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It's crazy that the US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in Iraq. Yet, we spend practically nothing on technology that could offer clean, safe, e

• jotm 12y ago
  Well, war is a proven way to make lots of money. Nuclear fusion is an uncertainty in the small minds of those who seek wealth and power only for themselves.
  • api 12y ago
    War is a proven way to empty the national treasury into the pockets of contractors. That's good if you're a contractor but it's a net loss for the rest of us.
• Shivetya 12y ago
  I wonder how much strife would come about should we develop such technology. It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. It would hurt companies who are in this trade, let alone those who create competitive energy technologies. By the same token, many countries are heavily vested in the businesses within their domain being able to complete. Finally, a safe and clean source of energy would likely become fairly cheap quickly which would boost production destabilizing the global economy. If any one country developed such technology could they keep it to themselves?
  • DennisP 12y ago
    I doubt any country could keep it to themselves. Even if we tried and avoided espionage, once it's proven to work economically every major country would ramp up research. (But espionage would happen pretty quickly. We didn't even manage to keep the H-bomb secret for long.) I think the strife involved would be much less than we're having now from limited fossil supplies...and far less than we'll have a few decades now from climate change.
  • simonebrunozzi 12y ago
    It would not be the first time that this happens in history. :)
  • justin66 12y ago
    > It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. So the main risk would be... war in the middle east, unrest in Africa, that sort of thing? Let's hope that never happens.
  • WhoBeI 12y ago
    > If any one country developed such technology could they keep it to themselves? I sure hope not because they shouldn't. Fusion has the potential to solve many environmental problems and since those problems typically don't give a shit about borders keeping it to yourself would be stupid.
  • stcredzero 12y ago
    It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. If I were the Saudis and the petroleum multinationals, I would be pouring money into researching industrial processes that will only be practical once fusion is invented. Then once fusion is invented, those companies would stand to make a killing.
• api 12y ago
  I think there are factors other than oil at work. Given the extreme fundamentalist religiosity of the Bush administration, I've suspected for quite some time that Iraq was driven by religious imperatives at the top with 9/11 and possibly oil used as rationalizations. I think it's well within the realm of possibility that the U.S. spent some number of trillions (I've heard from one to four) of dollars of taxpayer money to attempt to initiate the Biblical apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Since WWII every major military event or war has been seen by that crowd as a sign that "it is the hour of the time," 9/11 certainly included. The fact that it happened right about at the millennium added even more fuel to the fire. Throughout history leaders have often squandered the wealth of their kingdoms on crazy religious crusades, and being either rich or politically powerful does not exclude one from believing in things that are completely bat-guano insane. It's one of the only explanations for Iraq that really makes sense to me. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and it would have been far cheaper to develop better oil drilling technology here at home than to invade for oil. The war cost more than developing the entire Bakken play. It would also have been cheaper and ultimately more effective to deploy a missile defense shield and better border screening for hazardous materials if we were really concerned about WMDs. For a trillion dollars we could likely field Reagan's Star Wars dream complete with a staffed orbital space laser command.
  • josho 12y ago
    I just finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman, I'll spare the details, but the premise is essentially all driven by economics and power. An Iraq aligned with the US means more to US corporations and power over the next few decades than the cost of the war. If you examine history, you'll find that all too often religious motivations have been more about power than gods.
    • api 12y ago
      Hmm... so you think it's just pure realpolitik and long-term geostrategic stuff. It just seems awfully expensive for that. Of course I suppose it's possible that they actually thought it would be easy and that the Iraqis would just cheer us as we rolled in.
• gd1 12y ago
  Does that not lead you to question your assumption that the war was "for oil in Iraq"?
  • lobster_johnson 12y ago
    There is a lot of evidence that it was to secure the US' access to oil. Before Bush was elected, there was a lot of lobbying by Chalabi, Wolfowitz and others (see Richard Bonin's fantastic Arrows of the Night) to create the (false) impression that Saddam was an unstable warmonger who was amassing WMDs and preparing another invasion. The fear was that Saddam -- incredible as it sounds today, knowing what we now know -- was capable of taking Kuwait again and possibly even Saudi Arabia, which would have been disastrous for the US.
    • tsotha 12y ago
      There is plenty of (true) evidence to support the impression Saddam was an unstable warmonger.
      • lisper 12y ago
        Unlike the stable non-warmongers who have replaced him.
      • brianbreslin 12y ago
        Haven't we proven ourselves (us) to be warmongers too? :-(
      • lobster_johnson 12y ago
        Was. And warmonger he may have been, but a stable one. The evidence uncovered after the invasion shows that Saddam's Iraq had been bled dry by sanctions, and that Saddam's frustrations with forced weapons inspectors had been genuine (the chemical weapons were destroyed long ago) all along; by the late 90s, Iraq was toothless. Saddam could not have staged another war if he wanted to. Clinton didn't oust Saddam's precisely because it wasn't necessary; Iraq provided stability in an historically unstable region. The State Department and the CIA knew this; the neocons insisted on removing Saddam in spite of all the available information. The Pentagon (I think it was) had run simulated war games, every one of which predicted an outcome very much like today. Saddam was a dictator who massacred his own people, but his regime resulted in far fewer casualties than the invasion and subsequent chaos.
• mrb 12y ago
  Personally I really wish more scientists looked into Nickel-Hydrogen fusion: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 The phenomenon observed is so far unexplained... (Unfortunately the field is tarnished by one scientist who has a bad reputation who does research in this domain.)
  • tinco 12y ago
    Was the phenomenon ever independently reproduced?
    • sanswork 12y ago
      No, but people for some reason still believe him after he has spent the past few years making up excuse after excuse for why it couldn't be tested independently.
    • mrb 12y ago
      Yes (note: most people who have replicated it distinguish it from "cold fusion" - obviously this is controversial.) In 1994 Thermacore, under contract by the US Air Force, observed anomalous heat: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf In 1996 the CERN observed both (1) excess heat (however they theorize it is caused by local variations of its thermal characteristics) and (2) hydrogen absorption (which they concede is unexplained): http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CerronZebainvestigat.pdf http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CerronZebainvestigat.pdf In 2011 Celani observed excess heat: http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/papers/Celani-Cu-Ni-Mn-AlloyWires-Paper-ICCF17-pp.pdf http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/pap... There are some other groups who have reproduced it but the quality of their research vary a lot (for an overview see http://nickelpower.org/2011/12/30/replicators-as-if-december-30-2011 http://nickelpower.org/2011/12/30/replicators-as-if-december...). The problem is that it remains still hard to replicate. Zawodny (from the NASA Langley Research Center) has some theories about why, see slide 17: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Zawodny-GRC-LENR-Workshop.pdf http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Za...
    • verroq 12y ago
• rfugger 12y ago
  The war made defense contractors rich, and drove up the price of oil, which continues to this day to make oil companies rich. The Bush administration had strong ties to defense contractors and the oil industry. Dots = connected.
  • waps 12y ago
    Total world oil production has been decreasing since 2005, despite all the good news you hear. With the Iraqi production, the curve is going down but is nearly flat. That lead to oil prices of $100/barrel not going down. It hasn't gone up due to wars in the middle east, sadly. I realize people keep bringing that up, but it's not true. A few spikes, yes, the actual rise, no. Without Iraq that would have been 2.5-3 mbbl/day less, or a 3.5% drop instead of a 0.3% drop. I seem to remember from my economics class that oil demand is very inelastic. So if a 0.3% drop in supply leads to a price doubling/tripling (depending on the basis for that), what would a 3.5% drop have done ? So while I do not pretend to know the intentions of America, I'm scared to think what would have happened without it. If oil was the target, the war was a success (for the world as a whole, America only really profited by not seeing the world go down), and lack of success would have meant total disaster. The timing was near-perfect as well. But fact is, the only thing the Iraq war brought was a delay, or 2-3, maybe 5 years. The US shale boom is another maybe 5 year delay. Given that we're very close to the end of the second delay, we need to come up with something quick. Unless of course you'd like to see Russia take outright control of Western Europe, and have more middle eastern resource wars.
    • api 12y ago
      I blame conservatives for this too. They laughed for 50 years at all the hippies and eggheads who talked about the need for alternative energy. One of Reagan's first acts was to take the solar panels off the White House.
      • tsotha 12y ago
        Conservatives are just less interested in empty symbolic gestures.
• rdtsc 12y ago
  > US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in Iraq We lined the pockets of the military industrial complex. Think of it simply as taking a nice percentage out of everyone's pocket and handing it off to Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, GD, etc. As part of that transfer it was necessary to kill a good number of people on both sides.
• orbifold 12y ago
  Unfortunately fusion research is not something you can throw unlimited funds at and it would immediately be a reality. There are still hard unsolved problems and the amount people actually capable of solving them is limited and would not change significantly, if their work were better compensated. Something like Wendelstein 7-X took a decade of planning and building because they had to invent the manufacturing tools and construction methods as they went along, not because they had not enough money to finance the project.
  • DennisP 12y ago
    Stellerators like the 7-X are the most complicated reactors to build of any design we have. Fusion has been severely limited by funding for a long time. Last year I read a history of the U.S. fusion program by Stephen O. Dean, one of the major figures involved. It was a sad, repeated story of scientific triumphs followed immediately by drastic budget cuts. In one case, we spent $372 million on a fusion reactor, completed it, then cancelled the program and dismantled it without running a single experiment. Right now most of our money is going to ITER. Alternate approaches are starved. MIT's levitated dipole was cancelled, UW's FRC was reduced to computational studies, etc. Even MIT's Alcator C-Mod, one of our leading tokamaks, keeps getting threatened with cancellation. It's got the strongest magnetic field and highest plasma pressure of any tokamak in the world, and a couple years ago made a pretty major breakthrough in tokamak physics (I-mode). If fusion had more copious funding, then certainly a lot more physics grad students would take up the field. It's not like plasma physics is uniquely difficult. http://www.amazon.com/Search-Ultimate-Energy-Source-Technology/dp/1461460360 http://www.amazon.com/Search-Ultimate-Energy-Source-Technolo... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility