State of the art on proton-boron fusion for electricity generation

For decision-makers. The goal of this field is ordinary grid electricity from fusion with essentially no long-lived radioactive waste and no tritium-breeding factory attached to the plant. The leading "clean" fuel for that goal is proton-boron-11 (p-11B): abundant, non-radioactive inputs; helium ash; a path to converting charged fusion products straight into voltage. It is also much harder than today's mainstream deuterium-tritium (D-T) research. This survey is a catalog: who is trying what, sorted by a simple four-axis map—(1) continuous vs pulsed operation, (2) confinement family (magnetic torus, laser/inertial, pinch, electrostatic / magneto-electrostatic confinement (MEC), …), (3) fuel end-state (p-11B vs sisters), (4) thermal vs nonthermal kinetics—then scored on a physicist's feasibility checklist. You can stop after the introduction with a usable picture of the landscape. For working physicists and plant engineers. The same document then goes into the weeds at the density of a conference overview such as China's Fusion Energy Conference (FEC) pre-print on p-11B progress: nuclear-data uncertainties, Rider / Bremsstrahlung limits and proposed loopholes, project-by-project gate scores, digital-twin tooling, patents, and materials / direct energy conversion (DEC) risks. Huasheng Xie's zeroth-order feasibility frame (extended here with in-silico and hardware-iteration axes) is the common rubric.