awesome, but I always wonder if something like this would ever get built, since it would cause a huge change to the status quo.

"According to science writer Ben Bova, a single glass of water could produce as much energy as half a million barrels of petroleum."
Heavy, man. Heavy.
Practical fusion energy is always 50 years in the future, no matter how many years pass. Gotta' love the name, though "Dyn-O-Mak!" I'm sure we all hear it in JJ Walker's voice.

I shake my head when I think of how electricity is usually produced. Take hydro power. Build a big dam and let a large body of water form. Allow the water to run through a turbine and a generator to produce electricity. Or, get a heat source (gas, oil, coal, nuclear, concentrated sunlight), boil water, make steam, use steam to spin a turbine, use turbine to spin a generator to produce electricity. Seems to me there are always two or several conversions in the process which produce losses. We need a way to generate electricity directly. Oh, we have a couple of ways: solar cells, wind. Not totally reliable. Geothermal and thermocouples? Hydrogen fuel cells? I suppose there are always some losses an any system.

In the year 9595, if man is still alive, they may find......... as much as i like to read about advances in fusion, i think its in the pure research that it will stay. nuclear and all its derivatives have had a window of opportunity that lasted more than 60yrs. with the development of solar cells and other forms of energy, that window is closing rapidly. what a stupid prediction that it would only cost $2.7b . this figure is pure fairytale. what about all the "other costs" that get picked up along the way? waste products, if any scientific and engineering training location engineering and siting as no one will be happy about this in the back yard what other insurmountable obstacles will prop up? who will fund this amount of money if not a government? what are the dangers? i can see it going $40b and up. it just cannot be justified on any scale. guys, if you like pure research, go for it. if like me , you have to pay for it, its just not on. 5kw solar pe system can cost as little as $5000 au, that will do me, thankyou!

The only joke I see here is the price of research for fusion.
Make the cost big enough to spook all the hippies back to solar panel and wind turbine mentality.
And we all know those trophy pieces can't generate enough power to feed our needs, so we default to hydrocarbons as the only solution in our 'struggling economy'.
Sell it how you like, but absolute truth cannot be destroyed.

Fusion is not a maybe technology, the scientific basis is fine and it works. The real problem is the engineering required to scale the science into a practical machine. Given the befits it will be only a matter of time, its just how much time!

If only we could take all the funding for these fusion research programmes and pump it into LFTR (thorium) fission reactors, we might arrive at the situation where we have nuclear electricity generation that is not only cheap and walk away safe, it cannot be used to make a bomb (not one that doesn't scream "Here I am!" to any nearby detector and not without fatally irradiating the bomb maker and his or her mates). Had Fukushima employed thorium reactors, it would not have been half the incident that it turned out to be.
As for the redundant fusion researchers, well, they could be set the task of finding the cheapest/most efficient way of electrifying transportation and agricultural vehicles so that we can use the electricity that is produced. We are going to have to do that anyway as the easy oil peters out, so the sooner they start, the better.
I will add one caveat. NASA are experimenting with cold fusion, so there must be something in it. I would like to see some long-term plan that shows what power generation it is likely to be capable of and by when, before I write off everything with 'fusion' in the title.

Bref... rendez-vous dans 25 ans (or more ?)

Article says the "machine needs to ... recreate the conditions inside the Sun". Ummm, No. Very much: NO!
The sun creates roughly 3 times ten to the 26 watts. It does this in its core, about 3 * 10**11 cms in radius. That is 2.7 (or, rounding up) 3*10**34 cubic centimeters in volume. So the sun gets by making 10 nano-watts per cubic centimeter. Your Machine needs make energy at least a hundred trillion times more intensely than the Sun.

Fusion research should continue, but funding for various energy production ideas needs to be allocated based on viability. And don't forget continued work to improve existing energy sources.
Nuclear power is an important piece of that (if we can get past the political scaremongering). The record in the US and western countries is excellent.
Research should also focus on smaller generation options. For example, the Navy has a long track record with small and medium reactors used to power aircraft carriers and submarines. What are the benefits to deploying this size of reactor commercially?
Hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) is yielding tremendous amounts of natural gas and oil from shale rock.
Scrubbing technology has reduced emissions from coal powered plants to a tiny fraction of what they were a generation ago. Making these advances more cost-effective benefits a very significant sector of the economy.
Wind and solar are helpful, but limited because of their intermittent nature. So using them to pump water into reservoirs as a means of energy storage would make them more practical.
Thorium energy was already noted by another person here as a very promising alternative to uranium based nuclear power. A little more research could easily bring this technology to market.
Again, continue researching fusion, but don't overlook other technologies in the process or their viability as a criteria for awarding research funds.