And yet, from the Chicago Pile in 1942 it took until the late 1950s to get a working commercial reactor going. At it's base, the same issues you note with Fission are the same issue with Fusion, just at a larger scale. The temperatures and pressures approach that of the sun, so you need to figure out confinement, and the "piling together fissile material" is essentially what a Fusion reaction entails. In this case, and demonstrating the concept is achievable in general, it was done with lasers compressing the fuel pellet is my understanding.
Just as we proved in 1942 Fission could work, we have done the same with Fusion. Now the challenge is scaling it out.
Your continuing ability to be hideously wrong and yet so confident about so many different subjects is mind-boggling.
The possibility of a self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction was first theorized in 1932. The first successful reactor (CP-1 in Chicago) was built in 1942, just ten years later, and cost 2.7 million dollars. The source didn't say whether that was 1942 or modern dollars, so just for comparison, that'd be 49.3 million dollars if it isn't. Given Fermi (project lead) described it as '"a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers" I doubt it was the higher number, but it's possible.
The Trinity Test took place in July 1945, and the first nuclear bombs were dropped the same year. The first commercial power plant came online in 1957, 25 years after the first fission reaction was
theorized.
Nuclear Fusion reactions were first theorized no later than 1926 (first publication I found record of), first
demonstrated eight years later in 1934 (fusing Deuterium into Helium by Rutherford), and the first commercial reactor came online in...
Never.
Funny, that.
The National Ignition Facility, the place where this recent test took place, has been in operation and/or development for decades, and the best number I could readily find for its cost was 4.2
Billion as of 2008. Even if we take the inflated number, that's more than
eighty times the cost of the CP-1 pile. The facility came online in 2009, a
mere eighty-three years after the idea was first posited, and involves enormous arrays of high-powered lasers focusing immense amounts of energy on pellets to initiate fusion reactions.
There's a little bit of a difference in the timetables there.
And, of course, things go much,
much further than that.
NIF isn't the only facility working on Fusion, and hasn't been the only one for decades. The industrial and technological resources available over the last three decades
dwarf those available to the team that developed, designed, and built CP-1. Further, the research on Fission was a tightly-guarded secret, highly classified and restricted, limiting the available talent pools, and of course open international cooperation was completely out of the question.
Fusion, on the other hand? It's openly researched all over the world, and aside from the Chinese, the research is openly shared as different teams work collaboratively towards a common objective, and have been doing so for decades.
Yet, for some reason, in spite of all the resources, manpower, technology, and time that fusion research has had available, it hasn't given us anything viable for energy production for
almost ninety years.
It's almost like it's something monumentally harder to do. It's almost like there's very harsh physical reasons why Fission development was able to proceed rapidly and effectively, even while it was a highly-classified matter of state security, while Fusion research did not.
The sorts of reasons that mean your blithe assertion that Fusion will follow a similar time-table from 'first reactor' to 'commercial implementation,' are based on comparing apples to oranges. Yes, Fission and Fusion are both nuclear 'fruit,' but they function
literally in the opposite way of each other, and one of them is just much, much,
much easier to do than the other.
P.S. You may have noticed I didn't mention when the first fusion bomb was tested, even though I did for the fission bomb. That's because fusion bombs are actually two-stage nuclear weapons that need a
fission detonation in order to create the energy necessary to trigger the secondary fusion detonation. That's how hard it is to make fusion happen. Hard enough that it's standard practice to kick it off with a fission nuke.