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I like the fusion stories but I think you should focus on the work of these players.

Here's another "small fusion" concept that a private company is working on:

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ The technique they're using is called "plasma focus fusion." They're currently rebuilding their experiment to eliminate arcing that was vaporizing their electrical connection and contaminating the plasma. They expect to have the new device up in a few months; they've already moved the connector outside the vacuum chamber, and have successfully used an indium ring and silver plating on the steel baseplate to reduce the resistance to 6 μΩ.

( Eric Lerner's focus fusion process involves creating electricity directly without the need for heating water to spin a turbine. The cost is but a fraction of coal power production, nearly inexhaustible fuel supplies, and totally clean.)

And another, unfortunately their website is being rebuilt, called "Polywell fusion" that's based on the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, as extended by the late Dr. Robert Bussard. They have finished proving that their magnetic containment scheme will work for a net-power-output fusion device, and posted a paper on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.0133v1.pdf

Also worthy of note are Electron Power Systems http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/central/ and General Fusion http://www.generalfusion.com/ both of which are less promising to my mind than either the Plasma Focus or the Polywell. LENR isn't dead, but it's going very slowly. Here's a blog post on the Polywell arXiv paper, which details what they've accomplished and announced, and what remains to be done: http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/06/bussard-emc2-fusion-project-publishes.html

I hope fusion will be solved this decade; I think it's a virtual certainty that if it's not, it will be in the 2020s.