[audunw]

I thought so too. It’s pretty simple: if you’re making a nuclear thermal power plant a lot of the costs are associated with building the containment vessel and the heat exchange mechanism. Fusion is fundamentally lower power density than fission, so you’ll need a bigger vessel for a given power, and both the containment and heat exchange mechanism are far more complex and expensive. Thermal fusion will never be cheaper than fission, which already has a hard time competing with renewables. And renewables are still getting cheaper.

But then there’s Helion. If you can extract electrical power directly rather than through heat exchange and a turbine, it changes the equation drastically. So I think their approach can work from a theoretical point of view.