It's an exciting project. Breakeven isn't some magical barrier that we somehow don't know how to break, so it's headline milestones are not what excite me. It will be a platform to really look at divertors. We'll see just how the first wall at the tiny strike points in a large machine age. We'll also learn a lot about burning confined plasmas.

After working with a 50 kW gyrotron and 1 m major radius machine, the raw industrial scale of the project is awe-inspiring [0]. ITER has 20x 1 MW gyrotrons and a 6 m major radius. Every system in the machine is fascinating.

All that said, it is a slow and expensive project. The issues are mostly political. The design is very old at this point. All of this is fine, but in the context of potentially scaling up HTS supply chains to make a reactor that is much smaller, it becomes clear that the ITER path is not the one the first generation reactors will take. It's an important stepping stone in terms of plasma science and public opinion. It's going to be a lot of fun to follow its successes.

0. https://youtu.be/cvsj0nqHwic