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fpolingyesterday at 8:03 PM0 repliesview on HN

Helion most likely would not work. Even their own optimistic modeling gives very thin margins and even they completely ignore radiation damage to equipment.

Commonwealth and other tokamak designs are too optimistic as well. We do not know how instability in plasma will behave in production volumes.

Stellarator-based designs at least do not have big ifs, but they are way further and even they assume that radiation damage from neutrons will be manageable.

And all of this is ignoring costs. Outside of niche applications it is very hard to sea how fusion even if it works can compete with solar plus storage.