Remarkable. It's still nuclear energy, and the sobering part for me is that fusion neutrons are an order of magnitude more energetic than fission neutrons. Add the fact that fusion plants are an order of magnitude larger, and you get orders of magnitude more nuclear waste with order of magnitude higher activation/radioactivity.
If you don't like nuclear for these reasons, you'll probably hate fusion.
Furthermore, fusion does not produce highly radioactive, long lived nuclear waste. “Fusion produces only low level radioactive waste — more than fission does — but this low level waste does not pose any serious danger,” said González de Vicente. Contaminated items, such as protective clothing, cleaning supplies and even medical tubes or swabs, are short lived, low level radioactive waste that can be safely handled with basic precautions.
Perhaps Dr. dr Vicente is talking about ITER, but surely not a real fusion reactor.
Here's something talking about an actual fusion reactor:
"While the radioactivity level per kilogram of waste would be much smaller than for fission-reactor wastes, the volume and mass of wastes would be many times larger."
and
"To reduce the radiation exposure of plant workers, biological shielding is needed even when the reactor is not operating. In the intensely radioactive environment, remote handling equipment and robots would be required for all maintenance work on reactor components as well as for their replacement because of radiation damage, particle erosion, or melting."
Activation products are of a different nature than the fission products and minor actinides you get in fission reactors, and are not necessarily as fearsome to handle, nor is the total activity comparable at all to what you get in spent fuel.
However, those high energy neutrons do a ridiculous amount of damage to the structural materials, and if there are constant outages to swap and repair components, I don’t see an easy way of making energy economically.
I met a physicist who had written a paper in the 1980s about a fusion reactor that used the high energy neutrons from D-T fusion to breed ²³³U from ²³²Th, around the time that people were losing interest in fast reactors. The reactor itself might not be a profitable source of energy directly, but the fuel it produces would be useful in thermal fission reactors.
Fusion will be attractive as a neutron source long before it is attractive as an energy source, in fact there are many kinds of neutron generators already in use that use fusion.
The waste from fusion will be different in character from fission. Unless you are trying to make TRU you are not going to have any transuranic waste. Most of the real danger from fission products is in isotopes of a few elements in a particular range of atomic number, particular Cs and I.
On the other hand, a D-T reactor is going to have a lot of T around and T is hard to contain since hydrogen likes to infiltrate between the atoms in metals. The flux of neutrons on the first wall is going to be absolutely brutal, how bad the activation is will depend on what exact materials you're using, but the difficulty of the situation is such that you might not have much of a choice.
If you don't like nuclear for these reasons, you'll probably hate fusion.