Way too much regulation. And the politicians and their donors are heavily invested in keeping control of high priced energy.
That’s a distinct possibility. The USA is bogged down in bureaucracy. And this technology is ripe for selling to underprivileged countries without their own hydrocarbon-based energy sources. Eventually, the USA bureaucrats would have to relent, but they could easily have given up economic leadership by that time.
Similar things happened in history when the Chinese invented the printing press & gunpowder. The technology languished due to bureaucracy, while in Europe it was adopted. Took the chinese a few hundred years to catch up, didn’t it?