The article does not even mention Helium-3, which is rare but can provide limitless clean energy to power humanity for billions of years. It fuses to stable beryllium and thus does not have any of the usual problems with waste storage and disposal. We don't have the technology yet to build a fusion reactor this hot (we haven't even mastered D-T fusion for energy production), but it's inevitable that 3-He will some day become humans' primary energy source. Future generations will be annoyed that they have to recapture it from the atmosphere because we let it escape.
Good news:
Virtually all helium-3 used in industry today is produced from the radioactive decay of tritium in reactors, given its very low natural abundance and its very high cost.
Tritium, in turn is produced from lithium- 6. Between 1.9% and 7.8% of terrestrial lithium in normal materials consists of lithium-6
I mean 3He+3He -> 2 Be. This is a fusion reaction that would produce only a stable element. Of course, there would be side reactions and the reaction vessel itself would be constantly bombarded with neutrons. However, you definitely would not have the situation we have now, where uranium is burned up to just produce some slightly lighter but still radioactive metal that then has to be isolated from the environment for tens of thousands of years. It would be a big improvement.
The waste issue is the least pressing problem the Nuclear industry has. The total quantity of the stuff is tiny. Like you could stuff all of the nuclear waste produced by power plants in the US into a few Olympic size swimming pools. It's only a political issue, and the workaround is to just store the waste on-site at the power plants which has been feasible despite decades of pushback against permanent waste sites. Try doing that with a coal plant and they would be completely buried under a mountain of flyash within a month.
So this reaction is solving a problem that isn't really a problem. The big issue is the cost, and that's one area where Fusion power has yet to show any benefit. An economically practical fusion reactor is still a pipe dream, especially as renewables continue to chip away at the price of electricity and as storage costs continue to fall.
