Time to pause before the next step

Many scientists, who have staunchly supported ITER for years, are coming to realize it is time to further rethink fusion energy's development strategy. Specifically, as was suggested by Grant Logan and Dale Meade, and in keeping with the restructuring of 1996, a theme of better, cheaper, faster fusion would serve the program more effectively than ''demonstrating controlled ignition...and integrated testing of the high-heat-flux and nuclear components required to utilize fusion energy...'' which are the important ingredients of ITER's objectives. The author has personally shifted his view for a mixture of technical and political reasons. On the technical side, he senses that through advanced tokamak research, spherical tokamak research, and advanced stellarator work, scientists are coming to a new understanding that might make a burning-plasma device significantly smaller and less expensive. Thus waiting for a few years, even ten years, seems prudent. Scientifically, there is fascinating physics to be learned through studies of burning plasma on a tokamak. And clearly if one wishes to study burning plasma physics in a sustained plasma, there is no other configuration with an adequate database on which to proceed. But what is the urgency of moving towards an ITER-like step focused on burning plasma? Some of the arguments put forward and the counter arguments are discussed here