You would be right if not for one thing. ITER and its planned successor DEMO take forever to build because they are huge. The whole point of SPARC and its plann

You would be right if not for one thing. ITER and its planned successor DEMO take forever to build because they are huge. The whole point of SPARC and its planned successor ARC is that they use new high temperature superconducting magnets with a significantly higher field strength than ITER. This means they can build a machine with the same Q gain as ITER in 1/10th the size. Because of this they can go through steps 2 and 3 much faster. And they have already done step 1 in an existing reactor at MIT. They claim they can do step 2 in 3 or 4 years because the machine is so small. They recently proved their magnets work in a demonstration last September or thereabouts. They have the strongest large bore magnets ever created, and this directly leads to a much smaller machine. That is why I say they are promising. Really, check out the links!