Bill Gates Sponsoring Palladium-Based LENR Technology 183
Baldrson writes Kitco.com reports that: "Low energy nuclear reactor (LENR) technology, and by extension palladium, is attracting the attention of one of the richest men in the world and a pioneer inventor of new technology... In a recent visit to Italy, billionaire business man, investor and inventor Bill Gates said that for several years he has been a believer in the idea of LENR, and is a sponsor of companies developing the technology... During his trip to Italy he visited the national agency for new technologies energy and sustainable economic development (ENEA) where scientists have made significant progress towards a working design for low energy nuclear fusion. The centerpiece of their design is the same as in Mitsubishi's, palladium. Creating palladium foil with just the right parameters, and managing stress levels in the material was a key issue, one that the researchers at EMEA were able to resolve several years ago."
just a new name for cold fusion (Score:5, Insightful)
It's good that he has a lot of money, because this is going down the toilet.
Re: (Score:1)
A fool and his money... ... lucky for him he has lots and lots of it, so he can afford to part with some of it into losing propositions.
Although, I'd probably advise him to just go buy one of every state lottery ticket number - at least then he'd get *something* back for his stupid waste of money, rather than the nothing LENR is going to return.
"pioneer inventor of new technology" ??? (Score:3, Interesting)
TFA calls Gates a pioneer. Well, the covered wagon part is right. Please name something of value that was invented by Gates himself. Give up? Ok, without looking it up.... name something of real scientific or technological value invented by Microsoft Research Labs. That lab allowed Gates to take enormous tax write-offs but never produced any scientific or tecnological break-throughs. But hey, it was all in good tax-dodging fun, right?
Re: (Score:3)
Pretty sure ClearType came from them. There's also C#, though I suppose some would argue about its technological value. They also did a pretty heavy duty astronomy visualization program that I forget the name of.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you have made my case. :) Fonts. A minor derivative language. Astronomy visualization. For these the US taxpayer sacrificed $billons in lost revenue that had to be made up from the taxes of hard-working creative folks who actually make useful things. Gates didn't build his monopoly the old fashiioned (and legal) way. Microsoft inherited an OS monopoly from IBM becasue IBM was arrogant enough to think that only IBM could sell operating systems. Microsoft stole their monopoly in internet bro
Re: (Score:2)
This free Microsoft tool for automatically stiching images together to make a panorama is pretty freaking amazing, and I am no Microsoft fanboi for sure.
http://research.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't sound much of an advance on Hugin. Which is available Free and cross-platform [sourceforge.net]. There are up-to-date portable versions too.
Since I move from system to system, from client to client, that last point is a mega-killer. If it takes 3 months to get a program installed through the IT department, and the project lasts 1.5 months, portability is an essential.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe I'm missing something about Hugin, but it seems like quite a manual and thus rather tedious process to actually do. Please correct me if I am wrong, because I spent a limited time only, reading the documentation.
The Microsoft tool is fully automatic. Just drop a bunch of images in a window, or a video, and it does the math by itself and it spits out the panorama in seconds. And the result is amazing. This is one reason why I have virtual machines with Windows installed, (I get my Windows VMs as a resu
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sub-pixel rendering was invented by Apple. Microsoft only patented there implementation called ClearType, which uses 3 sub-pixels instead of 2 sub-pixels, and is carefully worded around the existing Apple patent. The Apple patent is referenced in the Microsoft patent.
Re: (Score:2)
Woz did a text aliasing trick using RGB colors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
TFA calls Gates a pioneer. Well, the covered wagon part is right. Please name something of value that was invented by Gates himself. Give up? Ok, without looking it up.... name something of real scientific or technological value invented by Microsoft Research Labs. That lab allowed Gates to take enormous tax write-offs but never produced any scientific or tecnological break-throughs. But hey, it was all in good tax-dodging fun, right?
Or, you could look up the definition of the word "pioneer".
Here you go: "among the first or earliest to enter a new field of inquiry, Enterprise, or progress."
Bill Gates and Microsoft clearly meets that definition regarding the personal computer
Re: "pioneer inventor of new technology" ??? (Score:1)
Gates was essential for three acceptance of software patents. That was innovative for the legal system. Oh wait, you mentioned technology.
Re:"pioneer inventor of new technology" ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if this was an invention, but it certainly was pioneering: Microsoft 8K BASIC. It was originally written by Gates and his buddy Paul Allen personally. (You've got to start somewhere.)
MS 8K BASIC came built in ROM with all of the microcomputers of a certain era: TRS-80, the Apple II, and my own beloved (but obscure) Ohio Scientific. Note that Apple's own Integer Basic, written by Woz, wasn't nearly the success on the Apple II, though it had its following. The Apple II wouldn't have been nearly the success it was without MS 8K BASIC to help make it mainstream.
I learned assembly language originally by studying Gate's and Allen's handiwork. My Ohio Scientific had a 6502 processor, and after reading a book on 6502 assembly language to learn some basic principles, I *really* learned 6502 assembly by studying disassembly listings of 8K BASIC. It was a marvel of clever assembly techniques. It may be hard to appreciate at this point the impact of that little 8K piece of code. It's what made the fledgling microcomputer business viable for hobbyists a few years before the IBM PC made "personal computers" viable for businesses and your grandma.
Oh, and let's not forget Gate's innovations as a monopolist. I don't know the details, but one can't logically disparage him as a monopolist without recognizing his pioneering innovations in the field of monopoly. For example, his ongoing rant at the time about "Microsoft needs the freedom to innovate", while having built a business on doing nothing but copying the (technical) innovations of others was actually kindda innovative, in a business sense. Of course, John D. Rockerfeller and others had pioneered monopoly a century earlier, but one can't help but recognize that Gates must have pushed the monopolist's state-of-the-art of a bit further. For example, Rockerfeller certainly didn't invent "embrace, extend and extinguish". So, let's give credit where credit's due.
(Note to moderators: before you down-mod me for saying positive things about Bill Gates here, please note the ironic undertone of the last paragraph.)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I hadn't heard that, though it could be. Your last reference provided an unrelated though quite interesting observation:
What about the open-source movement, which over the past decade has won considerable loyalty and enthusiasm in many programming quarters?
“There’s this wonderful outpouring of creativity in the open-source world,” Lanier said. “So what do they make — another version of Unix?”
I've often thought the same thing. I guess "embrace, extend, and extinguish" is OK so long as one replaces the "extinguish" part with "world domination" [wikiquote.org].
Re: (Score:1)
Didn't he invented EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish)?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That lab allowed Gates to take enormous tax write-offs but never produced any scientific or tecnological break-throughs. But hey, it was all in good tax-dodging fun, right?
Tax write-off and tax dodging? What the heck? That's like you donating $100 to the Red Cross to get $15 back in tax refund. Not to even mention all the payroll taxes that people working in Microsoft pay. MS would be way better off just stashing the money like Apple does.
Your post is utterly moronic. What is it about Microsoft that turns otherwise smart people into f**king morons?
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't go so far as to tar Microsoft as being a company that invented nothing of value. However, I don't think Bill Gates himself would qualify as an inventor of note. I mean, we generally don't say the microchip was invented by the stockholders of Texas Instruments?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I am willing to go out on a limb and quote a lot more than that:
1: Active Directory. Yes, it is Kerberos compatible, but it is the only infrastructure that can scale to millions, if not billions of users. OpenLDAP can't do more than just domains, and businesses need trees and forests for their organizational structure.
2: Exchange. IBM and Google are exceptions since they eat their own dog food, but every other big company has their messaging on Exchange.
3: GPOs. Try to manage thousands of desktops wi
Re: (Score:2)
2. Exchange is overrated crap.
3. Sure, if 'management' is limited to pretty much locking the desktop background. Try to install and configure non-trivial third-party software through GPOs. Hell, even try to install Microsoft's own VisualStudio.
4. BitLocker is indeed nice.
5. RefuseFS is still very experimental. BTFS supports integrity checking on the file
Re: (Score:2)
It's good that he has a lot of money, because this is going down the toilet.
There was a time when technology was based on science. Today we learn it's based on faith (Bill Gates said that for several years he has been a believer in the idea of LENR).
I remember hearing somewhere that if you imagine science vs religion as an axis, on the extreme side of either end, fundamentalist science and fundamentalist religious, you have people motivated solely by faith.
Re: (Score:2)
The "fundamentalist scientist" does not seem very extreme - surely he will accept it whenever someone proves him wrong on some account. Otherwise, he is no scientist.
I think that was the point.
Re: (Score:2)
There was a time
Thats right. Fraud is a recent phenomena in technology and science, and Bill is the first dupe ever to be swindled. It isn't as though it's so common that there are entire catalogs [hoaxes.org] of scientific frauds going back hundreds of years. Nope. LENR/Cold Fusion is the very first.
And why are these fraudsters emerging when there were none before? Capitalism. Obviously.
Palladium foil with just the right parameters (Score:3, Insightful)
That sounds like a boondoggle, not something that would be useful in a productive environment.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
That sounds like a boondoggle,
Why? We use vast quantities of things that must conform to very strict parameters, such as every semi conductor. When original research was going on they were extremely time consuming and low yield. Now 2m silicon crystals are commonly grown with impurities less than PPB and virtually zero defects at the molecular level! There's no reason to think this couldn't happen with palladium foil given sufficient resources.
Re: (Score:3)
There's no reason to think this [cold fusion] couldn't happen with palladium foil given sufficient resources.
There is at least one overwhelming reason to think this could not happen regardless of how you prepare the palladium: basic physics.
The Coulomb repulsion of the deuterons keeps them so far apart that the likelihood of fusion is exponentially small. You can muck about with the palladium until the cows come home but unless do something like replace the electrons with muons, it is unlikely you are going to induce a significant amount of cold fusion.
It is like saying that by applying sufficient resourc
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe so. The OP seemed to make it out that the palladium sheet was the limiting factor, hence my comment. Granted I don't know much about nuclear physics.
Re: Palladium foil with just the right parameters (Score:2)
Free electron screening is well understood [wikipedia.org]. It doesn't make LENR feasible.
Until there is a convincing and well controlled demonstration of paladium/deuterium LENR, or a plausible theoretical mechanism proposed, don't expect people to take it seriously.
Re: (Score:2)
why can't the electrons get between two nuclei and cancel their repulsion (rather like muons can do)?
The problem is that the conduction electrons are spread out so they can't clump together in the space between the nuclei. This is due to the low mass of the electron. A muon is very much like an electron but is over 3,000 times more massive; this means it is 3,000 times "smaller" and thus can fit into the small space between the nuclei just fine.
The problem is not that the electron wave function can't get close to the nuclei. The problem is that the electron wave function can't get clumped together i
Re: (Score:2)
The article is full of shit.
It claims that Gates's blog post here here [gatesnotes.com] supports LENR, but it does no such thing (although some people in the comments section do mention it).
Re: (Score:2)
Gates is a very lucky man (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gates is a very lucky man (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Plus the business ability to make it work financially. Plenty of people have the ability to innovate technologically but no skill at business management - they can try and fail, or they can just go work for an established company and give up the possibility of vast wealth in exchange for a near-guarantee of a moderate income.
Re: (Score:1)
Plus the business ability to make it work financially.
That's doesn't need ability, that just needs money. What world do you live in?
Re: (Score:2)
But that only gets you as far as most of the failures in the dot com boom. The compnies that burned through their investors' money without turning a good idea (or a bad one) into revenue.
"Business ability" means having the skill set to allocate resources (manpower, capital, etc.) to tasks that move the organization in the direction needed to achieve one's goals.
Re: (Score:2)
He was born in the .01% He didn't have to schmooze
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite right. And being a bit of a louse like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, who are willing to screw others to any degree for the sake of their own ambition, doesn't hurt either. To make it their level, you need the right mix of luck, technical skills, business acumen, and psychopathy.
Re:Gates is a very lucky man (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Gates is a very lucky man (Score:4, Funny)
Under any other circumstance it seems he would be pursuing a career in alchemy.
He did say that he might have pursued physics [reddit.com] if he didn't end up in computer science.
Re: (Score:2)
end up in computer science.
Pretty much the same way I ended up in computer science. A freshman, on the first day of class in the fall. Not knowing my way around the building, I walked into the wrong classroom.
Rossi (Score:2, Insightful)
Whatever happened to Andrea Rossi [wikipedia.org]? I was all excited about the E-Cat stuff from 2012, but since then he seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth...
Re:Rossi (Score:4, Funny)
An 'independent' group of LENR researchers who were not allowed to 'independently' setup/inspect the equipment nor 'independently' operate it (Rossi did) watched it with ridiculously inadequate measuring equipment for 30 days and said it 'works'.
I think they also independently claimed that the Brooklyn Bridge was a 'good deal' and they should buy it from me, but I haven't seen any money from them yet.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Back then in 2012 it was already clear Rossi had nothing. In the mean time we got 2 crappy report from his friends at bologna university & lund (so not independendent) and both were rife of so many error as to be laughable. The last one had Rossi remove the "ashes" which turned out to be something else altogether than previously found, and was Ni 62.... By coincidence Rossi had bought Ni 62 a bit before but that was for "calibration" wink wink.
Bottom line : forget Rossi. There is a good reason he does n
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Visit E-Catworld if you want to read more about the E-Cat. Basically, Industrial Heat bought his business, then refined the E-Cat a lot, then a study revealing that the invention worked amazingly well was released at the exact same date that oil prices started to go down. Then IH installed the first operative plant which will let visitors come and see it, and shortly after that Bill Gates traveled to Italy to heavily invest in his technology.
Re:Rossi (Score:4, Interesting)
Who published this "study" and how was it peer reviewed?
Re:Rossi (Score:4, Informative)
Who published this "study" and how was it peer reviewed?
I'd guess Snake Oil Monthly, peer reviewed by "homeopathic scientists". Obviously. Or (since Rossi is a tiny bit subtler than that... though only a tiny bit) the """Journal of Nuclear Physics"""*, which (in a startling coincidence) is "published" by Rossi himself (if posting something to a blog counts as published). It may well have been peer reviewed, but of course since Rossi is a fraudster, not a scientist, the peers in this case... well, lets just say they probably have more of a theoretical degree in physics than a degree in theoretical physics.
*As a side note, this is a good example of why simply because something was "published" in a respected-sounding journal does not mean it's actually trustworthy. I could form the American Journal of Renowned Physics Breakthroughs tomorrow and publish the flimsiest of flim-flam in it. Anyone could.
Re: Rossi (Score:2)
The first sentence in the Wikipedia article: "Andrea Rossi (born 3 June 1950) is an Italian convicted fraudster, inventor and entrepreneur." (Though the footnote to "fraudster" indicates he was ultimately acquitted, on what appears to be a technicality, of the major charges relating to an alleged oil-from-trash scam.) The best you can say about E-Cat is that Rossi seems to be doing everything possible to make it look like a scam (Starts with a Bang [medium.com].)
Rossi's E-Cat was the first thing I thought of when I rea
Re: (Score:2)
Dude. Even Steorn is still around ! Apparently they started re-tweeting or posting some funnay stuff about the new free house heating systems again. Boggles my mind.
LENR is not fusion (Score:4, Informative)
LENR means Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, and is most decidedly NOT fusion; the coulomb barrier is not applicable. The mechanism is completely different, the best theory so far is that of Widom-Larsen which explains it using Ultra Low Momentum neutrons. See http://news.newenergytimes.net for details, for the theory http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml .
Re:LENR is not fusion (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
The most credible information I've seen is this presentation at SRI [wikipedia.org] in California.
Cafe Sci Silicon Valley: What Happened to Cold Fusion? (Pt 1 of 8) Introduction [youtube.com]
Unless Dr. McKubre [wikipedia.org] is a complete fraud of course.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can change a nucleus other than by merging with another. The Widom-Larsen theory is (as I understand it) that a proton on a metal surface is converted (forced by combined forces of groups of electrons) into a neutron by combining with an electron, and that this no-speed neutron is then easily captured by a nearby nucleus, changing its isotope number. So e.g. nickel would stay nickel but have an extra neutron. This could happens a second time for the same nucleus. If then one of the extra neutrons is con
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Many LENR reactions (if not all) are fusion reactions.
Or how do you call it if a H atom "combines" with another one?
Low energy fusion in vacuum are researched since the 1890s (yes, eight teen not nine teen), especially japanese, italian and german researchers did stuff like this over 100 years ago. Easy to google btw.
Re: (Score:2)
nuclear reaction. fission is to fusion as a square is to rectangle. they are not the same thing but fusion and fission are both nuclear reactions. just because cold fusion is bunk doesn't mean it's not a 'nuclear reaction' of decidedly low energy.
Re: (Score:2)
the best theory so far is that of Widom-Larsen
Widom-Larsen requires an implausible mix of scales. The effective mass of heavy electrons in the solid state is a collective phenomenon happening over distances and time-scales that are large relative to the nucleus and nuclear time-scales and affect the dynamics of the electron's interaction with the lattice, on those scales. To impute to these large-scale effects efficacy at the nuclear scale is very unlikely to be correct.
Consider a car analogy: a car moving along a freeway in dense traffic interacts wit
Cold Fusion (Score:5, Funny)
640 Kelvin ought to be enough for anybody.
A Fool and His Money (Score:1)
A fool and his money are easily parted.
Re: (Score:2)
A fool and his money are easily parted.
But not an atom and it's neutron, nosiree!!!
Re: (Score:1)
What on earth are you banging on about?
Germany had a thorium reactor, THTR-300. It was a buggy piece of junk.
The CDU got Germany out of nuclear power (fucking idiots). No maoists were involved.
Berlesconi got Italy out of nukes. No maoists involved.
Re: (Score:2)
And here I thought I was the only one having difficulty parsing that.
Re: (Score:2)
Nice! Love it! We should all use the term berserk from now on. Especially a large scale thorium berserk. ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
Of course the plural is taken
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
why you so down on renewables? can't kill sunlight
Re: Whoops (Score:1)
environmental regulatations in China will kill PV. the production is so insanely toxic that there is no credibility to the dumping, jusr a trail of cancer and deformed babirs downwind and downstream.
Re:Whoops (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates is far more intelligent than you,
That needs a big 'citation needed' next to it, but:
and has already seen a working plant, which is why he is investing on a technology that is going to displace oil and outright kill renewables.
You don't understand risk analysis. He's investing a very small proportion of his wealth in something that may have massive returns. The probability of said returns may be small, but that doesn't make it a bad investment if the potential payoffs are huge, as long as you can afford to take the loss if it doesn't pan out. Most people with his money will invest a few millions in a few fringe ideas, because it only takes one to pay off to more than make up for your investment. The majority of his portfolio will be in relatively safe investments with a close-to-guaranteed return, a bit will be in risky venture.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. Hero worship much?
Re: (Score:2)
> Whereas most people in slashdot are brainwashed and gullible morons that would rather invest in the most useless and most expensive form of energy generation: photovoltaics.
I guess you think Warren Buffet is a moronic investor too:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
Re: (Score:2)
which is why he is investing on a technology that is going to displace oil and outright kill renewables.
Why should any power source build on LENR kill renewables?
First you need plants, takes decades to build a big plant.
Then they need to be _cheaper_ than the renewables.
And the main problem: do LENR plants even produce enough heat to be feasable as electric power plant?
Perhaps a 'table top' fusion/LENR plant is usefull to heat a room, or even a house or for cooking, but making it usefull for an electric pla
Scam (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Kitco is very bullish on precious metals - so the source is suspect - have a read of some of their other stories.
Re: (Score:1)
See http://news.newenergytimes.net/ . Gates visited the Frascati LENR laboratory on 2014-11-12 if I interpret the article correctly. You could check the Enea website if you know Italian :-)
Re: (Score:2)
This smells like a scam of some sort
While I don't disagree on the smell, Gates is richer than God, and the first thing I thought on seeing this was that if I had that kind of money I might spend a bit of it on wigged-out ideas, just in case. It's like me throwing a panhandler a buck just 'cause I can.
Re: (Score:2)
Once you understand that "lefties" encompasses all evil dictators and genociders of the 20th and 21th Century AND drug cartels and mafia AND practically all terrorist groups AND most billionaries and CEOs of evil corporations on Earth AND most owners of the big and corrupted media (including MPAA, RIAA, Hollywood and Disney) that control the narrative, you stop listening to their lies, as they serve ONLY to their interests
Wait, really? Are you trolling, or just completely batshit bingo ball crazy?
Re: (Score:2)
Sssh. He's entertaining.
Re: (Score:2)
If you must feed the trolls, please at least have the sense to disable your karma bonus.
What? What is it good for, then? It's a shiny lure.
Re: (Score:3)
The Palladium bit did me in (Score:3)
The stopped just short of saying he was going to imbed an arc reactor in his chest. A superhero, he ain't.
Re: (Score:2)
He has the power of Super Money. Plenty of superhero setting characters have that power, usually in conjunction with a high skill level in another field.
Re: (Score:2)
Power of Super Money, perviously known for using hyper-aggressive business stratagies often anticompetative and bordering on ilegal, personal interest in developing energy technology, capable of some innovation on his own but more commonly hires more specialised underlings... is this Gates or Luthor?
Wait, I've seen it before... (Score:2)
Technically Illiterate (Score:4, Informative)
The 'Tech Metals Insider' article contains a link to what it describes as another of its articles on Low Energy Nuclear Reactors, but it is actually about the hohlraums used in some inertial-confinement laser fusion research. The author is apparently unaware that this is a very different technology, and so cannot be regarded as a reliable guide on the subject.
Why is this on kitco? (Score:1)
Now that gold has tanked, they need to promote the sale of palladium to gullible investors.
Other ideas for Blliy (Score:5, Funny)
You can heat your house with two tea candles and a couple clay flower pots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Perpetual motion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
There is a lot more. These guys and gals have us to the point of completely free energy.
But while the communist cabal of evil "real" scientists are all busy trying to shackle the world with their hoohaw global warming money and freedom grab when they aren't out killing puppies, and figuring out ways to break Jerry Sandusky out of jail - the true inventors working tirelessly in their garages have solved all our energy problems
WAKE UP AMERICA! from a cave in Idaho, where men are still men, and the sheep are pretty nervous
Inventor? (Score:2, Troll)
Slashvertisement for Kitco - Really? (Score:2)
This item is simply hyping a press release from a rare metals sales firm. There is nothing to see here folks, move along.
Cool, BUT.... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Didn't he announce he was doing just that last year?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, there's his stated goals, but golly gee, it isn't his fault if his money earned/spent during his lifetime outlives him is it? Think about The Foundation.
Re: (Score:2)
Foundation and Empire? With Gates as the Mule?
Re: (Score:2)
I was going to say, the simile isn't entirely apt because Gates hasn't been totally successful as the Mule. And then I realized, the Mule wasn't entirely, either. So point to you.
Re: (Score:3)
I see a lot of "fool and his money" posts and it's nonsense or pseudoscience. And I see a lot of posts on "Fusion being 20, 30, or even 40 years away" from posters when stories on hot fusion are posted here.
So given the lack of progress in hot fusion after billions have been spent and decades wasted,...
Thermonuclear fusion has made progress - the evidence so far is that the tokamak system can be scaled up to commercial plant size. It is the only fusion technology to currently be in the running to do this. So there is progress. Unfortunately even if current plans pan out as expected it will be the most expensive energy in the world, exceeding the cost of every means of energy production currently in use (and some of them will be getting still cheaper in the mean time).
if a low cost fusion alternative can be found then it should be researched. After all what do you have to lose?
...
But given that the payoff for a relatively minor amount of funding is so massive, harsh criticism for research into the phenomenon is counterproductive. It should in fact be encouraged by anyone who considers themselves a person who supports clean energy.
Nothing wrong with investing effort in