandora. Easy Peasy, just ask James Cameron.
That’s no planet, that’s a
spacestationmoonUnobtanium is too low-grade and won’t work well – what’s needed is weapons-grade impossibilium.
Maybe alloyed with gullibilium, can’t see it working otherwise.
Of course .
remember cobalt was named from the german kobold meaning goblin.
Maybe we should check the prop rooms.
If they still have Captain America’s vibranium shield, test it with a lightsaber.
If it holds up, problem solved!
You might need a fission reactor twinned to the fusion one to ‘use-up’ the problematic errant neutrons. The Canadian CANDU technology uses U²³⁸ yellowcake with its small natural content of U²³⁵ as fuel. The normally considered non-fissionable 238 does, however, participate in the fission reaction synergistically through capture of excess neutrons from 235. The CANDU fuel costs are thereby a mere 2.5 US cents per kWh!! How’s that for a combined cycle fusion/fission set up?
Just skip the fusion reactor altogether then! With Tritium costing about $30,000 a GRAM and providing about the same amount of energy as a tonne of coal the fusion reactor as currently persued was never ever going to be viable, and all the claims of “safe, reliable, cheap renewable energy” were either fantasy or outright lies.
Can you imagine where the state of the art of fission technology would be if all these wasted fusion billions had been invested in breeder, molten salt or high temperature fission designs?
It’s just unimaginable the huge scale of the malfeasance and deceit that seems apparent now in fusion projects and gives hints to what is going on in other fields like medicine and climate science.
I have thought for a while now it may never ever be possible. I am pretty sure that if it ever does, it will not be any of these Rube Goldberg contraptions, but something very simple.
Incredibly high energy, and complicated devices with a bajillion delicate and ridiculously hard to make and expensive parts, just does not seem to be a really ideal combo.
What they really need is a forcefield that can hold it all together for a long period of time, but not be degraded by the plasma.
I can think of only one sort of forcefield that can do this. It is currently in action, right now, containing an intense fusion reaction that is perilously close to the earth.
The force is gravity, and it holds the sun together. So when the physicists figure out how to generate a star-size gravity field, and confine it to a building, we will have our first working fusion reactor. Until then, these devices are just very expensive research projects.
How about if we take a really big ball of something really cheap and plentiful, that will fuse, and just make it a large enough mass that it will fuse on its own?
We can stick it way out in space somewhere, so we will be far enough away so as not to get fried ourselves, then just soak up the energy as it radiates away from the heap?
Maybe we could come up with some form of self-replicating biological entity that can use the radiant energy to make some other energy storing molecules, using waste products from other things we have lying around?
Lasers and boron show more promise:
https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/exploring-alternatives-to-magnetic-confinement
More promise. Probably 1,000,000 times more promise.
BUT 1,000,000 X 0 = 0, nevertheless, onward with the spending.
One of two fusion boondoggles.The other is the US Laser Ignition Facility (LIF) in California. The idea is inertial confinement of plasma superheated by 4MW worth of lasers for long enough to get some fusion from deuterium.
They recently made a big deal about having finally released in one hohlraum shot more energy than input—by a little, for a small fraction of a microsecond. What they didn’t say was that the LIF takes at least 4 hours to cool down enough to attempt the next shot. Their best month ever they were able to do 28 shots. No way that ever enables fusion power.
Covered both ITER and LIF in illustrated essay Going Nuclear in ebook Blowing Smoke.
Boron! ‘Nuff said.
But seriously folks, it achieved burning plasma in 2021 and reported scientific break even in December 2022.
Progress!
Why is it so convenient to ignore the vastly larger amount of energy (300X?) used by the laser ignition system, which means that the actual energy output was exceedingly smaller than the input, even for that tiny fraction of a section?
The ‘more energy released than input’ is also a farce. It only measured the estimated amount of laser energy that reached the target. It produced 3+ MJ with ~2MJ of laser input.
The total energy it takes to actually generate that 2MJ of laser input was stated as “Well above 400MJ”. That means it consumed 133 times as much energy as it generated.
So even if they were able to reduce the cost of the target by 3 orders of magnitude (1000x cheaper) and increase the speed of operation by a similar amount (1000x faster), they would still need to find a way to generate at least 150x more energy from the reaction for it to be viable.
At the present rate of progress (about 10x improvement in results after ~15years, including the great breakthrough in 2022), it would need about 130 years to get there. Long after we’re all dead from being panicked about ‘climate change’. And remember- this is assuming a huge breakthrough every 15 years.
So even worse than a wind turbine.
But it didn’t kill any birds/bats/bugs, that we know of anyway.
There were originally 2 Laser fusion facilities. Los Alamos was applying Carbon Dioxide lasers and Lawrence Livermore was using Nd:YAG. At some point they scrapped the LANL effort, established the National Ignition Facility at Livermore.and switched to Nd:YLF as the seed laser. I was offered employment at both LANL and LLNL in 1975 which I declined. I wonder how much taxpayer money has been spent on that National Boondoggle Facility. If at least there were some off shoot products but there are none I am aware of
A guy I went to school with could do 28 shots too.
Here’s an idea.
Build the fusion thing in space and, rather than a really long extension cord, transfer the power to Earth via lasers focused on an Ivanpah-type the solar collector array.
If something goes wrong and Ivanpah is vaporized, no great loss!
(Might need to set up a no fly zone above the collector.)
Forget fusion…try Thorium Liquid Salts Cooled Reactors….China just started one in Mongolia – little water in Mongolia but not needed to cool. Smaller is better – electricity can be produced locally w/o those huge power lines which are ugly and subject to nuclear bomb and solar shutdowns.
Exactly. Fission designs are amazing now and there’s still plenty of room for development and miniaturization. I don’t have a problem with fusion research, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of improving/implementing fission designs.
+100 – fusion research was this huge vacuum sucking up disproportionate shares of precious tax dollars, depriving other promising fields of $
I don’t have a problem with ANY research not funded with MY dollars without my DIRECT investment.
Government funded, not so much.
The thorium molten salt reactors are really exciting to this old nuke trained on CANDUs – I love CANDUs but the fact that the MSRs can run at very high temps unpressurized and that the thorium fuel cycle can eliminate/avoid the long-lived highly radioactive products of u235 fission, oh and online fuel reprocessing (!!!!) – just gets my heart fluttering! Shame this didn’t happen when I was still in that field in the early 90’s.
I have been waiting for a fusion reactor since the late 60’s and have been following the developments along the way. After all this time I’m willing to bet that there will be no sustained fusion reaction until we can control gravity, and my great grandchildren will be long dead before that happens. Sad because I really wanted fusion to work.😞
Interesting you say that. I realize there are few here who follow the UFO story- but if you do, you’re aware of Bob Lazar, a technician of some sort, who claims that decades ago he worked at area 51 attempting to reverse engineer a flying saucer. His claim is that the saucer was powered by element 115 and the power source functioned as an anti gravity machine. If these craft are real- and if you saw the congressional hearing yesterday, you’d know that they probably are- the craft somehow uses an immense amount of energy- actually more than a fusion reactor could produce. Even if you’re a big skeptic of UFOs, this topic is now so important because it might be true, that it’s worth following- just in case we somehow figure out how those craft do amazing things- like move at speeds orders of magnitude faster than anything we have.
It would be nice but I’m not so sure as this sudden UFO talk really looks more like a “Wag the Dog” episode to distract from other potentially catastrophic goings on in the halls of power. My wife says I’m jaded. 🤷♂️ 😉
It’s NOT a sudden new thing. It’s been around longer than I have and I’ve been around since ’49. It’s been ignored, mostly and in the same way that climate skeptics have been ignored. Those who are into the subject are really into it pretty much regardless of their other opinions- all sorts of people from all across the political spectrum. It’s not about attempting to distract from anything else. They just want to get to the bottom of whether or not these things people see, including many military pilots, are real and if they are, what are we going to do about it? You should watch yesterday’s event. It’s about 2 hours long. But warning- it’s an addictive thing- once you go down the rabbit hole, you may not get out!
P.T. Barnum and H.L. Mencken said all that ever need be said about suckers, money and government fear-mongering side shows.
That sentence along, sinks the claim as atmospheric friction would make the object glow. As discovered by the SR-71, friction from the atmosphere is not trifling even up in the upper troposphere or lower stratosphere.
And how was he “hired” to reverse engineer something?
Drafted just won’t identify/find the kind of talent or skills required.
Nor does putting a thousand chimpanzees to work ever produce William Shakespeare literature.
Lazar’s recent testimony was third hand hearsay and rumor mill type claims.
To my mind, UFOs as generally reported look like they are optical not material.
Your statement that friction making the object glow negates the claim, is not necessarily so. I have seen a UFO travelling at high speed. Back in 1971, I was crewing an airline aircraft from Gladstone to Brisbane in Australia. It was 1 PM on a fine clear day and we were flying south at 16,000′.
We were suddenly called up by Air Traffic Control to ask if we could see an aircraft at about our 2 o’clock position travelling north west at 10,000′. They had it on radar and it looked like a small ball of white light and advised there was no known military traffic in the area. We advised we could see it.
The object was visible for possibly up to two minutes, maybe less and I calculated it must have been doing over 2500 m.p.h at 10,000′ then it was gone from our sight. I have no idea what it was and am sorry now that I did not inquire further to see if other information on the sighting had been obtained. Had it been a normal craft there would have to be sonic booms at that altitude and speed but no reports of that type were heard. A mystery to me I can tell you, but no more than the sightings by pilots flying off the Nimitz off the coast of California some years ago.
Well you just proved that the thing you saw wasn’t a physical craft – no sonic booms, hot glowing skin, nor distinguishing marks.
“Small ball of white light” is not an alien spaceship.
It was physical of some kind as it was identified on radar and was moving at high speed. Because we appeared to be about 80 miles from it, all that we could determine was that it was like a white round object and flew about 80 miles from when we first saw it to disappearing in under two minutes. I didn’t say it was an alien spaceship but that it was some sort of unknown object and it was travelling at a very high unexplainable speed
Moscovium?
Unfortunately, it has a half-life of 650 ms
Joseph,
I’m sorry, but I’m pretty sure all this excitement about UFO’s is complete nonsense. If the US government really had an alien flying saucer, do you seriously think no real evidence such as photos of the saucer and detailed engineering details (Lazar’s vague sketches are nowhere close) would have leaked out over many decades?
Much of the present excitement was sparked by the videos released by the US navy. If the navy really thought they could be alien craft do you seriously think they would have released them?
As far as I’m aware none of these videos prove anything apart from the existence of such strange phenomena as birds, balloons and passenger jets.
They look weird because they are shot in infra red and are also negative – brighter looks darker in the videos. They also look weird because the cameras are precisely locked onto the targets – this can cause false impressions of speed and also give the impression that the targets were able to instantaneously change velocity. Those instant changes in velocity are indeed created by advanced technology – human technology, that is.
Also, quite a few of these fuzzy UFO’s clearly have flashing navigation lights just like commercial jets.
Mick West has lots of videos debunking many of these US navy videos – and many other UFO videos.
One example: a video showed what was claimed to be a UFO flying at huge speeds far in advance of human technology. It was actually an insect flying past close to the camera.
When I was young I was very interested in UFO’s. I read lots of books and magazines on the subject. But I don’t think I became a believer. And now I’m totally sceptical.
As with climate change, scepticism is the only rational way. It has nothing to do with denying anything. But it has everything to do with checking the facts and the data.
I was able to debunk a claim in a UFO documentary – before I gave up on this irrational rubbish. In a US city many people had reported a bright light in the night sky – no doubt the media hyped it up, leading to more and more reports until it was classed as a “mass sighting”. If it’s a mass sighting it must be true, right?
A professional photographer had a bright idea. She set up her camera on a tripod and took a time exposure of the bright object to see if it was moving. The object showed up as a bright bar, so it was indeed moving, though slowly. Just one small problem. When I looked carefully at the image on the screen I saw several other bars that were much fainter. These were clearly background stars. The length and orientation of the faint bars were exactly the same as the bright bar.
So: the bright object that had ceated so much hysteria on succssive nights was moving precisely the same as the stars. It was obviousoly a planet, either Jupiter or Venus. Venus has produced countless UFO reports. Most people probably don’t realise how incredibly bright Venus can be – in good conditions it can be bright enough to cast a visible shadow on the ground.
I do believe that there are likely to be other civilisations out there. But the universe is vast and it will be incredibly difficult to establish communication with them.
So, until a vast spaceship lands on the White House lawn, I will remain pretty confident that all the UFO’s have rational explanations such as hoaxes, balloons, bright planets, the technology used by the US navy cameras – and insects whizzing right past the camera.
Chris
You’d think if they can travel the stars they would have developed stealth technology by now …
Harry Turtledove wrote a short story years ago where aliens had developed the warp drive but were otherwise at the technological level of Elizabethan England.
The spacecraft were caulked wood, they had muskets, cannon, chamberpots, etc.
Needless to say, their invasion of Earth didn’t proceed according to plan.
You’d think if they can travel to the stars, they could manage to park it on Earth without crashing and leaving wreckage and “biologics” for us to retrieve. Unless, of course, they sent only women pilots (“A SEXIST would say!!!).
But they often have flashing navigation lights, so maybe they do want to be seen….
Wow, I detect UFO deniers! 🙂
Well this is a world famous DENIER site!
Joseph,
I’m sure you mean that in jest!
But there is a good analogy here.
Climate sceptics are often called “climate deniers”. But of course most sceptics do believe in the reality of climate change. In fact a powerful sceptical argument is that the climate is always changing.
In the same way, I have never denied the existence of UFO’s – because some sightings remained unidentified perhaps due to the lack of good observational evidence. They are by definition UFO’s.
But I do not believe that all these fuzzy blobs and optical artifacts are evidence for aliens.
There’s a very famous saying: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Alien spaceships flying around our skies is one of the most extraordinary claims ever made. So my question is:
What is the extraordinary evidence?
I would be very interested to hear your answer.
Regards,
Chris
watch the congressional hearing from a few days ago- it’s 2.5 hours long- worth every second of your time
I had the same thought when Bergin mentioned gravity. However Lazar said the ship was powered by a quantum singularity – miniature black hole! If possible, it would be at the level of “Mr. Fusion” from Back to The Future – what ever is fed to the black hole drops down its gravity well and accelerates to its doom – and gives off about 30% of its mass as energy!!! Almost as good as having a free source of antimatter.
There’s no doubt that there have been planets out there long before our sun even formed 5 B years ago. We might be so primitive that any aliens look at us as we look at a snail. In the same way a snail could not envision us, we perhaps can’t envision where evolution might go. I saw a UFO in ’84. It was one of the well known Hudson Valley sightings. What was it? I dunno.
From what I’ve seen in discussions is that a craft can warp space-time. Warp it so much that the craft isn’t really moving- it’s the space-time that is moving. Therefore, it doesn’t feel inertia which is why they can accelerate so fast that it would kill us in seconds and they can do a 180 instantly- and it can go faster than the speed of light because, it isn’t really moving. Sounds pretty wild- of course. But, imagine going back a few hundred years in a time machine with your smart phone and showing it to anybody- even the smartest people and saying, “I can talk to anyone on the planet with this- and I can find vast amounts of information on almost any subject- on this object- I can even show you a person in China talking to you”. Then mention any number of other modern technologies. And that’s only a few hundred years. Imagine a civilization more advanced by billions of years. Saying all this doesn’t prove anything but it’s a good idea to consider it. If you didn’t see or read about yesterday’s Congressional hearing on the subject- I strongly recommend it. It’s all over YouTube – though the MSM ignores the subject the same way they ignore AGW skeptics.
What it really seems to REQUIRE is a star size mass. While there are umpteen trillions of those around, they unfortunately seem to be more difficult to control than a hungry grizzly bear.
No doubt telling anybody a few centuries ago that someday you could go from Boston to Europe in a few hours- zipping along 8 miles high at 600 m/hr. They’d lock you up as a witch. 🙂
One minor correction: Ivanpah is alive -producing over 90% of design capacity. The bankrupt solar plant that never worked is Crescent Dunes, currently in Intensive Care. A second minor correction – all we have to do is to master that omnipresent step “then a miracle happens”.
Is it still using large amounts of natural gas to get started every day?
Yes.
Is it still killing huge amounts of birds.
Yes, for the desert area it occupies.
The proof is in the pudding.
“Trouble is, the convention in British politics is that the papers of one administration are withheld from all subsequent administrations.”
If it’s convention and not in law- a brave new administration ought to be able to break that precedent, no? What would Churchill do?
It is neither, and that references the view of government projects here in the states.
Even when incoming Administrations support a grandfathered project, the top level direct reports all tend to be much less knowledgeable.
Plus, those top direct reports typically start work with preconceived notions and alliances to pet solutions.
Very few top direct reports ever catch up with where the project was left by the preceding Administration.
At every go-around, the projects pick up new staffing and responsibilities which add to the work/report burdens.
A prime example is where NASA was given responsibility for Muslim Outreach.
Story Tip
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/biggest-us-electrical-grid-operator-issues-energy-emergency-alert-as-temperatures-soar
https://www.foxnews.com/world/video-captures-climate-activists-defacing-king-charles-iii-portrait-scottish-national-gallery
I thought Charles was one of theirs?
if we had spent 1% of this wasted money on a design for thorium salt reactors we would have globally cheap electricity for everyone by now …
Fusion power is NOT a green thing, or a warmunist thing related in any way whatsoever to global warming. Indeed, the greens absolutely hate anything to do with nuclear.
Fusion power has been a work in progress since the first fission power plants were developed in the 1950s. It’s not a boondoggle, and offers the opportunity to generate all the power mankind will ever need for a vastly lower production cost than anything else, including hydrocarbons, fission power, wind or solar or geothermal power.
Stop attacking this as a boon doggle — it is an exceptionally challenging opportunity to rid us all of a massive amount of cost and waste.
I have been waiting 60 years so far. That is a lot of investment money down the bottomless fusion hole. Just to construct a different way to boil water. 🙄
Funny thing is that the world’s atmosphere really does need more CO2
I agree with much of what you’ve said, but the problem is that these dollars could have been much better spent on safe, reliable, and very likely less-radioactive-waste-generating fission research and implementation.
Governments see it as a hopeful solution to replacing gas and coal as baseline production, but we already have the answer for that.
Like the Tesla cars that Elon Musk’s company makes, I’m happy for private enterprise to finance their own activities, including nuclear fusion. I’m even happy for governments to fund some research. Not in the billions though.
If it’s feasible (which I sort of suspect it is), I think that it will be achieved by a small flexible team backed by private funding rather than government research funds.
The problem with Musk, is that his so called “private company” is heavily subsidised with government money, literally all over it, and the casino banking stock market pumping it.
The moment that money train stops the so called “financial genius” will be bust like all the other “good ideas” for recycling people’s money, and the banking speculators will dump it like a Tupperware party.
Utter bollox yet again from Duane approching a record number from him of “pigs can fly” junk.
How else would they get into space?
You apparently don’t know anything about fusion power and why D-T fusion will be too expensive even if the plant cost the same as a regular plant. It’s totally in the wrong direction – D-D would at least have cheap fuel but is much harder to master than d-t.
Anyways, you’ve been lied to – we have all been lied to for decades: the fusion projects have really been means to due basic research in the field and was never designed to produce a practical design.
Enviros are onboard with fusion, since they have been told there’s no nuclear waste – another lie, since the whole core will be irradiated from high energy photons and neutrons.
It is the most colossal boon-doggle in history.
WUWT is NOT a Luddite site. It’s a climate science site, and fusion power has zero to do with the climate change fight that WUWT is engaged in with the warmunists.
Fusion power is being promoted by governments as a solution to the non-problem of CO2 and climate change and of course they pump money into it like they have wind, solar, tidal, etc., all wasted since it will not produce what was promised.
I could also imagine some sort of lightning like event happening ( internal or possibly external) causing some sort of very damaging occurrence to these expensive apparatus.
As far as UFOs go – have the laws of physics changed or something while I was asleep? Aliens some how create a warp drive( the power would be immense) but are that smart but can’t navigate their craft in for a safe landing. Oh and they also have super cloaking devices too. ( or the are very small? go figure)
Down let them suck you in. No real evidence came out at the hearings; and laws of physics ( and basic logic) didn’t support the “ aliens are here” con theory.”
The aliens just use UN IPCC CliSciFi climate models to violate the laws of physics.
Pull the plug and blame climate change for it.
The Fusion Industry Association claims that at least four private fusion companies could be delivering power to the grid by 2030 if enough funding can be made available.
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Fusion Industry Investment Passes $6bn
Building a Global Fusion Energy Industry, From the FIA
The Fusion Industry Association (FIA) released its third annual fusion industry report ‘The Global Fusion Industry in 2023’ on July 12, unveiling worldwide findings from an electrifying year of fusion development. 43 private fusion companies were surveyed for the report, ranging from fusion industry giants to new entrants with bold visions, committed to addressing the challenges that remain ahead for commercialization.
Below are some of the report highlights. The FIA will continue to keep the public informed about the development of fusion energy during this exciting time in history.
— The fusion industry has now attracted a total of $6.21 billion in investment (up from $4.8bn last year), after another $1.4bn flowed in over the last year.
— The additional funding comes from 27 individual investments since last year’s report, which include $250m for TAE, $200m for ENN, $79m for Kyoto Fusioneering, $55m for Energy Singularity, and many more.
— Thirteen fusion companies were founded or emerged from stealth mode in the past year, making this year’s fusion industry survey, with 44 entrants, the largest ever.
— The US continues to lead the race with 25 active fusion companies (including many of the largest), but the industry is becoming more geographically diverse, with 12 countries now fielding at least one fusion company. This year’s survey included new entrants from New Zealand (Openstar), Sweden (Novatron), Germany (Gauss, Proxima), and China (Energy Singularity).
— While the total new funding announced this year is less than last year’s $2.8bn, it shows continued investment in and excitement about the industry, even as many technology investors have pulled back in other fields.
— This year saw a much wider range of smaller “Seed” or “Series A” investments, with 27 companies in a variety of technologies announcing funding.
— Meanwhile, companies who had previously secured funding are growing. Respondents claimed to have created 975 new jobs in the last year at their companies, and around 3,000 jobs in the supply chain, though this is likely to be an undercount as not all companies responded to this question.
— Optimism about timing remains high. Four companies believe they will deliver fusion power to the grid by 2030, and 19 by 2035.
— But challenges remain. Almost every company still thinks funding is a challenge, as plenty more money will still be needed to solve the remaining science and engineering challenge and reach commercial viability.
— Beyond private investment, it is also notable that we are seeing an increase in public-private partnerships, with 18 companies involved in public-private partnerships valued at over $70 million.
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No one can claim there isn’t something to be said for the power of positive thinking,
Especially if it can generate 6.1 billion dollars of investment for fusion systems which more likely than not will never produce a single watt of commercial electricity within the lifetimes of everyone now reading this blog.
The fusion industry generates a lot ot investment but never produces any fusion. 🤦♂️
Seems paltry compared to subsidies for wind turbines.
Bussard’s Polywell seemed a promising approach around 20 years ago, but there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of progress (or funding) since his death.
There does appear to have been some small scale experimental work done at Sydney Uni,
Pity the poor venture capitalists hoping to get in on the ground floor – should have paid more attention in physics class or hired a private consultant physicist to crunch the numbers.
ITER Is far from the only fusion project and deuterium-tritium is not the best fusion fuel. LPPFusion and several other companies have been working with hydrogen-boron, pB11 fuel which produces no neutrons or radioactive waste (only product is helium—not waste!) Our FF-2B experimental fusion device is a tad smaller than ITER—it fits in a 3-meter cube and so far our project has spent $10 million raised mainly from individual investors. . But we’ve already achieved the 2-billion degree temperature needed to burn pB11 fuel and we expect to start experiments with that fuel this fall. ITER is extremely misguided but it is far from the main story in fusion energy. Check us out here: https://wefunder.com/lppfusion
Good luck! (No sarc tag) Hopefully you can attract more funding – hopefully the ITER scandal does rub off on your efforts.
It’s an interesting science experiment. A better use of gov’t dollars than subsidizing windmills and solar farms, at least.
Even with fusion reaction operating successfully, though, I doubt it can meet the standards of fission power in terms of cost, reliability, safety, and quantity/danger of waste products within the next century or two. And keep in mind fission power designs will continue to advance, as well.
It’s still a bad use of hard earned tax payer money – it was all bet in one direction to friends of administrators and other approaches get choked for funds.
Sincere thanks to Lord Monckton for an article that provides a load of useful information to folk like yours truly, who never seem to have the time to research a fraction of the subjects that interest them.
Definitely an improvement over creating “pauses” out of a very spiky data set that obstinately refuses to deviate from a monotonic trend of +0.13C/decade. Although said monotonic trend hasn’t been observed for long enough to distinguish it from a small segment of a sine wave with period of ±1,000 years.
Please your Lordship, more postings of substance, and less pausology!
The most difficult step in some projects is knowing when to pull the pin.
Nice report.
It is interesting to hear of knowlegable problems with fusion. Of course there is another one too, which comes from basic magnetohydrodynamics. Confining a plasma with a magnetic field (which you mention as edge effects) is pretty much impossible, and this get worse with scale. The plasma inherently carries a large electric current, which generates a magnetic field of its own, but the actual field is of a chaotic shape and strength, depending on the exact current in a particular micro volume of plasma and its exact temperature. The result can only be unstable plasma position control, and as the temperature is so high cannot be allowed to impinge on anything without serious damage.
The probable reason why the sun is stable (assuming our theories about it are correct) is that its constraining mechanism is gravity. The magnetic effects are there to be seen on the surface, a chaotic ever moving pattern, and this should be the warning that our puny attempts will fail, as they have done for about 60 years. However these projects with desirable aims never seem to be able to admit that the original idea might be incorrect, or that a severe problem has been found. They are essentially jobs for life for thousands of people, funded by the taxpayer. They all need a serious review every year, by a person or two who have experience of commercial reality. Of course this never happens, because the resulting report would be far too embaressing!
You get a lot more bang for the buck offering a prize rather than funding because a prize is only paid for success. Funding is paid for failures.
Case in point ITER is a great success for those “working” on the project with high salaries and lavish facilities. But otherwise a failure
As always, Monkton’s writing is biting and to the point. And one thing left out, is that the “Standard Model” may in fact be completely or partially out to lunch too. Ergo the underlying theory this is based upon, if incorrect means it can never work!
Fission and fusion reactors both have radiation problems, but only fission reactors produce usable power
A standardized, low radiation hazard fission reactor pre approved for construction is the holdback.
So, you’re saying a fusion reactor “might” “possibly” be built within a century of start – if things that don’t currently exist should be brought into existence?
They
might beare fueled with the wrong kinds of inspiration.