How is that relevant to the article?

Russia: a capitalist oligarchy, which hasn’t been communist for 30 years.

Wagner Group: A private military/mercenary group/soldiers for hire.

I’m personally quite interested in Helions design of fusion reactor, whilst I don’t necessarily think they’ll be the first to achieve a design viable of continuous operation, I think the insights gained from the much more complex and expensive “tradition” fusion reactors will hopefully help inform their design and make something viable for smaller scale cheaper operation that could be rolled out on a grander scale.

One thing that is apparent with energy tech is that it always starts out expensive and typically goes down in price due to wide adoption and large scale production.

Re the issues with operating life, etc; there are similar issues with almost every option whether solar/wind etc

Obviously either way we’re going to run into issues with large scale energy storage. Here’s hoping Sodium batteries provide some effective respite for that in the near future.

Though it’s also worth pointing out that Sellafield is Europe’s largest nuclear site and has operated since the 40’s and suffered the disaster in 1957 when reactor design, nuclear safety and safe handling were in their infancy, and the world was just starting to explore harnessing nuclear power generation.

And also to be more relevant to the subject of the article; this is one of the reasons why fusion should be being researched, much lower chance of problems arising from waste/risk of meltdown etc.

Fusion isn’t fission, it could provide relatively cheap and clean nuclear power.