I earlier mentioned that my very first airplane flight was when I was around 10-years old from Honolulu to Maui.  I was born at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu in 1940.  Grew up in Kakaako and when I was in high school, took a trip to Hilo.  The first 18 years of my life was otherwise spent on Oahu.  I left in 1962 for Los Angeles to spend the summer living with my older brother, who got me a summer job at the Naval Civil Engineering Center, Port Hueneme, California.  Then spent 3.7 years at Stanford University. During our junior year, most of my friends decided  to join the first full year of John Kennedy's just announced Peace Corps when they graduated.  So I had to do something similarly sacrificial.  To explore my possible future, I found a summer job with C. Brewer in Hilo.  Lived in the Boys Club, and adjacent was the little league field of a team I watched.  They went all the way to Williamsport for the Little League World Series in 1961. The Big Island became home after I

Two major news stories recently about hydrogen. In September the White House launched a generational  $7 billion hydrogen plan. Then this month the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNR) announced a  momentous breakthrough in harnessing controlled nuclear fusion . When I retired in 1999 I took on the gargantuan task to help save Humanity and Planet Earth.  Wrote several books on the subject.  Two of my early contributions were, one, in 1979 drafting the first hydrogen bill when I worked in the U.S. Senate.  And second, this was after spending two stints at LLNR working on the laser fusion program.  I keep telling people that I'm here just to plant seeds for the future.  Well, such good news more than 40 years later is fine enough for me. Long ago I became enamored with  hydrogen , for our Sun and all the stars generate energy by fusing this gas.  It is the most abundant element in the Universe.  Combust hydrogen in our atmosphere, and the products are energy and water.  If s

I f I'm identified with any renewable energy subject matter, it is hydrogen.   Recently, I was inspired to re-focus on this option because of an e-mail I received from one of my colleagues, asking me to  read this hydrogen article .  I responded to him: ************************** Dear Benny: The key to the hydrogen economy will be the transition, and this article you sent shows a pathway.   A quarter century after I drafted the first hydrogen bill ever created in the Senate, which became the Matsunaga Hydrogen Act, I thought this was the perfect bill. There is more hydrogen in the Universe than all the other elements put together. All stars utilize this gas to create energy. When combusted on Earth, the only products are energy and water. Surely these are clues that hydrogen will be significant for our future. In 1979 while on assignment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on fusion--which, of course, is another hydrogen option-- I was asked to work in the U.S. Senate . 

We've all met famous people in our life.  For many, a movie or rock star is memorable.  I'm not into that, but the closest for me was when Nancy Sinatra and Tommy Sands swam in our backyard in Kilauea, Kauai.  Princess Diana and her entourage sat right above our box for a stage show in the West End.  Looked like the crowd below was waving, in that British way, to us, so we waved back.  The electricity of the moment when she got into her limousine is unforgettable. My famous people are scientists.  I worked for Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and saw him twice in Honolulu.  He had come over to tout the potential of placing wind energy conversion devices at the top of the Koolau mountain range, for which which he was disparaged, and met a group of us at the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii.  He worked on the Manhattan Project, which led to him later building a Hydrogen Bomb. The second encounter was for breakfast at the Hyatt Waikiki.  I had kn