But ITER is the worst possible fusion project. I mean no offence, but ITER makes nuclear reactors look cheap and small. (well, granted, the actual reactors are small, but I'm talking about the support infrastructure too)

Frankly, if ITER has the scaling laws of Tokamaks right, there won't ever be a working Tokamak smaller than a 10 story building, or producing less than about 1.5 GW. And q values can go up to maybe 10, not counting generator losses. To be honest : we don't want that.

Getting this refunded basically means that more money is going to various other fusion ideas, and that's much better than having all our eggs in one hugely expensive, massively unwieldy and "just 10 more years" project (just 10 more years for about 40 years now).

Frankly, ITER is one of those huge failed projects that just won't admit failure for mostly political reasons. We all know about lots of them. Either it will fail directly because physics somehow prevents Tokamaks from being cost effective, or it will fail because it won't succeed by the time we need it to succeed. So far, the net result of the project is that a 6 story Tokamak can't work, due to plasma instabilities. So they're building a 10 story one.

The project itself has stupendous accomplishments. It has demonstrated almost unprecedented international scientific collaboration. The amount of money freely given to fund ITER is ridiculous. The amount of companies collaborating with academics on it is in the hundreds. It has so many governments invested in it ... It has so many committees and university boards invested in it it's hard to find a decent physics department that isn't invested in it ... but all of these are political achievements. The physics side of the project is finding physics not all that cooperative.

You should think about what ITER is trying to do as a way to apply massive force to reality until it bends to our will. It's not smart at all (of course the details of doing this are very intricate. There's a difference. Smart is finding a way to beat the calculation speed of a huge datacenter with a 1990's pentium when it comes to calculating digits of pi [1]. Intricate is building a huge datacenter. Both are great accomplishments, of course).

The problem with most of the other projects are facing is that they violate "holy cows" of physics in some way. Polywell physics require a very low-pressure non-thermalized gas, which has been demonstrated but violates thermodynamics theory. It's never going to get past more than one or two physics boards. Z-pinch is one of those tricks that's just too good to be true if it works (it does work to some extent of course). Like polywells, it's a huge risk, so getting physics professors to bet their careers on it is a non-starter. Laser fusion (and other forms of inertial confinement fusion) has similar "WTF" parts that will prevent their widespread acceptance. Because most of these things have multiple projects running, in practice this is about 12 projects.

All fusion projects, with 2 exceptions (one of which is strongly suspected to be a fraud), are happening inside America, funded by either the DoD or DoE. Each of them has a much lower chance of success than ITER, I would agree with that, but if they do succeed, the payoff will be much greater. If polywells work, for example, we should be able to build a 100 megawatt or so fusion reactor the size of a 60s TV set, that could operate in a building that needn't be bigger than a big house. You know, easily small and efficient enough to install on even medium sized ships. Hell, you could probably power planes with it. None of the projects even approach the size and inefficiency of ITER (meaning 10 stories, maximum achievable q value of 10 or lower). ITER should be shelved as "not good enough" and people should go back to the cafe napkin stage.

[1] http://bellard.org/pi/