Ironically there was notable news in the fusion reactor space this week as Gemini 4, building on the work of Matt Landreman and GPT-6 Astra a little while ago, expanded counterexamples to Grad's conjecture which had claimed exact solutions for controlling a key aspect of fusion were impossible.
So fusion may actually be more around the corner thanks to the advances of capabilities of AI which helped prove that the fusion problems aren't as hard as they were thought to be for decades.