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Another important project, a proposed demonstration of nuclear fusion--called ITER--was slated to receive $160 million in federal funding this year; instead, it received no funding. ITER will consist of a 500-megawatt fusion reactor, to be built in the South of France, with which researchers will attempt to demonstrate that fusion can be a practical source of electricity. If all goes well, results of the project will be used to design the first commercial fusion power plants. Fusion projects in general have been delayed in part because of intermittent funding, says Ian Hutchinson, the head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. The ITER project is taking up where research left off in the early 1990s, the last time funding dropped off. If funding had been constant, Hutchinson says, "we could have been at this stage 10 years ago." He calls the current cuts a "complete disaster" in terms of the message it conveys to the international community. "It's completely reversing ourselves from what we've been saying the last four years," he says, given that United States officials have publicly supported the project.
The ITER project could go on without support from the United States, but it will move forward more slowly, Hutchinson says, and when the facility is complete, researchers in this country won't have timely access to the results. He hopes that in the coming year, "cooler heads will prevail" and the funding for ITER will be restored.
The appropriations bill is not bad news across the board for research and development, but it does favor short-term development, which often comes at the expense of long-term research. For example, the DOE overall received an increase in funding compared with both last year and the president's request. But the Office of Science--the basic research arm of the agency--saw nearly a half-billion-dollar cut compared with appropriations bills in Congress earlier in the year. In the DOE, some programs that were slated to be cut in the president's budget will continue to receive funding, such as research on geothermal and hydroelectric energy. Eliminating these proposed cuts added to the overall budget and led to cuts elsewhere.
The cuts in research funding have researchers and organizations such as the American Physical Society calling for Congress to push through new funding this year. But many, including Drell, are preparing for more difficult times ahead: they're anticipating similar budget shortcomings next year.
In President Bush's proposed 2008 budget, weapons development wins big while overall funding for research suffers.
Last week, the international community decided that France would be the site of a fusion reactor. Ian H. Hutchinson, the head of MIT's Nuclear Science Department, explains why the United States should support this endeavor.
Congress is largely attorneys with little or no background in the sciences. There is likely not one inventor in the entire congress. These people have no idea of what to do or how to do science and invention. Private industry faces headaches as the dollar weakens and the energy crisis looms larger. The USA graduates fewer and fewer mathematicians and physicists compared to India and China. We are 25th in the healthcare. The innovation to solve these problems comes from largely mathematicians and physicists. We cannot imagine the damage that done by congress this month thus action must occur promptly. The evangelists and other religious zealots are stoppable. If we do not stop them we will tear down this Nation.
The last time Federal laboratories suffered this setback was when Gingrich was speaker. We organized our stockholders, mostly republicans, to go to Washington to meet with Senator Boxer at her office. Action occurred. LANL and other DOE laboratories saved from the cuts for the most part. How much influence we had is hard to tell but having a former Wharton mathematics professor (republican) and a list of other talented scientists go to speak to the democrat senator demanding change can help? We got a good taste of the bureaucracy surrounding Washington. The entire operational concept of our government is in error. We must abandon it and start anew over the internet.
We are proposing regime and government change altogether by means of massively intensive internet ‘virtual government’ that accepts direct contributions to laboratories from concerned citizens for change. For example, almost all Americans like the feeling that USA is first at best R&D in long terms efforts. When the collider died in Texas, most wanted to see it finished but were powerless to do anything about it. The new government could be ‘SCICOPS’ ‘Scientific Congress of Intelligent Citizens Optimally Propelling Science’; to be confused with CSICOPS started by Murray Gell Mann. SCICOPS would accept cash over the internet and with the books open to the public see the money efficiently transferred to the benefit of science that “must go where no other has gone before”. Our future in science or death of the Nation we so care about, or do we?
We plan to contact as many deep pockets that understand and use at least algebra to start the ball rolling. Your comments please! Silacon can design the websites using Ruby on Rails immediately and through in some cash. Silacon harvested technology from and invented technology for LANL and LBL; and made money doing so. Mathematicians, please speak up. We need you now. Just a minute, We hear old Ben Franklin and Einstein turning in their graves!
SCICOPS
(Anger and being tired led to a need to edit our statement)
Congress is largely attorneys with little or no background in the sciences. There is likely not one inventor in the entire congress. These people have no idea of what to do or how to do science and invention. Private industry faces headaches as the dollar weakens and the energy crisis looms larger. The USA graduates fewer and fewer mathematicians and physicists compared to India and China. We are 25th in the healthcare. The innovation to solve these problems comes from largely mathematicians and physicists. We cannot imagine the damage that done by congress this month thus action must occur promptly. The evangelists and other religious zealots are stoppable. If we do not stop them or they will tear down this Nation.
The last time Federal laboratories suffered this setback was when Gingrich was speaker. We organized our stockholders, mostly republicans, to go to Washington to meet with Senator Boxer at her office. Action occurred. LANL and other DOE laboratories saved from the cuts for the most part. How much influence we had is hard to tell but having a former Wharton mathematics professor (republican) and a list of other talented scientists go to speak to the democrat senator demanding change can help? We got a good taste of the bureaucracy surrounding Washington. The entire operational concept of our government is in error. We must abandon it and start anew over the internet.
We are proposing regime and government change altogether by means of massively intensive internet ‘virtual government’ that accepts direct contributions to fund laboratories and other well thought out causes from concerned citizens for change. For example, almost all Americans like the feeling that USA is first and the best at R&D for short and long terms efforts. When the collider died in Texas, most wanted to see it finished but were powerless to do anything about it. The new government could be ‘SCICOPS’ ‘Scientific Congress of Intelligent Citizens Optimally Propelling Science’; to be confused with CSICOPS started by Murray Gell Mann. SCICOPS would accept cash over the internet and with the books open to the public see the money efficiently transferred to the benefit of science that “must go where no other has gone before”. Our future is science or the death of the Nation we so care about.
We plan to contact as many deep pockets that understand and use at least algebra to start the ball rolling. Your comments please! Silacon can design the websites using Ruby on Rails immediately and throw in some cash.
Silacon harvested technology from and invented technology for LANL and LBL; and made money doing so.
Mathematicians, please speak up. We need you now. Just a minute, We hear old Ben Franklin and Einstein turning in their graves!
SCICOPS
"The evangelists and other religious zealots are stoppable"
The root cause of this issue is the inability of our government to effective do it's job, not the lobbying effort of "religious zealots".
While the government is busy playing political games with the federal budgets, trying to send political messages rather than meet its responsibilities, we get short changed.
The short term answer is to quit sending the same people back to Washington just because they can bring federal money back to their district!
This is another example of the practical application of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Guest (fasitron)
It would be educational to see which members of congress voted for the cuts and how they are related to the existing energy infrastructure. You know......follow the $$$.
thanks for the article... timely. I know there are a lot of scientitists that would support reevaluation of this project. But most of us do not know how to go about organizing.
it would be great if such an entity, with the skills and expertise help lead and organize this project... we need to find someone or organization that wants to lead in this endeavor.
i imagine the first step is to define the issue, the need, educate all scientist across the board, and organize a unified letter writing campagn to Congress.
maybe MIT technology can take up this challenge.
as for myself, im a microbiologist, hence, lack the knowlege and important contacts to do this. regardless, i, like many other non-particle scientists would be supportive and actively petition the need to congress. but we need to be educated on the issue and needs.
Once we are educated, than a nationwide petition of all scientists should show success.
as a cynic, maybe we should argue that this is needed to fight Al Queda... (this is a joke) but sadly it worked for fighting communism.
so, those who are experts in this field, let all of us help you.
ron hansing
Have no time to advance humanity
Probably these moronic politicians are saying to themselves "We have no time to advance humanity, we have Middle Eastern kids to blow up!"
Everyone has their priorities, and it shows in the budget. The 2007 budget for the National Science Foundation was $6 billion. The budget for the wars was about $150 billion. Outrageous!
There is sufficient reason to spend a paultry $2 million to fund the needed experiments in Focus Fusion. Lawrenceville Plasmic Physics may have the concept to bring inexpensive fusion to commercial reality within five years. Why doesn't the government - or even a state government or a foundation - chuck in the money just to find out if the idea could pan out? People spend billions on lottery tickets, but two million to possibly change the world? This is a no-brainer to me.
Re: Focus Fusion Needs Little $
Thanks for the interesting stuff about Focus Fusion . Why hasn't stuff like that been reported on Tech Review ?!
In terms of budgetary priorities, one area of development for the military is operating with a lower budget, especially when the missions are longer run interests. This one advancement would easily enable much more funding of future R&D.
In terms of energy policy, there is a lot of work the US needs to do. Brazil was ahead of the US by leaps and bounds, by having cars that burn multiple types of fuels. I've heard the original Ford cards also could do that already. Somehow we went way backwards.
The good news about fusion, is larger scale facilities could pump energy on the grid. The energy companies will like that. The alternative is we'll have our wind & solar panels on the homes, pumping our own energy into the grid. Recently found a company that networks local neighbors, to bypass the grid when appropriate and sell to each other. Smart thinking.
You would have thought americans would be in favour of more private rather than public funding ..... anyhoooo..... Perhaps those fusion scientists will pull their fingers out and do some hard graft for change , the money comes later as a reward for achievement .
What about "intelligent design" funding?
If funding for studying "intelligent deisgn" or sending probes to the moon to find evidence of creation had been included, it would have gotten billions with no question.
Science, it's as popular with this administration as bipartisanship...
I find it interesting that that people are so quick to blame the “religious zealots” for cutting the funding. The reason it was cut was they needed the money to do things like build a $700,000 bike trail in my state of Minnesota. It’s all about priorities. By the way, the representative that procured the funds for this important project has a big D by her name.
Guest (SolarUser)
Because of bush's war in Iraq we have less funding for a lot of things beside this project, like children health care. Thanks to all the idiots that voted this idiot back into office.
Besides, was it not this idiot president who wanted to go to Mars and scrap the space station and Hubble. How does he think we are going to get there, and with what power source?
If The Greeks Capitalized on Their Knowledge
The Greeks needed exactly 500 years to reach the nuclear age. Their schools encouraged innovation and invention. They had the theory of the atom, they were aware of electricity and magnetism.
I think history will look back at these fund cuts and say "what if they had spend more money on science..".
The labs told us thirty years ago fusion was ten years away, billions later still no product or solution. If this money had been spent on solar we would be their now.
Having worked at one of the DOE labs I learned one thing, they are masters at wasting money. I say issue rewards, large ones, to be paid for each solution. Even rewards of hundreds of millions would be cheaper than government funded labs. Look at Burt Rutan compared to NASA, he does the same work for less than a penny on the dollar. One of the labs wasted tens of millions on auto milage, look at Aptera, if the labs did the same work over a hundred million would be gone with probably no real results. Shut down most of the labs and establish bounties and rewards on top of letting the people keep the money after the reward has been paid back with interest to further keep the ball rolling.
Re: false promise: Instead Rewards for Solutions
Your recommendation has a history of success. People pursue the prize both for the money and the recognition. Look at the X-prize flight. Look at the early awards for nanotechnology innovation. Look at the historical award for detecting a ships' position on the ocean, that lead to the use of time to determine location. There are now open source innovation websites now that match a granting organization to those who create solutions.
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djs
25 Comments
fusion project
In a fusion reactor, the energy produced is mostly in the form of gamma, X-ray, alfa and neutron radiation; a funny way to raise steam, and a good way to render the reactor materials radioactive. If the fusion funding over the decades had gone into solar energy, the world would be in better shape.
Reply
lcp
1 Comment
Re: fusion project
You are confusing fission with fusion.
Reply
djs
25 Comments
Re: fusion project
No - in fusion the products are light particles (in the case of fast helium nuclei they are also known as alpha radiation) and light quanta created at 100 000 000 degrees - i.e. gamma rays. In fission, heavy particles such as lead nuclei (and some light particles) are created, at more terrestrial temperature.
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