“Long touted as an inexhaustible energy source for the next century, fusion as it is now being developed will
almost certainly be too expensive and
unreliable for commercial use.”
Lidsky was advocating movement to advanced fuels. Unfortunately, his PhD student Todd Rider shot down most of those schemes (the ones using non-Maxwellian plasmas). After that, Lidsky transitioned to fission and spent the rest of his career working on that.
If fusion is to have a glimmer of hope, it's D-3He (which produces maybe 5% of the neutrons of DT). But 3He is very difficult to get. Mining the moon for it is probably impractical, because the concentration of 3He in the regolith is too low (and the moon could only power Earth for about 1000 years even if it could be mined).
Perhaps. On the other hand, there are many more technologies than there are market niches for them to fill, so most technologies will be losers.
I see nothing that tells me fusion won't be a loser. The attachment some people have to it is bizarre. It's like they were told when they were young and naive that fusion was going to be the future, and are unable to revise their programmed opinions in light of contrary evidence.
How can you tell that wind and solar are losers? Their market shares are expanding rapidly across the world. They seem to be winning in the marketplace, not losing.
They provide less than 1% of the worlds energy needs and even if you project up to 2040 they are still only going to be providing around 3% of the worlds energy needs. How is that winning?
So perhaps you are the one who's been too tied to one specific narrative that's not holding up to reality.
In the magical world in which your argument there would be correct, technologies jump from 0 to dominant market share in a single discontinuous leap.
But we do not live in that cartoon universe. Here in real world, market share increases nearly continuously. On the way from 0 to 100, it passes near all the intermediate points.
What distinguishes a losing technology is not that it ever had a low market share -- all winning technologies did at some point -- but that they stop growing, and start losing market share. That describes nuclear, not renewables.
"As it is now being developed"