[ncmncm]

All of your alternatives make it even more expensive to build and to operate, and so even less competitive. Regardless, extracting the few grams of 3H or 3He bred for fuel in the thousand tons of molten, radioactive lithium jacket, every day, is a problem no one has solved. Good luck with that.

It is conceivable that fusion could be made to work in outer solar system spaceship propulsion, where the constraints are very different. It will never generate commercial power on Earth. The billionaires pumping cash into fusion startups are being taken for a ride. They can afford it.

By contrast, Bill Gates got US taxpayers to pony up fully half of the scratch on his pet SMR project, without giving up any ownership. So, we are the ones taken for a ride, instead.