9: Off the Main Trails

In Latin ITER means the way. Which one? Fast track or dead end? Actually, no one knows whether or not ITER will lead to a profitable electricity production in a further generation of up-scaled tokamaks. Concentrating most of the available subsidies and manpower on a single project for magnetic fusion is a questionable policy. A similar doubt applies to the emphasis put on high-power lasers in the realm of inertial fusion…