I'm certainly not reducing the advancement to dollar values. In contrast, the expenditure necessarily must be evaluated in money and time, and it's an age old problem: who gets the research allocations?
The advancements are often unknown, but even if the genome project hadn't had the side effect of spinning off a massive amount of technology, the end product would be a significant advancement that would have accelerated all manner of biological research. This was biology's biggest project ever, and it is massively dwarfed by the boondoggles of physics.
In contrast, what can we learn form ITER? The opportunity for learning seems awfully minimal, and if it does complete its goal, as the article points out, it's not terribly desirable. And if the end goal isn't desirable, where's the side-effects of tech development? There appears to be none. However many contractors get rich.
Potential for advancements can be difficult to judge, and the biggest advancements are almost never expected. But when judging must be done about potential, it's typically best done by those close to the field rather than by political means. ITER seems to be more of a political beast [1] than a scientific one. A political beast that has now robbed the field of fusion of $20B of dollars that could have gone to other research projects. (There's significant intra-science politics of course, that greatly steer the course of research as much as scientific goals. However I'd much rather go with those political winds than the politics of nations when deciding research.)
> In contrast, the expenditure necessarily must be evaluated in money and time, and it's an age old problem: who gets the research allocations?
Sure, but a) when does the evaluation occur (after one year, after two years, after ten years, or after a new or accidental technology has been demonstrated to save humanity from certain destruction)?
> In contrast [to genome projects], what can we learn form ITER?
Experimental physics experiments have always suffered this comparison. I can't address your question, sorry.
Your suggestion that it may all be about the end goal (as if there's always and only a single end goal for research) is perhaps intentionally misguided - as you then hint at in your subsequent paragraph.
ITER does not do fundamental research like the LHC, they focus on very specific technical problems in the field of fusion power - as if it's already a given that their particular approach to power generation is desirable and workable.
The author's concern is that even is the problems are solved, tokamak fusion power is still a prohibitively expensive and unsustainable idea; it's only natural to question why those research resources funds aren't devoted to other areas that at least make an attempt to obtain directly useful results. The tritium economy issue is particularly wexing, any commercial D-T reactor will need outside, fission produced tritium.
I don't mean specifically to compare to biology, but even within physics, is ITER a good place to put research money? Though I'm not a physicist, it seems that even many other fusion projects would be better bets.
My feeling -- undeniably hard to substantiate -- is that this is a difficult position to defend or attack.