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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.
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.
-- 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.
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.
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.
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! --
It doesn't much matter anyhow. Nuclear waste becomes no more toxic than a great many other industrial process after being stored for only 5 years or so. Leave it at the reactor site for 5 years, then move it (which is the actual plan in many places).
We're only storing old fuel because it's valuable, not because it's unusually dangerous. WHy should we care about "safe for 10000 years" storage? It's complete and utter nonsense.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why? what logic is that?
Other questions:
Do you know what the different grades of waste are?
do you know how it's contained?
Do you know if it's a solid?
if you can't answer those question accurately and in detail, STFU.
I am so sick of people that don't know jack driving policy and decisions about scientific decisions.
I got news for those people:
"Your opinion does not matter."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The whole point of green is creating an Age of Less.
NO, the whole point of green is creating the Age of Sustainability, and anyone who wants less isn't green.
It's true that neo-puritans have glommed on to the environmental movement since the early '70's to the extent that they have dominated it until recently, but there are some actual green voices out there, clamouring to be heard amidst the neo-puritan lies.
The thing that should be stunningly obvious to everyone is: sacrifice is unsustainable. It requires more self-discipline than any large group of humans has ever managed, and in the absence of self-discipline it requires unsustainable (to say nothing of unethical) enforcement measures.
The neo-puritans are in particular trouble right now because green tech has reached industrial viability--wind farms, solar farms, biodiesel, etc. are all becoming viable industries, and in opposing them neo-puritans necessarily reveal that they don't love the environment, they hate industry. While genuine greens are out there making the world a better place, and making money on the way.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"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.
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.
*ahem*.
Except for all of the following:
1: Social Security Tax they pay.
1a: the SS tax their EMPLOYER pays on their behalf.
2: Transaction Fees
3: The FICA they pay out of EITC
4: The taxes that their EMPLOYER pays on the wealth this employee generates in excess of his wages.
So, yeah, aside from all those, the working poor pay no taxes.
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.
Citation please? The thing is, that as a graduate student I fall into that bottom 40% in income, and I most certainly do pay federal (and state) taxes. Other graduate students I've talked to on the issue pay taxes as well. Given the size of the standard deduction, I can't see how anyone without dependents who made much more than $10,000/yr could avoid paying some taxes (except in select cases, like running a home business in the red).
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
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.
I don't have a citation, but I do find the comment believable.
1) As a graduate student, you probably don't *really* know what poor is. Yeah, I know you probably eat nothing but Ramen noodles all week, but you aren't paying for them with food stamps.
2) "without dependents" - That's probably a big portion of the 40%. People who make 10k/year and have 4 children.
I bet somebody could whip out a calculator and a W-2 form and figure out what income level corresponds to 0 taxes.
Which, yours or mine? I've just said that I can state from personal experience that the statement, "the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability" is simply false (based on the US income distribution reported here).
I never said anything about being poor, I only stated the objective fact that I fall below the 40th percentile of income.
Now if you look at a copy of the 1040 for 2008, you'll see that the standard deduction is $5,450 for those filing as single or married filing separately, $10,900 for those married filing jointly, and $8,000 for head of household. You get another deduction of $3,500 per exemption, which will be 1 (assuming no one can claim you as a dependent) plus the number of dependents. Obviously there are lots of possible permutations and there are there are various tax credits, the possibility of itemized deductions, etc., but it's clear from those numbers that plenty of people making less than the 40th percentile (about $35k/yr) will pay taxes. A single person with no dependents making over $9,000/yr can easily end up paying taxes, and a single parent (head of household plus one dependent) making more than $15,000/yr can end up paying tax.
So, it's clear that that factoid is bunk. I was legitimately curious where you got it from, because you're not the first person I've heard use it (or something similar). I even heard someone being interviewed on a news show say something similar.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy