In reply to The Lemming:
Here are my views.
1) There is no doubt in my mind that nuclear fusion is *the* power source of the future. It is fundamentally clean and safe, and to all intents and purposes, limitless. It really can't explode, melt down, blow up etc. Any kind of reactor design is likely to be able to suffer non-nuclear industrial accidents, but people die in boiler explosions and falling off wind turbines - all power generation carries risk.
2) The project you are refering to, ITER, is, in my opinion, not going to be the first fusion reactor to succeed. ITER is "Tokomak" fusion. This - if/when it leads onto the DEMO power generating reactor in 40 years, will not be small, cheap, affordable etc. It will maintain the status quo of gigabuck power plants with high running costs generating centrally controlled and distributed electricity.
2a) ITER is basically sucking up all the state funding for Fusion in almost all the world. I think that this concentration of funding into one design has happened to soon. I think the Canadian and Iranian governments are funding other types of research.
2b) The end game for fusion is the "Aneutronic" fusion of Hydrogen and Boron-11. This can produce direct high voltage electricity without steam turbines. It will simply not be possible in ITER.
3) The other main reactor discussed on this thread is NIF, or laser fusion. The US Congress are correct to call it a day on this. In terms of power generation I see it as a monumentally dumb idea. I basically see it as a weapons lab re-spinning their work to keep them all in jobs now that the cold war is over.
4) "Hotter than the sun". This is a disingenuous marketing tactic to make it sound well difficult. Another, equivalent statement is "ions with 3 times the energy generated by the electron gun in an old-fashioned CRT television". The high temperature part is a sympton of ITER being the wrong design.
5) Several rich people, "black science" compaines and military groups are funding alternative fusion reactors that will be smaller than ITER, significantly cheaper (both in total and per unit of energy generate) in both capital- and running-cost, and will be more suited to a more localised generation system. Lockhead Martin claim theirs will make 100MW and go on the back of a lorry.
5a) Many scientists in the ITER fusion program will claim these other types will never work as a power station due to technical problems. This is despite ITER and its precursors having swallowed over $30B (inflation adjusted to 2010) and thus far failing to demonstrate that they will work as a power plant, and indeed they do not plan to do this for over 20 years with the DEMO plant.
5b) A degree of faith is required in the other projects, because being backed by militaries, private companies or VCs, they do not publish all their data. Some scientist see this as meaning they have nothing. It does not, it simply means they exist outside the ivory tower of pork-funded, job secure mainline fusion research. There is more than one development model
5c) Here are some of the alternatives
US Navy -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell - if this works it's my favourite and could see fusion powered boats, aircrafts, road trains and space craft, and would genuinely change the world.
General Fusion -
http://www.generalfusion.com - private investors. This design apes a thermonuclear weapon's fission trigger in compressing a fusion core, similar to laser fusion. Unlike laser fusion it uses molten lead and steam pistons to hit gas via molten lead instead of 192 incredibly expensive lasers hitting precision manufactured pellets.
Lockhead Martin -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor - One of the worlds biggest defence firms. Neither myself or the fusion people I've spoken to can really figure out the design (it sounds like a polywell but is the wrong shape.) This one had been a "black" project, the guy gives a single talk at Google and then it goes "black" again. I think that was part of a rising effort in the USA to get a Senate Hearing to look at if the fact all state money goes to ITER is a great big mistake and should be reversed.
Field Reversed Configuration -
http://depts.washington.edu/rppl/programs/frc_intro.html - there's not much public info on this, but a company called "Tri-Alpha" has significant VC funding for it.
6) If one of these succeeds before ITER has it's first fusion event, there are going to be some akward questions asked about what to do with the site in France. Occasionally gigabuck science projects get cancelled part way through construction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
7) Despite my feeling that we give to much money to just one project - ITER - it has a $13B budget over the next 10 years - of which the UK is but a tiny part. In the UK we are taking over $1.5B *per year* from energy consumers via inflated bills and passing it onto people subsidy farming via windmills. Once decentralised fusion generation is running there will be no reason not to pull down all our windmills and recycle their rare earth materials and their steel. Heaven only knows what we do with the waste cement.
It is complete madness to poor all the resources into renewable that we do now (including deforesting vast swathes of the USA to run half of the Drax coal plant). whilst giving a tiny proportion of those resources to the fusion program. You have to ask what the future looks like, and use your funding to get there. We are not.