For all practical purposes, we need to pretend like fusion doesn't exist. Sure, we should still invest in it and do research, but we're setting ourselves up for disaster if we peg our hopes on viable fusion.
Plus, fusion likely has the same kind of practical, economic limitations (huge upfront capital cost and long build time) that make fission hard to justify in an environment of small, cheap fossil fuel burners and wind/solar units.
It does feel exciting that fusion has apparently moved from being "just 5 years away" for something like three decades to this past decade they've revised down to now perpetually "just 2 years away", at that burndown rate we can expect it in maybe three decades.
That said the cheapest fusion power we'll ever have access to will always be solar power because the capital costs of building our solar system's sun are already well and easily sunk/amortized.
I'll add that as well as reaching Qtotal > 500, we need continuous operating life to be of the order of 10 million seconds, "only" 13 orders of magnitude away. Not going to happen in 2 years, or 5 years, or 40 years.
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The mininum viable Qplasma would be in the neighborhood of 100.[1] Fusion may get competitive for electricity generation with a Qtotal > 500.[2]
Plus, fusion likely has the same kind of practical, economic limitations (huge upfront capital cost and long build time) that make fission hard to justify in an environment of small, cheap fossil fuel burners and wind/solar units.