As a sustainable energy source? No I don't see it.
This is the way I view it: for nuclear fission radioactive materials are readily available in nature. All man has done is collect and purify them. Want to create a new material like plutonium? Slowly collect the emissions and bombard uranium. Nothing fancy, can be done relatively easily.
Fusion on the other hand is found nowhere in nature except in a star. Not on this planet, any other planet, asteroids, comets, etc. The amount of sustained pressure and temperature is phenomenal - a massive gas giant like Jupiter or even larger doesn't create it. Then you have the problem of materials of construction. Every material is created in the fusion reactor of a star. What materials hold up against a star? Nothing does, massive gravity holds that star together. How are you going to create that on earth? While it's nice to ponder, containing sustained fusion nuclear explosions is a pipe dream.
It's a massive waste of money. These articles use descriptive terms to describe progress. If you have to walk to the moon, and you climb the empire state building, sure, technically you've achieved orders of magnitude of improvement, but it's still meaningless.
Understand where you're coming from but, without any scientific facts to back it up, I believe the human race will ultimately be able to harness nuclear fusion for its own benefit.
Modern humans supposedly have existed for about 200,000 years. For all but the most recent 119 or so of those years, the prevailing wisdom among many intelligent people regarding controlled, powered flight in the Earth's atmosphere held that if God wanted mankind to fly He would've given him wings, and I suppose those wings would've been on his back and would've flapped like a bird's -- or maybe an angel's. But they obviously
weren't there. So, what was the natural conclusion?
Then, in December, 1903 a couple of obscure bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio turned conventional wisdom on its head and proved that, in fact, God
had given Man wings. They were there all the time. It's just that they were
in his mind, not on his back where conventional wisdom would've had them. The Wrights' first flight wasn't much, a forty-yard jump over a large puddle, but that turned out to be enough of a start to allow astronauts to land on the Moon 66 years later. Or, put another way, the modern human race required nearly 200,000 years of existence to figure out how to fly in Earth's atmosphere at all. Then, in 66 years, a little less than the
average length of a single human lifetime, it went from not being able fly at all --- to the Moon.
Am guessing that, in 2022, controlling the fusion reaction may appear to some like the mastering of controlled, powered atmospheric flight looked to their 19th- or early 20th century grandfathers, i.e. nearly-, and probably totally-, impossible. But if past is prologue, at some point science
will produce the necessary breakthrough(s) and, assuming humanity can also find a way to avoid using its existing, scientifically-developed, nuclear fusion weaponology to blow itself to bits in the meantime, will then move on to the next "impossibility" like, say, time travel, or wormholes or ...???