[DennisP]

I guess the answer depends on which country you're talking about. The U.S. government pioneered nuclear power but has done very little with it over the past several decades, and has impeded private efforts. Canada has a regulatory system friendlier to reactor startups than the U.S., and at least one molten salt reactor company (Terrestrial Energy) is making good progress there. China has an aggressive government program developing every type of GenIV reactor, and Terrapower moved there after giving up on the U.S.

This article mainly covers the MIT fusion effort. For years they struggled to keep their government funding, despite their tokamak having the most powerful magnetic field of any in the world. They finally lost that battle, and now private investors are stepping in. It doesn't appear that there was an alternative.

Government can obviously throw more money but it tends to be more conservative about what it funds. And private funding can go pretty far; it was interesting to see that TAE (Tri Alpha Energy, an aneutronic fusion effort) is up to $800 million in funding. They started work in 1999, so long-term fundamental research does seem to be achievable in a startup setting.

[dmix]

Besides, comparing the efficacy or ability of government's in 1940s wartime vs the modern nation states is a terrible idea and is very weakly related. In terms of pure scale, administrative top heaviness, legislative/regulatory oversight has expanded 100x in the past century, the degree of economic intervention, access to talent in peacetime, etc are all vastly different.

Even NASA in the peacetime 1950-60s which was so famously efficient and effective was largely the result of talent quickly absorbed from private industry and academia into one organization. It was a newish organization which held many of the benefits of non-gov/private organizations, as they were not yet fully affected by the heavy bureaucratic and political load which hits every government agency over time.

The type of stuff that scares away the raw talent and creatives and shifts to a system which values people who play politics and shifts power to administrative roles over the producers. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html