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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."
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.
-- 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.
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! --
Next time you go to Las Vegas (if ever) you should go on a tour of the Nevada Test Range- it's really cool. Just don't have kids afterward.
They take reservations several months in advance (I think it was through the DOE). Basically you'll find yourself on a bus, packed with senior citizens too old to fear radiation, darting from crater to crater past big scary RADIOACTIVE signs poking up from tall weeds. You'll also meet a lot of right wing types during the day.
They don't allow cameras, which is a damn shame. Go before Ernie the tour guide dies, so you can hear firsthand accounts of all the nuclear tests that went awry. Ernie is big on nuclear power but he probably glows in the dark.
Because eventually nuclear weapons will become sufficiently cheap and readily available that a single person will kill us all.
The only way to stop it is to remove the possibility of a person considering that course of action.
That, or provide a robust means of safety against nuclear warheads. As improbable as the first proposition is, stopping a couple dozen nukes from destroying all human life on earth is about as physically sound as me rolling a hundred pound boulder up Mount Everest.
World peace is at least physically possible, if improbable given usual human attitudes. And in any case, world peace is imperative, since we have surpassed the point where superior physical force truly corresponds to an evolutionary advantage. It only increases the odds of mutually assured destruction, or perhaps worse still, reversion to our former primeval state.
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.
Nearly every place in the USA has a fault near it in some way.
This is why people who aren't delusional or dishonest want to site any American nuclear waste repositories in salt domes, which are geologically stable structures that have lasted quite happily over tens of millions of years without earthquakes or water intrusions (the latter is so obvious that even the neo-puritan anti-nukes aren't stupid enough to argue against it.)
In Canada we are planning to bury nuclear waste in granite dykes in the Canadian Shield, which have been stable for something like three hundred million years.
There are plenty of places that are suited to burying waste. The neo-puritans got together with politicians and chose one that satisfied all parties by appearing to do something about the waste disposal problem while ensuring that nothing was actually done.
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. I'm not talking about the crazy partisan things Bush did or Obama might be doing--I'm talking about things like Yucca Mountain, which lasted over multiple administrations and changes in power in both houses of Congress. It's failure is a failure of the entire US governmental system, a monument to the apparent inability of Americans to actually use their government to make modestly intelligent plans and carry them through to approximately timely completion.
Other people manage to do this kind of thing through their governments all the time. What is is about Americans that they cannot?
I'm deliberately putting this at the feet of Americans, rather than 'the American government', because I think at some point you have to hold people in a democracy up to ridicule when they continually elect such complete bozos (and I mean that in a bi-partisan manner.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It is worse than you think. I was at the APS meeting a few days ago and there was a nice talk about fission reactors and energy crisis. The upshot is that the reactors we do have will exceed their safe lifespans in several years (2014 ?) and should really be shut down or require maintenance. New reactors cost a lot of money to build because we lost the domestic industry. Old school nuclear engineers have retired, there are no new ones and we cannot even make large forgings - containment vessels need to be bought in Japan. Thus, at best, fission power could have an impact in 40-50 years, if we start building now.
The opinion of the presenter (which I consider sensible) is that Yucca was a wrong thing to do anyway. The "spent" fuel is not really spent - it has most of its energy in it, just needs to be reprocessed or deployed in reactors of different type. Reprocessing is expensive and, guess what, USA is spending all of its effort trying to catch up with Japan and France. Interestingly enough, the Japanese reprocessing plant turned out to be extremely expensive that suggests that we should really try an alternate approach.
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 believe that American culture has been becoming increasingly less capable of self-sacrifice for a greater or national good. For example, despite the large and prominent pacifist movements prior to the World Wars, we still eventually got around to getting involved. We sacrificed for Meatless Mondays and war bonds. These days, there are so many examples of Americans assuming the attitude that unless something directly benefits me or requires me to lose any skin, I will filibuster, lobby, or litigate.
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.