What a shame ITER has turned into a mess and been used as a political football. I know we've been saying fusion power is just 50 years away for 50 years but if you look at the findings of the last decade I think we are, at long last, probably quite close. We're at the stage where creating and confining a plasma is hard and in terms of energy output we are getting close to break even. There's certainly a way to go still but none of it looks like it would be a show stopper.
I've been following the ITER project for years and like a lot of big government projects it seems to have suffered from stagnation and too many leaders. It's never really felt like the goal was to build a fusion power plant it was always to understand this or that aspect of fusion power generation which is a much harder sell.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
