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What's Getting Cut From Science Part of the Federal Budget
Kristina at Science News writes "As part of the announcement of its proposed fiscal year 2010 budget, the Obama administration released a summary (called 'Terminations, Reductions, and Savings: Budget of the US Government, Fiscal Year 2010') that includes which science-related programs are getting cut. Two big programs are the nuclear waste storage project at Yucca Mountain in Nevada and a second prototype airborne laser missile-defense weapon." Update: 05/07 23:03 GMT by T : On the other hand, reader Dusty writes, "The NASA budget for 2010 has been announced, up
5% on 2009. Human space flight plans to be reviewed."
Every gun, bomber, particle weapon made, means less money for those who need to go to college to make better, smarter bombs.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
They found a fault runs right under Yucca Mountain anyway.. isn't exactly a good site for storage anymore anyway.
"n September 2007, it was discovered that the Bow Ridge fault line ran underneath the facility, hundreds of feet east of where it was originally thought to be located, beneath a storage pad where spent radioactive fuel canisters would be cooled before being sealed in a maze of tunnels. The discovery required several structures to be moved several hundred feet further to the east, and drew criticism from Robert R. Loux, head of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, who argues that Yucca administrators should have known about the fault line's location years prior, and called the movement of the structures "just-in-time engineering."[8][9]
In June 2008, a major nuclear equipment supplier, Holtec International, criticized the Department of Energy's safety plan for handling containers of radioactive waste before they are buried at the proposed Yucca Mountain dump. The concern is that, in an earthquake, the unanchored casks of nuclear waste material awaiting burial at Yucca Mountain could be sent into a "chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernauts"."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_mountain#Earthquakes
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Even though it doesn't appear on the list, I have it on good authority that they are also researching a communications network technology based on a series of tubes...
That's a very disappointing list! I was hoping for something crazy to rant about. I suppose the elimination of the subsidies to help fund new nuclear power plants isn't something I agree with, but it sounds more like they already subsidized 25 possibles and just aren't looking at any more this year.
Let's just pray that the Airborn Laser Missles don't come and attack Yucca Mountain. ... Again.
News about government initiatives seem to revolve around the passing of a bill and the subsequent appointment of a blue ribbon panel or the filling of a key post. We rarely get news of how well the initiatives are doing unless there is a scandal, but I can't help but feel that given how undermanned some agencies are, (1/3 to 2/3 of government bureaucrats don't do noticeable amounts of useful work) most new programs and initiatives lack guidance, defined outcomes, and an effective means of targeting funds.
Signatures are the new names.
Wow, that's like me getting a pay raise of 20 cents a day.
Actually, the 2'nd ABL is not being cut, but is on hold. The project is to go back to RD stage after this and figure out how to lower costs and increase power. To be honest, I think that it is a mistake, but, after 8 long years of deficits, I am not certain that it is a bad thing. At least we know how to build one and can figure out how to do a fabrication line pretty quickly if needed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why not cut the weather modification program and stop the damned chemtrails?
It's not $17 billion in cuts, it's $17 billion in proposed cuts, 99% of which won't happen. For comparison, last year George W Bush proposed 434 billion in cuts, none of which happened.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Nuclear waste needs to be stored in the congressional districts where it is generated for now. Transporting the waste is very hazardous.
-- annual farm-commodity payouts to no more than $250,000 per person and a phasing out of the direct payment of subsidies to farms with sales exceeding $500,000 per year. Savings: $143 million.
Why that has something to do with science I'm not sure. But on another level, you don't have to be some big mega farmer to reach $500k on farm sales. We own about 600 acres that was inherited from my grandparents. We rent this out. The farmer that farms it is a family operation, father/son, and they farm about 1600 acres total. End of the year, they may bring home about $50- 60k each. Oh, and don't forget a rainy day fund incase a field floods, or a hurricane comes through and knocks the crap out of the yield.
They sell in excess of $1 Million worth a crops a year, but farming is expensive. A tractor will cost you $80 - 100k+, need a new combine, those are about $200k. Don't for get grain trucks, chemicals, seed, diesel to power the irrigation systems, repairs, etc..
It's gotten to the point where the son is debating whether or not to continue after his father gives it up after this year. He can make just about as much working a regular job without the risk. Kill their subsidy, and that is one less family in the farming business.
$500k isn't a lot when your talking about farming.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
[quote]It's important to note that Obama's cuts, if implemented, would not actually reduce government spending. The cash would be shifted to areas the administration rates as higher priorities.[/quote]
Courtesy of the CSM article on the same subject. These are just programs being killed in favor of other things. It isn't like he's trying to balance the budget or anything.. that was more of a Clinton thing.
So first they splash out staggering amounts of money in a very hastily drawn up 'fiscal stimulus' package, and then they cut back on the basic, well thought out* spending in the budget? Am I the only one who thinks this doesn't make sense?
* compared to the fiscal stimulus package anyway
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Seeing just what was cut doesn't tell us much. We'd really need to also look at what wasn't cut to see if our tax dollars are being spent intelligently or not. But, the fact that none of what was cut seemed like it was working anyway indicates that there must be tons more fluff that hasn't been cut yet.
The "Fault" in Yucca is a joke. Nearly every place in the USA has a fault near it in some way. The "Fault" at Yucca is just another anti-industrial age strawman cooked up by a bunch of environmentalists. I ran Yucca mountain through the same earthquake simulations used by insurance companies all over the world, and the premiums were pretty damned low.
This is my sig.
Where can I view (in human-readable form) the whole fucking budget. All of it. I'll streamline that shit like a soft turd in a wind tunnel.
I'll do it for free, and in under a week, too.
Fortunately, the sharks are still in the budget.
Quite frankly, other than the Hot Rocks project, we never really thought either the NEO or FEO space-borne lasers would work, or even the airframe-based lasers.
The logistics in a real time battlefield with countermeasures made them pretty unrealistic.
Hot Rocks is really just throwing pebbles (aka Brilliant Pebbles) or rocks (hence Hot Rocks) at a missile and hoping one of them hit - and had the highest probability of working in battlefield real life conditions.
Were I the pres, I would have killed both of these programs too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Unfortunately Duke Nukem Forever was on this list as well... :(
What will Mitch and Chris Knight work on now?
...for the nuclear waste storage dump. Make it a long skinny row along the US/Mexico border.
Those are science programs?
most people who make it to 75 aren't the expensive people. it's 40-60.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...'cause it doesn't look like you're going to get your way any time soon. Not after the individualist theocrats shit the economic bed.
Maybe if you prayed to your precious 'gods' a little more, or followed their rules a little better, things might change.
Seriously tho. Why so much anger? Why so much rage? There's more evidence for human-driven climate change than for your doomsday prophecies. I know you don't believe in human-driven climate change, so relax. Have a beer. It's on me. Did anyone ever tell you, that you look, like a star, as you sit at the bar. So I drink....
Blar.
got a cite? no? of course not
dumbass
This isn't basic research. It's engineering.
Huh? Actually, lifelong medical expenses for healthy people are higher than for people who die younger.
"The NASA budget for 2010 has been announced, up 5% on 2009. Human space flight plans to be reviewed."
I'm quite glad to hear that this review of NASA's spaceflight plans is occurring, and from what I've read seems to be quite good at minimizing outside/political/industry influence and making sure that the recommendations will truly be the best ones possible. The only problem is that NASA and/or the administration might end up ignoring those recommendations for political reasons (e.g. making sure jobs remain in particular congressional districts).
Evidence has recently been leaked that the NASA's ESAS study which settled on the homebuilt Ares I (based on then-Administrator Mike Griffin's pet design) over the already-existing commercial EELV rockets was deeply flawed. Basically, the flawed 60-day ESAS study (often relied on by certain NASA officials to defend their plans) had a number of major problems:
(from Selenian Boondocks, with parts of the leaked study available on Wikileaks )
As things currently stand, the Ares I has been running into major problems, many believe it to have fundamental design flaws, and projected development costs are running into the $30-$50 billion range. Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago a NASA-commissioned independent study confirmed that the commercial EELVs would be able to fulfill NASA's needs of transporting NASA's orbital and lunar spacecraft, with estimated costs of a few billion dollars (about an order of magnitude less than the Ares program). That's to say nothing of SpaceX and COTS-D, which could do the job for around $1.5 billion dollars of development costs.
O_o
I highly disagree with this statement from General Eisenhower. While it may or may not have been debatable back then, I don't think there is any way you can claim this is true now, at least in the modern United States. According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal taxes. Zip, zero, nada. Yet the warships, guns, missiles, etc, are paid for with federal tax dollars.
So if Americans in the bottom 40% income-wise do not pay any taxes, then how is it robbing them of their food or clothing when guns are purchased? How is it robbery when the other 60% spend their own money that they earned on missiles?
Now, one could argue that the bottom 40% commit robbery, because they often vote for missiles and don't have to foot the bill (while some in the top 60% don't want to spend any money on missiles), and those in the bottom 40% often vote for social and welfare programs that they don't have to pay for, but I digress. The point is that, if anyone in America is starving or without clothes today, they are certainly in the bottom 40% of income earners, and they don't pay a dime for missiles, so clearly they aren't the ones being robbed. And if their argument is that that money could have been spent on social programs for them instead, well, sorry, but someone else choosing not to give their money to you (via a social program) is not robbing you. It is only robbery if they take what you rightfully earned and is rightfully yours.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
They could use it to store unicorn farts from non-nuclear energy proposals.
It is clear to me that President Obama is an person is does not really believe Global Warming to be a major problem. Because nuclear power is a workable way to reduce Green house gases; but Democrats want nothing to do with real solutions; they just want reasons to tax and tax and tax. Tim S
Sure, storing nuke waste and a big laser weapon require science. But they're not science. They're giant contractor employment programmes, both spawned by the Pentagon.
Giving the money directly to science programmes is better for science.
--
make install -not war
I just caught a local PBS show in which someone from NASA (I didn't catch his name, as I came into the program right after his
introduction) shared the following bit of bad news that comes with the new Federal Budget:
"The Shuttle is 30 years old. We've been flying this machine for thirty years. Over the last year and a half, we've been transitioning to a new Constellation program and developing a new launch vehicle as well as the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle to take us back to the moon. That's the goal.
When that shuttle retires, there's going to be a serious change in workforce.
What are we going to do with all the engineers that were performing sustaining engineering on that shuttle program?
The idea was to take them and move them over into the part of the Constellation program that develops the Altair, which is a Lunar Lander going back to the moon.
Today, when President Obama rolled out his detail budget on space, he pulled the Altair and pushed it out three to five years.
So that's a real concern.
If you had asked me this morning at 8:00 if there was going to be a problem with the space industry with engineers and moving forward, I would have said no. This afternoon we've got a real concern
about that and how we're going to fill the gap with those employees.
And we've still got time. We've got a couple of years to try to convince the present Obama administration to continue to go back to the moon."
I just heard through the grapevine that $100+ million in stimulus funds might go for development of the ATST.
(Yeah I know - watch out for Ewoks.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
with no frickin' lazers on their heads.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The problem with smokers is that they die of lung cancer and lung cancer treatment is expensive. We spend a million bucks per lung cancer patient, and, all that money doesn't improve their survival odds
This is my sig.
The ABL is cool. It's like a shark with a freaking laser beam on its head. Only it flies, and it's not a shark.
Just store it in Detroit. No one will notice or care
you should go on a tour of the Nevada Testes Range
That joke was sorta... hanging in the air :)
very bad tragic mistake, leaving many tons of spent and deadly fuel rods in the back yards of reactors everywhere. in little concrete sheds. hundreds or thousands of little dirty bombs waiting for a Wacko bin Looney to park a pickup full of dynamite by.
ought to put a bucket of cracked fuel rods under the desk of every bureaucrat in Washington who came up with this awful decision.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
ou go right on believing that like a good little useful idiot. The so called environmental movement has been and still is dominated by Communists.
I run a hard right wing site (check my profile -which I say only to illustrate my fan of the right credentials), but I think you are completely wrong to say that neo-puritan environmentalists are the same as socialists. I would say the Democratic Party of today is an alliance between neo-puritans ,socialists, organized labor with nationalists leaning towards them, and there is a political difference between all of those groups.
we Republicans are we're really screwed as a party until we start reaching out to people in the Democratic Party and make them come to our side. The "independent" is politically useless because they just sit the fence. We need to steal committed people from the Dems and pick off audiences that support us. We have no credibility on the Reaganesque stance of peace through strength and we pissed away the 1990s balanced budgets that we then imposed by spending like whores ourselves.
That doesn't leave us with too many credible selling points... and we need something that can work. We need to rebuild, over the years, a reputation for budget discipline. We need to attract those groups like labor, that might be at odds with the enviro-puritan wing, and we need to attract immigrants rather than repel, because our capitalist message appeals naturally to them more than socialism. Anyone that jumps the fence and outruns guards to be an American is sufficiently independently minded that by all rights they belong on our side.
This is my sig.
The real question is: why are Americans incapable of governing themselves? You guys do so many things so brilliantly, yet you can't put together a decent government for anything. ...
Other people manage to do this kind of thing through their governments all the time. What is is about Americans that they cannot? ... (and I mean that in a bi-partisan manner.)
As a long-time member of a small -- but dogged -- American political party, I can tell you part of the answer. The "bipartisan" centralist governing coalition is beholden to their primary donors, which are, by and large, corporate entities of one form or another. They, in turn, wish to maintain their status quo control of our governing system; this is a recipe for policy stagnation. Any change -- especially one which brings *other polities* [read 'citizens'] into any sort of power position, with the ability to cause change, would threaten the status quo; therefore, that cannot be allowed to happen. So, in short, the fix is in. The vast amount of money needed to compete in elections restricts the field of players to those willing to kowtow to those with the money: corporate interests.
But: every time the power shifts from one member of the bipartisan coalition to the other, some people 'fall off' in disgust, and end up at one of the 'little parties', which are slowly growing. As well, there are many "independents"; people who find themselves in the middle, but don't identify with either of the two big parties: they either vote in the out-party, or they vote 'for the person': i.e. without consideration of that person's party.
As time goes by, there will eventually be *too many* of these 'independents' and 'little partyists' for the two main parties to adequately absorb; at the same time, the Net will expand the ability of these people to communicate with each other directly. At that point, we will see a fundamental rearrangement of the political system in America. It make take the form of a "moderate' centralist bloc, which persists; or the polity might become split between the two extremist factions; or there might be a rousing free-for-all with a flock of small parties spread across the idea spectrum.
Ironically, the better the situation for political expression (like the latter case cited above), the *worse* for adequate self-government, as politics rushes in. So I guess the answer to your question is "we self-govern badly because, unlike you, we still have a viable and on-going political debate going on." Perhaps you should look at your 'our-government-runs-well' model and ask yourself if that value is the best political good a polity can ask for or achieve.
If you want to follow the "one people, one state, one policy" theory, that is your business. We don't all fall in line --ever-- and, ironically, that is our saving grace. We all love our country, but few of us trust our government -- since it lacks adequate *citizen* representation.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
I'm not saying that all examples of obstruction are bad, but just that it feels like obstruction for selfish reasons takes overriding priority over the public interest -- very general examples being Yucca Mountain or the Land Mine Ban Treaty.
In the really great and grand scheme of things, there is considerable unity in the leadership of the USA, democrat, or republican.
1) They are united on the war in Iraq. AS much as Democrats bitched about it, you never really saw them explicitly vote to end the war, or cut off its funding, the way they did during Vietnam. And... more and more we find out they were on board themselves, but had a political base they had to placate.
2) They are united about alternative energy. Sure, Republicans chalk it up to farm aid, and Democrats want to save the atmosphere, but there's a torrent of money and incentives for all sorts of things.
3) They are united on food protectionism. American farm markets are protectionist. We protect our farmers. Screw the third world. -sigh-, I wish we protected our manufacturing too. But, oh well.
4) United on free trade. The Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, despite their friendly appearances, are mercantile countries trying to get rich at American expense. The bipartisan response has been to let them.
5) Both like giant militaries. Ok, the Democrats may only want to blow you up 10 times over, and the Republicans, 15 times over, but if you blink you'll find those sneaky Democrats funding the stealth fighter and bomber, ballistic missile subs, the a-bomb and the h-bomb, and they never really do -stop- missile defense research. The way it works is a division of labors..
There's just a lot that its in common, more than people really realize.
This is my sig.