> No net energy gain --> that is the keyword here. ;-)

No.
It is *a* keyword here.
While room temperature desktop fusion with net energy gain is the 
alchemists stone (and also a very very very nasty two edged sword if 
it ever came about)(free energy and free H bombs for all) it is by no 
means the only use of fusion.

The ability to produce energetic neutrons from a standing start using 
relatively basic equipment and an easily portable device promises vast 
applications. When the LASER was first developed it was not apparent 
that it would in a few decades become as useful, wide-spread and 
commonplace as it has. On the one hand so commonplace that any child 
may have one, and also so incredibly useful and powerful that our 
society would very very sorely miss it if the laws of physics were 
suddenly rewritten to preclude inversion.

Similarly, perhaps, the ability to "pump" energy from a simple, 
portable low potential source into usefully energetic particles may 
well open up all sorts of so far unexpected applications. And, unlike 
the LASER, Einstein does not seem to have predicted it 90+ years ago 
:-).

And FWIW the people who developed this newer method were well aware 
that the system is incapable of net energy gains and is unlikely to 
ever be directly extensible from its present form to a "Mr Fusion" 
power source. The world had better hope that such a capability is 
indeed forever beyond our grasp - if it's not then its discovery will 
usher in an era of so far unseen destruction and chaos. While "free 
energy" has the prospect of driving utopia, the reality of human 
nature is that the weapons system implications would come to the fore. 
Such a system might not only be useful as a 'bomb' in its own right 
but may provide the means of converting eg reasonably available U238 
into more 'useful' isotope such as U235. Even the current net energy 
loss system may offer that potential when adequately developed - we 
may have already taken the first steps across the boundary into 
anarchy.

> Just wondering if the money could be better spend elsewhere,
> for example, to fund more research scholarship for engineering
> students.

So, no :-) (or yes indeed !!! if the above somewhat wild conjectures 
come to pass).
The people doing this work are the engineering students who were well 
trained in a past decade and who used their research scholarships 
well. Thank them for your desktop etching system / component inspector 
/ food etc sterilise / woman-portable death ray / home uranium 
enrichment facility / ... a decade or so from now.



        RM 

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