“The magnets look crazy—like they were hit by a truck—but the particles see an almost symmetric magnetic field,” Stewart Prager, a plasma physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and chair of the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, talking about the National Compact Stellarator Experiment, which the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced on 22 May would be terminated midconstruction due to cost and schedule overruns.

In 2002 when the NCSX was planned for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), the cost was estimated at around $75 million and startup was planned for 2007. By the time the project was approved in 2004, the cost had climbed to $96 million. About $92 million has gone into the machine so far, but a review this spring put the tab at $170 million and the start date at 2013. Moreover, the review, by DOE’s Office of Science, concluded that “the bottoms-up estimate is...

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