Comment by jeffreyrogers

The thing I never understand about these fusion reactors is how they plan on generating energy from them, assuming they exceed break-even. In a conventional nuclear reactor the coolant is piped to a steam generator which then drives steam turbines to generate power. This is a relatively obvious design and it was pretty well understood from the start of development how the power generation would work. Of course, there were a lot of engineering challenges to overcome to make it work in practice. While fusion itself is a harder problem (as the lack of success for decades has demonstrated), it seems like the power generation aspect has many new challenges as well.