Kind of a lazy comment. There has been substantial progress with the latest development from NIF as well as SPARC demonstrating a magnet section that would enable ITER at a much smaller scale using fundamentally superior superconducting technology With NIF’s latest result, we’re no longer just generating smoke from rubbing sticks together, now we got a flame.

That’s a substantial, qualitative change in the state of the art of fusion technology. Now we need to do it dozens of times per second and make steam from it, while using efficient lasers and breeding tritium from the lithium jacket.

Works kind of like the EUV light sources TSMC uses to make the highest end computer chips, except a fuel pellet instead of a drop of tin. Like so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy

The mininum viable Qplasma would be in the neighborhood of 100.[1] Fusion may get competitive for electricity generation with a Qtotal > 500.[2]

1. Sabine Hossenfelder, How Close Is Nuclear Fusion?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&t=8s

2. Nicholas Hawker, A simplified economic model for inertial fusion, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33040650/

NIF's target cost millions of dollars to make. It produced 1.3MJ of energy, which is (generously) worth about a penny.

SPARC/ARC would enable a tokamak at a smaller scale (and self-sustaining from bootstrap current, most likely) but ITER is so far out of the running that something can be much better than it and still not be practical. ITER's gross fusion power density is 400x worse than a PWR's reactor vessel; ARC would only be 40x worse.