That interview makes it pretty clear that the MIT project is not the obsolete boondoggle that the NYTimes portrays it as. They've made significant recent advances. Something I don't think they mentioned: the Alcator C-Mod has the strongest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, several times stronger than ITER will have.

Aside from that, comparing it to ITER is a bit silly since ITER won't be operating for another eight years. We shouldn't just shut down research while we wait.