Mrs. Buck TurgidsonThat hyped up “fusion breakthrough” was just for a setup to test h-bombs without doing a full detonation. They didn’t design it as a tool to harvest the energy for civilian use. It doesn’t even seem like they’re spending much time thinking about that. (screenshots from the New York Times)
There is current active fusion research for civilian use going on with torus magnetic confinement. I have a friend who works in one of those research groups and it’s pretty interesting, but as we’ve all heard since childhood, it’s still decades away.
In order for something like this to be an actual source of electricity, you need a way of capturing the energy. The main approach is using the neutrons produced by the reaction to heat a fluid to power a turbine, but that’s a massive engineering undertaking in its own right.
The magnetic confinement approach, as opposed to the laser approach getting all the headlines, is actively designed with energy harvesting as the primary goal. This laser method seems to have eschewed those considerations because it wasn’t their goal in the first place. Introducing the infrastructure to harvest that energy after the fact isn’t a trivial undertaking.
Frankly I think this whole ordeal is as much security state saber-rattling as it is a scientific breakthrough.