Unlike designing a fusion reactor, or going to the Moon, here nature is fighting you every step of the way. There are a host of instabilities working against confining a burning plasma. It’s not that it’s impossible to create a practical reactor; it’s that mitigating all of these natural processes will lead to a device of immense complexity. The key point is this: even the most optimistic fusion fans say we might have grid power from fusion, if all goes really well, in another 30 years or so. Look at the recent progress in photovoltaics; the only remaining obstacles are in energy storage, which also has seen great progress in the last few years. Is there any serious doubt that in 30 years we could have a solar power economy if we really wanted it? Why, in that case, would we choose fusion instead, even if it worked? It would be more expensive, more prone to failure, more fragiley centralized, and it comes with some hazards: low-level radioactive waste, tritium, and more. So I’m not saying that it’s impossible. It’s not a perpetual motion scheme. However, further expenditure aimed at fusion energy is simply pointless.
Helion is projecting a small amount of net electrical energy out of their next reactor, which they project to come online in 2024. And that reactor is designed primarily for producing He3, which they will use in their follow-up reactors designed for power generation.
So any fusion fans who still say we won't have grid energy from fusion for another 30 years are either misinformed or not very optimistic.
"A handful of organizations have performed bulk fusion, where a large volume of particles reaches temperatures high enough for fusion to occur on a large scale. [...] none of the organizations that have managed to do bulk fusion have done it in a practical way that can be used to make electricity."
Seems pretty straightforward and accurate to me. Helion is already re-capturing most of the energy from each pulse. I'm not aware of a single other approach that has demonstrated direct conversion from plasma energy to electric energy.
