A lot more discussion on PWs here.

http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php

Richard Nebel (who is running the project) left a couple hundred comments but has been quiet since the last contract was awarded.

Polywells already operate over 2K. The advantage of IEC is that temperature is essentially just the voltage of the well, so it's relatively easy to drive these machines at >10K.

The problem in IEC is confinement and density. In primitive IEC machines, there is a physical, spherical grid which drives collisions inside the grid. Because the ions hit the grid on at least 1% of passes, the losses are too great to achieve breakeven. Additionally, without compression density is low.

The Polywell is a basically an Elmore-Tuck-Watson IEC device with a shielded anode and magnetic compression of the virtual cathode, which may give the concept good enough confinement and density to drive net power. Additionally, the instabilities that plague tokamaks are avoided; the magnetic field has good curvature at all points.

Results for WB-8 (which has .8T magnets that will tell us a lot about scaling) are due in April 2011; at that point they decide whether to approve WB-8.1 which will attempt a p-B11 reaction.

The Navy contract has an option for an honest-to-God 100MW fusion reactor if results are good, so this thing is for real.

The advantage Polywell has over the ITER path is power density. Even if it works as well as advertised, the most advanced ITER follow-on design still has a power density a few orders of magnitude below light water reactors, meaning tokamaks will probably never compete with fission plants. Polywell, OTOH, operates at high beta, so it has a power density that makes it economically competitive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

The likely global rise in sea levels for the next century is much less than the tidal surge. So they've either been flooding all along, or are going to be fine. In either case, this is silly.