this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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We have not spent a hundred billion dollars on fusion energy research collectively as a planet in the past 70 years of working on it. We do spent 10x that every year for the US defense budget.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/
That's just the US government's contributions. Harder to find totals for private investments and the historical contributions from all countries.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-energy-iter-idUKTRE6581JB20100609/
Heh, in 2010 the ITER project had already been funded with $16 billion euros, which would be $22 billion euros adjusting for inflation. Kind of funny that they were hoping to have it producing 500 megawatts of thermal energy by 2020... However, the funding for ITER itself is kind of a hot mess of debate, with differing opinions on how much has truly been spent on it thus far and how much more it will need: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Investment-in-fusion-has-reached-USD6-21-billion
I'm not sure if that's saying $6.21b USD just for 2023 for private funding efforts or if that's the cumulative thus far in general.
I'd say it's safe to say if you tally it all up--public and private investments--it's around a hundred billion or more. But yes, the US does dump an awful lot of money into the military industrial complex instead of towards more universally beneficial endeavors; though, that wasn't really what was being discussed.