A commercial power plant based on nuclear fusion is decades in the future. The path to that future is through a forest of many alternative designs. The two major groves in this forest are magnetic confinement fusion (as in the DIII-D tokamak, the largest operating tokamak in North America) and inertial confinement fusion (as in my hometown’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab's National Ignition Facility.)
The above two projects are NOT operating power plants, but simply experiments, and several additional experiments and prototypes may lead to power plants. Also, there are other experiments that might (long-shot) lead to an operating power plant. This paper is about one of the off-mainstream fusion experiments.
