It’s unnecessary greenwashing hyperbole. Of course there will still be carbon emissions from the production of the reactor parts and the sourcing of fuel ingredients. The potential benefits of working fusion are far greater than carbon worries, and the media sells it short with narrow-minded labeling.
A fusion rector does not have control rods. It has a magnetic containment field around a plasma which is, something like 10x hotter than the sun. if you put a control rod in there it would instantly vaporize.
At the risk of being pedantic, if this is the LLNL NIF, then it's ICF, not MCF, though putting a graphite rod at the heart of a laser-driven thermonuclear event probably looks about the same either way.
I think it's there for people who may not be familiar with what fusion energy is, so they can understand that it's a potential climate change solution.
