building something _at scale_ is basically the approach ITER has taken, and there is a different kind of problem in it: people & project management at that scal

building something _at scale_ is basically the approach ITER has taken, and there is a different kind of problem in it: people & project management at that scale are very tough. Maybe tougher than the engineering even is. When you need many countries to smoothly co-operate on a many-billion-dollar decades-long project that's hard to swiftly articulate or grasp, let alone pivot, while technology and geopolitics swiftly shifts around you, you're going to have a bad time. ARC with modern superconductors is in many ways ITER but capable of being built on a multi-university budget, by virtue of those superconductors being much more powerful while being much smaller and lightweight and operating closer to room-temperature. The whole reactor needed for the same energy scale a ITER is physically much smaller. The PSFC at MIT (who is proposing this plan) built the last great tokamak that got us closest to real fusion back in the 90s and that inspired ITER. ITER was the best plan available after that: the project size was necessary given conditions at the outset. Now many people are committed to it, and we're many billions in, so it likely isn't going away. But ARC is probably a better version of basically the same plan given today's outlook: a scaled up tokamak, doable at university, national-lab, or skunkworks-level project sizes. So I believe we could see huge progress from this in the next 5 years. The only thing I have not seen articulated in Zach Hartwig or Dennis Whyte's otherwise fantastic talks in the past year is: what's next? What are the concrete steps between today and some version of ARC? They don't seem to be raising money yet, so it is clear there are some open questions about the other innovations in the ARC design, and I want to hear how/when we expect those to be solved or at least well-defined.