David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote: That money could have gone a long way toward funding LENR adequately.
You can say that about any large sum of money, devoted to anything. For example, a small fraction of the $12 billion spent annually on cosmetics in the U.S. and Europe could go a long way toward funding LENR. Money is fungible. I think it only makes sense to talk about money that might have better been spent on LENR when the funding competes with LENR, or at least when the people involved see it as competition. For example, the plasma fusion programs, or clean coal, or advanced fission. That is, funding devoted to energy sources that are: futuristic, complicated, high tech, and as yet non existent. If the DoE or a large corporation thinks about funding cold fusion, it is likely to take the money away from one of these rival energy systems. You might say that CSP competes with cold fusion, but I don't see it that way. It is competing with wind, or coal, or natural gas. They are not all at equal stages of development, but they do all exist, and they are all generating serious amounts of power on a national scale. Getting back to cosmetics for a moment, people often criticize the $12 billion spent on them because this seems like a frivolous or non-essential use of money. I agree, but people have the right to spend their own money on whatever they please. The world is full of frivolous goods and services. - Jed Note. $12 billion for cosmetics comes from: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/764
