On my understanding, the push for centralization came from a specific faction whose pitch was basically:
here’s the scaling laws for tokamaks
here’s how much money we’d need
… so let’s make one real big tokamak rather than spending money on lots of little research devices.
… and that faction mostly won the competition for government funding for about half a century.
The current boom accepted that faction’s story at face value, but then noticed that new materials allowed the same “scale up the tokamaks” strategy to be executed on a budget achievable with private funding, and therefore they could fund projects without having to fight the faction which won the battle for government funding.
The counterfactual which I think is probably correct is that there exist entirely different designs far superior to tokamaks, which don’t require that much scale in the first place, but which were never discovered because the “scale up the tokamaks” faction basically won the competition for funding and stopped most research on alternative designs from happening.
On my understanding, the push for centralization came from a specific faction whose pitch was basically:
here’s the scaling laws for tokamaks
here’s how much money we’d need
… so let’s make one real big tokamak rather than spending money on lots of little research devices.
… and that faction mostly won the competition for government funding for about half a century.
The current boom accepted that faction’s story at face value, but then noticed that new materials allowed the same “scale up the tokamaks” strategy to be executed on a budget achievable with private funding, and therefore they could fund projects without having to fight the faction which won the battle for government funding.
The counterfactual which I think is probably correct is that there exist entirely different designs far superior to tokamaks, which don’t require that much scale in the first place, but which were never discovered because the “scale up the tokamaks” faction basically won the competition for funding and stopped most research on alternative designs from happening.
In fact, many 21st century fusion companies do not use Tokomaks, but use other designs from the 60s. My estimate from wikipedia is about half.