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Not a physicist, but I thought it seemed fishy as well. I’m curious how they plan to sustain a reaction, since their setup didn’t seem to be useful for more than a single shot…

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At https://www.hb11.energy/our-technology they list a number of papers they've published supporting their approach.

On ignoring the H B-11 reaction with high intensity lasers: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3506

On the reaction avalanche: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-b...

On the conversion of alpha particles to electricity: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-b...

This reads like a type of ICF which normally has a stream of pellets being fed in after the initial pellet has reached a hot enough temperature to sustain the fusion reaction.

I don't think the goal is to sustain the reaction here... I think the goal is to make a pulsed reactor, where you start the reaction on each pellet in turn. You could imagine a laser firing at 1000 pulses per second, and firing a stream of 1000 pellets per second into the reaction vessel that each pulse hits.

Pellets could turn out to be the size of a grain of sand.

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