You have a fantastic mindset in that you can call multiple billions of dollars "almost nothing"
Presumably, the operative fact here is that it would mostly be other people's money, and no one minds spending that wildly
Presumably, the operative fact here is that it would mostly be other people's money, and no one minds spending that wildly
the question is "are we ready?". With nuclear energy we were on the brink of nuclear war during various periods of time, and the natural limitations of the technology help to limit the access to it. The success of fusion in non-Tokamak devices, something like inertial confinement and mixed schemas, brings the risk of a new class of weapons, something along neutron bomb (or boosted fission) without fission primary, which thus wouldn't be subject to technological limitations rooted in the fission.
A fusion bomb necessarily needs a transient, extreme ignition, which I believe can only be achieved with a fission bomb (even with the truly massive fission energy building an H-bomb took a while!).
>A fusion bomb necessarily needs a transient, extreme ignition, which I believe can only be achieved with a fission bomb
Inertial confinement doesn't really need much energy. It needs huge power, huge energy density (notice that power != energy). Fission primary is the best way to achieve that of course, yet Sandia Z-machine or LNL NIF lasers achieve power enough for ignition too while not spending any noticeable amount of energy (NIF uses old lasers so it consumes more energy than it would if it was built with today's lasers). Both devices - Z-machine or a NIF-like with the old lasers replaced by modern solid state ones - are already of the size on the scale of 10-20 shipping containers and are capable of burning something like a grain size pellets which creates neutron flux deadly in the area of the size like that LNL NIF building. To me it seems like there are really great chances that either of them would be miniaturized enough to produce a space engine as well as a weapon (to which our civilization doesn't look ready).
[1] http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/Highlights.pdf
edit: clarity
On page 17, Fusion research for the NIF of ~480M is outlined. We could debate for a long time about how this is more of PR move, and not realistic. In the parent, this is where I talk about Nuclear Weapons research. For this to make power you literally need to drop millions of pellets of gold plated deuterium one after the other to create 'power', all the while firing the lasers like 100X faster than they can currently be fired. You decide if that's attainable.
On page 44, the supposed ~400M a year is outlined and in the discussion notes. "The FY 2014 Budget Request funds U.S. contributions to the ITER project for long-lead procurements required in construction of the facility; the majority of these contributions will be spent on in-kind hardware sourced from U.S. industries, national laboratories, and universities" Which is basically a retelling of my comment about the ITER 'boondoggle'. There is also a gov't sentence on how they money will go to existing projects, which is really lip service to Fusion research and mostly used for Public Education (very good!)
General research on the 'sun' is very far afield to say that it applies to harnessing fusion to create electricity.
But again, it's super easy to spend money that isn't yours, to fix problems you don't really understand. It's just not very often useful.
Arguing that his idea would be spending "other people's money," is a non-sequitor. Following that logic nobody should have any say in how the government spends money, because no single person is contributing the majority of funding.
Well, when you consider that the Iraq war cost to the USA has been at least 1 trillion (this is not just what the DoD spent), spending tens of billions on fusion research doesn't sound so bad.