This is like the "spinoffs from NASA made the billions wasted on inefficient rockets well worth it!"<p>No, <i>no it didn't</i>.<p>That's not how spending works. You don't set tens of billions of euros (or dollars) on fire and then say: "Look at all this nice warmth we're making as a side effect!"<p>I love the <i>concept</i> on fusion power in the same way that I love the concept of space mining and colonies on Mars. I read science fiction books as a young man and would like that vision of the future to come true.<p>But the harsh economic and practical reality is that fusion power is decades away, will cost well over a hundred billion to develop, and <i>another</i> hundred billion to deploy over <i>many more decades</i>.<p>Meanwhile, solar, wind, and other green energy technologies can meet our current needs right now and scale well into the next century.<p>Fusion might, <i>might</i> make sense to start developing some time in the future when we have much stronger superconducting magnets. The ITER project and its already "previous gen" magnetic tapes won't be it. Its successor project, DEMO won't be it either.<p>To get useful amounts of power in our lifetimes, we need an agile company doing fusion in the same way SpaceX is running circles around the dinosaurs at NASA and co.
Unfriendly summary of the article: "Trying to develop a quiet ship propulsion system is only the <i>second</i> best way to develop a quiet ship propulsion system, the <i>best</i> way is to try to develop a fusion reactor and get a propulsion system as a spinoff".