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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

Any idea on how much money we're spending on this?

Also, I can imagine it's a joint project only partially because we can share the cost, I imagine another reason to work together is so that no one country gets this technology first.

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Several billions of Euros, with Europe paying the largest share, but the reactor is in France so we get much of the secondary benefit (i.e. scientists and engineers spending their salaries there, construction work).

http://www.iter.org/faq (several are relevant).

Initial budget was €5bn. Current budget is four times that and with completion nowhere near estimates of the final cost are as high as $60bn. Go figure.

If by "we" you mean US's share, that's 9% of total costs. China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the US are paying 9% each and EU is paying 46%.

With 'we' I meant every country that's involved, not just my own country.

$60bn is actually surprisingly little for research that could change the future of energy production and possibly society as we know it. To put it into context, the Apollo program cost $200bn in today's money and a high speed train between LA and SF is projected to cost $100bn.

And the war in Iraq $1 trillion :(

Yup. I purposefully didn't mention it, because it can lead to distracting political discussions, unfortunately.

$1 trillion is not a lot of money for the US. the Congressional Budget Office estimates that interest spending on US public debt will hit $915 billion in 2028[1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-on-a-course-to-spend-more-o...

That doesn't mean 1 trillion isn't a large amount of money. That means the US spends a trillion dollars servicing it's debt. As it so happens, the US will be spending a lot of money servicing debt.

That’s a very misleading figure as inflation both directly reduces the actual debt payment nessisary, and makes comparisons between spending 2003 – 2011 vs 2028 difficult to compare.

except inflation is directly related to the amount of new debt issued, because thats the only source of M1 money supply. If the US Treasury didn't borrow from the Federal Reserve and instead printed its own currency, this would be different.

The FED can create money from thin air when banks fail. So, debt is not the only source of M1 money supply.

1 trillion dollars is 3070 dollars per American citizen. That's like 9% of my annual gross, that's a lot of money.

Unfortunately, it did change the future, just not in the way its planners thought.

It's interesting to note that on the ITER FAQ page, they mention that 90% of contributions are to be delivered "in-kind" in the form of parts of buildings, instead of cash.

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