ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

The reason why solar is not going to work mostly is because there is no legitimate mass installation of batteries that can handle the demand of energy. And the reason why the batteries cannot handle the demand of energy is because governments are not serious about deploying more, and people are already comfortable with the quality of life they already have, so neither are going to step up to make this work. And to be fair, why should the average citizen impose restrictions on themselves to solve this crisis? It's not realistic. Governments are supposed to be the ones to make these initiatives. Analogy: I hate having to pay for taxes, but I like that the government gets it from everyone, so that it can implement common services that benefit a lot of people, which wouldn't be possible otherwise.

The only way is nuclear fission because, as you said, it is proven to be safe and reliable. However, the people have spoken: They do not want "dangerous" nuclear reactors around, even if those impressions were formed by reactors designed and built in the 1950s-1960s. I personally think this is a shut case. There is no convincing of the people to go to nuclear fission anymore.

At this point it looks like ITER is hampered by it's relatively old supeconductor technology (ultra low temp/moderate field strength traditional magnets vs high temp/high field REBCO magnets).

Where do you see the crisis? Unless you want to provide everybody with an abundance of energy, people need food and shelter, some electricity for electronics and some transportation once in a while.

Of course, any amount of energy can be burned for simulations and bitcoins but that's simply limited by supply. There will be a crisis when bitcoins and simulations are more valuable than human lives, but that's not changed by offering more energy.

I assume by "energy crisis" you mean "how do we continue to generate energy while drastically decreasing climate effects"? Because if we're not worried about climate there's no looming energy crisis. There's plenty of oil, gas, and coal out there still.

And so if we're talking about climate stuff... is nuclear really the only way? Renewables continue to get cheaper and scale up; grid storage with batteries and pumped hydro is already a thing, and plenty of other storage methods are in development, it seems unlikely not a single one of them will turn out to be useful?

Plus, carbon capture for fossil fuel electrical generation is possible, just expensive, and not all fossil fuels are equally bad for the climate, so possibly carbon capture + cleaner fossils could be part of the future, too?

I think people have been saying "it has to be nuclear, so it has to be fusion" since way before we had the alternative sources (and storage) we now have, and are continuing to develop. Is it just a trope now, that maybe should be revisited?

(I find the possibility of fusion power really exciting and interesting. I'm just not sure it's necessary)