I'm tempted to agree with you that putting all that money into ITER when we're not even sure if that's the right way might seem like putting all your eggs in th

I'm tempted to agree with you that putting all that money into ITER when we're not even sure if that's the right way might seem like putting all your eggs in the same basket but at the same time I think it's a fallacy to consider this a zero-sum game. ITER already cost over 14 billion dollars which is a huge amount of money but almost negligible when compared to, say, the defense budget of the countries contributing to ITER. The Sochi winter olympics cost $51 billions. Or to compare to something more relevant, the amount of money "wasted" fighting the consequences of global warming is going to explode in the next decades, a few dozen billions are going to be cheap change compared to that. So I agree that we should probably pump more money into more projects when it comes to nuclear research but I don't think it means that we should take it from ITER.