The road map of fusion power is compared to the development and deployment of other energy technologies. A generic deployment model is presented, which describes the fastest deployment (of any new technology) achievable with the constraint that the industrial capacity that needs to be built up must be continuous and should not overshoot the replacement market in the final, saturated state. It is shown that the development needs an 'investment' phase to build up industrial capacity which takes several decades, during which growth is typically exponential, but net energy production is negligible. During the exponential growth the cost is dominated by the capital investment, which allows for a simple comparison of different energy technologies. Fusion is at the start of the exponential growth phase, while still having significant uncertainties concerning its technical feasibility. In comparison to e.g. solar PV and wind, fusion is 'late', lagging by some 50 years. To follow the same rate of development that fission, wind and PV have shown, fusion will need to have 3 DEMO reactors operational in the early 2050s, followed by 10 generation one (GEN1) plants in the early 2060s and 100 GEN2 plants in the early 2070s. For the cost development to be comparable, an estimated allowable cost for one DEMO reactor is *20 G$. While these indicative numbers for the pace and cost of development are very challenging but perhaps not unthinkable for fusion, this analysis does point towards an emphasis on 'simpler and cheaper' reactor designs.

Measurements of the internal magnetic field structures using conventional polarimetric approaches are considered extremely challenging in fusion-reactor environments whereas the information on current density profiles is essential to establish steady-state and advance operation scenarios in such reactor-relevant devices. Therefore, on ITER a hybrid system is proposed for the current density measurements that uses both polarimetry and spectral measurements. The spectrum-based approaches have been tested in the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) during the past two plasma campaigns. As such, KSTAR is a test-bed for the proposed ITER hybrid system. Measurements in the plasma core are based on the motional Stark effect (MSE) spectrum of the neutral beam emission. For the edge profiles, the Zeeman effect (ZE) acting on the lithium emission spectrum of the newly installed (2013) Lithium-beam-diagnostic is exploited. The neutral beam emission spectra, complicated by the multi-ion-source beam injection, are successfully fitted making use of the data provided by the Atomic Data and Analysis Structure (ADAS) database package. This way pitch angle profiles could be retrieved from the beam emission spectra. With the same spectrometer/CCD hardware as on MSE, but with a different wavelength range and different lines of sight, the first ZE spectrum measurements have been made. The Zeeman splitting comparable to and greater than the instrumental broadening has been routinely detected at high toroidal field operations ( ∼ 3 Tesla).