With ITER (and tokomaks more generally), the original assumption was that scaling laws would enable you to reach breakeven just by making the thing big enough.

With ITER (and tokomaks more generally), the original assumption was that scaling laws would enable you to reach breakeven just by making the thing big enough. The problem is that "big enough" means throwing $25B at it, and when that's spread across a committee of a dozen countries, that's not a recipe for getting anything done quickly. With quantum error correction, we're not talking a $25B facility with many competing hands in the pie. Instead, we're talking about improving the spatial and timing precision of RF, optics, and photonic hardware. Unlike fusion, where basically everything needs to be a custom job, there are established industries around these quantum-adjacent technologies with decades of accumulated know-how and plenty of low-hanging fruit to get most of, if not all of the way there.