George Will in Washington Post Editorial Promotes Fusion as Energy of the Future

Veteran political columnist and commentator George F. Will has an op-ed article in today’s Washington Post promoting the fusion as an power source that can take care of America’s energy needs.To be clear, he’s talking about ‘hot’ fusion (as opposed to cold fusion or LENR).

His argument in favor of fusion is that it uses an abundant source of fuel — hydrogen, it produces no greenhouse gases and no long-lived nuclear waste, and has no risk of runaway nuclear meltdown. Will argues that the federal budget should fund the research and development of fusion, and that $30 billion dollars over 20 years (one estimate of the time and money needed) would be money well spent, saying, “given the societal will, commercially feasible production of fusion energy is possible in the lifetime of most people now living.”

He laments, however, that because fusion is not seen as immediately essential or glamorous by the public, and because the horizon for success is so far away, it is at risk of being neglected — and he notes that the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s staff is now less than a third that it once was.

I hope that Mr. Will soon becomes aware of what has been going on in the LENR field. He seems to be smart enough to easily recognize the many advantages that the E-Cat (and anything similar) would have over any hot fusion projects under development — in a much shorter timeframe.

I sincerely hope that it won’t be too long before opinion-makers in the scientific, political, educational, and other fields start taking LENR as seriously as they do fusion and other alternative energy technologies. There is a lot riding on the work of Rossi and Co., and I hope that 2014 will see a sea change in thinking about how we solve our energy problems.