I agree solar is very tough to beat, and even more so as storage improves. As I've said before, I consider Helion is the least dubious fusion approach, but that doesn't imply I think their absolute chance of commercial success is high.
One very significant issue with Helion's scheme is the enormous quantity of tritium produced. To put this in context: to power the world with such reactors might require ~10 TW. If using 2DD + D3He, this would produce 12 grams of tritium per second. If this stream were all released into the environment (which it would not be, but this is for purposes of illustration) it would lift all the water in the entire biosphere close to the US legal limit for tritium in drinking water, including all 1.3 billion cubic kilometers in the oceans. Tritium capture and containment will have to be extremely good for this technology to be globally acceptable.
Thank you for your very well informed perspective. Fusion proponents seem to be either industry insiders with vested interests, or less informed fanboys who are simply unaware of the technical and economic realities.
This issue of safety is particularly prone to handwaving; in reality, the combined effects of activation and proliferation risks and the substantial radionuclide release potential will make the operational realities, regulations, environmental litigation and associated costs very similar to fission.
That's not too say fusion is inherently dangerous, rather that modern fission projects are already very safe and fusion won't improve on that. Yet fision still failed. So if fusion can't improve on the economics - and they quite clearly can't for the foreseeable future - then they bring nothing to the table.