I’m beginning to think that fusion energy is just a form of welfare for engineers and physicists.
Check out ITER. It’s a research/demo fusion facility being built in France (10 years and counting), the budget of which was initially projected to be 7 billion euros but is now expected to exceed 25 billion euros. The thing isn’t going to generate, assuming it works, a single watt of juice. Just heat, which be vented. It involves scientists etc from dozens of nations, including the US.