Back when I was in grad school, I worked at the Center for Electromechancis (now defunct) at UT Austin. My thesis project was related to a Tokomak generator that used a single turn toroidal field magnet with a very high current (9 MA) and a 20 T toroidal magnetic field. My thesis advisor had an innovative plan for testing pulsed power Tokomaks but was never funded because the traditional fusion research community wasn't interested in anything that didn't follow the standard paradigm (low-current, many windings). While it may not have led to a working generator, his proposed experiments could have significantly advanced our understanding of plasma behavior in a fusion reactor.

Hopefully Polywell Fusion will have more success but at the time (15 years ago) anything that wasn't ITER was not being funded.

Everyone is frustrated about our energy options. The technically obvious choices of coal and nuclear have been culturally and politically tainted.

That frustration makes us gullible. Look at all the wonderful new and unproven methods bubbling up for public attention - like the Polywell.

It might work but the burden of proof is on the promoters. Bring me a useful generator, even in prototype, and I'll give you a hearing. Until then, you're selling snake oil until you prove otherwise.

Whitehall,

What is your point? Without experiments it is difficult (maybe impossible) to decide what will work. So dismiss alternatives without doing the experiments because the alternatives are unproven?

You will note that funding experiments is what I suggest. Which is a bit far from promoting snake oil.

In any case the experiments are on going (thanks to the US Navy) and will tell us if this device has promise. What I want is an increased rate of funding so the answers will come sooner.

Whitehall: You obviously have not been following the news and discussion concerning the Polywell, and have come up with a content-free generic slam on anything that's new and unproven. There ought to be a word for someone that is the exact opposite of "gullible" - for people that violently reject anything that is not already a known, official fact, signed off by "experts". Skeptic does not cut it, because skeptic implies critical analysis and inquiry - and your response has none of that, just name calling.

That is not to say that caution is not needed when looking into more obscure subjects like the Polywell. It is. There are many things that are scams and BS, even sometimes sincere BS.

Dr. Nebel has built a new Polywell based Dr. Bussard's design under Navy contract. It is producing data, not all of which is completely understood, and this data is being independently reviewed. No-one is claiming that this thing will definitely work. However it is showing a lot of promise, and is worth pursuing on that basis because the device is relatively cheap and quick to build compared to the the big-science approach of ITER.

It's becoming clear that ITER is not going to get anywhere practical any time soon, and we are running out of time. As mentioned by Bolie above, the big-science approach to fusion has tended to strangle all other possible competitors for government funding in the cradle - because of this, we don't even know what we don't know about the subject.

And we are not dealing here with the classic scam pattern: A secretive (paranoid) inventor with a closed black box looking for funding from gullible investors who are not experts in the relevant field. Instead, the design and principles of the device are widely known, related smaller devices (Farsworth fusors) have been built by hobbyists and for high-school science projects for years (now some are also attempting to build small-scale Polywells on their own), there is discussion and design ongoing in public forums (see the talk-polywell.org links above), with some resident sharp critics that help to provide rigor and grounding to the discussion.

Now, I am no expert in physics, beyond a general-science background - so you can take what I say with a large grain of salt. I personally cannot provide the proofs you demand. But I do know what an open-source community working on an active project looks like, and the Polywell community has all the same flavor as any active OSS tool project; Apache, Linux, Gentoo, etc. It's simply does not smell like a scam or fraud. It's technical and interested people collaborating to achieve a common goal, and having a good time doing it.

(Note that I agree with what you are saying concerning coal and nuclear - or even our untapped domestic oil, of which we have more than some let on.)

Regardless of what else we do, we should be allowing the exploitation of existing domestic resources, building more nuclear plants, and continuing to clean up coal power.

The biggest problem I saw with ITER was that its goal was to build a working fusion reactor. All of the work was being done to develop working fusion reactor systems. This was before anyone knew for certain a working fusion reactor was possible or how it would work. They were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop subsystems that would be used in reactor but weren't willing to spend the same amount for an experiment that would verify the behavior of plasma undergoing fusion.

My impression was that ITER was a way to fund professors and grad students in perpetuity. If they were to succeed, they'd probably end up losing their funding... so they were in no hurry.

I like the x-prize model... here's $1 billion dollars. Whoever builds a working fusion reactor gets it, tax-free. Adjust the amount and/or criteria accordingly.