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Uh... I would not take that graph as some sort of gospel. The truth is that even now we do not have an effective known path to economically viable fusion power generation, and if nothing else our computer simulations are indescribably better than anything they had in the late 70s. Had we blown billions more in the 80s, we probably would simply have blown billions more in the 80s and still have no fusion today.

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that may be true, but getting it (or any new technology for that matter) to the point where it’d be economically viable requires an investment at some point..

and ‘blowing’ those billions in the 80s may very-well not have paid-off with economically viable fusion power today, but i highly doubt it would have left us with nothing to show for it.

We don't really have a hell of a lot to show for what we have spent. Non-zero, sure, but a lot of the lessons we learned could certainly have been learned for a lot more cheaply if we hadn't tried to leap to the end of the process with grandiose projects built more on hope than science.

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