IEC is a different fusion scheme. "Millions" is pretty much a shoestring budget for fusion projects. There is some experimental data, but without actual fusion

IEC is a different fusion scheme. "Millions" is pretty much a shoestring budget for fusion projects. There is some experimental data, but without actual fusion since the lasers weren't powerful enough yet. This team didn't invent the lasers. They've been waiting for the lasers to get sufficiently powerful to attempt fusion with them. Those lasers are finally becoming available for researchers to use, so it should be quite inexpensive to test this idea. Worst case, they have to build one for tens of millions, which is comparable to other private fusion projects, but hopefully they can run the experiment on other people's lasers.