Re:It's *ALWAYS* 20 years away (Score 2)

We can imagine the arc of progress in an instant, but the pace occurs at the tempo of human lives. My dad started working on ITER as a young man in the 90's and just retired from ITER2, which is 75% to first plasma. The ITER projects are large-scale science experiments like CERN, not for commercial power. They're making incredibly detailed measurements about the physics of the reaction, as well as how to keep the energy of the sun inside a magnetic bottle. Fascinating stuff. ITER is run by a consortium of governments and paid for with grants from those governments, so you can imagine the political wrangling involved. Meanwhile, commercial companies have run with the experimental data and are doing things like miniaturizing reactors so they can prototype them faster. Fusion technology is happening, but its hard stuff. The potential gains for humanity when we master the technology are too great to ignore.