Please have a look how frigging huge ITER is. There is no other way to put it. This thing has its own campus. It is also delayed because it is the first of its kind and also underfunded with some mismanagement on top. But
ITER is a mess. It's a stereotypical government program that will do little to advance fusion science and will take so long to build and be so expensive that it will be of questionable value even if they manage to finish it.
Magnetic confinement fusion like ITER is no less of a boondoggle. Maybe even more so because the progress is intentionally slow in spite of not having a dual-role for “stockpile stewardship.” ITER is being funded not just by the US but by many countries, started development in 1985, detailed design in 2001, and construction in 2013, but it’s not even PLANNED to get full fusion until 2035. 2035!
Plus, it won’t even generate electricity at all. That’s planned for the DEMO reactor that won’t start operation until 2051 at earliest. It is depressingly slow if you think one of the main reasons we should be developing alternative energy sources is to address climate change. It’s so bad as to qualify as a waste and maybe even a negative investment as it’s pulling a bunch of researchers toward a project that literally has no hope of being relevant to fighting climate change (as its first possible kilowatt-hour of electricity won’t start until 30 years from now, well after we’ve exhausted our carbon budget for 2 degrees C of warming).
ITER alone has absorbed about as much investment as the entire Manhattan project, in inflation adjusted terms. That’s just one project to produce a prototype reactor. Fusion has been very heavily funded, to lots of hype but very little evident progress. Sometimes throwing money at a problem just isn’t the answer.
I've always wondered: why exactly is ITER so expensive, and slow? Is the engineering required at such a standard that it should takes decades of planning and construction and tens of billions of dollars? The timeline is so dilated (started in 1988, first plasma planned for 2025!) it feels like the kind of project that's expected to be cancelled from the start.
It just doesn't strike me as obvious that reducing the major radius by a few meters would have such a huge impact on cost/timelines.
BTW, ITER isn't even scheduled to be turned on to produce research results at scale until 2027. That's another 14 years before they even do something interesting!?
If I recall correctly, the ITER project was very badly managed until 2015, resulting in the project being about 6 years late. A new management took over then, and the project is now moving on pretty swiftly. But indeed it's taking way too long...
I think a problem with ITER for PR isn't the cost. It's time. I learned about it and got excited more than a decade ago. It'll still take years of time for it to be finished.
I'm not really sure how to express this, but the huge amount of time just diminishes the impact of it for me.
Scale is everything for fusion (plasma). ITER is very important, as it represents the current most likely way. (Hence the name.)
That said, it's big, design by committee, slow, meticulous, etc.
It's not a fail fast market-driven experiment.
Also, most of the money is spent on the fundamentals, planning, developing operational knowhow, basic material science and plasma vessel engineering.
All in all, it could be better, but at least ITER is actually being built. MIT's ARC is still somewhere between "secured funding for a scaled down prototype" and actually will build something. Though it's great news, that they got funding (from Eni, an Italian energy company).
ITER reminds me of the Space Shuttle, the Joint Strike Fighter, and (to give a private sector example) Intel Itanium.
Large bureaucracies seem prone to fixation on huge omnibus money sponge projects that "everyone can get behind" but that starve out everything else. The fact that these projects are so big tends to make them slow and not very innovative.
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