As the host of this site, it has always been my contention that one of its under-stated goals was to encourage a new generation of experimenters to investigate the possibilities of fusion.
A lot of the veterans here are fairly certain that the Fusor will never be a meaningful source of useful energy on the planet, and they may well be right. The experiments are interesting, they'll tell you, and there's a lot valuable science to learn, but the likelihood of the Fusor or anything like it ever achieving the "breakeven" level required to supply useful power is nil.
Just don't tell that to the next generation of young scientists who are building Fusors. Kids like Taylor Wilson who recently demonstrated a fusor-based devise for President Barack Obama at the White House Science Fair:
According to the caption that appears beneath this photo on the White House blog, Taylor and the President are discussing his technique "for detecting nuclear threats and … an environmentally friendly, cost-effective, and highly sensitive system capable of detecting small quantities of nuclear material."
But look carefully at the object on the table in front of Taylor and the President, and you'll see, it is essentially the guts of a Farnsworth Fusor. Yep, the Fusor has made it to the White House. Let's hope the President fully grasped what he was seeing here. Maybe he can squeeze a few research dollars into a future budget.
Maybe that will further encourage this new generation of experimenters to find more secrets that are locked inside the Fusor.
Because the great asset of a new generation is that – as a young Cliff Gardner said of his glass blowing techniques back in the 1920s, "I didn't know it couldn't be done, so I just went ahead and did it… "
And maybe, some day, somebody like Taylor will build the Fusor that achieves breakeven, because they just don't know that it can't be done.