Why? Imagination is one thing. Techniques that work are quite another. We only need one technique that works, and imagining a whole multitude of others doesn't make much difference to the process of finding one that works, except in providing extra blind alleys.
Which presumably didn't need much current.
In an unmanned space craft? Why?
That's only the start of the problems. There's a long list of inventions that can work in theory, but fail in practise. Some examples are:
cold fusion em drive ITER lattice confinement fusion tokamaks
Laser boron fusion has all the earmarks of a scam intended to relieve investors of their dollars and keep them pumped up with "we're so close" hype.
It would be far better to invest in technology that has demonstrated that it works. Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) have already run for years at significant power levels.
These are walk-away safe, don't need water for cooling, can be placed anywhere they are needed, even in the desert, use readily available fuel, can even eat the highly radioactive waste from conventional nuclear reactors, can reach 100% fuel burn instead of the 0.7% of conventional reactors, don't require a pressure vessel, run at high temperatures more suited to power production, automatically adjusts power output to variable power requirements, and supply power when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Witness the folly of the 2,800 mile "Sun Cable" to deliver 10 GW from solar arrays in Australia to Singapore. If the cable runs at 1 MV, the current required is 10,000 amps. The conductors are huge.
The loss in 2,800 miles is significant. The power stops every night when the sun goes down, and every time a trawler breaks the cable:
The main problem with LFTRs in the USA is regulation. Current laws simply do not recognize nuclear reactors that do not use pressurized water and do not need a pressure vessel. Until these laws are changed, little progress will be made. Meanwhile, China and other countries are proceeding full steam, and will own all the patents for commercial systems. They will be able to charge whatever they want for licenses, and restrict the use however they want to maximize their profits.
Cold fusion wasn't an invention, but an explanation for a puzzling and not reliably reproducible observation. There's not tested theory that says it will work.
ITER hasn't been finished yet, so it hasn't failed in practice, and probably won't. It's sound - as far as it goes - but hasn't got anywhere yet.
It looks like another version of cold fusion.
ITER is a sort of tokamak.
Not all the hall-marks, by any means.
But still produce radioactive waste. "Thorium nuclear reactors are unlikely to produce cheaper energy, but the management of spent fuel is likely to be cheaper than for uranium nuclear reactors." Since we can't manage the radioactive waste from uranium based nuclear reactors, a reactor that produces somewhat less nasty radioactive waste is still a problem for which we haven't found a practical solution in seventy years of trying
It would only qualify as a folly if it got built. A super-conducting cable might not be quite as huge, or as lossy as you seem to imagines.
These days, cables get buried in trenches dug into the sea bed. A big ship dragging it's anchor managed to damage a modern cable across the English channel, so the next generation of trenches are going to go deeper.
Nobody has built 1GW LFTR plants yet either.
If there are any profits to be made. Nuclear plants aren't cheap, and they don't seem to generate particularly cheap electricity.
Nuclear plants are heavily regulated, but we've had enough of them go wrong to make this seem a very good idea.
Fusion without radiation? Impossible - fusion, by definition, produces gamma radiation - marvel claims that alpha radiation is produced and do not describe the fusion reaction at all.
The gamma radiation produced in fusion is "shielded" by distance, and by its interaction with... well, everything. There's no persistent product remaining (if the gamma gets free, it departs at the speed of light...). The importance of the advanced fusion process (instead of deuterium-tritium, which is the classic low-excitation fusion recipe) is that it does not eject neutrons which activate/transmute all the stable isotopes in the vicinity, thereby creating long-lived radioactive material.
I really can't tell WHAT the Marvel process (from there grade-school graphics) is or that it does not eject neutrons.
If you could use Google, you might have found
Hey SL0WMAN, if Marvel REALLY has an non-neutronic fusion reaction they could simply tell us what it is.
The article did say boron and hydrogen; these aren't new reactions, I was introduced to those possibilities thirty years ago, in grad school, but they DO require a honkin' big laser push.
https://hb11.energy/ is pretty up-front about that. Heinrich Hora - when he gave his talk about it - was pretty explicit about weird way they were going to get the kind of brief high intensity laser output required.
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