> Plasma breakeven is all anyone is really working on. Once you have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater basically, which then can be used to create energy. The point of an "ignited plasma" is that it's self-sustaining and just pumps out heat, even if most of the energy is used to keep the reaction going.

This is dead wrong. First of all, the experiment described here is ICF, in which you have to constantly re-heat new pellets of fuel. Even for MCF, you have to spend inordinate amounts of energy just containing the million kelvins plasma with few kelvin superconducting magnets, and to constantly deliver new D+T into the plasma.

If containment fails at any time for any amount of time, your reactor is instantly obliterated.

Not to mention, your source of heat only heats up by about half of the energy - the other half is radiated away as hard to capture neutrons, which are almost entirely a waste product.

I have no idea why you think that ignited plasma is enough to maintain an energy-producing reactor.

Edit: million kelvins should have been billion kelvins...