> Why?
IP theft is a thing and yet China can't make Nvidia GPUs and I can bet $10 it won't be able to in 2030. I don't see why the west could 'just' copy a Chinese energy-positive tokamak even if it had all the plans. (Yes I know this one isn't that.)
The wake up call is for the west to be able to do that at the very least.
To be fair the US also can't make Nvidia GPUs and neither can anyone outside of Taiwan. Agreed that IP isn't everything but the chip shortage during covid sure as hell WAS a wake up call to the west.
Now they are finding that actually its going to take a decade to reproduce what the chip fabs in Taiwan have built even with their help.
Fusion is never, ever going to be economical. The fuel is basically free, which is great. Meanwhile, the reactors themselves are arguably the most complex and expensive machines ever built, and they are essentially disposable due to the nature of fusion reactions.
There's a reason that the wise engineers who built our only working fusion reactor put it about 1 AU away from us. Much cheaper and easier to just catch the energy it sends us.