I'm surprised that we're still chasing moon shots in strong force fusion, while weak fusion, which has actually been demonstrated already, gets little attention. Chemically assisted/low energy nuclear reactions have been proven to produce clean energy and useful transmutation. This process can be used to turn radioactive waste into inert material. For example, technetium-99 is a particularly pernicious by-product of nuclear fission. It has a half-life of ~200,000 years and is very mobile in the atmosphere, making it difficult and expensive to handle. In a CANR reactor, this nuclear waste is converted into the safe, and valuable, palladium-106, and the by-product is clean heat. Given the double benefit of clean fuel and nuclear waste recycling, I think this should be a bigger priority than strong-force fusion.
http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/einsteins-lost-hypothesis
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24216601?seq=1
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012815...