You forgot competitor number one, mother nature, who already won, with the sun.
Human created fusion is actually quite a dangerous investor carrot; it promises somehow being able to sustain the profit driven nightmare. But not only that, if it was ever successful, it would remove all motivation and possibility of us ever becoming solar powered, thus we would never connect to the sun.
Without that connection, we can quickly become even more careless than we already are, about orbital dynamics, which if we look closely, are actually not doing very well.
The leap seconds being inserted into nuclear clocks are an indicator of deteriorating orbital trajectory, in other words, how far our planet is straying outwards off its original path.

There are those who will argue this is natural slowing of the Earth, but it isn’t, it is down to the way we use energy, the energy of the sun, or rather the way we don’t use it.

For logical proof, we only need to note that the decay in orbital motion coincides with the growth in our population, the same way as C02 and temperature rise relates.
The way that the sun is used by nature exerts a positive force on the rotation of the planet, whereas we are removing the capital energy from the Earth, which has a slowing effect.
As long as we don’t use the energy of the sun, we are actually working against it, de-creating everything created from it by nature.
Hence the real reason we are drowning in pollution, and the the sun is now literally burning our planet, with us on it.
The Fusion solution to that problem would be to deliberately break the orbit of Earth away from the sun, or geo-engineering, which would have the same effect, increasing the reflectivity of earth increases the solar pressure on it, again pushing us away from the sun.

All of the problems can be fixed by getting busy using the sun.
Do we really want to be another Nibiru?

Sorry Mark, this was meant as a reply to the original source article, the new Medium android app is absolutely hopeless, I will correct later with PC.