> If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed.
This is the reason that NSF exists - many exciting and potentially promising future technologies are not commercially viable. We invest in NSF to fund the foundational research to get to a place where ideas are commercially viable enough for industry to fully develop and implement them.
Also, there is also (internal) overhead in industrial research organizations, and there are similar problems of optimal resource allocation in any organization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to do better, but I think it’s selective logic to apply these critiques only to the public sector.
This is the reason that NSF exists - many exciting and potentially promising future technologies are not commercially viable. We invest in NSF to fund the foundational research to get to a place where ideas are commercially viable enough for industry to fully develop and implement them.
Also, there is also (internal) overhead in industrial research organizations, and there are similar problems of optimal resource allocation in any organization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to do better, but I think it’s selective logic to apply these critiques only to the public sector.