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Presumably because everyone in MCF has been waiting for ITER for decades, and JET is being decommissioned after a last gasp. Every other tokamak is considerably smaller (or similar size like DIII-D or JT-60SA).

Much of the interesting tokamak engineering ideas were on small (so low-power) machines or just concepts using high-temperature superconducting magnets.

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It's hard to believe that after all of this time, ITER is still almost a decade away from first plasma.

There's the common joke that fusion is always 30 years away, but now with the help of ITER, it's always 10 years away instead.

The really depressing part is if you plot rate of new delays against real time elapsed, the projected finishing date is even further.

This is why much of the fusion research community feel disillusioned with ITER, and so are more interested in these smaller (and supposedly more "agile") machines with high-temperature superconductors instead.

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