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You must be talking about those EMC2 folks...

Unfortunatly, although the Navy continues to fund research into Polywell style fusion reactors, there are several big hurdles to overcome. The biggest ones (to me) are that the concept has unknown scaling constants (e.g, does a "big" version lose too much efficinecy), and they most expensive component (the magnets) are inside the reactor and get bombarded with radiation which creates and equally big material science headache as some of the alternate approaches.

Read more about it here...

Fund ITER out of the navy black ops budget.

You mean like these guys? As I recall, the US Navy are very keen on the idea of electric ships, and who can blame them? If your choice of fuel can be extracted from sea water you need not put into port for a very long time.

See Polywell.

What do you think of the efforts at http://www.emc2fusion.org/ and http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php ? They seem to be making real, measurable and open results but the mainstream physics community seems to ignore this progress.

I have seen this before with Dr Robert Bussard's appeals for fusion research funding. The problem is, the average schmo doesn't have more than a few dollars to contribute; it takes millions of them to raise the amounts needed. On the other hand, a wealthy investor or government agency could make an immediate difference.

Bussard claimed that what a Tokomak can do, an infinitely cheaper Polywell device can do better, with no radiation or hazard (on top of power produced). In a form factor small enough to fit on a medium yacht.

His research was under wraps for a long time (the Navy wanted this to power their big boats), then they cut off his budget, and he did one last act of a man who had very little left to live - he got in front of a Yahoo and Google tech forum, handed out everything he worked out in the last 15 years on handouts to anyone who'd take them from him, did a ~1 hour braindump that got put on the interwebs, and promptly kicked the bucket soon after.

Is it feasible? Energetically? Financially?
Quite possibly yes. No reason to get excited yet, but his company will tell us in a year or two. They're now financed by -someone- (maybe google or yahoo as these organisations had interest in clean containable ways to power datacenters and have been actively approached for this financing), and emc2fusion will likely get busy building a full-scale energy-positive POC in the next few years.

If they turn out to be right, this is BIG . And it's career-changing if you work on a tokamak project - this will cheapen power by an order of magnitude, allow contained powerplants in very small form factors, and generally end up being the biggest disruption the energy market has ever seen. Nothing to get excited over.

If it pans out, the French will end up wearing their new tokamak (an uberexpensive adventure, as tokamaks go) in a less than complementary way. I'm surprised they didn't wait.

The Polywell will get there first.

Yea, the Polywell reactor is a very interesting concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell (even has pictures)

pictures of it in action: http://www.emc2fusion.org/

It will be interesting what there results are next year when its completed in April 2011.

Perhaps if the D-T reactor does really well they can redesign it to handle a fuel composed of hydrogen ions (protons, in other words) and Boron-11 ions. The products of this reaction are helium-4 ions, which are not radioactive and do not induce radioactivity in their containment vessel if they are captured electrically. Electrical capture also avoids the losses associated with converting heat to electricity.

I really hope General Fusion gets this to work, but if I had any money, my money would be on EMC2 Corp, which is working on inertial electrostatic fusion. This or this should get you started on a search for more information.

Dr. Nebel Inherited Robert Bussard's legacy; Aneutronic fusion. For the cost of a single DC10 it could be yours too. ($200 Million) 1 100 MW plant and the Physics is sound. http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2008/01/wb-7-first-plasma.html http://www.emc2fusion.org/

You'll be reading about these people in 10 years or so http://www.emc2fusion.org/

Maybe if electric fusion can generate surplus, economical power, it would be wiser to just create gasoline from water and air? Hydrocarbons can store hydrogen in high densities much more safely and easily than via compression, and recycling carbon dioxide would result in zero net additional CO2.. Who knows, if the WB-series of fusors can be scaled up enough, maybe it'd eventually be cheaper to manufacture gasoline this way than by cracking raw crude?

Interesting, how that relates to Rober Bussard's Polywell fusor, which he claims can be made into a prototype 100 MW plant in 7 years, provided the needed 200M USD funding?

You can also listen to his lecture at Google Tech Talks in 2006 to get an idea of what he's up to.

BTW, you can donate to this fund via Paypal and sign the petition to renew his funding from the government.

Looks like it works to me:
http://www.emc2fusion.org/

I can't believe the gov't doesn't just immediately fund the full-scale reactor, given the fossil fuel crisis we're currently stuck in. 200 million dollars is a handful of days in Iraq, and we could immediately drive the price of oil down to 10 dollars a barrel with fusion as a reliable commercial power source.