Comment What? No peer review? eggs in baskets and civility (Score 1) 308
I can't answer for others who advocate for Polywell -- indeed, with my limited background in nuclear physics, I probably qualify as an "internet crank" but the trails of information that are out there seem pretty high density that at the very least, someone who knows should be given a grant to examine things and make sure that the good stuff gets attention.
From where I'm at, calling the folks who advocate for polywell "cranks" is almost as good as calling Dr. Bussard a "crank" since he holds forth in a hard to understand voice (like a crank) for 90 minutes in the Should Google Go Nuclear video -- in which he was definitely "advocating" for his project.
At the very least, every government that is supplying any money to ITER should peel back 5 or 10% (I'd like to see more than that, but even such a pittance would be a princely sum -- even that much of a rollback will lead to a rice-bowl fight, I'm afraid) to establish some kind of research board to examine the other alternatives: NIF, Polywell, Thorium (in many forms), Burnaby BC's "General Fusion", whatever, and lets not just aim for the commercialization of one alternative. Let's go for several and eliminate as they prove unworkable, or long term intractable. ITER has had more than enough time to breakthrough and it hasn't. So let's not stop working on it, but let's put a few more eggs in our baskets.
And unless Pons and Fleischmann are showing up again, let's hold off from calling people cranks when what you ask for isn't available and not necessarily through the fault of the technology being suggested.
And the neighbour who asked for peer-reviewed evidence that Polywell doesn't work is on the right track there.