Indeed, this is no baby, but a random blob of cells. Two things we can be certain of:
1. No economically viable hot-neutron Tokamak fusion plant will ever be built;
2. Every cent wasted on this, instead of being spent on building out solar, wind, and storage, brings climate catastrophe incrementally closer.
It is just barely possible that something learned while fooling with this stuff will turn out to be helpful for making a practical non-Tokamak fusion system for spacecraft propulsion. The plasma fluid-dynamics physicists employed on these massive boondoggles are who would make that. But the longer they bumble about with this, the longer it will be until they can get started on that.
Every cent wasted on this, instead of being spent on building out solar, wind, and storage, brings climate catastrophe incrementally closer.
But in the real world the money going into this is on top of that going into solar / wind / … and not instead of. The nature of the climate crisis is such that we need to stop debating which things to do and just do all the things unless we genuinely run into limits of what we can spend, which we are nowhere near reaching.
We need to spend the money on things that will help, and take away the money from things which are not helping. Those latter things include weapons, internal-combustion vehicles, Portland cement, and Tokamak fusion projects.
For the past decade, total US spending has been at or below $600 million/year, or 0.003% of total US GDP. Even with my low expectations of success or viability, the research itself is worth pursuing. US spending is a large fraction of global fusion spending, and though I don't have an aggregate total, it is also in all likelihood too small to matter.
There are vastly larger areas of expenditure that are far more harmful to achieving a sustainable, renewable, carbon-neutral energypath. Pressent fossil-fuel based infrastructure and exploration is among the leading candidates. You should be focusing your ire there, or other similarly significant areas.
IDK. I guess I'm fine with it. Keeping the lights on. I more or less agree with Saul Griffins: Fission and maybe fusion will be important in a few decades. As a successor to renewables. Useful if we survive this key hole event.
Of all the things we waste money on, I don't much resent Dream Big efforts like fusion, space exploration, and stuff.
1. No economically viable hot-neutron Tokamak fusion plant will ever be built;
2. Every cent wasted on this, instead of being spent on building out solar, wind, and storage, brings climate catastrophe incrementally closer.
It is just barely possible that something learned while fooling with this stuff will turn out to be helpful for making a practical non-Tokamak fusion system for spacecraft propulsion. The plasma fluid-dynamics physicists employed on these massive boondoggles are who would make that. But the longer they bumble about with this, the longer it will be until they can get started on that.