Recent news from Osaka, Japan published by the scientists and engineers at ILE states that they now are confident that fast ignition of a fusion burn by a petawatt laser coupled with the existing multibeam laser compression systems "is understood".

Simple in concept, the system is capable of taking a plastic pellet containing dt and once compressed by the main lasers, hits it with a petawatt pulse that generates a burst of high energy electrons and ions that interacts with the compressed pellet and initiates fusion reactions.

The exciting thing reported by the researchers is that when they tried this experiment, when they synchronized the petawatt beam with maximum compression, they generated a burst of neutrons indicating that the petawatt beam does indeed boost the compressed target into the fusion regime.

One would think that our government would at least want to keep the US in the forefront of such potentially world order changing research, but the reality is that our effort has been cut back, the money throttled down, and thus the U.S. isn't moving as fast as possible to understand and ultimately to exploit this new technology.

One thing that governments don't always consider is that this generation of scientists has a limited time working at maximum productivity before the biological limitations set in. It takes so many years to master the math, physics, technology and so on that unless we really push them once they start to be scientifically productive, we don't get the full benefit of their intuition.

When the experiments take years to develop on machines that cost billions, the limitations are both "understandable" and stupid. This technology has the potential to help with shifting energy production away from greenhouse producing fossil fuels, to enable us to develop new space propulsion systems capable of vastly improving our planetary exploration, using simple materials plentiful on earth. This technology could also extend the life of our conventional fission power systems by hundreds of years.

Since our civilization has only a limited time to develop energy sources that don't screw-up the environment on a global scale, it is important to push this "fast igniter" effort as fast as possible.
I hope that we can perhaps find someone in a position to nudge the budget folks to enable the US to help the worldwide effort to bring this idea to blossom. It might be the most important tiny nudge in resources possible at this time.