[ladams]

Stellarators in particular suffer from very long development cycles. It takes years and years of research to develop the algorithms used to optimize the coil geometries, and then the production of the coils and assembly of the vacuum vessel within the coils is much more challenging than for a tokamak. The coils are hard to produce because they have highly irregular shapes, and tight tolerances. Assembling the vacuum vessel is hard because the coils cover much more of the "toroidal-ish" surface area than in a tokamak.

The is a lot of interesting work going on in stellarator design optimization now, but it will likely be many years before that research is realized in another actual reactor.

[fizigura]

For a few billion USD you could build a real power plant of this type. Sounds expensive, but consider how much money nuclear fission did cost initially, and how much money we burn on other stuff, then it's not unthinkable to have somebody rich chip in and make it happen. (Germany just gave $10bn subsidies for a domestic Intel factory.)

[Guvante]

They managed to handle what a fission reactor outputs every second in this experiment.

I don't think that points to a commercial reactor whenever someone spends a few billions.