PDF

oct10-opinion-vogt.pdf

Many Canadian physicists will be surprised that the Canadian Government has committed $ 13.9 M, over a four year period, toward the development of technology for a fusion reactor proposal in Vancouver.  The technical ideas underlying this fusion reactor appear to belong to an unrealistically idealistic state, envisaged by the Greek playwright Aristophanes in his play, The Birds, in which everything works perfectly (“Cloud Cuckooland”), unlike on our real earth.  Moreover, the substantial funding 1 for this project, which has come from Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC, an agency of the federal Natural Resources Ministry), appears to have been awarded to a consortium comprised of General Fusion Inc., Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Powertech Labs Inc., without the kind of peer review which normally would apply to research funded by Canadian agencies such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council (NSERC).  Since this project relies on unproven science C it is at the Concept Exploration (CE) stage, not at the Proof of Principle (PoP) stage C it should be preceded by experiments for PoP and should therefore really be called research, not technology, and its funding should be subject to the peer review which normally governs Canadian research. ...