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Comment by greesil | Hacker News Reader

The irony is delicious.

Especially considering the total budget of it is $340 millions vs ITER's tens of billions.

Iter and 7-X are both publicly funded research in confinement fusion with different topologies.

90% of the basic research Iter does can be switched to 7-X if it turns out to be more successful topology. Among other things, Iter develpes technologies and processes needed for a fusion power station, something 7-X is not even touching.

Wendelstein is a plasma research machine, not a net energy machine. There's no version at that price point which is a viable power plant - ITER is the smallest viable power plant (but you wouldn't want to run it). DEMO is it's successor which is 10x larger in terms of vacuum volume and is meant to be an actual electricity producing plant.

To be fair, they might not be totally independent figures in the sense of, I would be surprised if the cheaper project did not benefit at all from the knowledge created by the larger project.

Help on either project actually flows both ways. If I remember correctly, Wendelstein 7-X provided experience and know-how regarding microwave heating and welding large plasma vessels. In the end they're scientists and engineers and don't seem to see the other project so much as competition than a way to learn more than just with one of them.

They're both riding on the back of the past 70 years of R&D on fabrication, scientific instruments and data acquisition, and plasma physics. My point is what's the marginal research value per euro spent on one vs the other? Tokamaks are sort of a known thing. It's almost pointless to discuss now because the money is spent, but ITER has always felt to me a a very inefficient use scientific funding.

Their findings complement and help each other, there is no irony in there

Of course they can complement each other but ITER can still be an inefficient use of science funds at the same time.

ITER is like a NASA project. Built to work from the start. Still an experiment, but if they weren't sure Q > 1 would be achieved with the design, they would shut it down.

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