The risk calculation is: expected cost minus expected reward. The expected reward is astronomical (no pun intended!), so you're simply restating my point: fusion is not likely to work regardless of how much money we throw at it. Amazon's R&D annual budget exceeds $20b. That's one company spending half an ITER a year. The private sector has no problem coming up with those sums for ideas it deems promising. The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.
> That's one company spending half an ITER a year.
No it's not even close to the total cost of ITER. It may just pay for the cost of actually physically constructing it.
The R&D that got taxpayer funded scientists to the point where we are able to construct it at all is going to be a multiple of that.
> The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.
So you're saying that things like fission reactors, spaceflight and GPS, treatments for some rare and not-so-rare diseases, the Human Genome Project, ARPANET, everything that came out of CERN, etc. were bad ideas just because no private company could be assed to develop and build those first?
No. It's a fact that all of these were vitally important to get our species where it is today, even though they would have looked like a terrible investment of time and money from the perspective of a private company. Today private companies have happily entered some of those spaces that have been pioneered by government funded scientists.
It's true that many moonshots fail. That's why they're called (sometimes literal) moonshots. But it's important to try anyways so we can advance as a species.
And most of the time we learn a lot even if we fail.
The risk calculation is: expected cost minus expected reward. The expected reward is astronomical (no pun intended!), so you're simply restating my point: fusion is not likely to work regardless of how much money we throw at it. Amazon's R&D annual budget exceeds $20b. That's one company spending half an ITER a year. The private sector has no problem coming up with those sums for ideas it deems promising. The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.