An 'interview' with Ed Moses - opportunity missed.

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Chris Bradley
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An 'interview' with Ed Moses - opportunity missed.

Post by Chris Bradley »

This morning on BBC radio there was a few minutes given to an interview with Ed Moses. Apparently, there is some new Memorandum of Understanding that's been signed between NIF and Appleton/AWE recently (the details of which were not at all discussed).

It was a typically miserable interview which would have further enlighten neither the previously unenlightened, nor the enlightened!

This seems typical for interviews of 'technology' subjects these days. The 'mainstream' is sooo far behind the curve on technology, it is seemingly impossible for journalists to be able to bridge the gap any more.

If you are permitted to receive it outside UK then, if you like, you can hear it at;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/ne ... 585189.stm

(but frankly I'd recommend you don't bother!!)




For the record, I heard beforehand that he was going to be on, so I sent the editorial team the following;

> NIF is a total disaster as a 'fusion energy' project. If you are actually interviewing Ed Moses today, I trust you will drill him hard on all the failed promises, previous debacles and many other total failures it has experienced, more of which are therefore to be expected in the future. For further info, see; http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nif2/findings.asp and http://fire.pppl.gov/ICF_Happer2.PDF .

and afterwards I followed up with;

> Your interview with Ed Moses was a pitiful piece of 'journalism'. The equivalent interview in politics would have been as ignorant as; '..and here we have a man called Colonel Ghaddafi who says he can bring prosperity to Libya'. You totally whitewashed the prior history of NIF and missed the chance to pull up the Director of NIF to account for all the massive budget over-runs and misleading, misdirections given to the US Senate by NIF management over the past. You needed to probe him on whether the MoU was going to drag on UK budgets in the same way it has uselessly drained US budgets. This was a really bad piece and a missed opportunity with the Director of a project it sounds like you've never ever heard of before, nor put any effort into finding out about.
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Doug Coulter
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Re: An 'interview' with Ed Moses - opportunity missed.

Post by Doug Coulter »

Except for the occasional green "spin" they apply around funding time, it's no secret that NIF has nothing to do with fusion power. It's a program for stewardship of the nuclear weapons program, a way to avoid breaking the test treaty while continuing to get data on H bomb tech. Almost everyone in the US is aware that our DOE is misnamed -- it's the dept of nuclear weapons, and has little interest in much else, and it's been that way my entire lifetime. Once you know the score, it's all much more clear.
Sure, they do the work with and permitting fission reactors - because that's where the weapons fuel comes from. As most know, other considerations are pretty much ignored by them -- look at the huge messes they've made with waste at their labs.

Note which labs do this, and what they do the rest of the time. Nothing to do with bettering civilians in any of those shops, ever, it's all pure military work. And that's the reason they chose the approach they did, it gives them the kind of data they want for their real tasking. If you asked those same scientists for a practical fusion power source, they'd surely do it much differently, but that's not what they are tasked to do.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
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Richard Hull
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Re: An 'interview' with Ed Moses - opportunity missed.

Post by Richard Hull »

I listened to the entire bit....What a load of "hooey"! Putt-putt boat fusion!? A terawatt-usec pulse at 1,000pps.... Akin to capturing lightning. Finally, there were the words.... oh well, of course, we would have to scale this up a good deal to actually make a viable power source....... Scale up a 4 billion dollar system?

One costly fusion debacle after another with no end in sight. Much of this will end as national treasures, if there are any really left, are used to just sustain ridiculous lifestyles of voters who aren't working.

The need for circus to calm and lull the masses is mostly a need for electronic pleasures which translates to electrical energy and at this stage that only means coal and fission plants need to be constructed immediately and at an accelerated pace.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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