September 2004 President bush says to group of big time supporters “I’m going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting.”(( Please note, the point of my story 1979 – Of Art, the Ayatollah, Oil, Mellon & Fusion is to promote energy alternatives such as Argonne National Laboratory’s Dr. Ronald Martin’s inertial confinement fusion program (Heavy Ion Fusion). In 1979 the US Department of Energy took away Dr. Martin’s $5.5 million budget and gave it to the University of California at Berkeley. To date, Berkeley has spent about $100 million and their program and gotten nowhere))…
Dr. Martin’s 11/1/06 letter: “I’m still very much interested in Heavy Ion Fusion. I believe it can supply the worlds’ energy and do away with the dependence on oil, but very little seems to be going on. The focus on renewable energy is okay and valuable but will not be adequate to produce the 3 terrawatts the United States needs. That’s part of the problem: few people state quantatively the amount of energy any technology can produce, and don’t understand how much 3 TW is. For instance – the United states has about 100 nuclear plants at about 1000 megawatts each — that’s 0.1 TW. So even expanding nuclear energy to 3 TW would be a problem with the present technology. The jest of the problem: efficient nuclear energy (fusion) = 10 million times more energy per gram of fuel than chemical energy (coal, oil, gas). Data by Electrical talk – Electrician Wenatchee. That huge factor should not be ignored.”