I am not current on the technology other than I heard a few months ago that they were able to produce a net gain of energy. I think that they are shooting high power lasers at the core and igniting the reaction that way.
Another possible improvement: the heat is used to boil water and turn turbines. Maybe they should consider a process that excites electrons in a conductor and eliminate the steam turbine process all together. Maybe something that produces a massive magnetic field and eliminates the heat conversion process — much less heat, no spinning turbines, much more efficient, etc. Steam power is so 19th century. :)
I know, it was big news about the net gain a few months ago, very close to “ignition”, but the “net gain” was very narrowly defined, measuring the energy of the laser beams themselves versus the energy output of the fusion, and there was a gain if you just looked at that comparison, but it ignored the total electrical power consumption of the laser devices, which was much larger than the fusion output. So there was a breakthrough of sorts but still far away from actual commercial power generation.
But we’ll see. A lot of clever people are working on it.