All of this would be garden-variety corruption, wholly legal under modern norms, except that a rapidly unfolding existential disaster looms: global climate disruption, and the project steals money from work that could actually help.
The reason is likely just incompetence and management failure, not conspiracy to swindle money.
The same process occurs anywhere billions of public dollars/euros are involved, and it is not easy to track what they are supposed to buy, or how quickly results should be expected.
Since commercially competitive fusion power is already known not to be possible, no actually-useful result need ever be achieved. The longer it takes to get to the ultimate failure, the better it is for everybody actually involved. Taxpayers excepted, of course.
I missed that law of physics which says commercial fusion power is impossible.
Massively subsidized commercial (I should qualify, here, hot-neutron) fusion power seems technically possible, and could even happen, given enough corruption. But total cost to the public will necessarily be overwhelmingly more than long mature (by then) alternatives.
It starts out many tens of $billions in the hole, before the first watt-hour comes out. And taxpayers are already paying for that, today.
Mealy-mouthed wishy-washiness should not be rewarded.
You're talking like someone who has no clue.
(I should make clear that I make no assertion about the potential viability of aneutronic fusion. I am talking specifically about Tokamak.)
Guessing you can't, as no one else has.
I'm skeptical of alt-fusion projects, but... MIT's Commonwealth Fusion SPARC reactor uses a similar Tokamak design but with much higher magnetic field superconductors to be much more compact and thus is planning on a much earlier first full fusion date of 2025, i.e. a full decade earlier and actually potentially relevant to addressing climate change: https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/cfs-commercial-fusion-powe...