Always happy to see people doing new and interesting stuff with fusion. I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since.
> "The timeline question is a tricky one," he says. "I don't want to be a laughing stock by promising we can deliver something in 10 years, and then not getting there. First step is setting up camp as a company and getting started. First milestone is demonstrating the reactions, which should be easy. Second milestone is getting enough reactions to demonstrate an energy gain by counting the amount of helium that comes out of a fuel pellet when we have those two lasers working together. That'll give us all the science we need to engineer a reactor. So the third milestone is bringing that all together and demonstrating a reactor concept that works."
The fourth step is to deliver the reactor concept as promising machine. The fifth step is to attach it to power generating equipment and demonstrate the power plant. The sixth step is to scale up a supply chain capable of delivering multiple units that compete with other sources of commodity electricity (or other energy products). The seventh step is to scale to large scale without being unduly burdened by either supply chain (raw material, skilled labor) or regulatory impact/public concern that inevitably scales with any large fleet of any new tech.
Fission made it to step 7 and then faltered and is now teetering depending on where you look. It never scaled past 5% of total world primary energy.
The promise of fusion is to deliver nuclear energy with less public concern than fission because it makes less radiologically hazardous material. The challenge is to go through the physical, engineering, and commercial viability phases as a power plant.