Really excellent succinct and easy to follow summary.

And that on /. of all places, where article summaries usual go to die.

Many CEOs have emergency plans for a retirement out of reach from shareholder class action suits, but this seems a bit excessive.

... how about starting a blog where you try to make science more accessible to lay people.

20 m holes in aluminum ... with a LASER! And Apple bought the company,

iDefense is going to be awesome and really sleek looking.

... , dying viruses release toxins ..." that quickly act on /. editors and make them forget the most basic biological facts.

... I'd hardly call it a failure.

One advantage that is purely political is that sub-critical reactors will be more political acceptable.

Don't think accelerator reliability issues are much of a concern any more, the systems are pretty mature at this point. I see the many advantage in being able to produce tailored neutron energy spectrum to process as much waste as possible.

The latter is the main focus in my mind. Excess energy is just an added bonus. We need a process like this as burying the nuclear crap has become a politically untenable.

By I much prefer inherently safe reactor designs.

You are barking up the wrong tree.

Of course there is no conspiracy and I very much appreciate that Jeff Bezos invests into General Fusion.

What I find problematic is that ITER crowds out other fusion research due to its cost overuns. For instance there are now only 1 1 1/2 positions allocated to the Shiva star device (a machine GF could put to good use for plasma compression experiments). This is just enough money to prevent a mothballing of the machine, but not enough to actually get some research done.

This is not conspiracy but just how the world works. As ITER absorbs more money the overall public budget doesn't grow, and government is too inflexible to allow for private partnership (especially with, god forbid, a Canadian company).

No one, and I mean no one, expects the Polywell will escape the Ritter issues.

Except those who continue working on it. Cusp confinement has been theorized but to my knowledge never experimentally confirmed until these results came in. They may very well be overoptimistic with regards to having any chance in approaching thermalization in the center of their reactor, but given that they now have an experiment going with fairly decent confinement it seems warranted to establish to what extend Ritter's concern will haunt this design.

Plasma dynamics are very difficult to model and while Ritter's conjecture is plausible it nevertheless makes some assumptions that may not hold in the actual experiment.

You may call this hand waving, but the best way to establish this is an actual experiment. This, after all, is also the way that science works.

Too funny. So you really did not look at the paper. Arxiv is a pre-print archive. The notion that these nine authors spanning two companies, one European university, Los Alamos and the US Navy will not manage to get this published in a per-reviewed journal is rather cute.