One of the holy grails to pine for after the current designs actually enter service is to look at ways to drive electrons in a wire directly from the plasma, no detour via heat.

That's actually really interesting, as I never heard of that before.

Yeah you're absolutely right, damn that'd be one hell of a Holy Grail touchdown moment for Humanity if we could pull that off, the direct transference, no "middle man".

The other is aneutronic fusion.

From the link (for others like me and did not know what the word meant)...

Aneutronic fusion is any form of fusion power in which very little of the energy released is carried by neutrons.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 2 points 7 months ago

I mean, in principle we can already do it: Fusion reactions tend to produce lots of electromagnetic radiation, and we can drive wires directly via electromagnetic radiation, the technology is called solar panels. Trouble being solar panels generally aren't good at absorbing X-rays.