>>11041518>>11041544Fusion as a serious concept is a lot newer than many of our other power sources, and has progressed neither particularly faster nor slower than most of them.
Just as an example: solar power has only recently become economically viable as primary power source. Back in the 80s, you only really saw photovoltaics on very low energy portable devices like calculators, as it was very expensive and inefficient. It was not new technology then either, way back in 1876 it was found that you could generate electricity by exposing selenium to sunlightm, and Charles Fritss made the first solar cells in 1883. So it took over a century before we even had good enough solar to consider commercial usage of it. It was also half a century after those first solar cells before we even knew what fusion was, and before that we thought the sunlight running those primitive solar cells was caused by gravitational collapse.
We had our first working artificial fusion source a mere generation later, with the Hydrogen Bomb in 1952. Similarly, while Ben Franklin did his famous kite flying experiment with electricity in 1752, it was half a century later before Alessandro Volta, for whom the volt is named, built the first electric battery. Then it was a couple more generations before we saw the first electric generators and engines, and a couple more before Edison and Tesla hit the scene.
Considering how hard it is to experiment with fusion, something which only naturally occurs in the heart of stars, it isn't all that surprising that we still don't have a working fusion reactor less than a century after we even realised such a thing as fusion existed.
It's not helpful when folks go around talking about "20 years from now" like that was useful or meaningful, when its timeline is still shorter than the development of many other technologies, from computers and rockets to other power generation mechanisms.
