I made some calculations.

The total cost of ITER is $14 billons (and going up :) ). The total production of electricity in the word is 20000TWh/year.

If we magically switch to 100% tokamak fusion production, and we want to recoup the inversion in one year, it would add 0.7 $/MWh to the production (and distribution cost).

A more realistic scenario is to generate only the mythical 1% using tokamak fusion reactors, and recoup the money in 10 years. With this modification the R&D cost is 7 $/MWh.

Just for comparison, the current cost of electricity is 50-150 $/MWh. So 0.7-7 $/MWh is not too much.

Anyway, the ITER project is not even close to make a functional power generator, so the final cost may be much bigger than $14 billons.

Sure but it's not mainly the R&D, it's the capital cost of such large, complex reactors. MIT's ARC, to take the most conservative alternative, is also a tokamak, but with much stronger superconductors it can be built a lot smaller and cheaper.

MIT has a lot of experience in this area since they already have a tokamak with the strongest magnetic fields of any in the world. They've made at least one fundamental breakthrough with it, not too long ago. Of course Congress is about to cancel their funding.

Lockheed will probably lap ITER within the next few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

Let's not forget that the end-game for fusion is "virtually limitless, safe, clean, carbon-neutral, very high-density power"--a set of characteristics literally none of our other sources of electricity have.

The author also neglects all of the scientific advancements that we've made but haven't yet transmuted into engineering advancements. Graphene, nanotubes, metamaterials, etc.

LENR, too, which the US Navy and NASA seem to be considering:

http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Attachment/386-IEE...

LENR has never recovered from the shellacking Koonin and Lewis gave it.

It just needs a change of the name or the initials and it's good to go..