There are far bigger and arguably more useless 'money sinks' than ITER, which has since its inception cost about US$20 billion or so. The UK's HS2 project is p

There are far bigger and arguably more useless 'money sinks' than ITER, which has since its inception cost about US$20 billion or so. The UK's HS2 project is projected to cost in the ballpark of £50 billion. This is literally a railway line—something that people have been building for a couple of centuries now. Sure, there's a bunch of land acquisition and construction, but it's still a bit of a joke how expensive it's got. The F-35 project has an estimated lifetime cost of US$1.5 trillion. This is a full two orders of magnitude more than ITER. Sure, this is meant to be spread out over the next 50 years or so, but the initial production cost over-runs were so big it isn't even funny. Plenty of mass rapid transit systems easily run into the tens of billions of American/Australian/Singapore dollars/pounds sterling/euro. In contrast to all of these, the money given to ITER is a complete pittance for the sort of science and results that it is expected to generate from the late 2020s. It is a big construction project, similar to a large airport or skyscraper. (Let's not even talk about how expensive Berlin Brandenburg airport got—it's a bunch of bitumen tarmac and a handful of buildings that managed to punch past 6 billion euro.) Its construction has steadily and consistently progressed in the past eight years that I've been paying close attention to it. I am fully confident that it will meet its timeline of first plasma in the late 2020s. Probably closer to 2025, actually.