Conspiracists and media brainwashed people will react this way no matter what. Doesn’t matter whether it’s secretive or not. It’s not about you or the subject matter but their need to feel important or in possession of some truth THEY don’t want you to know.
I suspect its less about the need to feel special than you imagine.
My take is that these folks can't accept that nobody is actually driving. It terrifies them to realize that we are all aboard a rudderless ship, so they imagine these secret cabals to be able to sleep at night.
Take COVID. There is insufficient proof that it was the result of lab work, but many many people prefer that warm fuzzy thought over acknowledging that mutating is just what viruses do, and always have done. Knowing that we're all one unlucky mutation away from grisly death is just too much for some folks. "It can't happen again, we shutdown that lab!"
To those people it has to be a nice, neat conspiracy. That way someone is in control, and if we just put those few villains in their place everyone will be safe from viruses, economic instabilty, immigrants, and the boogey man forever.
Steam power is no joke if you actually look at the numbers. At this scale, it lets you move energy around and convert it to electricity in fewer steps, with fewer losses, than any other strategy.
We are still trying to solve the problem that we can't keep the plasma hot long enough to create fusion energy, so working on exotic conversion schemes is one step too far.
Consider also how complex these reactors already are, it makes sense to use the simplest method that we know works well.
Makes sense, but from a layman perspective it seems like introducing additional complexity and lots of inefficient, high-loss transmission steps.
We start with detached electrons moving at high speeds (plasma). We want detached electrons moving at moderate speeds (electrical current). And yet, the intermediate steps involve everything from heat, steam, large-scale mechanical forces and magnetic induction, just to get back to the electrons?
It feels more like the "pull in a 500MB framework instead of writing the function yourself" kind of simplicity.
There are lots of ideas, like using a reverse cyclotron (a particle decelerator) to drive a turbine, or harnessing the photo-electric effect (essentially solar panels, but for x-rays).
