Huh, I thought current research is focused on much larger facilities that require giant magnets to contain the nuclear reactions. Even ITER has its share of delays and issues.
That's kind of the point... these projects got the most funding for several reasons. For one, many believe it's the ony possible way. For the other, political and business reasons... Small reactors that can be built anywhere are not in the interest of big energy corporations. They want big, bulky, centralised, expensive reactors, because that gets you more government subsidies and keeps the market clean of small competitors. And the government wants big research projects that employs a lot of people.
There were studies and experiments to achieve fusion on a much smaller scale. Buzzard, for example, wanted a petty 500 million to build a test reactor, after tests on a small scale testing device have shown a net return in energy... for a few microseconds, before the thing fried, of course.
He never got that money, because there was too much scepticism, and because there's economic and political forces that wouldn't like energy to become quite so cheap, ergo no funding.
For a big company it isn't difficult to invest a few hundred million on the side in "silly projects" and skunkworks. It's basically playing lottery. Most of them won't ever return anything, but if one manages to live up to the promise, you strike it big. We might be seeing the results of that here.
Or somebody might have been overenthusiastic. Let's wait and see. If they really have their first test reactor up in a year, and the thing works, I'll be optimistic.
) Perhaps it would be simpler to just make fusion-powered rocket engines and use them throughout the whole flight,
