Well, whichever nation builds the first working Fusion power plant wont know where to put all the money.

How long until NSA and China steal those designs, though? Two...maybe three months? I guess whoever builds it will also have the expertise advantage in dealing with those designs, though, which should give them at least a few years of competitive advantage.

Also, my guess is neither of these "traditional" approaches will work to create actual fusion power. My guess is someone else's out of left field approach that will totally shock the scientific community will be the winner.

To realize a complex design like a Stellator they actually also needed to develop a lot of manufacturing expertise, had to build custom machines for making tools and components etc., I doubt anyone would be able to copy that without significant effort.

It's not like stealing a cookie recipe. Pretty much anything that has even a little bit of complexity can't be "stolen" just by having a blueprint.

I was chatting about this with a friend and there are something like 5 different in production technologies which produce or cause nuclear fusion. Only three I think are aimed at sustainable power generation, but it's still pretty cool.

I hadn't heard of this one before, always interested in fusion news. 3 others I know about are

http://www.generalfusion.com/

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ (Focus fusion)

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...

Tri-Alpha is the biggest private effort...about $200 million invested, 30 Ph.Ds, 150 employees. They recently announced they'd achieved stable plasma, the only major milestone left is scaling up the temperature. They think the plasma will get more stable at higher temperatures. Like focus fusion, they're attempting boron fusion.

Helion is similar to Tri-Alpha but with a pulsed design instead of steady state. They have funding from YCombinator. Instead of boron they're shooting for a hybrid D-D/D-He3 fuel cycle (the D-D reaction produces He3). They say only 6% of the energy released would be as neutron radiation.

Sandia's MagLIF project is interesting. According to their computer simulations they can get 100x to 1000x energy gain by preheating a fuel capsule and crushing it in an upgraded Z-Machine. Things are looking good so far.

UW has the Dynomak project, which is fairly similar to tokamak but a lot smaller and cheaper. They need $10 million to test the concept.

Just saw this: "New advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor". Plus the usual "10 years away!"...

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/541996/a-workable-fu...