Most of the companies above have been stalled due to lack of funds. If there were to be a renewed interest in fusion, with say the Fusion X-prize, these companies may get the funding they need to complete their technologies. Personally I hope all the fusion technologies make it on the market, I’m sure they will each fill a niche.

Another well-funded fusion concept lacking an efficient means for converting generated energy into electricity:

Scientists plan to ignite tiny man-made star

While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun.

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

Its goal is to generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and pressures billions of times higher than those found anywhere else on earth, from a speck of fuel little bigger than a pinhead. If successful, the experiment will mark the first step towards building a practical nuclear fusion power station and a source of almost limitless energy.

At a time when fossil fuel supplies are dwindling and fears about global warming are forcing governments to seek clean energy sources, fusion could provide the answer. Hydrogen, the fuel needed for fusion reactions, is among the most abundant in the universe. Building work on the £1.2 billion nuclear fusion experiment is due to be completed in spring.

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, nestled among the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States into a billionth of a second.

The result should be an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.

I suggest we make this thread a sticky as I would guess this will be a popular question and will save reposts

JimmyT wrote:
I think once one approach is successful, other approaches will have a lot of problems getting funding. Particularly if they are inherently more expensive to begin with. So the first technology to cross the finish line will have exclusivity for a long time.

I would expect the opposite, because if fusion is proven to work(or at least break-even).
without multi-billion investment, then a lot of investors will start crawling for this pie (which is not truth at the moment of speaking),

As usually happens not all of them will be accommodated by the original inventor, so its likely they will invest into alternative approaches, even if they are more expensive and/or more problematic.

If you see in industry there is always some options for each type of solution each with its advantages and disadvantages.
An example – how many types of persistent data storage do you know?

If FF fails to work, a lot of others will take the lead, but even if somebody else succeeds faster, FF can still cross the finish line successfully and find its own niche,

Breakable wrote:

I think once one approach is successful, other approaches will have a lot of problems getting funding. Particularly if they are inherently more expensive to begin with. So the first technology to cross the finish line will have exclusivity for a long time.

I would expect the opposite, because if fusion is proven to work(or at least break-even).
without multi-billion investment, then a lot of investors will start crawling for this pie (which is not truth at the moment of speaking),

As usually happens not all of them will be accommodated by the original inventor, so its likely they will invest into alternative approaches, even if they are more expensive and/or more problematic.

If you see in industry there is always some options for each type of solution each with its advantages and disadvantages.
An example – how many types of persistent data storage do you know?

If FF fails to work, a lot of others will take the lead, but even if somebody else succeeds faster, FF can still cross the finish line successfully and find its own niche,

I agree with Breakable. Way back in the ’80s there was a buzzword among investing headlines called “High Tech”, whatever that means. Once somebody proves fusion above breakeven, there’s going to be a bandwagon that everybody has to get aboard (according to the headlines). These herds are driven by emotion, not real research. Practical fusion, in my opinion, is going to make the dot-com circus look like a one trick pony show.

There are posts from a Helion Energy with their “Fusion Engine”. Not aneutronic, deuterium/tritum, but the burn chamber is isolated and seems to produce minimal radioactive waste. It is a field reversed configuration with two plasmas accelerated together at 1 million mph in the burn chamber. They claim that scaling up would produce “break even” They have a neat illustration/cartoon but not much real data to verify their claims. Does anyone have any hard information on this group and their progress.

Well for large power plants Gigawatt or more
1. Bussard polywell
2. Crossfire which is a different version of a polywell
http://www.crossfirefusor.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor/overview.html
3. tokamak and similar
4. laser compression
https://lasers.llnl.gov/

medium power plants megawatts
1. focus fusion
then nuclear
1. traveling wave
2. beta voltaic
3. Hyperion
4. thorium

small kilowatts or less
1. cold fusion
2. bubble fusion
3. pyroelectric

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power