Business Bro interjections aside, the last 20% is probably the most important part, starting around 17:40. It's pretty much my exact point of view.

If you start @13:00 and watch for 35 seconds, you can see who lurks hubski:

I have been wondering if there's a very different approach from all of this that might be superior. Instead of using the energy from fusion to boil water and going through turbines to generate electricity, if you're clever enough, you might be able to go straight to generating a voltage across the chamber

Anyway. idk, maybe ITER is ultimately the (too late) scaling up of a dead-end design, but the analysis tools and know-how that are developed are very, very valuable. There's already papers about the active monitoring and control designs, data formats, instrumentation, etc. Don't get that with private. Just patents and trade knowledge, if that. We could have just put the recommended money into fusion, and maybe even achieved it, but instead, the united states public sector of fusion is slipping far behind almost all of the western world, and my god if that doesn't just sum up This Magic Capitalist Moment.

To kill a dead horse deader, this is why we don't have fusion yet:

LOL I brought up this plot and study a couple conferences ago and one of the senior scientists was like "OHHHhh, that's just Princeton propaganda!", I guess because they're one of the only places left with DoE magnetic confinement fusion facilities? I thought he was kidding. He wasn't. Which is even funnier, I think. And sad.

I'm very skeptical that significant, feasible, scalable, whatever net gain is possible within ten to fifteen years, from this point. And that makes sense, given the recommended total vs. actual total $$'s of fusion funding in the plot above. The rest of the world isn't terribly dissimilar, but there has been more gov't funding recently, compared to the US. If it's more than fifteen years 'til fusion, unless some business secures like $40 billion, say... How can we expect businesses to allow the scientists and engineers to continue indefinitely? What happens with the knowledge gained from the attempt if the plug is pulled (or many plugs) during an economic downturn?

I think we'll get fusion, eventually, but it should be a good ol' fashioned tug of war between business and government. If governments of the world pooled $1 trillion over the next five years, that'd probably guarantee it within ten, but it's a question of both time and money (James Webb had almost a bottomless budget, still took much, much longer than advertised, and most money went to private contractors anyway). Fusion in five, even ten years could save tens of trillions of dollars in potential climate change damages.

Should a private firm(s) succeed, I'm not sure that I like the idea of one or two companies controlling the on-demand-and-clean energy market, but I guess even a worldwide fusion energy business monopoly is preferable to no fusion ever, though.

Entry 2 of:

Ask me anything, this is what I get paid to think about. Oh. Wait, no, no it's not.