The US gives about the same amount of money to the National Ignition Facility as to the ITER project, roughly half a billion dollars per year (a bit more for NIF, a bit less for ITER). Of course, the main objective of the NIF is to assist in the stewardship of the nuclear stockpile, not to seek economic nuclear fusion. Still, it's great that they achieved this milestone. Congrats to all involved. And good luck in the future.
Fusion using lasers is an off-shoot of H-Bomb development, and advances by John Nuckolls from early laser-based fusion research in the 1960s(!) were fed back into H-Bomb research.
These fields are surprisingly related. For details, see Alex Wellerstein's book "Restricted Data", chapter 7.
MCF faces a few engineering hurdles. ICF faces several times more. Investing in a facility on the scale of NIF for ICF doesn't make much sense if the goal is economic fusion power on the grid. There are much lower hanging fruits where that money could be spent: such as on new MCF machines or a wider and shallower mix of ICF machines. Ask non-US fusion researchers how they feel about ICF if you want a proper outside perspective.
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).
I also understand that fusion in general is unlikely to be an economically-viable energy source anyway, since the reactor and any surrounding material will be relatively quickly (~few years) be made brittle by the neutron bombardment, while also becoming radioactive - meaning any fusion plant will have to be carefully and constantly torn down and rebuilt, and materials from the old plant securely stored for large amounts of time (not as large as fission waste, but still in the order of decades or centuries). There are other concerns with hydrogen escape etc, but this one seems completely fundamental.
Some methods of fusion solve this in varying ways, with liquid metal blankets, etc, or using non-neutron is fusion fuels. But that’s missing the point. There’s no path to these more viable methods of economically producing power that don’t run through the path of generating more fusion energy than it absorbs, so we start with the easier fuels first to prove we can do sustained fusion before worrying too much about neutron embrittlement.
Even if we had unobtainium that was free of radiation degradation, fusion reactors would still be unlikely to be competitive -- they're just too large and complex, and hence expensive.
The problem is that ITER is funded as a science project, and the researchers want to get as much research as possible.
So they are going to spend a lot of time studying plasma before they irradiate the vessel with fusion byproducts and it's no longer safe to take apart (for example, to add new sensors).
It's the only facility of this size so the research program is completely sequential.
We could have fusion, we just need to spend $20 billion a year for 10 years. Not $1 billion a year for 200 years.
The first job of ITER is to show that disruptions can be controlled. This is absolutely necessary, and requires access to the machine to repair it when disruptions occur. So this had better be done without tritium (or possibly even deuterium). And if they can't do it, they will never be allowed to operate the machine with tritium.
Mirrors are interesting. They hit very high performance metrics in a small budget. However they have this pesky issue of requiring an electrostatic field. Conduction losses are a killer, scale up in nasty ways, and ablate material quickly.
In terms of inexpensive neutron sources: they're perhaps some of the best we have.
I don't buy this view. You can see from the quotes these physicists don't really understand why they got this result. We don't actually know enough about what is happening with ICF of MCF or any other xF to rule out approaches. And why should I need to seek foreign opinions to confirm your view? NIF detractors grow on trees in the US. You never, ever get a story about NIF without one chiming in.
Department of Energy wasn't made when the grid came online; it was made when nuclear bombs were invented. The DoE isn't the department of electrical power security; it is the department of nuclear weapons security. The fusion energy research has been painfully underfunded because there isn't a political motivation to solve the problem. How does solving the energy crisis benefit the countries that benefit the most from it? Put another way: when you are on top of the hill, why would you flatten the landscape?
