I'm not sure I get this. Is this a joke? What's the goal here? What's the business model? Have I missed some fundamental development in nuclear physics that makes it possible to build a fusion reactor for $3,000. Is the $10bn being spent on ITER redundant?
He's probably trying to get it to the point where he could get real funding. He's already achieved fusion in a simple IEC fusor device (which is surprisingly easy) and was next trying to build a fusion reactor with a Polywell style magrid confinement similar to the experiment done at the University of Sydney[1][2], except with superconducting magnets.
Such small reactors would never reach anything near net power (or break-even) but as a hobbyist research project, what he has already done is quite impressive.
As for ITER being redundant - well, if the Polywell guys working on the contract from the US Navy work it out, they estimate that they could build a demonstration power station in the next five years for $200 million. So I hope so.
Given that similar research is funded by the US Navy I'd have guessed that there is a pretty good chance that there is some chance this is a legitimate approach:
Even if there is a very small chance of this working it is a pretty small amount of money compared to ITER - and I'd love to see a small project like this actually come up with the goods.
[Edit: corrected my mistake where I assumed that this was the same lot of researchers as the ones being funded by the US Navy]
Well poywell research maybe, but not _this_ particular project. Actually as someone pointed out, this is dated 2010, and the guy has had to bin it due to lack of funds. Although quite how far he imagined he'd get on $500 / month I'm not sure.
Heh, I understand your confusion. I was at the talk Bussard gave and it seemed to me that if it was feasible then it would have been trivial for any of a number of early employees to drop the 'requested' development funds on them.
ITER is one approach to building a device which can use a fusion reaction to produce more energy than it consumes. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawerence Livermore is doing the same but using inertial containment with laser beams. The guys in Canada [1] are using another form of inertial containment. Here is a link to a survey from Bnet [2].
All of these efforts have one thing in common, they haven't been built yet so there are engineering issues of unknown magnitude to overcome before they are workable. The science is pretty solid, but I don't see us build NIF style power plants any time soon.
That being said, there are more potential winning solutions in the mix than their has ever been before. Frankly I'd consider success in one of them to be a pre-requisite for the mis-named 'singularity.'
By reading the Wiki on this, it seems like they're either on to something interesting, or they're great con artists... Why does this concept seem so simple?
Sometimes simple ideas aren't necessarily obvious. Think about the web, for example, in many ways it was simpler rather than more sophisticated than existing ideas about networked information. A perfect example is the "concertainer" or Hesco bastion, which is basically a scaled up sand bag and properly should have been invented and re-invented many times for the last several millenia, yet it's a recent invention.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606#
(and it's the first google talk video I watched, some quadrillion ticks ago)