I don't see anything to get excited about in the information which has been provided in the press. Hutchinson's comments are about the basic type of design. I

I don't see anything to get excited about in the information which has been provided in the press. Hutchinson's comments are about the basic type of design. I presume they have some kind of secret sauce which they see as providing a better solution. I say, good for them for trying it. Just like some of the other commenters, I suspect that the reason they went public with an information-lite release is due to internal politics at LM. When I was in the fusion research business, we stayed in stealth mode the entire 5 years. We probably could have continued if we had put out press releases like this to attract more funding. We didn't think we had any results worth having a press release about, however, and I didn't want to be that guy. If I were to jump back into fusion, I probably would go with a linear, mirror-type, high beta device. They are easier to build, cheaper, and have one major design flaw (i.e. problem which needs fixing). I have had some ideas on how to improve the endcaps, which are the real weakness of the design type. I saw that dkirtley had some good things to say about the Budker-style Gas Dynamic Trap design in the last thread about this. I'm not so sure that I buy into that way, but I'm glad that people are following that path. What the article really tells us is that there is one more group out there who is following a technical path that probably wasn't being followed before. That is good news, because there are many ways to build a fusion reactor that doesn't work, but there may be one or more ways to build one that does. It's good that we have a few more scouts checking the territory.