I'd like to see a tad less credulity in tales like this. Certainly, innovations in engineering are quite workable by an amateur enthusiast, particularly in niche areas with significant commercial interest like medical isotope manufacturing.

But hard fusion is an area that's been looked at for decades by literally thousands of top physicists around the world, and there's little low-hanging fruit left for a tabletop inventor to come across. Multi-billion dollar efforts like the National Ignition Facility involving hundreds or thousands of scientists are where the action's at today, and they've brought together solid plans for pursuing economically sustainable fusion.

An outsider may indeed bring new ideas that have value in niche areas, simply because that's not where the majority of scientific attention is being focused -- but it's unlikely to be a replacement for the core effort of an entire movement, as the article suggests.