[r3012]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

“It will be the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor.”

Does the $3.9B spent on ITER not count?

https://www.science.org/content/article/cost-skyrockets-unit...

[vlovich123]

$80 Billion was spent between 2014 and 2017 on R&D of autonomous vehicles [1]. That's 12 Billion / year (& numbers from a while back - I'm sure investment has kept going). The US government spends ~18 Billion on the entire DOE, the majority of which appears to be keeping facilities running / maintenance (even though it classifies all of that as R&D) [2]. Fusion saw about ~4.7 Billion in funding in 2022 [3].

Orders of magnitude matter and fission / fusion R&D has been criminally underfunded for decades.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/gauging-investment-in-sel...

[2] https://www.energy.gov/ne/our-budget

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/nuclear-fusion-report-private-inves...