A prototype would only be a portion of the development costs. The private world would foot most of the bill, assuming that economically viable fusion reactors were demonstrated.

These are prestige projects. They wouldn't build them, if the design were cheap. Another example, is the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center in Astana, Kazakhstan. It's a 150m high tent structure which supposedly cost $400 million to produce.

This brings up an important point. The primary purpose of ITER is to immunize 34 national governments against accusations that they aren't doing publicly funded fusion research. That's the primary reason there's only one big approach rather than several different approaches.

NASA above is notorious for doing singleton missions in identifiable niches (like one Mars rover at a time, one space station at a time, or one space telescope at a time). That's because having one such thing is a great selling point for a US congresscritter, but having two or more is no more valuable. They don't even need to do very much (which is a serious current problem with the International Space Station).

There won't be a "few different approaches" unless someone in power has an actual interest in the research rather than the prestige of the research. For example, the US military has at least two different fusion research projects going because they want nuclear explosion data (for the National Ignition Laboratory) and a fusion power plant for naval ships (Polywell).

This also explains why air conditioning in Afghanistan can pull in a lot more money than fusion research. Losing a war is very dangerous to a political establishment. Ineffective fusion power research, that goes nowhere for decades, is not threatening.

Which isn't that hard either given all the junk that would be lying around.

Used lead acid batteries.

If you're going to do that, let us keep in mind the complex concepts of the "junkyard" and the "garage". There will be vast piles of exploitable crap out there.

China is a nation of men not laws. Their government can make illegal whatever they feel like. And they're pretty good at hiding whatever they want to hide.

Because what they can do is the primary constraint on what they actually do.

ITER will do absolutely nothing to develop this alleged assembly line for fusion power plants. We can stop wasting our time with this. Second, a prototype is not production infrastructure. If you're spending money on the order of building the production infrastructure just to build a car, you're doing it wrong.

In other words, ITER is useless or even actively harmful to us because it is pulling money, effort, and resources (like very skilled and very scarce labor) from valid fusion development needs and dumping it into a white elephant.

We don't need a "vast R&D science experiment facility". That sort of grotesque feature bloat naturally results in overly expensive and unproductive projects. We need focused, cheap projects that do just what we need.

So we're going to make a hundred thousand fusion reactors? First, we're speaking of prototypes not tooling an industrial factory or running a supply chain. If car makers were actually making billion dollar prototypes, then they would be doing it wrong.

One can make a working fusion reactor on a table for a few thousand dollars, maybe less. There are two conflicting demands on ITER which should have been factored out. First, the research into large scale fusion phenomena. They could have done that with a very large Farnsworth fusor or polywell device, say hundreds of meters in diameter and a few modest free-electron lasers to illuminate portions of the fusing plasma. That could be done within the current budgets of various countries.

Second, they could have focused on building a cheap, break even fusion power plant, say a tokamak or whatever. Again, that's something that would fit within the budget of several countries.

But by combining both tasks in one reactor and discarding any research into cheap approaches, the resulting reactor will be guaranteed to be pretty useless to any future efforts at economically viable commercial fusion power generation.

Opportunity cost is invisible. But the fusion research community didn't do much with the opportunities they had.

I don't get what you think oil companies earn here. Just by the US (not counting the considerable expenditures by the rest of the world), fusion research has spent over $20 billion (not adjusted for inflation). Do you seriously think that a single oil company can casually burn $2 trillion on just looking for oil? That's probably enough money to completely replace a good portion of the current oil infrastructure globally.

I find it amusing that the link above contains more of the same rationalizations about fusion research as I read here. If only we had a few more zeroes of money to spend, we'd be doing all sorts of awesome stuff. It misses the key question. What has been done with the money spent on fusion currently to justify increasing that budget?

Squandering money on fusion research is no different than squandering it on any other source. Scientific research should be no more immune to the ethics of spending other peoples' money.

Not a cent. Coal mining companies have plenty of incentive to do that research on their own.

The victims would be dead. You're not going to get very far with that approach. It also probably is illegal for the families of Chinese victims (should you happen to find them somehow) to give you that information. If not, the bureaucracy can always make it illegal whenever they feel like it.

We could of course spend one or two orders of magnitude more on fusion power. But what would we get as a result? From what I see for current fusion power and for similar scaled R&D, the result is that we would burn more money.

You keep referring to that graph like it shows something.

Takes more than money. It takes someone focused on making it happen in an economical fashion rather than just doing R&D for a few decades or centuries.

I think with a different approach, we could have it by now with the money already spent on fusion efforts.

While true, you do need to keep in mind that the environment is not everyone's highest priority. Most people (as in probably the high 90s in percentage) would in fact rather keep civilization than keep the temperature in a particular narrow range. It's not just anti-government libertarian retard neckbeards. China and India don't have that as their highest priority either.

As to your pop psychology (like use of long phrase such as "cognitive dissonance"), perhaps you should leave that to the grown ups. I've found that people who attempt to psychoanalyze others merely because they disagree are idiots.

You are no exception. Who else would rant about being held back by libertarians who at best are a very insignificant minority worldwide? Are we beaming our mental failwaves at you? Going through your trash?

Well, people are blaming Syria's disastrous agricultural policies on "climate change" (actually meaning global warming, of course). I don't know if that situation has been aggravated by pesticide abuse. But if so, then there you go.

Sure, there's a reasonable case to be made that global warming makes desertification and human-caused drought worse. But these things would happen anyway at a very severe level even in the absence of global warming.

So the answer to the grandparent's question is "Yes, I do fly off the handle much."

The original Civ V release was terrible. Sure, it had some nice tactical flavor to it (which the computer players are completely incompetent at BTW), but it loses a lot of the fun of Civ IV.

For example, there's a lot more restrictions in play - especially the penalties on placing more cities. They dropped the health mechanic of Civ IV for growing cities and population, but they replaced it with a bogus penalty to culture and research from additional cities. It just doesn't feel right. The tech tree is bogus and it's clear that they structured the tree as they did for game balance rather than any sense of realism. Even worse is the culture trees. They don't feel even remotely realistic.

Subsequent releases have helped balance that stuff out somewhat (Civ 5 does have a better religion system an the ideology conflict in the late game is nice) and add more to the mid and late games, but it still needs a lot of work. For example, in the latest variant of Civ 5 there are three different ways to trade.

The city state mechanic needs work too. A more realistic mechanic would be that the barbarians eventually settle down and form the city states (as they adopt the civilization ideas of the core civilizations). But that would mean a lot more city states than are presently in the game and a whole new mechanism for dealing with trade and city state alliances is required.

To the contrary, it's there, it's just not scaled up to the level where it'd be break even. The whole point of ITER should be to do that in a cost-effective manner not to find a way to burn several tens of billions of dollars.

Currently. It wasn't in the past, and it won't be after it ends. Just because ITER gets a bigger budget presently doesn't actually mean much. Research value isn't proportional to funding. Those other projects are about as useful as ITER for a fraction the cost such as the Polywell reactor, the National Ignition Laboratory, even some of the cold fusion stuff.

Where's the evidence? All I see are the usual white elephant projects.

That picture is pulled out of someone's ass. Those curves have no meaning. The assumption is that if we magically spent that kind of money, we'd have viable fusion. I see no reason, given what actually happened and given the US's consistent fumbling with similar scale R&D to believe that. That black line is more than ample, if fusion researchers were at all serious about developing fusion power.

Remember that air conditioning money is at least doing something useful. My view on US fusion research is that it's been a great way to keep fusion researchers from doing anything useful. That's harm in my book.