If global warming will be more significant then is predicted now I believe they will suddenly invest 100x more into this technology. This and nuclear plants are only reasonable way how to have available energy for some 'CO2 removal' projects...

Is money more limiting than time though? Nine woman and a child analogy comes to mind.

Fusion is notoriously underfunded.

More money means you can buy better gear, hire more workers, complete projects faster and run multiple parallel sites to complete various goals at the same time.

Of course there is some point where adding more funding will not advance the speed as much anymore but I doubt were even close to that point at the moment.

Why is it so underfunded? The first country to build one will be taking a big step to reducing their dependence on other countries for energy. I can understand big oil exporters not wanting to push it too much (although it's unlikely to come into fruition for the current generation of politians), but for others isn't it a no brainer?

Historically, Fusion has been bad at predicting when it's going to be ready for prime time, that plus very early fusion experiments turned out to be a lot of duds. Just think of the Cold Fusion hype (on a side note; cold fusion does work, µCF replaces electrons with muons in the hydrogen atom which reduces the radius of the atomic nucleus such that fusion becomes possible at room temperature and far below but generating the necessary muons is a fools game) and the various other nuclear fusion failures.

Fission on the other hand could report a lot of results and success and, at the time, seemed to be infallibly safe.

Same reason preventative medicine is not practiced. The upfront costs are great and the out come not certain leaving many hesitant to invest in something they may never benefit from. Especially if your country has more immediate pressing matters that you could fix right now with that money.

Another (completely stupid) reason is that it's "nuclear" energy. The general public has a hard time understanding that fusion and fission have very different risk profiles. I recall that after Fukushima some countries cut their budget for fusion research because nuclear energy is clearly bad and unpopular.

>Why is it so underfunded?

- Oil/coal/natural gas lobbyists and interests which hinder tax payer funded research.

- The fact that there is no guarantee we will ever figure it out and no idea whatsoever as to how much it will cost to figure it out. Investors like returns, in their lifetime, leaving largely tax payer funded research as the greatest source of funds... see above.

And then with government-funded research... if a government figures out fusion, what do you do with it? Do you license it to private industry? Do you make state-owned power plants?

If you give it to private it industry, it's going to get to other nations. If it gets to other nations, you lose non-electrical power and create potential strategic issues, which means you are motivated NOT to share the technology.

It sucks.

I wish we could all just get along, fund stuff like this and space exploration, and get over petty politics before our species goes extinct.

I'd argue fusion is actually overfunded, if you go by its likelihood to actually deliver a competitive source of energy. A clean sheet energy R&D program would invest very little in nuclear fusion.

Given climate change, giving it to other nations is exactly the right thing to do, even from a purely self-interested perspective. Nobody wins if coal plants in China tip us into runaway warming.

And that's another reason ITER et al are very broad international projects: everyone wins when the project wins, and nobody can stall one project by poaching Von Braun for their own scheme.

Because we already have a functioning fusion reactor.

Utility-scale PV now costs only $43/MWh. Investing in developing fusion reactors makes very little economic sense compared with capturing the output of the fusion reactor we already have.

The research should still be done, of course. It can have benefits to a future interstellar civilization - but until we're interstellar, PV is far, far more compelling.

We have a functioning fusion reactor for some portion of the day. It has a really annoying duty cycle though.

Cheap intermittent sources are sufficient to destroy the economic case for expensive baseload sources. The latter have to be able to sell their output most of the time or else their economic case collapses entirely.

Nine women can't have one child faster, but on average they can have about nine times as many children in nine months as one woman. It really depends what your goal is and the bottleneck in reaching that goal whether or not that analogy holds.