Who puts the Con in Fusion Confusion?

US nuclear-fusion game-changing achievement

In high school, I got excited about these laser-ignition experiments at the US government labs. That was in 1967 and I looked forward to a future of energy abundance and flying cars. Meanwhile, two generations of researchers have earned a nice retirement -- and I ain't got no flying car. I wish the third generation well.

For over half a century they've focused multiple lasers on tiny magic-mixture pellets in microsecond bursts. For one brief shining moment, they produce the center of the sun-like conditions that compress two hydrogen atoms together to make one helium, releasing a burst of energy in the process. How many seconds of power per decade does it all add up to? Less than a minute? Of course, they were actually modeling more effective H-bombs, so maybe we got our money's worth (we won't know until the world is utterly destroyed in a nuclear holocaust).

The current irritating and irradiating "fission" Nuclear Power Industry came to us courtesy of these same government labs, as well as the entire political establishment (you see, nukes are not just H-bombs and huge, mutant, lizard-monster things!). Of course, the electric utilities got the blame for the industry's real and Hollywood-conjured shortcomings, though at the time those executives knew nothing about nuclear energy and needed a kick in the butt to adopt it. They were happy burning coal to make the electric energy we demand, so blame them for that.

During the promotional period, we were told that nuclear energy would be so abundant that it would not be metered and the downsides weren't mentioned. I was in middle school and looked forward to a future of abundant energy and flying cars. Of course, the researchers were looking for grants -- mo' money -- so a positive slant is to be expected, back then and right now.

Still, I'm all for fusion energy. It's how we'll power our new robot girlfriends. "Honey, grab me a beer."/"Of course, darling, shall I massage your feet as well?"

Women can have robot girlfriends, too. They can complain about not having boyfriends.