Lockheed’s secret lab says they’ve solved the problem of hot fusion containment, and that they can build a 100 megawatt reactor small enough to fit on a truck in less than one year, with commercial prototypes in less than five years, and reactors available on the market in a decade.
Supposedly it took them only four years to work this out, which makes you think of Bussard’s talk to Google back in 2006, where he claimed that the only reason we didn’t have working fusion reactors was lack of will.
Hot fusion is a highly energetic, highly radioactive process but it does not generate extremely long-lived waste like conventional fission reactors do. A hot fusion reactor accident might do as much initial damage as a fission plant accident, but the long-term cleanup would be relatively simple; if we can’t have true cold fusion, hot fusion is still a big step up from coal or fission.