One thing mentioned in the article was another advance in this design, where some of the materials that deal with the most intense neutron bombardment are replaced by a liquid that can be pumped out and circulated. Presumably there's still a containment vessel for this liquid that is a maintenance pain, but they do seem to be working on the problem.
The liquid blanket technology is nothing new or unusual and, from what I recall, seems to be generally agreed as the way to go. You are exactly correct about the containment vessel, and there is also the raw machinery needed to maintain the containment field and the reaction. I think the lifespan for these things is on an upper bound of 3 years, and I can't remember if that is at power plant or experimentation scale (experimental reactors run way less frequently and create less radiation than a power plant would).
It's an interesting problem to me because fusion is largely solved and well understood from the physics perspective (which is what most people consider the challenging esoteric part), the remaining challenge is a much more 'mundane' task of developing economic methods to create the needed materials.
> "It's an interesting problem to me because fusion is largely solved and well understood from the physics perspective (which is what most people consider the challenging esoteric part), the remaining challenge is a much more 'mundane' task of developing economic methods to create the needed materials."
On one level, yes, it's a well understood problem. I mean when you get to the point when Make can teach you how to build your own fusion device I think it's safe to say we have a fairly decent handle on what's involved:
However, the challenge of producing a nuclear fusion device that generates more energy than it consumes is still a technical challenge. Perhaps it'll just be a question of better materials, but from a layman's perspective the plasma confinement/control aspect does not appear to be a completely solved problem.
