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Comment by ericHosick | Hacker News Reader

It seems like they've done all of this at a surprisingly low cost.

1 million assembly hours at 370 million project cost = 370 Euros/hour (assembly + management overhead costs).

I think one important price factor is that this is "only" a plasma containment experiment and will only run Helium and Hydrogen, not the Deuterium-Tritium-mixture needed for energy-generating fusion.

This means it generates way less neutron radiation, which in turn means less need for shielding and easier working conditions on and close to the machinery, avoids material degradation, ...

Also, if I understand German sources correctly the 370 million doesn't include wages of the people working there (maybe external construction contractors, but not the effort by MPI personnel). (EDIT: found a quote of ~1 billion EUR as cost for the entire project since 1995)

Good call on the actual price. Still 1/13th the current cost of the not-yet-operational ITER... Makes me wonder if the stellerator concept will be more feasible in the long run.

I don't think you can draw any conclusions from comparing the price of Wendelstein 7-X and ITER. ITER is much larger than Wendelstein, it looks like the magnets in ITER are roughly 10 times as heavy, so ITER needs much more material than Wendelstein.

This is an earlier-stage demonstration than ITER. A fairer comparison would be with the cost of JET.

Wow. At my university group, we're continuously trying really hard to get funding for our research, where we ask for less than 1 percent of that budget. It's really, really hard to get because the landscape is quite competitive. But such a project, if we'd ever get one, could fund a co-worker and me for three years plus a bunch of partners at other universities.

3.7m euros would last 3 years? That seems... quite expensive.

It does, that's why typically we only ask for less than that in our grant proposals.

The assembly was done by Polish engineers mainly. I bet they were doctors paid by university, but even if not, top world class engineer from Poland will not cost more than €30/hour. Add management overhead of another that much. This is not a lot.

I bet a lot of the work was performed by academic indentured servants.

Academic indentured servants that absolutely knew this would be the case but were no doubt tripping over each other to get a spot on the project.

That doesn't make the institutionalized exploitation of their labor any more ethical or palatable.

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