On 7/11/05, Michael Huston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I was confused about something he said about nuclear testing and > thought that it directly contradicted something he had said about the > international community being very close to workable fusion power, and > we aren't because we're backward, technologically.
Opposition of nuclear testing and support of fusion research are not necessarily contradictory. The problem is that the word "nuclear" is highly overloaded. By definition, "nuclear" is an adjective relating the subject to the nucleus of something else. In the default context, the nucleus referred to is that of the atom. Multiple technologies take advantage of possible changes and interactions between the nuclei of different atoms. The two primary interactions are those of fission and fusion. Thus we have atomic nuclear fission and atomic nuclear fusion. Further, there is a difference in the technologies leveraging nuclear fission. For lack of better terms, I'll refer to them as military applications and commercial applications. Common examples are nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants, respectively. There may come a day when there's a similar distinction for applications of fusion, but right now I know of no military fusion applications since "cold fusion" (a self sustaining fusion reaction) has not yet been achieved. So, when someone speaks of something "nuclear", assuming the atomic context, there are many possible meanings: 1) military (weaponized) fission 2) commercial fission 3) research toward commercial fusion I, personally, oppose the first but neither of the second. In fact, I promote both of the latter where possible. I find the paranoia of the general public regarding commercial fission to be not only irrational but irritating. Jacob Fugal .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
