I used to have an awful lot of hope for ITER, but the more I've learned about plasma the more complicated it gets. It is a problem of energetics. Also the very high recirculating power to power output ratio makes a practical station extremely difficult, even if over unity is achieved.

In a typical fossil fuel fired, steam power plant as much as 10% of the generated power is used to run the plant: the blowers, pumps and lights, etc. So a recirculating power of 1/10 is not unrealistic. Nuclear plants are probably similar: the primary coolant pumps and condensate pumps consume the most power: in a large plant these can be several thousand horsepower, so 5-10% doesn't seem unreasonable.

Now in the ITER's case, if 90% of the power is sent back to run the reactor and only 10% is sent to the grid, then the Recirculating Ratio is something like 9:1. Which means that for an ITER-like reactor we'd need a plant with 9 times the power generating capacity for a given power output compared to fossile power.

So if you want a nominal 1000MWe to grid, you're going to have to process something like 10,000 MW of total electrical power. With losses you're looking at a reactor power of nearly 20,000 MW or more. All other things being equal, that's still a hell of a lot of waste heat...

This is one of the reasons hope is fading for conventional magnetic confinement fusion...it sucks, but there you have it.

And ITER hasn't even demonstrated an over unity power extraction system yet, so the argument is moot anyway.

:(  >Sigh<