It's a nice video, but a striking thing about it is that it ends with "I just want my infinite free energy". Where on earth is that supposed to come from?

Fusion is ultimately a fancy way to boil water. The tokamak (or stellarator) heats a given amount of water per second, which after losses to power the plant itself and the losses in the steam turbine, makes some finite amount of MWh to output to the grid. This contraption is as the video says very non-trivial to design and build and so it costs some very non-zero amount of money, and lasts a finite time (walls are damaged)

Big $$$ / finite_amount_of_mwh / life_expectancy = min_cost_per_mwh, if we want to pay this thing off. Very possibly more than existing methods.

I'm extremely on the side of doing scientific research, but I'm baffled by constantly bumping into people who suggest somehow fusion is going to mean infinite free power, or anything even close to that.

So far the tech seems headed towards just being an alternate form of a fission plant -- complex, expensive, slow to build, possibly won't ever make a profit. Likely worse, since fission is a known, mature tech.

> fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually

Wasn't it perpetually 20 to 50 years away? I'm not an expert on the space. But new computational methods and magnets seem to be genuine steps forward.