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Fusion is easy. You can even build a tiny fusion device at home.

Getting more energy from it than what's required to sustain & contain the reaction, that's the hard part. The Sun is a massive fusion reaction, true. But the actual energy density is about that of a compost pile (something like 275W/m³). It's just the size of an unimaginable number of compost piles. What's needed for "fusion power" is to make the energy density much, much higher, which of course requires more energy to contain the reaction. Does a break-even point even exist and do we even get usable amounts of power on the other side? Who knows. But if you need say, 1mW to sustain and contain a reaction that produces 1.2mW, that's pretty damn inefficient. 83% of the power output is going right back to keeping things going.

And at the end of the day, it's still going to be used for the same thing as coal, gas, and fission. Heating water to make steam to drive turbines.

In the meantime, I'd think a much better use of research funding would be looking into fission-fragment power generation. Instead of using the reaction to create heat, you shape the core in such a way that it essentially fires a particle beam in a given direction. That particle beam goes through a magnetohydrodynamic generator, and the charge and kinetic energy of those particles is converted directly into electricity. They use MHDs in some coal plants already to increase efficiency and recoup some losses from the exhaust and whatnot, but this would be scaled way up. The problem lies in the durability of the materials used, but it seems that's an easier problem than fusion, right now. It also bypasses the Carnot cycle and could eventually achieve up to 90% efficiency.

And the bonus of fission-fragment is it can use "spent" fuel from normal fission reactors, and break it down to something less nasty. So it would actually be "green" in that it also reduces existing nuclear waste if done right.

But yeah, as it stands, "green energy" is a lie. It all takes "traditional" energy to produce the equipment and to setup. Those fiberglass wind turbine blades never decompose, and are pretty dirty to construct, IIRC.

Honestly fission has gotten real damn good.

If we want something new and shiny, we could try to beat the Chicoms on Thorium Molten Salt Reactors.

It is achieved and works like all other green energy: more input than output.

How do they KNOW fusion happens for NO CHARGE in teh SUn. Where else DOES FUSION happen?

Sport Sullivan was a pioneer of green energy

...then he ruined baseball.