I'm not even talking about ITER here. Let them have their own nice European pork barrel boondoggle, though I'd point out that even if it fails miserably, it's still generating valuable science and technological capabilities that cannot be generated or sustained any other way, so it's not a "waste of resources". We're talking about these projects as if they'd offer marginal, rather than _radical_ improvements in our situation, which is simply not true. If this is done this will completely upend the world and make it a better place - there's no doubt in my mind on this whatsoever. This is the _only_ environmental thing I wouldn't mind paying more taxes for, but I'd argue we don't even need that - we just need to look a little bit ahead and allocate existing resources towards longer term, riskier things benefits from which we _know_ will absolutely dwarf the investment. The reason why this is not happening is because we have trillions of dollars flowing into other troughs from which everyone involved is used to feeding. Until we disrupt those arrangements somehow our only chance of solving this is private sector investment, but private sector can't sustain things of this magnitude over an extended period of time. Not unless Musk gets involved.

Any burning plasma MCF machine will be "derived from it" in that it will incorporate the physics learned from it. The machines that come later will not be as large.

And "late" is better than never.