If you believe the folks at General Fusion

Some of you may remember the write-up they had in PopSci a few years ago. Basically this thing is a brute force steam punk style fusion generator. There is a several metre diameter sphere of molten lead and lithium that is spun up to create a vortex. Plasma is injected into the vortex cavity and them BLAM!!! a bunch of giant steam powered pistons bang on the outside of the sphere to create a compression shockwave. The shockwave compresses the D-T plasma, fast neutrons are captured by Li to make Be, which then decays to make more delicious tritium. Grab some energy from heat, then revortex, reinject, resmash, repeat. The great thing is the clanging sound lets you know it's working.

I've been fortunate to visit the facility a few times, and the progress they've made over the past few years is astounding. These guys are the real deal. Hopefully in just a few short years the reactor will be up and running and we can stop spending billions and billions on less practical reactor designs.

Good question on the cost. Can anybody speak to the ratio between production and material costs in any memory type? I'm curious how big of an impact using exotic materials such as paladium and hafnium will make to the overal cost.

Hmm.. Looking at all the layers they used to produce their chip makes me think that the production costs will be high too.

Just wondering if Casimir forces are in line at all with string theory prediction of gravity acting over a bunch of small dimensions and then when distances are small enough gravity to take the small dimensions into account the force is stronger. By "in line" I guess I mean is the given explanation fairly definitive or is the extra dimension explanation within the realm of possibility. IINAP so apologies if I'm way off.