Risks aside, you're only emphasizing my point. Why hasn't the Capitalist West tried to harvest at least solar energy with Solar Power Satellites as well documented and envisioned during the O'Neill era? The answer is that the West is now eating its own belly and prefers to seek profits in that fashion other than expanding the civilization. The asteroid belt contains a large multiple of Humanity's current wealth -- at least 3 orders of magnitude. Do I really need to spell out that it's a pure investment decision to spend a trillion dollars now in order to access 1000 times Humanity's current wealth, as represented in the Asteroid Belt? You'd think that that was a no-brainer. Investment consortiums should have been formed and should have raced to build launching methods in order to exploit that huge wealth base.
But we didn't. Our civilization instead failed mentally and preferred to engage in fraud and war in order to make a few more millionaires and billionaires. These "great men" (hah!) lacked the moral fiber to understand that they could become trillionaires from exploiting the resources of Earth's orbit, the Moon, and then the Asteroid Belt.