The ITER project alone is expected to be 20 billion dollars.
None of the current commercialization schemes, in which 80% of the energy comes from the release of neutrons, are especially preferable to fission reactors. It's still a process that creates "nuclear waste." It's still a very expensive process. One of the purported attractions of fusion reactors, "walk away" safety, is matched by many modern fission reactor designs.
Commercialization of aneutronic fission is still science fiction.
It seems to me that anyone who comes up with a plausible back-of-the envelope fusion design can stir up some level of funding, even for cold fusion experiments which got a very bad reputation after the Fleischmann–Pons fiasco.
More money doesn't seem to push the process forward in any proportional way.
When I was in high school one of my dad's friends took me to an open house at his work where they were building some kind of plasma injector for the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor. That was more than forty years ago.
In contrast, people were building nuclear power plants, ships, and submarines just fifteen years after Fermi built the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1. Even without the wartime push to build the atomic bomb and later cold war pressures, I suspect the development of fission reactors would have been fairly rapid after the first successful reactor was built. It seems fusion is fundamentally a much more difficult problem.
I won't disparage fusion research, but I wouldn't bet the house, our civilization, or our natural world on it.
If you are optimistic and enthusiastic about fusion you can find refuge here:
https://focusfusion.org
= new reply since forum marked as read
