Fusion

Another scam looking for suckers to "invest" their money.

Actual research with a shot at achieving useful results:

No one has suggested even a vague concept of how high power lasers could be made efficient enough to make inertial confinement useful for energy production.

Glen

Nature seems unwilling to let us make fusion work. Every scheme fails for some sneaky reason.

Lots of people are trying, mostly with plasmas.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Looks like they're starting in Livermore, California. They have $450 million to play with and are hiring 22 people.

This looks like a fun position: "Firearm Specialist"

Fusion is simple, desktop Farnsworth FUSOR

But getting power from it is impossible You cannot get more energy out of a spring than you put in compressing it!

Some flipped out mamaticians (same sort of animals that play string theory ;-) keep brainwashing the masses.

A hydrogen bomb is not a spring.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That's not actually true.

The chirped laser pulses they use are unique - if tricky to produce - but they are working on scaling up the process to a degree that can make money as well as.

Boron has an atomic number of five so five protons and an atomic weight of 10.8, which is to say that 80.1% of it is B-11 and the other 19.9% B-10. Hitting the B-11 nucleus hard with with a proton give you three alpha particles - which accounts for the six protons and six neutrons in He-4 and releases quite a lot of energy.

Maybe think of it as shrapnel, the bomb is triggered by a normal chain reaction with Uranium / Plutonium, but much 'shrapnel' is formed that makes it seem more powerful.

Like a firecracker with small metal balls around it exploding.

A chain reaction (the normal bomb), is when you have springs hold together by small fragile clips; hit one and the clip fails and the spring expands and jumps away (*radiation). When you throw such a fragile spring with clip at a bunch of other ones then the explosion / release) of the first one triggers all other springs, 'Chain reaction"! 'explosion'

It is all so simple. How did the springs wind up compressed and locked by small clips? If** the universe started as a big bang there was the required density, exploded, expanded, not all springs were 'released', keep digging for Uranium, some of it is ready to go.

Simple

But compressing the springs again ? no way will you get more out then you put in.

Interesting technique, but not inertial confinement, and still subject to the same laser efficiency issues as inertial confinement. No meaningful test data turned up in my search.

Not unique, widely used since invented in 1985:

Seems to be about as far along as inertial confinement was in 1980.

They seem to think that they have done as well as the NIF crowd - more energy released from fusion than was put in to compress fusion target.

Obviously nowhere near as much as it took to persuade the lasers to start the compression. It's not much of a milestone, but better than anybody had done in the 1980's.