The Mössbauer effect is cool. You can have a decent capture cross-section if you match the energies to the required band gap. And a concentrated radioactive isotope is like a population inversion, so you might be able to get it to work like a laser. You might be able to get a neutron decay to amplify like this. But I cannot see how you could get a charged thing like a hydrogen nucleus to approach another one. Rutherford was famously amazed at how small and hard the nucleus was.
So, what made John Tanberg think he could do it? And how did he explain the lack of decay particles? No, I don’t expect you to know what was going on in Tandberg’s head, but I would like to ask him.
Actually, there is a partial solution to the electrostatic problem with meson catalysed fusion. Replacing electrons with mesons reduces the repulsion to much shorter wavelengths. But that’s not been done yet.
Unfortunately Tandberg died in 1968, but maybe you can talk to his spirit on Halloween. Tandberg was in turn inspired by Friedrich Paneth och Kurt Peters who had tried the same thing and claimed to produce extremely small amounts of helium. Considering this was before even the discovery of the neutron they must have had ideas that would seem odd to us.
Muon catalyzed fusium has been done, and it works fine. The problem is that the muon is unstable and takes a lot of energy to produce so no one has been able to come close to net energy gain.
What’s lost in articles like this, is that the military, typically via DARPA, is one of the few research funding organizations that is willing to fund high-risk/high-reward research. So for all the (to outsiders) boondoggles, there are programs that led to the internet, robotics, GPS, autonomous vehicles, etc.
The problem with what is termed “basic research” is that for the public (and many legislators) is that the term basic is lost in that it is research for knowledge, not necessarily application.
And with enough knowledge, someone will find an application…
