As a follow up to my last post, here’s another funding opportunity (edit: sorry, first link no good, now fixed. It’s DE-FOA-0000800) for Small Modular Reactor (SMR) development. No requirement to tie into tokamak research with this one, but you do need to have a working reactor in place by 2025 +- 2yrs. It doesn’t state that it has to be a fission reactor. Cost sharing by the DOE up to $226 million. There would be intellectual property issues.
It seems to me if there’s this kind of money available for this program, they ought to be able to come up with more funding for alternative fusion energy research.