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...Looks like someone never read the first law of thermodynamics..

Lots of reasons to dispute the article but that is not one of them. The energy comes from converting Hydrogen into Helium. There is a bit of matter that is converted into pure energy in the process . E=MC^2 . Every second the sun converts 4 million tons of matter into pure energy. That is how it provides enough energy for life on Earth even though our planet only gets tiny fraction of all that energy radiated.

To be clear it is the combining of Deuterium and Tritium to create Helium and a high energy neutron. While Deuterium is plentiful and can be extracted from water at a cost that is modest when compared to the energy value, Tritium does not exist naturally in any significant quantity because it decays with a 1/2 life of 12.3 years. So the other question to ask is where are you going to get the Tritium. Ans. Breed it in a nuclear reactor - so why not just use the power from the nuclear reactor [which exists and works well ] and skip the cost and fuss of the fusion reactor which doesn't exist and if it did would look like a Rube-Goldberg machine of complexity.

Yes I am aware that there are schemes to take the neutron from the fusion reaction and us it to bread tritium, but there is no demonstrated scheme to break even in the tritium cycle after all known losses in the cycle are account for.

I am familiar with the mechanism of the fusion reaction, but when the article tries to say that a man-made version will violate the most basic of natural laws, that’s just plain absurd.