Quest For Fusion - Stars Love Dirt

The highest density of star formation occurs for spiral galaxies about one third of the distance outward from the center to the edge. This is something of a mystery because radio astronomers show through study of the same galaxies that the highest density of neutral hydrogen gas is two to three times farther out from the center. For some reason, therefore, it appears that stars are formed not in areas where the gas density is highest, but inside those areas where stars and dust also lie thick.
Harlow Shapley, Galaxies, Third edition, p.167

Doesn't it seem strange to you Dear Reader that nuclear fission was discovered by Otto Hahn on December 17, 1938 and that by July 16th, 1945 the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated!? This has to be the all time record in physics for text book to market of any physical discovery. And if you have read into the subject, the technical challenges were all but overwhelming, yet all overcome with slide rules and log tables.

Fusion - Squeaky Clean Will Never Work...

  You would think that the feat of fusion in confinement, for the betterment of man, would have been a cake walk. Just from general appearance, any one with a high school education, would surmise that it would be much easier to fake a star in containment, then to actually create a portable supernova in a deliverable pipe! It seems that Man is a very resourceful monkey when it comes to overpowering other monkeys. And as history shows, there is no end of resources available for anyone with a really good other monkey frying device. And we as a species are destined to populate the galaxy? I think not.

It is yet another bummer of my life so far that we still have not even come close to solving this problem. Yet there has been lukewarm efforts for decades always cooled by the lack of government financing. You would think that if you built one device successfully, you could just extrapolate your way ahead or back to the easier devices. And you would think that copying nature would be a really good starting point. Like the Wright Brothers picked up the airplane design from actually watching birds fly! Why don't these fusion boys actually study the birth of stars in nature?  

You have to remember Dear Reader, that hundreds of times a year in our local cluster stars come to life all on their own. Untouched by man, and yet since a fusion reactor is not designed to blow up in a ball shrivelling explosion, and to never be a threat to any one except oil industry executives, the job just can't seem to get done. Strange that...   

P.S. It is the Oracle of Ottawa's greatest hope that this public service will somehow lift up the human race a few beeps up the Kardashev scale...