What sort of scientific Scrooge chooses to take his invention to the grave like that? What has he gained in the end?
I cant find the notes I made now, but essentially I ended up deciding that something so revolutionary, if proved and accepted as doing what it said on the tin, would take a life of its own. I came to the conclusion that once people know of its existence, the inventor will lose all control and become an instant target. Such inventions are the "babies" of such inventors, so loss of control is an issue. Becoming a target, more so. I'm not sure what the people who did the science that lead to nuclear stuff intended or thought, but if it were me, the idea that my science was used to make such evil devices as nuclear bombs would at the very least cause me trouble.
Interestingly there is some relevance to what is happening now with the NSA internet spying issue. People may well look at this sort of behavior and conclude that there are no limits for certain nation states. So, if a Belgian, for a random small country example, were to invent such technology, and say this person decided that only small poor countries could have access to it in order to equalize small poor countries with rich ones, how might the likes of China, UK, USA, India, etc, react to that? What would be their limit to acquire such technology? The second you deploy such a unit, spies would be all over it. Perhaps, war. So in the end, unless you do as told, your good might end up slaughtering millions.
Now, I'm not saying that starlite was or is for real, or that the inventor thought this way, but I can certainly see why such an inventor might be so paranoid as to get in to a position where the secret dies with him.
Of course I am very open to the idea that this says more about my personal psychology that any general point...