A Future Real Economy

[GD4ELI]

If you want to talk about defence - well talk about security because security (on the back of paranoia and hysteria) is the new defence, post Cold War. So you have people moving from govt depts to the boards of companies producing airport scanners, for example. In the same way in which people once and still maybe moved between govt and the defence industries. But defence and security is irrelevant in this context.

 

And it's a great market to be in

[P.K.]

And it's a great market to be in

 

Amen to that!

[manxy]

This Link here looks interesting although I don't know whether it could face the colder climates of our seas...?

 

The Hawaii pilot plant is expected to have a 10 megawatt capacity, and be operational by 2012 or 2013. It is hoped that its success will lead to commercial-sized plants generating 100 MW or better, by 2015. According to Lockheed Martin, such a plant could meet the electrical needs of a small city.

 

[VinnieK]

The idea that defence R&D receives potentially unlimited funding from the government is bunkum. At £2 bn it's a major player, but by no means one of unlimited resources, and its pot doesn't even constitute the lion's share when non-defence research funding from the government receives £3.5 bn* (a substantial part of which is consumed by medical, pharmaceutical and engineering research). Even then, the reliability of the defence R & D budget is by no means a foregone conclusion and until recently there were serious concerns that it could be all but obliterated by MoD cuts.

 

Pongo's suggestion of security, rather than defence is on the money. Outside of the three fields mentioned in parenthesis, Cryptography for instance is a hot topic, with comparitively healthy and stable amounts of funding thrown at it (one of the more lucrative avenues of research for pure mathematicians, for instance, is in fields and subdiciplines relating to cryptography).

 

*Economics and Social Sciences, and the Arts and Humanities receive about £0.25 bn per year.