It seems to me that the more plausible explanation is something like "Solar and wind power are proven to work, whereas fusion research is still trying to find something that even looks like it might work." Even after this "milestone," fusion still requires more energy from us than it gives back.
Basically, the funding is going toward practical technologies, in the sense that you can actually put them into practice today and reap rewards.
Exactly. If one were to give a hundred billion to fusion research, how much faster would we get results? Would we be funding needs that are critical to help the science into its next phase, or just be funding the N next-best ideas that previously were set aside?
For a community that has such high praise for bootstrapping businesses, there's a surprising love of throwing money at unproven scientific research avenues. We're in this for the long haul, if we get fusion in twice the time for half the money, we'll still have fusion.
If we have fusion in 30 years instead of 60 years, we have colonization of the solar system happening in our lifetimes. We'd have the economic rationale for removing all military engagement in the middle east. We have 30*380 billion on petro cost savings here in the U.S: http://www.fuelfreedom.org/the-real-foreign-oil-problem/oil-... God knows how much CO2 we remove from the atmosphere. 100 billion sounds cheap to me.
It comes down to energy. Fusion would dramatically decrease energy costs, which would in turn drive costs of almost everything else down and allow us to do things that had been only a dream before such as fusion propulsion. So run your cost/benefit analysis again with that in mind.
This is even before we get into ecology - most modern energy sources are highly pollutant (oil/coal). How much better off will planetary ecology will be if fusion comes online 10 years earlier?
Excellent points. I certainly know that with much more funding, there could be much more efficient research, though I wonder where the limit is. How many more world-class physicists are there to put on this problem? Are the other theories really "next-best" ideas, or are they simply unexplored avenues, or perhaps more appealing with recent technology advances, but we've already committed to the current paths.
There's a second factor, which is that certain specific fusion designs are heavily over-funded, in a way that doesn't necessarily reflect their practicality. A case in point: NIF isn't even supposed to be the basis for a reactor design. ITER is, but it's still a fair way off and even assuming it lights it'll be 2 more generations before possible industrial application.
The problem is that these approaches can't work without enormous budgets, and while they produce lots and lots of very interesting science, they hoover up talent and funding resources that might be better spent exploring other avenues.
Basically, the funding is going toward practical technologies, in the sense that you can actually put them into practice today and reap rewards.