[arethuza]

There are a lot of fascinating engineering issues with projects like ITER - which are starting to scale up towards a commercial scale fusion plant. For example the ITER cryostat is apparently the largest high-vacuum chamber ever built:

http://www.iter.org/newsline/294/1792

[apaprocki]

The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER, which wasn't even built yet. I'm not sure what wound up happening. I visited the one at MIT and got to see it fire live from inside the control room, but the postdocs were all sad that we were canning working primary research for what seemed like a complicated construction boondoggle. I hope they found another way to fund the research!

[ZenoArrow]

I don't understand what you mean by "The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER". ITER is a tokamak, the world's largest (if/when it's completed), so funding for tokamaks is not a problem.

[Ygg2]

That has little to do with ITER. They could fund tokamaks by diverting some cash from other budgets.