TL;DR Boom lots of dead people in the containment structure, expensive cleanup, but nothing like a fission disaster. It would be an uninspiring explosion, but it would be dirty.
TL;DR Boom lots of dead people in the containment structure, expensive cleanup, but nothing like a fission disaster. It would be an uninspiring explosion, but it would be dirty.
Or for better context: research facilities today regularly lose plasma containment. It's why we don't have practical fusion reactors, but they're already at the plasma densities we would run at (which is an order of magnitude or so better then the Sun achieves).
Densities are extremely low, so you only have a few grams of material in the reactor, even at large volumes anticipated for a commercial design.
Furthermore, the reaction is extremely finicky, as demonstrated by what an incredibly hard time we are having creating and more importantly sustaining it. Any deviation from the ideal and it just goes out. So no runaway chain reactions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Accident_potentia...