Instead of focusing on pie in the sky nuclear fusion, why not rethink what works, coal firing plants. I cannot fathom that all the energy and time wasted on the other alternative crap cannot be focused back on making a 100% clean burning coal plant! Focus on what to do with the output of burning coal.
Buy MY solar system on MY house paid for with MY money and tailored to MY needs is very efficient. Like everything else in life, it's always more efficient if the one that's paying for it and benefiting from it is also the one making the decisions.
That's why decentralized green energy works if you're in a good situation for it (mine produces 50% of all the electricity needed for my 2-story all-electric house and will pay for itself on about the 10th year). That's also why "green" energy like the Dims want it doesn't work: it's always inefficient because it's forced onto people who don't want it and paid for by people who don't want it, but decided on by bureaucrats.
Yes, we have approximately 500 years of known exploitable reserves of coal in this country at current rates of consumption. Other than CO2 which is not a pollutant or a key driver of the climate they already put out only a minute amount of pollution. Like China and India, we should be building more coal fired power plants.
The issue with coal is pollution. Not CO2. China and India have been billowing out far more pollution than the western developed nations combined. The reason they don’t focus more on clean output is because it cuts into their profits.
There is no such thing as a clean burning coal plant. Even with the most advanced scrubbers 2% of the heavy metals particularly Mercury still goes right up the stack. Most scrubers are only 90% so 10% still gets into the air and condenses with water vapor to rain back down. That is unacceptable to society and our lakes and rivers thank us. Coal is best left in the dust bin if history. To barely meet the EPA standards which modern people want zero not 2 to 10% allowed into their drinking water sources. The costs of scrubbers is in the hundreds of millions of dollars it makes coal totally not competitive with gas plants or even nuclear. This says nothing of the coming $50 to $100 per tonne carbon taxes world wide that will make coal easily the most expensive power , gas second with nuclear, wind and solar dominating the under $50 mwh price field. Solar can be had for under $23 mwh during the sunny times of day.
https://www3.epa.gov/airtoxics/utility/hgwhitepaperfinal.pdf
Same for NOx clean coal is a myth.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-coal-pollution/