Fusion power is attracting private-sector interest

Fusion research has always been handicapped by restricting funding to processes that yield only hot neutrons. The reason is simple: fusion research is really a jobs program for high-neutron-flux physicists, to provide a pool to draw upon for weapons programs. There was, and is, no expectation ever to generate power with it. Indeed, any such reactor would destroy itself, in short order, with its own neutron flux.

The hydrogen-boron approach mentioned doesn't produce appreciable neutron flux, so has never had anything like the funding. Besides positive ions, it would produce lots of hard x-rays. Both can be made to yield electric power directly, without a detour through heat. It might even work.

The objection that (as it's called) pB fusion requires insanely high temperatures is a shuck any physicist sees through. What it takes to fuse nuclei is not heat at all, but collision speed. The LHC routinely produces beams with "temperatures" that, by the same criteria, exceed 10 million billion degrees. Bulk heat is just the crudest way to get fast particles.

The remaining difficulties are to get enough particles in one place colliding to produce enough collisions to be worth the bother, and to keep them from leaking so much energy before colliding that not enough is left to make them fuse. Things going very, very fast are hard to keep in one place without slowing them down.

The pB people have very hard problems to solve, but their project is not doomed from the get-go by depending on producing neutrons that would destroy their very expensive gadget.