>>11097452Fusion 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 an example solar power - itself an example of harnessing fusion from the Sun - has only recently become economically viable as a primary power source. Back in the 1980s, we really only 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 sunlight, and Charles Fritts 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 Fraklin 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 generations and engines and a couple more before Edison and Tesla hit the scene.
It is not that shocking that we still don't have a working fusion reactor less than a century after we even realised such a thing as fusion existed.
