Sounds like not much worse than if one of these liquid sodium solar plants went kapoof, maybe less as you'd expect the hydrogen to evaporate, whereas sodium will react with whatever it touches.

Seems to me smart design assumes a meltdown and keeps the supporting structures a good earth birm away from the fusion bottle, so you only have to replace half the plant.

Thanks, I think learned something today. (Well, that's why I asked!)

This isn't actually about getting rights for chimps. It's about getting them declared people so that animal rights groups can sue other people (specifically the chimps' owners) on behalf of the chimps. Once established, this will trickle down to include all animals, thus to make pet ownership too legally risky, since anyone could sue you on behalf of your pet. (Ditto raising livestock.) Yet another step in the ARs' avowed goal of ending animal ownership and use.

Outfits like Greenpeace and PETA don't want to save the Earth, nor do they love animals. They want to destroy humanity, and they hate people.

Definitely sounds expensive. :(

So what does it do to the surrounding environment when it melts the reactor?

Sounds to me like what this needs for containment (which works when unpowered) is collapsed matter, or perhaps a solid mass of neutrons. Best get busy on that new research project.

Seriously, would something like that work?

So what happens when (not if) the magnetic containment fails?

I had a similar thought:

How much energy does it take to maintain the magnetic containment? How does this compare to the energy output that can be captured from the fusion reaction? (Uncapturable energy doesn't count; it's a waste product. And where does it go?)

If that exceeds the value of the fusion energy, is it possible to bootstrap this into something that produces net energy?

Well put a bunch of Firsters on one side of the room and a bunch of Seconders on the other side and then let them do battle with their respective speech and arms and see who wins.

There's probably a lesson or three in there. Figuring it out is above my paygrade though; that's why I'm so appreciative that this country has an independent judiciary making sure that the people with the arms aren't able to just simply apply force majeure to prevent free speech...

Perhaps. IEEE Spectrum credits Maruska, as do several other histories of the subject.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...

Maruska seems to have made the first working violet LED. Some people claim that it doesn't qualify as a blue LED, but as far as I know there's no agreed-upon hard distinction between violet and blue. Maruska developed the right materials and process to make it, even if RCA pulled the plug before he had solved all of the problems necessary for commercialization.

I suspect it may be more "Justifying our jobs", since these invasive policies seem to come from TLA bureaucracies rather than from those actually in charge.