The big problem with magnetic confinement fusion is simply that it uses magnets for its confinement — enormous magnetic tokamaks that not only cost an ungodly amount of money, but take decades to produce. A working LENR/magnetically confined reactor would obviously lead to better and more efficiently designed reactors down the road.
What makes Hot fusion reactors big and costly is the standoff distance between the reactor walls and the plasma. It order to keep the plasma from destroying the first wall of the reactor, that plasma must be confines a long way away from the first wall of the reactors structure. This requirement makes the hot plasma reactor huge with super big magnets and a 800 foot reaction chamber.
Right now, ITER and other fusion research facilities are all trying to figure out how to create and confine a fusion reactor efficiently enough to release more energy for capture than they had to inject in the first place. Note that by doing this, and generating the first-ever net joule of fusion energy, would still only produce one net joule of energy. The first successful fusion power generator will be an enormous moment for mankind, but we need modern power plants to output net megajoules, if not gigajoules.
With a LENR plasma of only 7000K rather than 200,000,000K, the LENR plasma can be held very close to the first wall of the reactor...just inches. A reactor producing gigajoules might be fitted into a shipping container and built very inexpensively.
