p-B11 fusion would be the holy grail for energy, since ordinary Hydrogen is very common, Boron-11 is the most common isotope, and Boron itself is fairly common

p-B11 fusion would be the holy grail for energy, since ordinary Hydrogen is very common, Boron-11 is the most common isotope, and Boron itself is fairly common on Earth (annual production is around a million tonnes). Moreover, the reactor design could be remarkably simple and highly efficient. Power could be directly converted from the plasma to electricity without a need to use heat exchangers or steam turbines. Additionally, the low neutron flux would make the reactor remarkably safe, as would the fusion products (primarily ordinary Helium). However, as far away as D-T fusion energy is today p-B11 is even farther. p-B11 fusion requires plasma temperatures 10 times higher than D-T fusion, making it that much more difficult to build devices capable of inducing fusion. Worse yet, at those conditions the bremsstrahlung radiation loses using conventional plasma confinement technologies would be significantly higher than the power produced by the fusion reactions. What that means is that for every watt produced by fusion that might be converted to a fraction of a watt of useful power there would be more than a watt of power radiated away in x-rays and gamma rays, meaning that it would cool faster than it could be heated by fusion energy, rendering it useless as a power source. In short, p-B11 fusion requires the development of novel approaches to plasma confinement and ramping up their capabilities up to and orders of magnitude beyond what we've done with tokomaks et al today. To say that this would be an enormously challenging scientific and technical enterprise would be a gross understatement. Nevertheless, it very much does warrant continued research. No matter the difficulty there's no way to get to a destination without spending the time on the road there.