Influencers do what they do. They often repeat talking points without fact checking. If they lose in court because of that, then let that be a lesson to all those who reshare without fact checking.
We have to train future physicists and STEP is a little cheaper to do fusion than conventional tokamaks. Fusion will be powered by AI and we have to catch up with others countries. All the G7 have their fusion programs. The 2.5 billions is the total provisional budget for 100MW prototype. To many, fusion will always 20 or 50 years away but recently, success in maintaining nearly continueous plasma in stellarators has encouraged researchers in using AI to design and maintain plasma. Current highest plasma temperature is 130 millions Kelvin, record continuous plasma is 30 minutes. The advantages of stellarators is when fusion occurs, the plasma is only minimally disrupted unlike tokamaks which has to maintain at least 1 mega amps to keep the plasma. To achieve DT fusion, temperature needs to be at least 100 millions Kelvin. The article mentioned the success at NIF, it's good but it's not as good as stellarators. NIF users lasers to fuse DT capsules. As capsules can only be burnt one at a time, it's still not clear how to maintain fusion burns to make energy continuously.UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions
STEP sucked up £220 million in 2022, and it's still not apparent what that accomplished