> Nuclear power plants are largely considered as one of the most reliable sources of energy.

Reliable how?

I mean we first have the issue is we've never built one so how we can judge reliability?

I assume the author is alluding to the apparent abundance of fuel for nuclear fusion. This is and isn't true. Obviously hydrogen (particularly protium) is abundant. Deuterium is relatively abundant, even at ~150ppm. Tritium needs to be produced in a nuclear reactor.

Current hydrogen fusion models revolve around dueterium-tritium ("D-T") fusion. This is because you need to neutrons to sustain the reaction but that presents two huge problems:

1. Because everything is at such high temperature, you eject fast neutrons. This is an energy loss for the system and there's not really a lot you can do about it; and

2. Those free fast neutrons destroy your containment vessel and reactor (as do free Helium nuclei aka alpha particles).

And then after you do all that you boil water and turn a turbine just like you do in a coal or natural gas plant.

So "reliable" is an interesting and questionable claim.

There are other variants like so-called aneutronic fusion (eg Helium-3, which is far from abundant) and those aren't really "neutron free". They're really just "fewer neutrons".

So what about containment? Magnetic fields can contain charged particles and you have various designs (eg tokamak, stellarator) and that's what the AI is for here I guess.

But the core problem is to make this work you superheat the plasma so you're dealing with a turbulent fluid. That's inherently problematic. Any imperfection or failure in your containment field is going to be a problem.

Stars deal with this by being large and thus using sheer size (ie neutrons can't go that far without hitting another nucleus) and gravity.

It increasingly seems to me that commercial nuclear fusion power generator is a pipe dream, something we simply want to be true. I'm not convinced it'll ever be commercially viable.

I'd love to be proven wrong and certainly won't stop anyone from trying.

In a way AI is the new blockchain. Go back a few years and you had a gold rush of startups attaching every idea to "blockchain" to build hype. That's what AI is now. I don't think it fundamentally changes any of the inherent problems in nuclear fusion.