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a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, thinks he's found a way to harness the nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun— and do it with a device not much bigger than a beer can. ...by injecting heated and magnetized hydrogen ...then shooting a 10- million-amp current into the can, which collapses and crushes its contents

The poor national labs are as starved as private R&D, and actually compete with Industry now. Some have become quite famous; For example, we all know that if you send Livermore a white paper, you will, in 2-3 years, get to read it, published as some staffer's original research.

So like all the miracle inventions we read about _exactly once_ in the UK papers, the national labs have learned that it is easier to pretend to be relevant, than it is to actually expend the cost and effort of doing peer-reviewed research. Publish Science Fiction, everyone feels better about their collapsing technology base, and the beery masses forget the details, as if they ever understood them in the first place.

So we have a casual mention of "a 10- million-amp current"; And what does the infrastructure cost to dump this current through a plasma? Oh, _maybe_ the group will get some funding for it.

The peril of releasing stories like this is that some of us went to school when 5 credits were not given for Womens' Studies.

Some of us were educated in Hard Science. One reason it is called "Hard" is that it is more difficult than "learning" MBA jargon.

A reading of even a single issue of _NASA Tech Briefs" will abundantly illustrate to anyone with a High School General Science Education just how far our R&D capabilities have been gutted.

To Wit: "This reaction has been performed previously with calcium compounds. We used strontium".

Anyone who has seen the periodic table once could have predicted that!

It is painful for me to see a country that ran the Manhattan Project descend to this. I fear for the next generation.