To answer your question, my understanding gleaned from reading a handful of articles on the topic is that many experts in fusion energy think that all money put into the Tokamak architecture is wasted because that architecture has been surpassed by better designs; very little transferrable knowledge can actually be learned via ITER, it doesn’t answer fundamental research questions and the engineering questions it answers weren’t worth spending ten billion dollars; and practically speaking, there’s no clear path from ITER to building a commercially viable fusion reactor, in other words, it does not actually serve a function as an engineering prototype.
“Widely believed” is a weasely enough term that I think the existence of multiple articles to this effect written by experts qualifies the stance as being “widely believed”.
To take a meta stance on the question, the fact that experts in the field of fusion energy can have this disagreement and yet the project went forward proves my original thesis that really smart people can disagree about the fundamental viability of a project, yet that project can still move forward and suck up billions of dollars due to one faction being more politically/bureaucratically successful for whatever reason. This is a coordination failure.
This is a tangent, but why is ITER almost entirely pointless? And why do you think this is “widely believed”?
To answer your question, my understanding gleaned from reading a handful of articles on the topic is that many experts in fusion energy think that all money put into the Tokamak architecture is wasted because that architecture has been surpassed by better designs; very little transferrable knowledge can actually be learned via ITER, it doesn’t answer fundamental research questions and the engineering questions it answers weren’t worth spending ten billion dollars; and practically speaking, there’s no clear path from ITER to building a commercially viable fusion reactor, in other words, it does not actually serve a function as an engineering prototype.
“Widely believed” is a weasely enough term that I think the existence of multiple articles to this effect written by experts qualifies the stance as being “widely believed”.
To take a meta stance on the question, the fact that experts in the field of fusion energy can have this disagreement and yet the project went forward proves my original thesis that really smart people can disagree about the fundamental viability of a project, yet that project can still move forward and suck up billions of dollars due to one faction being more politically/bureaucratically successful for whatever reason. This is a coordination failure.