Dr. Robert W. Bussard is a physicist who’s been working in the field of nuclear fusion for decades. He is famous to spaceflight fans as the inventor of the Bussard Ramjet, a concept for fueling interstellar spacecraft in flight from the interstellar medium.
He’s been working on a design for fusion power plants that differs from the usual approach (which has been 30 years in the future for the past 40). Previously unable to publish because of the military sponsorship of his research program, he’s now releasing details of the past decade’s work. See the Wikipedia articles (I happen to have edited some of them :-) for more, including a 1.5 hour talk at Google. The upshot is that his team demonstrated on a limited scale that they understand the concepts, and feel confident that they will scale to designs for powerplants.
What this means: clean, cheap power generation from seawater and borax. The Boron-11 / Hydrogen fusion process used in his design releases no radiation or neutrons (which generate radiation in the surrounding materials). The design can also be used for an incredibly powerful and efficient space drive, that can be used to get to Mars in days, and the outer planets in a matter of weeks.
All for a mere $200 million in research costs. It’s inconcievable to me that some government or large company wouldn’t take a crack at this.
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