Lockheed compact fusion electricity generation

[marchesarosa]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

[principled]

Marchesa, I'd love to think that we are on the cusp of power generated by fusion, but in truth it always seems to be a decade away.

Successive governments spent hundreds of millions developing nuclear power stations (unfortunately driven by the need to produce plutonium in the first instance) and yet never built on that experience to produce a standardised fission reactor that would have permitted us, like France, to have a reliable method of producing energy without producing the "evil" CO2 and with the bonus of no wind turbines. Had they done that, then at least it would have given us a breathing space until fusion arrives.

The upside of that policy would have been that they could have used the money wasted on wind subsidies to develop a reliable thorium/uranium reactor and then move to a pure thorium one. This would have ameliorated the green lobby's concern about waste nuclear fission products and nuclear proliferation.

Professor Cywinski said: “It’s interesting to consider where we might be now if thorium’s benefits had been widely recognised decades ago, as seemed likely at one stage.
“The UK might just have already built a multi-billion-pound industry based on the safe, virtually inexhaustible, low-waste, proliferation-resistant generation of nuclear energy.

From here:http://www.hud.ac.uk/news/allstories/governmentreportbacksunisnuclearresearch.php

But what do we have instead? Wind farms that need conventional back-up, a non-existent nuclear power industry, requiring us to import reactor technology from China, and a knife-edge situation regarding our generating reserve.
What a cock-up!
P