This field is so underfunded, but progress is still being made. Check out Commonwealth Fusion and their progress with insanely powerful compact energy efficient magnets. They recently clocked a stable 20T magnetic field.
There are many areas in science that receive significantly less funding.
I would also argue that the prevelant perception that fusion would lead to to essentially unlimited free energy is wrong. The extremely high capital costs would likely mean that fusion is unlikely to ever match solar or wind in energy production costs.
I'm not opposed to fusion/plasma research, we have much insights into nonlinear dynamics and chaotic behaviour due to this research, I disagree with the notion that this is a field that achieves incredible outcomes with small budgets, that's far from reality.
When weighed against the potential payoff fusion is very underfunded. If we make it work we basically have infinite clean energy until the heat death of the universe, not to mention a source of energy that could jet us around the solar system and beyond at speeds far beyond what anything we currently have can achieve.
The cost of ITER is not crazy for the energy industry in general. Huge energy projects are very expensive. We spend multiples of that on oil drilling every year.
They could build an Apple iFusion Reactor instead and still buy back $50B.
That's not the most costly costly project, not even close (prices in current dollars and total costs)
Apollo project: $257 billion
ISS: $150 billion.
STS: $196 billion.
Fusion energy has been constantly underfunded.
I guess you take issue with estimates like this?
I mean, think: for spinoff arguments to work, you need to have some notion of how technology would have progressed without NASA. How could one possibly figure out that contrafactual?
Apollo was ridiculously ahead of its time and was not sustainable. The entire stack was disposable and it’s pure luck that we never lost a crew. We needed a project like the ISS to do the real work to figure out how to live in space and build long lasting space hardware.
The biggest shortcoming of the project is that we never tried centrifugal gravity. There were plans for a module but it never got there.
There were plenty of non-self-referential justifications for ISS (like growing protein crystals, or space manufacturing) that never really went anywhere.
Ironically, maybe the best justification was it shows large space structures can be assembled from small units, so large launch vehicles aren't needed. NASA has of course totally ignored this lesson with SLS.
With the current state of things, I would bet that with a fully reusable orbiter like Starship, space-based solar with microwave transmitters will probably be a cheaper option than fusion. But we should work on both because we can't predict it until both are tried. It's easy to say no to a project when we don't know what the outcome will be, but we need to take on a lot of big risky projects to see which ones give outsized returns.
For fusion, this key technology limiter is the superconducting magnetic tape. Even small improvements in field strength have a dramatic non-linear improvement in fusion power gain. ITER started their design work decades ago and will continue construction for decades more. Meanwhile, SC magnetic tape technology has moved on, making the entire enterprise a dead-end waste of time and money. They got bogged down in the paperwork and bureaucracy of the “rest of the facility” with no hope of making actual working reactor.
There are many instances of this issue in industry, and in my experience large government bureaucracies are pathologically incapable of planning ahead for where the puck will be instead of where the puck was.
I like to imagine what would happen if a rich industrialist like Bezos or Musk approached the problem: First, spend a few billion on superconductor tape research and then start building many small reactors that are minimal test beds while in parallel improving the magnets. Only “go big” once the reactor can produce net power.
See also: NASA spending billions per launch on the SLS with a couple of test launches per decade while SpaceX spends millions per Starship and plans half a dozen test launches this year!
That was the last poster child for "REBCO tape will quickly solve all the problems".
Oh right - incepted in 2010, cancelled in 2021. 11 years - over a decade - and no reactor in sight.
So ITER is the correct bet: take boring technologies and build a functional fusion device with them that gets Q > 1. Because there's a fairly obvious corollary, which is that if you can somehow build better magnets, then the next reactor - DEMO, and actual power plants - can obviously be redesigned to take advantage of those magnets - they will not fundamentally change the internal dynamics of a tokamak, since it's the magnetic field shapes which matter, not the physical generators.
Everyone working with REBCO has always talked about "rapid breakthroughs" in about 5 years, and then 5 years later the story is always the same: it's considerably harder to build with these things then you'd think, they're still working through the engineering etc. It's not that it can't work, but it's not magically faster in the way people keep claiming and nor does it get you any closer to the actual goal, which is to get a Q > 1 fusion device functioning - which will, at all times, fundamentally require a very large vacuum chamber to do so unless magnetic field intensities are being vastly increased (and they're not: low-temperature superconductors can achieve far higher field intensities then high-temperature ones which is why the LHC and other particle accelerators use them[1] - some YBCO tapes might be able to do it, but manufacturing suitable quantities, of suitable quality, in long enough reels, and then winding magnets with them is an unsolved problem).
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Engineering-critical-cur...
Please cite the earliest REBCO-based fusion reactor promise date that has lapsed. I don't think reality agrees with your perception.
Importantly you can draw a straight line from REBCO-based fund raising and the amount of REBCO needed to be purchased for them. If "the engineering wasn't there" then that amount of money could not have purchased that amount of tape.
Also, how could ITER be the right bet when it costs so much and takes so long to build that it could never scale to anything more than a multi-generational science experiment (e.g. not a power source)?
This is a problem the US Navy is intimately familiar with when it comes to shipbuilding as it is currently experiencing with it's next generation aircraft carrier design.
It is incredible though to see people saying that the ITER design is "obsolete" when the actual proposed replacement technologies have ongoing papers trying to move towards practical deployment as recently literally this year.
EDIT: It is worth nothing that I could be wrong in the end if the SPARC project succeeds[1], but there's a pretty heavy asterisk on that since ITER is amongst other things, a research project - the plasma physics modelling, supporting fusion research, even manufacturing and magnet winding research and other miscellaneous construction processes are all public knowledge which is shared amongst participating nations. It's been the only game in town for decades, and no one was wrong to try and build a fusion reactor 3 decades ago when it was as desperately needed then as it is even more so now.
The most plausible IMO DT fusion scheme is Zap's, since it allows thick liquid lithium to cover much of the exposed inner surfaces. Zap's scheme doesn't even use magnets, never mind high temperature superconducting ones.
There is the larger issue of whether anything like ITER, with solid surfaces exposed to DT neutron flux, could ever be successful. ITER itself is very far out of the running as a prototype for a competitive source of heat, with volumetric power density of the reactor 400x lower than existing PWRs. A substantial part of that problem is limits on power/area through the exposed surfaces.