If X is big (like say greater than 50,000 years, for example), then it's not that big a deal. Chernobyl and Fukushima won't be considered uninhabitable for that long.

Plus, you can always put another nuclear plant in that spot.

I would suggest doing a modest cost/benefit analysis first. Energy usage reduction is not that valuable for most people outside of a few big things. And who's going to consider the more ludicrous optimizations like changing your sex to male just so they can save a little energy usage?

Actually, that is correct. Nuclear waste is not pollution - until such time as a third party or the environment is exposed to it. Nuclear waste in a cooling pond is not pollution. Nuclear waste in your ground water is pollution.

You might not have noticed, but today's nuclear plants in the US are from 30 years ago.

It's not much of a buggering to be honest. I'm more concerned about poverty, overpopulation, and desertification. Some of these can be made worse through extreme global warming, but they are major problems, bigger than global warming even in the complete absence of global warming.

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.

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.