What about the attempts at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics lab?

https://lppfusion.com/

When you've been trying to do something for 70 years, spent untold billions of dollars on it (global total seems to be unknown, estimates range for 50 billion to over a trillion), and only gotten to testbed device stage, then it's probably time to stop, look at it and say "maybe we are doing this all wrong". After all, the giant fusion device hanging in the sky is so much easier to use...

If the same research dollars were to be put into building molten salt Thorium reactors, we'd already be carbon negative across the board. But yet again it seems milking the system for research dollars decade after decade is more important (and profitable) than providing a solution that works.

Always just out of reach, kind of like no more wars!

Small correction to this:
There are several different Z- Pinch fusion reactor designs.
Some implode wires. Some implode small cans around a target plasma. Others implode a plasma liner around a target plasma.
The Sheared Flow Stabilized Z- Pinch pictured above (originating at the University of Washington and now at the spin off company ZAP Energy incorporated. Does not do any of the above. It is more like a very elongated spark plug, where you have a tube shaped inner and outer electrodes of about 100 cm length. When the plasma forms between the electrodes it moves faster on the outer edge than on the inner edge. This induces a sheared flow in the Z- Pinch which smooths out the kink and sausage instabilities that were plaguing other Z- Pinch devices. What makes this design so attractive is that it is very simple and and relatively cheap to build and it is extremely compact. You could put one of those on planes, trains, ships, etc.
There is another Z- Pinch type reactor design that has been making some waves lately: The Staged Z- pinch by MIFTI
Both are aiming for break even experiments in the coming years (depending on factors like funding, etc).

Just an essential precision: it is only for a tenth of a second that JET set a power output record for a tokamak device with a 16-MW effort in 1997" after more than ten years of research! This leads to take with a lot of precaution the excessive and often inaccurate communication of ITER-Organization (I am a plasma physicist specialized in nuclear fusion).

Thank you for the summary. I am optimistic about fusion and all of the efforts underway. Any year they could reach fruition. However, the one sentence that bothered me the most was:

"This energy won't be captured as electricity. Rather, ITER will serve as a testbed for the technologies it is hoped will underpin the first ever fusion power plants."

If 50 MW generates 500 MW in 2025 and they don't know how to capture it as either electricity or heat, I'm not sure they will know when they get funding for ITER 2.0.

Thank you so much for writing this article Nick!!! I have always believed that Nuclear Fusion Reactors will provide the unlimited energy needed on earth and really appreciated your explanation of the process AND the alternatives. Tokamak reactors may be first on the scene, but the other options, or ones yet to appear, seem more efficient and may eventually move to the top.

The energy conversion system for the tokomak is fairly well developed. One of the goals of ITER is to test modular blanket elements. The water jacket will transfer the heat to a small lake. In DEMO the water jacket will be replaced with a steam jacket.

Seems to me that any reasonably comprehensive look into fusion technologies should at least offer a mention of the approach being pursued by General Fusion and other startups. That company is well funded by leading venture capitalists. Its management and board of directors including many well-respected names from the energy sector. It has cooperation agreements with leading U.S. universities. It has received substantial grant funding from the U.S. and other governments. Yet you seem to feel that this technology doesn't even warrant a passing mention. Am I perceiving some head-in-the-sand technical bias here? Sure sounds like it.