It's true there will be a PR reckoning for that wording. I am not under the impression that those that greenlit ITER were deceived about the target performanc

It's true there will be a PR reckoning for that wording. I am not under the impression that those that greenlit ITER were deceived about the target performance metrics, which is the implied scandal. The scientists and engineers gave pitches to committees, the committees asked questions, the scientists answered honestly. Not everyone on those committees is clueless about plasma physics, as indicated by their informed questions (see the DoE FES subcommittee transcripts). Is this how we should decide to allocate society's taxed income? I don't know, but I don't think the funding of existentially critical research that requires expensive machines that only produce incremental knowledge should be on the chopping bloc every year. Regardless of whatever "well actually"s come about, the achievements of ITER should not be sidelined. If ITER is successful, it sets a very important bar for mega projects in the 2020s. It would be a valuable yardstick and a blueprint for a nuclear facility that has enormous subsystems for cooling and tritium processing. Thanks to HTS we might not need to make a machine much larger than ITER to hit the necessary performance metrics, but ITER is being made now, not in another two decades. Watch SPARC for now.