General Fusion's plant in the UK comes online in 2025. It's a proof of concept, that costs a couple hundred million to build and isn't for practical usage. Generally speaking, no fusion reactor has created more energy than it consumes, but this one shows every sign of turning that around.
So, dive into SMR, or wait until this is a viable option and sidestep the radiation and waste issues of nuclear?
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The aim of the pilot plant, Mowry says, is to reach a fusion-relevant temperature of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and show that the whole process could be economical. It will use a relatively unreactive fuel of pure deuterium, a hydrogen isotope with one neutron, instead of the deuterium-tritium (D-T) mix a full-size commercial power reactor would use. That lets the pilot project avoid having to source rare, radioactive tritium and deal with the excess heat and generated radioactivity. A working reactor would breed its own tritium by using the radiation produced by the fusion reaction to break down the some of the lithium liner.
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https://www.science.org/content/arti...ited%20Kingdom.