Helion's design seems way more promising than the NIF one which doesn't seem to have any clear path to being a "continuous" operation production design.
Helion's design also works essentially by brief inertial confinement, thereby avoiding the issues of Tomahawk continuous confinement designs. However, in the Helion design rather than having pellets of fuel which would need to be replaced for each shot, it uses injected gaseous fuel (deuterium + He-3) which is heated into two plasma "donuts" which are magnetically fired at each other to (together with brief magnetic compression) achieve fusion conditions.
Helion's design also works essentially by brief inertial confinement, thereby avoiding the issues of Tomahawk continuous confinement designs. However, in the Helion design rather than having pellets of fuel which would need to be replaced for each shot, it uses injected gaseous fuel (deuterium + He-3) which is heated into two plasma "donuts" which are magnetically fired at each other to (together with brief magnetic compression) achieve fusion conditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaQLZaaHWo
Helion have a contract with Microsoft to build a production model for them (to power a datacenter) by 2028.
https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-world...