Or: "Why utopia is still as distant as ever."

The article was a good summary. It also bolstered my belief that most of us here now won't live to see fusion at scale. I very much suspect that at some point in the near future, simpler renewable power generation plus storage solutions (batteries, kinetic, hydrogen etc) may become so inexpensive that the high startup cost of fusion will seem uneconomic, and fusion will go back on the shelf til we get around to interplanetary travel.

Fusion would be so close if research and ones owning it was public instead of relying on private companies to do it...

No. For the initial decades all the research was publicly funded and progress was very slow.

Always 10 years away

I wasn’t aware of the whole ‘makes giant container highly radioactive ‘ that doesn’t seem like a good thing.

Yep. The only reason it continues to get major funding is that other use for fusion.

(To be fair, the plasma stuff is interesting and potentially hugely beneficial too)