It seems easy to conflate any or all approaches as fringe when no one's done it yet, and especially if there are political and program-$ecurity concerns overriding doing what's best, but some approaches scream magical thinking with unexplained reasoning more than others (like one or more cold fusion proposals in the early 1980's). OTOH, it seems like ICF and tokamak are the officially-sanctioned dogma and all other approaches are discounted automatically.
Q0: Without bias from my opinion, how fringe or potentially legitimate does IEC seem?
Q1: Props to the article's team that they invented some awesome lasers. Is there enough experimental data yet on their novel approach to backup their claims to justify funding a prototype? Would such a team be able to test this on a shoestring budget without spending millions?
"Millions" is pretty much a shoestring budget for fusion projects. There is some experimental data, but without actual fusion since the lasers weren't powerful enough yet.
This team didn't invent the lasers. They've been waiting for the lasers to get sufficiently powerful to attempt fusion with them. Those lasers are finally becoming available for researchers to use, so it should be quite inexpensive to test this idea. Worst case, they have to build one for tens of millions, which is comparable to other private fusion projects, but hopefully they can run the experiment on other people's lasers.
Personally, without drawing from rigorous empirical proof that doesn’t exit, I don’t think things like unique IEC approaches are based in fairy tales. Fusion science used to be very tribal and dogma was important. That era has largely passed. Tokamak, stellarator, ps laser, steam machine, whatever. If you can find the money to make it and do the science to show its performance, great. Everyone wants you to do that. This idea of pulling resources away is tricky to navigate, because there is finite resources spent on research and getting any one design to work takes significant effort. That’s why so much is being poured into ITER instead of other promising leads. Humans are ready to see a machine work. It’s painful to get there. It’s not my first pick on a machine. But in order to keep progress moving a real reactor needs to be made of some kind.
You misinterpreted what I said. I said that I don't have evidence that inertial electrostatic confinement is not based in fairy tales. As in, they are a reasonable route to explore.
Double negatives are tricky! Now you seem to be saying they probably are based in fairy tales, or at least have no reason to think otherwise. The first time around, you seemed to mean the opposite, which is what you say you actually meant.
Q0: Without bias from my opinion, how fringe or potentially legitimate does IEC seem?
Q1: Props to the article's team that they invented some awesome lasers. Is there enough experimental data yet on their novel approach to backup their claims to justify funding a prototype? Would such a team be able to test this on a shoestring budget without spending millions?