[ak217]

I'm not an expert but I've been following the field for a while. It's telling that negligible venture capital is pursuing this route to commercial fusion, and the only cheerleading for it comes from DOE lab press releases. That's because the NIF is a thermonuclear bomb simulator developed by a lab tasked with both thermonuclear bomb development and also developing a portfolio of civilian applications for its technologies. Even if the NIF were to break even on the entire power plant package in theory, harvesting energy from fast fusion neutrons is hard enough in magnetic confinement designs without them pulsing like a bomb as they do in ignition designs.

Meanwhile the VC money is quietly piling into tokamak and stellarator magnetic confinement designs, driven by high expectations from real breakthroughs in ReBCO tape manufacturing technology. These superconducting tapes can be manufactured like semiconductors and can develop magnetic fields that were previously impossible, which is a key manufacturability enabler in a design whose path to commercialization is far better de-risked overall. There are still concerns with the durability of equipment needed to capture the neutrons in these designs too, but ReBCO tapes were the real prior changer.

[DennisP]

Funding is starting to kick in for private laser fusion attempts. Over the past couple decades, lasers have advanced even more dramatically than superconductors.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102...

[donkeyd]

Currently, about $3B is invested in fusion per year, while about $6000B is spent on oil subsidies. That's just to show how little we spend on fusion. Any decent increase in spending would really help speeding up the process. I think that's something we should all be promoting!

[zaking17]

Thank you - exactly what I was curious to learn more about!!