Todd Rider's 1995 PhD thesis poured cold water on all these exciting aneutronic fusion approaches. He maintains to this day a good presentation covering various

Todd Rider's 1995 PhD thesis poured cold water on all these exciting aneutronic fusion approaches. He maintains to this day a good presentation covering various approaches and what is feasible and what isn't. Current version at https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.129/f5o.aea.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/BetterRouteToFusion2023-01-19.pdf https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.129/f5o.aea.myftpuplo... (You can find links to the thesis and papers and the latest presentation at https://riderinstitute.org/research/ https://riderinstitute.org/research/ ) tl;dr: Fusion of heavier nuclei (like pB11 discussed here) are not feasible due to the bremsstrahlung output being higher than the fusion output. Ways around that would be, in theory, non-thermal plasmas, but these are very hard to do because the thermalization time constant is much lower than the fusion time constant. Alternatively one could, at very high efficiency, recycle the bremsstrahlung energy via some apparatus to heat the plasma. It's very unclear if any of these approaches are even remotely feasible. Now for this particular approach in TFA, described in the open access (as a former scientist who no longer has institutional access I'm very happy about the open access trend!) article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36655-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36655-1 (thanks to user fghorow for providing the link in a sibling comment). Quoting: > And the physics challenges can be overcome. As demonstrated in ref. 2, by using the recently updated values for the p11B fusion cross-section3 and properly accounting for kinetic effects, it can be shown that a thermal p11B plasma can produce a high Q (where Q = fusion power/input power), and even reach ignition (where the plasma is sustained by the fusion reactions alone). So they claim the old values that e.g. Rider used for dismissing pB11 fusion as infeasible have recently changed sufficiently to make it feasible. Further continuing: > By employing a plasma with a low internal magnetic field and operating in a regime in which the electrons are kept at a lower temperature than the ions, the radiation losses can be further reduced1; and by maintaining a non-equilibrium population of energetic reacting ions, the fusion power further increased4. This, again, is about non-thermal plasmas. Theoretically possible, but very hard to do in practice.