Boy, of all the possible “alt.fusion” contenders, I would have thought General Fusion would be at the bottom of the list. The approach requires a huge capital outlay to build the device, it is mechanically very complex, it still ends up with radiation issues, and as far as I know it is very far from creating a working prototype. In other words, it is everything that FF, Polywell, and Tri Alpha (among other approaches) are not.
If I had $20 million, instead of putting it all into one highly speculative basket, I’d give $5 million each to those three different approaches, with a promise of additional $5 milllion to the first group to show breakeven. So much of this basic research is done on a shoestring, and given that all these approaches require far less capital than tokomaks or ICF in order to produce useful information, I’d think spreading around a bit of seed money to lots of approaches would be a more efficient way to produce the desired goal.
