Environment & Energy

They are the University overseeing PPPL, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a National Laboratory dedicated largely to the idea that fusion energy will save the world.

It's a little late for fusion to save the world.

That lab played a role in my son's scientific development through the public outreach of the Science on Saturday series held each winter.

As he's in nuclear materials, as far as fission vs. fusion, he can get a job, but fusion has a materials science problem that strikes me as nearly insurmountable.

Frankly, though, overall, if one hangs out around the Andlinger Center and attends events there, one can learn how otherwise antinuclear the general tenor is there, with respect to fission, which is also too late to save the world although in a rational setting it wouldn't have been.

From what I can tell, almost nothing has been done to reverse the folly. It's all chanting along the lines of "renewable energy will save us," although it didn't save us, isn't saving us and clearly won't save us.

There are decidedly brilliant people at Princeton, but to my mind there is a profoundly weak psychology to the place. They felt a need to demonize the best available option, fission, to advance funding for the merely speculative, fusion.

As for so called "renewable energy," clearly all it has done at vast expense is to entrench the use of fossil fuels.