Military might want an exclusive interest in a cheap small heat source for a
number of strategic interests including ships, but, at any rate, the NRC and
other country equivalents will hold this back for a decade+ of testing and
proof of safety before allowing marketing. It's nuclear, remember. And that is
just the govt pace, no one wants to sign off on safety until it is absolutely
proven out -I'm talking millions of $ of testing.
----- Original Message -----
From: Jed Rothwell
To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 1:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Vo]:Re: [Vo]:Rossi’s customer
Jay Caplan <uniqueprodu...@comcast.net> wrote:
Right, between the military interst and NRC regulators, it will be 10-15
years before any of this tech is available for commercial use.
Why do you say that military use of technology slows down civilian access to
it? In my experience going back to the 1970s it is just the opposite. NASA and
the military spurred progress in computers and other high-technology by
spending huge sums of money on it. This brought it to civilian markets much
sooner than it would have reached them otherwise.
For example, the microscopic motion sensors used to deploy airbags in
automobile collisions were first developed by the military and some fantastic
cost. I believe they may even have been developed for use in Star Wars. Star
Wars has been a $90 billion blackhole of money and waste, but it has produced
several useful spinoffs.
Military technology that has alternative useful civilian uses has never been
embargoed by the military, except in the middle of WWI and WWII. Immediately
after World War II radar, cavity magnetron microwave generators, computers and
many other technologies were made fully public by the U.S. and the UK
governments, which had developed them. A few things were kept secret, such as
some details about how to make nuclear weapons, and the existence of Bombes
used to break the German enigma machines. The British kept the Bombes secret
for a long time because they assured other governments around the world that
German enigma machines (and the more modern variants) were unbreakable. They
wanted other governments to continue using the machines so that MI5 could read
their mail, which they did.
Surprisingly detailed information on the nuclear bomb was released in the
Smyth report, "Atomic Energy for Military Purposes," 1945. See:
http://www.archive.org/details/atomicenergyform00smytrich
- Jed
