Possible, but unlikely (imo). It's just that private business doesn't really do large-scale multi-decade pure research efforts with far-off ROI, and governments have chosen to spend money elsewhere. Hence, progress is steady, but slow.
I don't buy this. Generating electricity from fission is stupid simple once you figure out that piling a bunch of uranium produces heat (literally what Fermi did in Chicago in '42).
The safety features to keep the whole thing regulated, not melting, and to avoid poisoning everyone around it obviously aren't simple, but the process of creating and capturing energy as electricity is.
By contrast, the process of capturing the energy and converting it is a huge part of the challenge with fusion.
Fusion power has the potential to be a serious game changer and everybody should have access to it.
The problem is that nobody knows how to build a functioning reactor yet or if it's even possible to build a functioning reactor. It's very possible that we could throw trillions of dollars at this and still not figure it out.