[nimish]

> engineering problems

This is what is holding fusion from commercial viability.

Give me a modern tokamak with 75 years of known dynamics, increase the size and magnetic field (i.e. bring high temp superconducting wires to market).

At the very least you get something as a consolation prize that has real uses vs. decades of wacky research ideas that more than likely will go nowhere.

IMO thinking of fusion as needing a "silver bullet" to viability is one of the major issues. Everyone wants the sexy new reactor concept, but nobody wants to be improving the boring donut design that's on the edge of practicality.

[r3012]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

“It will be the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor.”

Does the $3.9B spent on ITER not count?

https://www.science.org/content/article/cost-skyrockets-unit...

[vlovich123]

$80 Billion was spent between 2014 and 2017 on R&D of autonomous vehicles [1]. That's 12 Billion / year (& numbers from a while back - I'm sure investment has kept going). The US government spends ~18 Billion on the entire DOE, the majority of which appears to be keeping facilities running / maintenance (even though it classifies all of that as R&D) [2]. Fusion saw about ~4.7 Billion in funding in 2022 [3].

Orders of magnitude matter and fission / fusion R&D has been criminally underfunded for decades.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/gauging-investment-in-sel...

[2] https://www.energy.gov/ne/our-budget

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/nuclear-fusion-report-private-inves...