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OT: Moorabal/Lal Lal wind farm 28-Jul-2009 At 5:05:32 PM anthonyk

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>On 28/07/2009 Wendy wrote:
>>upon billions invested in with net results of, well, um, to my understanding,
>>about zero.

to some extent the solutions are there already. they've got theoretical solutions for handling the massive neutron flux you get from the plasma, needed to make a working plant, but you have to look at it experimentally before you really have confidence in what will work. and to make those experiments it takes a project costing 10s of billions of dollars and 10+ years to build, and only then can you come up with designs to make a prototype power station, and after making that you can look at production. but its already being argued that the money going into ITER is economically viable due to the returns it'll lead to from the massive benefits when it eventually comes online.

out of interest Australia chose not to support the project (under the Howard govt I believe), so we'll be left out of technology that comes out of it, or will have to buy the technology at a much higher price. it might have been political however since Australia has the best source of some of the materials needed for fusion from mines in WA (lithium etc?), so maybe they're planning to use that for bargaining.