Yes, it is real science - at least for those really interested in this particular deep-niche specialty.
But is it meaningful "general science" news? I'm thinking "no".
*From the photo, the whole tokamak would fit in a long-bed pickup truck.
It's by far the easiest way to fill a news paper/site, and people will read it.
Longer bit - it's also uses a different cross-section shape for the confined plasma. I'm not a physicist, but "negative triangularity" seems to have been discussed in research papers for 4+ decades. Good bet that it's the usual "there are advantages and disadvantages to using this..." situation.
Anyway, yet another tokamak that doesn't solve the inherently poor economics of tokamaks.
True. Though the U of Seville co-leader's quote shows an excellent understanding of the economics of modern fusion research:
"It [our first tokamak] needed to be one that a university could afford but also one that could make a unique contribution to the fusion landscape at the university scale," said Garcia-Munoz. "The idea was to put together technologies that were already established: a spherical tokamak and negative triangularity, making SMART the first of its kind. It turns out it was a fantastic idea."