The whole thing was designed to be a money sink from day one, draining money away from research that might actually succeed.
The UK's HS2 project is projected to cost in the ballpark of £50 billion. This is literally a railway line—something that people have been building for a couple of centuries now. Sure, there's a bunch of land acquisition and construction, but it's still a bit of a joke how expensive it's got.
The F-35 project has an estimated lifetime cost of US$1.5 trillion. This is a full two orders of magnitude more than ITER. Sure, this is meant to be spread out over the next 50 years or so, but the initial production cost over-runs were so big it isn't even funny.
Plenty of mass rapid transit systems easily run into the tens of billions of American/Australian/Singapore dollars/pounds sterling/euro.
In contrast to all of these, the money given to ITER is a complete pittance for the sort of science and results that it is expected to generate from the late 2020s. It is a big construction project, similar to a large airport or skyscraper. (Let's not even talk about how expensive Berlin Brandenburg airport got—it's a bunch of bitumen tarmac and a handful of buildings that managed to punch past 6 billion euro.) Its construction has steadily and consistently progressed in the past eight years that I've been paying close attention to it. I am fully confident that it will meet its timeline of first plasma in the late 2020s. Probably closer to 2025, actually.
And the F-35 was the first mass produced Generation 5 fighter and it still is the only one. Definitely not useless for deterring enemies of freedom such as Iran, Russia and China.
Fusion has an alternative: Fission.
Sure, it might not be as sustainable in the long term (although with wide deployment of Breeder Reactors it might be), but we have enough Uranium for the short term anyway.
And we have many decades of experience with them, how to deploy them most economically, how to use them with the least downtime (more than 90% uptime in many reactors) and so on.
A bit more realistically, one could describe ITER's top goals as photo ops for politicians, checking boxes for diplomats, and life-long employment for careerists. Wikipedia's summary has conceptual design work ending in 1990, but tokamak assembly not starting 'till 2020. They're hoping for "first plasma" in ~2034.
That is not the timeline of a project where scientific results or technological success actually matter to the folks in charge.
What is the correct time-line for a project that exists at the boundaries of theoretical physics and mega-engineering?
In the history of humanity's major projects, 50 years is not even a blip. Europe's grand cathedrals took centuries to complete.
If your degrading climate and straining electrical grid need economical & at-scale fusion power NOW, that's a rather different situation.
When stimulated by burning military needs, fission technology went from the the first fission experiments in the US in Jan'39, to the Chicago Pile (first nuclear chain reaction) in Jan'42, to military use of fission bombs in Aug'45, to routine operational deployments of fission-powered military submarines (a very demanding application) the late 1950's.
Fusion power is not a realistic solution to global warming. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, where every single current fusion power project hits its declared milestones successfully, fusion power will not be a major part (say, more than 1%) of global electricity production by 2100. Renewables, fission, and degrowth are the only possible solutions to avoid climate catastrophe. Fusion might be a path to greater reliability and prosperity in the subsequent centuries, if we avoid the worse outcomes of global warming.
> When stimulated by burning military needs, fission technology went from the the first fission experiments in the US in Jan'39, to the Chicago Pile (first nuclear chain reaction) in Jan'42, to military use of fission bombs in Aug'45, to routine operational deployments of fission-powered military submarines (a very demanding application) the late 1950's.
Fusion reactions are incredibly more complex than fission. All you need to make a fission power plant is a large-ish mass of fissile material clumped together - it heats up and boils water. The rest is control to prevent various runoffs or runaway reactions.
In contrast, fusion requires inchomprenaibly large pressures applied to a gas to even get one pair of atoms to fuse. Then, the energy of the fusion event tends to push other atoms away, requiring even more pressure to keep the reaction going. The only conceivable way to achieve this is using extraordinarily powerful magnets, and even the most powerful we know how to make require special shapes to actually achieve the required pressures in a relatively tiny volume. Then of course, they need cooling, and the whole structure needs to be solid enough to hold the mass of the magnets.
So, fusion needs special magnets, special mathematical shapes, and numerous engineering challenges to contain all of these. It's not in any way surprising that it is going to take much more time to develop than fission took.
Not to mention, the atom bomb was developed using enormous resources. The paultry 100B dollars over 50 years that ITER will probably take is nothing compared to the Manhattan Project (compared to the GDP of the time). The Manhattan Project at one time employed 133,000 people. Give ITER 65,000 employees and see if they can accelerate their time-line.
Nitpick: Yes, the Manhattan Project got far more money and people than ITER. But:
- ITER is merely one of >100 fusion power experiments - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fusion_experiments
- Cost/time trade-offs are not linear. The MP's war-priority timeline created enormous inefficiencies. Vs. fusion power research has been going for ~7 decades now. If you add up the budgets of the >100 experiments, over 70 years - then what's the comparison?
You have finite resources
-and-
Excessive CO2 is pushing the only place where your species can live closer and closer to "no longer inhabitable" status
...then how many decades and $billions should you pour into a line of research which shows no signs of real-world utility, after 6+ decades and umpteem $billions of research?
As other commenters have said, ITER's budget is pretty small compared to both other similar projects, and to the magnitude of the potential pay-off.