I was not thinking about the current state of affairs....in which fusion is basically 'dead'....and relegated to useless international mega-demos.
Current reactors like JET, JT-60, Alcator, and NSTX are relatively large projects, but not mega-demos. Each of the above have annual budgets in the $100 million ballpark, while individual national labs have budgets dozens of times as large.
They're certainly not useless. Each has made significant advances towards resolving specific challenges in making magnetic confinement fusion work - plasma heating, plasma stability, confinement operation (learning to get past the quenches one of your links discusses), and increase heat output. One of the big concerns of the ITER designers recently has been funding the ITER design and construction while still maintaining sufficient funding at existing Tokamaks so they can continue generating data that will help refine the design of the final details for ITER.
ITER is a mega-project. If it doesn't work more or less as expected, then the Tokamak design will likely be dead, but data from the existing reactors point to ITER being the way to go - scale up to increase the temperature and density, and improve the control to enable reaching steady state operations. Even then, much of what ITER will learn will be of interest to those working on the Stellarator design, and possibly to other designs.
For reference, the entire Manhattan Project cost $23B in today's dollars.
Yes, fission is comparatively easy. It even happens naturally on earth if you have enough fissile material in one place, as it did in Oklo in Africa about 2 billion years ago. But it has enough drawbacks that over the long term we really want to phase it out in favor of something better. Dealing with those drawbacks is why modern plants are significantly different than those built in the 1940's and individually cost almost half as much as the entire Manhattan project.
Also, the $30 billion figure for fusion research includes $10 billion for inertial confinement research, overwhelmingly at the National Ignition Facility, which is primarily a weapons research facility. There's no clear development pathway between the NIF and a viable powerplant, despite what the press releases always imply.
And $30 billion over 60+ years adds up a lot slower than the $8+ billion per year I mentioned above.
No one really thinks fusion is a viable, affordable, near-term energy source anymore....its a science project in 'pure research' at this point....and funded like that.
Nor will it ever be if it doesn't get funding proportionate to its potential impact. The electricity market in the US alone is in the ballpark of $1/4 trillion annually.
What is your opinion of the Lockheed team? Seems to me their internal coil will cool the plasma.
It's similarly intriguing to the Bussard Polywell design. Both sound worth continuing research, and as I understand it Lockheed did get a decent-sized research grant. However, they also made numerous unsupported claims when they announced their research, such as suggesting they could have a working power plant ready by 2024. They're currently working at the kinds of energy levels Tokamaks were achieving in the early 60's, and I suspect several prototype generations away from having a decent idea how well their design will scale up.
They refer to "internal coils" but I don't think they really mean internal to the plasma, but internal to the chamber, as opposed to protected by the chamber walls. I wouldn't guess cooling of the plasma is the main potential issue, but rather heating of the coils.
The alternative to the Tokamak that is furthest along is the related Stellarator design, in particular the Wendelstein 7-X, which is comparable in scale to several of the Tokamak's currently operating that were built in the 80's and 90's.
