Comment by Retric

I really don’t trust that LLM estimate, they are really bad at that kind of thing but for the sake of argument let’s take that as a baseline.

ITER is supposed to be a 10-20x return on energy provided (10x being a basically guaranteed minimum) which means it may or may not be better depending on the specific bomb design, but it’s not massively better.

People talk about fusion as useless and slow but the current record holder in steady state was first turned on in 1983 and hit 0.67 in 1997. It’s not a failure of the underlying technology, it’s a near total lack of investment that’s stalled progress. ITER was started under the first Bush presidency and scaled back to a minimum design. It could have easily been built 20+ years ago if it was an actual priority.