Fission is getting energy by having heavy atoms break up into lighter ones, fusion is getting energy by having light atoms, well, fuse together.

Fusion reaction has pros over fission in that a fusion reaction produces a lot more energy than a fission - and that it can't 'melt down' - unlike fission it doesn't have to be kept in check. If Homer Simpson messes up at the fusion plant, the reaction will just stop. Why? Because for fusion to happen, the atoms (hydrogens) need to overcome their electrostatic repulsion of eachother - the Coulomb barrier generated by the protons in the nuclei (at fusion temps the atoms have all become ionized - electrons have shot off from the atoms, so you have electrons and positively charged nuclei flying around - aka a charged gas aka a plasma).

Anyway that coulomb force has the same dependence on distance as gravity (1/r^2) - but unlike gravity - is a repulsive force. If you can force the atoms close enough together (by putting them under high temperature and pressure) then they will be close enough that the nuclei of the atoms will be pulled together by a stronger attractive force - the nuclear force - which only works at a very short range. As mentioned, you have to get the atoms going really fast and really close together for this to happen (put the gas under high temp and pressure, which incidentally will ionize the gas atoms into electrons and positively charged ions).

The fact that it is now 'electric' is the key to both approaches (tokamak and stellarator) at containing the plasma. These are just two approaches at Magnetically Confined Fusion, which operates on the simple principle that charged particles (both electrons and the ions that you are trying to fuse w other ions) travel along magnetic field lines. They spin in tight little circles around magnetic field lines, the stronger the magnetic field, the tighter the circle. Tokamak, which is simpler than a stellarator, is basically a solenoid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solenoid that wraps around into a donut shape. Just as the magnetic field lines in a solenoid go along the length of the solenoid, the magnetic field lines in a tokamak will go around the donut (toroidal field). Just imagine that the tokamak magnets are really powerful so the magnetic field lines (not really lines) are really strong - then your ions will gyrate around and bump into other ions that are gyrating around B-lines. There are problems though.

It's been a while since I studied but basically, in addition to ions and electrons very fast giration around the magnetic field 'line' and it's slower movement along the field line (around the donut) - it also 'drifts' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guiding_center - this is the slowest movement. There are a few mechanisms that cause this drift, but to the great misfortune of mankind, these drifts are 'out' - the ions drift away from the plasma core, and towards the wall of the tokamak.

To stop this drift from happening, you need the toroidal (around the donut) B field lines to also twist, so they look like a twizzler that has been wrapped around on itself. In a tokamak this is generally done by running a current through the plasma around the donut. Plasmas are highly conductive, so you can do this. It is like a big coil of wire. Just like the coils on a solenoid generate a straight B field through the center of a solenoid, and the coils of a tokamak (donut shaped solenoid) generate a donut shaped B field, running a current through the donut shaped plasma will generate a B field from the ceiling to the floor thru the donut hole (the poloidal field). The poloidal and toroidal fields vector add to make your twirly twizzler shaped field that prevents drifts. This running a current thru the plasma is how you 'twist' the field in tokamaks.

Stellerators, on the other hand, generate the field with complex (very) magnetic configuration (look up images of WX-7). There is no need to run current thru the plasma, and this in theory, and I think now in practice, with WX-7, leads to a more stable plasma. This stability issue is very important. Scientists have known about drifts since year 0 of fusion research, but there are many instabilities that cause the plasma to break down.

As mentioned in the article - there is a triple product that basically describes the success of the plasma - plasma density, plasma temperature and confinement time. This is more or less equivalent to 'are we getting more energy out than we are putting in' and I believe the advantage of stellerator would be confinement time. Hopefully these brainiacs can get it happening.