Or how about
Everyone discounted the IEC due to Farnsworth's reactor and the grid problem. Bussard himself was working on an IEC that used grids for years. Finally, some way, they figured out that this would not work and some other method to trap electrons and keep them circulating would be needed. They made this discovery only a few years ago. He was then using money siphoned from the tokamak reactor research (that has been ongoing for 4 decades, which he was a major player in founding) to create experiments to prove his hypothesis.
This guy sat at vice president on the atomic energy council, hypothesized the Bussard ramjet in the 60s, and the fission rocket for space flight in the 50's. He had enough money to crate WB-5 which briefly validated his idea. Then in 2006 the navy's alternate power source funding was completely cut by Bush to fund the Iraq war. His machine blew up do to an instability and he needed an additional 2 million to re-create it.
To create a full on demo, which would need to be made to determine net energy output, would cost 200 million, as the energy output scaled in pretty well compared to the size of the machine.
SO now that is finally being built.
Everyone discounted the IEC due to Farnsworth's reactor and the grid problem. Bussard himself was working on an IEC that used grids for years. Finally, some way, they figured out that this would not work and some other method to trap electrons and keep them circulating would be needed. They made this discovery only a few years ago. He was then using money siphoned from the tokamak reactor research (that has been ongoing for 4 decades, which he was a major player in founding) to create experiments to prove his hypothesis.
This guy sat at vice president on the atomic energy council, hypothesized the Bussard ramjet in the 60s, and the fission rocket for space flight in the 50's. He had enough money to crate WB-5 which briefly validated his idea. Then in 2006 the navy's alternate power source funding was completely cut by Bush to fund the Iraq war. His machine blew up do to an instability and he needed an additional 2 million to re-create it.
To create a full on demo, which would need to be made to determine net energy output, would cost 200 million, as the energy output scaled in pretty well compared to the size of the machine.
SO now that is finally being built.