Agreed that equipment is costly, and thus the research as a whole is more expensive, but I think that has a small impact on the cost of the researchers. I also am under the impression that ‘think tank’ refers mostly to policy research—even if you’ve got a plasma physics think tank, say, they’ll mostly try to answer the question of what plasma physics projects should be pursued and other meta-level improvements to the field rather than building tokamaks themselves.
Agreed that equipment is costly, and thus the research as a whole is more expensive, but I think that has a small impact on the cost of the researchers. I also am under the impression that ‘think tank’ refers mostly to policy research—even if you’ve got a plasma physics think tank, say, they’ll mostly try to answer the question of what plasma physics projects should be pursued and other meta-level improvements to the field rather than building tokamaks themselves.