> Any entity that develops an unlimited, clean and cheap source of energy essentially has access to a money printer.
Well, one thing that should be clear to anyone watching the space is that fusion will be neither unlimited, clean nor cheap. At the very least, not with any approach being looked at today.
First of all, being based on state-of-the-art science and tech, it's clear that it cannot be cheap for another 20-30 years even if it was working today.
Secondly, fusion reactors will produce large quantities of radioactive waste, probably larger than fission reactors, because everything that comes in close proximity to the reactor will be bombarded by 30+ times as many neutrons than in a fission reactor (or 5x-20x as many for DD fusion), and much higher energy neutrons at that, making it brittle and radioactive. Most of the reactor components are expected to need changing every 2-4 years, by which time they will be radioactive waste. Not to mention, fusion plants will work with large amounts of tritium, which is notoriously hard to contain, making tritium leaks all but guaranteed. So, definitely not clean.
Thirdly, fusion reactors require large amounts of tritium, which is virtually non-existent on Earth and must be created in fission power plants. The neutrons from the fusion reaction can theoretically also be used to recycle tritium (when hitting the lithium blanket), but you would have to recapture 100% of the tritium produced this way to recreate fuel, which is not possible. So, to run a fusion reactor you will be limited by tritium availability, and that will mean you also need a small fission reactor, and that in turn requires uranium - so, not really that unlimited.
Not to mention, even Deuterium is not actually that easy to obtain, as you need to either get it from fossil fuels (the way it is mostly obtained today) or from water hydrolysis, which is another waste of your produced energy.
Overall, fusion seems extremely unlikely to be an economically viable source of energy in the coming decades. Every new reactor will require massive investments, it will waste a good portion of its output to keep itself running (powering the superconducting magnets, pumping coolant, void pumping the reactors, water hydrolisis, lithium processing to extract the tritium etc). It will require highly trained engineers to design, build and maintain. It will have a high risk of catastrophic damage to the reactor itself, easily vaporizing much of the investment in an instant if the magnetic containment of the plasma fails, for example, or melting down spectacularly if the cooling system fails. Virtually all components of the reactor, including the high tech magnets, will require constant replacement as they become brittle from the neutron bombardment - and all the old parts will require expensive radioactive storage for at least a few decades to centuries.