[myrmidon]

Sure but those are not really equivalent/comparable in scale; just looking at power/size and conceptual distance from commercial viability, the Chicago pile does not even match up to something like SPARC or JET, much less ITER.

A more fitting comparison to ITER would be something like Fermi-1 or other prototype designs at almost commercial scale, IMO, and those were multi-year, large projects too (and fission is much simpler than fusion, which obviously also helps).

[pfdietz]

The X-10 reactor at Argonne went critical less than a year after CP-1, with a power of 500 kW, rising to 4 MW in 1944. The Hanford B reactor, with a power of 250 MW, was in operation less than two years after CP-1 went critical.

[pfdietz]

Correction: the X-10 reactor was at Oak Ridge, not Argonne.