Sorry I meant to say Hubbert's 1956 'Nuclear energy and the fossil fuels' paper.

Also Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television, died before Bussard led the Polywell team to achieve fusion on Dec 17 2003. Bussard based his work on Farnsworth and some other people I'm vague on Hirsch, Elmore, Tuck, Watson. There was a publishing embargo for I think 11 years, due to the work being done for the Navy. So heaps of info has come out quickly. Current team is being led by Nebel I think.

I wish them good luck.

Actually fusion is not all that hard to create.

http://www.physorg.com/news10806.html

This one that uses crystals to create the intense electric fields needed is probably a better approach then the fusor. I used to work on the theoretical side of penning-paul traps and given a deep enough of a electric field you probably could generate fusion even with weak magnetic trapping.

I believe that some of the so called cold fusion experiments are actually seeing something similar to the piezo/pyro electric fusors. My best guess is that they might be forming platinum nitrides.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5765/1275?rss=1
Or some other nitrides that then produce intense electric fields. Who knows for sure.

But at least with my work on traps you get a sort of intrinsic understanding of these fields and the energy it takes to make a strong electric field is pretty high and the amount of fusion possible in the small region
is pretty low. The net outcome is chances of break even generation simply because of physical constraints and volume issues is very low in my opinion.

Fission of course occurs naturally and room temperature and we already have nuclear batteries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

With some really neat new ones that use ionization and are much more efficient then the thermonic ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_piezoelectric_generator

With most fusion routs you have to deal with a build up of radioactivity so long term fusion or fission is not as big a gap as most people think. Fusion is not "clean" cleaner than traditional reactors yes but not clean.

Nuclear reactors can be used to generate large quantities of isotopes and indeed we did this with plutonium.

The point is we already have nuclear batteries that can last basically forever. And of course we obviously have nuclear reactors and we can say use induction roadways to power cars. Very small nuclear reactors certainly small enough for a bus or truck and maybe even a car are possible. But fission also suffers from this volume constraint issue. I was once asked why we could not have nuclear bombs the size of a regular stick of dynamite a reasonable question but the answer is really the same as with break even fusion devices.
You need a certain amount of material to get a chain reaction and its actually fairly large.

You probably could generate fission using methods not all that different from a fusor but I can see you reaching break even. Its a cross-section thing and probability thing. Neither fission or fusion scale down it seems past a certain energy threshold thats actually fairly large. I won't say its not impossible but the problem of break even gets very hard past a certain size just like a "dynamite" size fission bomb is almost impossible to create. Your making a really hard problem we have not yet solved orders of magnitude harder with plasmas that small in some cases a few hundred atoms at the high energy state.

Now with all that said I've always felt that we could create much smaller fusion reactors then what we have attempted to create to date. For some reason we tried to go strait to one big enough to power a city. While smaller ones say capable of powering a submarine could have been prototyped much faster.

We kinda looked into this here.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/fusion_rockets_000719.html

And doh hmm maybe smaller is better.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985epfr.sympQ....P

More here.

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/studies?rm=MINIMARS&s=1

Long run they are better and probably will eventually be commercially built but they really don't offer any advantage over using small nuclear reactors which we could build quickly if needed.

But backing up a little bit coal fired plants could be constructed even faster if we really needed the electricity.

Nuclear powered cars with either a fission or fusion plant thats cheap is probably not possible in the short term. Other solutions can produce stationary power and grid electricity. With the nuclear option any grid issues could be rectified easily within a fairly short period of time not to mention expansion of renewable or coal fired plants etc.

The only problem thats solved by desktop fusion is the potential for a "car" power plant.
Unless we have a break through very soon I don't think they will make it in time even if they are feasible.

I went through my own Farnsworth fusor phase myself I think its something everyone goes through that looks at the problem. But if you step back and think a bit about cross-section collision probabilities and energy densities you become a advocate for electric rail and renewable sources of electricity.

Assuming even todays PV cells and Wind energy and a bit of hydro electric generation of enough electricity to power a high tech civilization is readily feasible. Whats missing is good storage systems and thats what I'm actually working on.

I've chosen liquid nitrogen as a storage medium its not got the energy density to really power a car but its perfect for a diffuse network of renewable energy sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_nitrogen_economy

If your considering load leveling of a electric grid its a really good fit.
CO2 is another possibility either compressed to a liguid or in the form of dry ice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage

This is the problem we need to solve along with better cheaper PV systems.

Hydroelectric or concentrated solar in the desert can be used for the small amount of high energy sources you need in a well planned electric/ low energy/ high information not high tech economy.

I'd say leave fusion for space rockets we don't actually need it on earth if we design our societies correctly. I'm not agianst it but its really not needed. We are better off living as peers with the rest of the ecology making use of our alloted photons like every other living organism in a sense as energy equals to other dumber forms of life. If we live this way we can be pretty certain we won't overstep our ecological niche and destroy the environment. Remember energy is but one resource we need and all the others are also effectively non-renewable. Coming up with a good small high energy source just means we will hit peak something else in the future. Given our population growth I'd guess it would be peak food.
Energy equality with the ecosystem forces us to solve our population problem which is the real problem we face peak oil is a symptom. So treat the real disease and start living within our means.