That may be possible. I built my fusion prototype for about $600k in 1990s dollars. Being more expensive doesn't make people think it is more likely to work.

That may be possible. I built my fusion prototype for about $600k in 1990s dollars. Being more expensive doesn't make people think it is more likely to work. The easiest way to make people think your design will work is to take an existing design with known parameters and make it 'better'. Unfortunately, 'better' often means bigger and more expensive, which is how we get to projects like ITER. SPARC is a version of a compact tokamak using advances in high temperature superconductors - thus, 'better'. A different way is to propose something completely different than what has been done before. Then, if it is cheap enough, people may be willing to take a chance on it. This is what I did. However, it needs to be different enough to not be easily dismissable as having the same problems as an earlier design. For example, if you are doing a mirror design, you better have a good answer for fixing the ends. One thing that often gets overlooked when talking about cheaper fusion designs is speed. Big projects like ITER take a long time to build, and then a lot of experiments get done on them, taking more years, because you need to get your money's worth from them. Smaller designs get the knowledge gains out of the design much faster. Robert Hirsch has been trying to bring this to our collective attention ever since he converted from a tokamak proponent to opponent decades ago.