I also recall a skunk works reactor that takes radically different approach (smaller reactors, instead of big) and was supposed to have results if few years.
[2014]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458339
Then there are new stories about skunk works being on track.
https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/lockheeds-skunk-works...
Relevant talk by one of the MIT professors working with Commonwealth Fusion Systems:
Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte (2016) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
Timeline (in case you want to skip over some parts):
00:01:00 - introducing Dennis Whyte, MIT department head for nuclear science
00:04:24 - presentation starts
00:06:00 - identifies breakthrough with REBCO magnets
00:07:25 - explains deuterium-tritium fusion
00:12:30 - basic metrics for reactor performance
00:17:15 - energy output of other previous fusion experiments
00:19:00 - examines ITER and the problems of its approach
00:22:00 - problems solved by high energy magnetic fields
00:28:15 - full scale reactor concept, teardown of REBCO magnets
00:37:00 - design limits and margins
00:39:00 - fixes plasma instabilities found in weaker magnetic chambers
00:40:00 - maintainability, lifespan, component replacement
00:45:00 - solution to neutron damage and energy capture
00:50:30 - cost and profitability
00:54:00 - full graph of field strength vs reactor scale (and thus funding requirements)
01:01:50 - Q&A
01:30:00 - question about the biggest risks
With "might" being the operative word. As long as none of these new approaches has achieved viable fusion (so, more power out than in) I think it's not a bad idea to just continue with the less radical plan that will probably work, even if it is slower.
Sort of like the space race between the USA and the USSR.
Work on ITER's design began in 1988 and they designed it to use the magnets they expected to have available in 20 years. However less than 2 years earlier, high temperature superconductors were discovered. An incredible amount of progress has been made in that field in the intervening decades that ITER could never take advantage of. This does not mean ITER is useless; it was always meant to be an intermediate stage before a real demonstration plant was built. At the time, it was imagined that this viable commercial reactor would be truly enormous, but now with the much better magnets perhaps it could be the same size or even smaller than ITER. The lessons learned from ITER, such as how to protect the walls of the reactor, will still apply. While some may suggest that ITER should have been scrapped and a new project started that incorporated high temperature superconductors, the fact is there's always going to be technological progress between a project's start and completion, at some point you just have to build something.
There are many proposals out there for smaller reactor concepts which use different approaches. Much of ITER's criticism comes from those who think these small reactors would make extreme progress if they had access to ITER's funding. This belief is unfounded. Tokamaks like ITER are within spitting distance of breakeven, all other concepts are many orders of magnitude away. ITER gets a ton of funding because it has a very good justification for needing that funding, it's a truly massive machine; the only reason to look at small reactors is that they don't need crazy funding to test. Were ITER to lose its funding there's no reason to believe it would be rerouted to these alternative experiments which have not justified that level of investment.
Most of these small reactor concepts are not very promising as routes to real power plants. That's not to say they are not worth investigating, there could be crossover and the technology may find other applications. The skunkworks concept seems especially suspect: it goes against all established principles of fusion reactor design, and that it's being done by skunkworks shields it from any rigorous academic scrutiny - though what numbers they have published suggest they've made little more than a toy thus-far. Realistically, only other tokamaks and maybe stellerators have a serious shot at beating the ITER development line to producing a viable powerplant baring some unforeseen paradigm shift, which is always a possibility but never a good horse to bet on.
It is worth noting that ITER has had some serious delays and cost overruns. This has been true of most large scale international science collaborations of the era such as the ISS and the LHC. While I certainly wouldn't complain if the process was more efficient, the fact remains that real progress is being made.
Not only are they doing fusion at a tiny fraction of the power, they're doing it with a much much much smaller system that is producing heavier elements out of thin air while having started as just a "sun in a bottle" research system to understand how the Sun interacts with the electromagnetic field of the galaxy (and why the 1960s nuclear fusion model of the Sun explains nothing of the past 50-60 years of observations published since).
They did it on basically a shoestring budget, too.
Really hope I get proved wrong in the next years.
Instead its just some weird reaction video by some rando on Youtube that has not cited his sources. The irony of this is, he accuses them of doing the same thing EU proponents have accused modern Cosmology of doing: filtering out anything that doesn't fit their narrative, even when its established science in another field for the past few decades.
The SAFIRE guys aren't cosmologists, they're approaching the problem of the Sun the same way a plasma physicist would. Literally, they are following in the footsteps of Hannes Alfvén (the guy that got the Nobel for magneto-hydrodynamics), and Kristian Birkeland (nominated for a Nobel seven times due to his work in this field), and continuing their work.
The people who claim that plasma physics has no place in space, in solar/planet interactions, in galactic/star interactions, etc are, frankly, insulting both the Nobel committee and the work of NASA for the past 30+ years. They're on the same delusion spectrum that flat earthers are on, just not quite to that extreme.
I'm not saying SAFIRE is right, but SAFIRE isn't even saying they're right. They've literally asked for other labs to replicate their results because they've found a novel way of replicating the Sun's activity in their lab, and they need to rule out measurement error in ways they haven't already. They are seeking replication and validation, something scammers don't do.
Anyway, in my opinion it's not a waste of money. Besides the potential scientific results which will always be interesting, manufacturing skills are evolving this way as well.
I don't know so much about SAFIRE and which state it reached, but Wendelstein 7-X and ITER are the two projects I'm confident with, and I don't see them as competitors but both bringing more knowledge about fusion.
And if you want to be really technical, we've had fusion reactors for decades, but ITER should be the first one that produces more energy than it consumes.