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Good News For US Fusion Research
zrbyte writes "Fusion research would get a major boost in a Department of Energy (DOE) spending bill approved today by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations. The panel rejected an Obama Administration proposal to cut funding for domestic fusion research in the 2013 fiscal year, which begins 1 October. It would also give more money than requested to an international collaboration building the ITER fusion reactor in France. This will allow the Alcator C-Mod fusion facility at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to be kept open, which the Administration had proposed closing."
Yay election year motivated spending.... lets see them get anything the following year :p
How exactly is fusion power a dead end?
You're confusing "distant destination with rewards that are worth it" for "dead end".
Friendly clue from Europe:
As long as you believe the only politics that exist is "Democrat" or "Republican" your country is never going to arise from it's current venture into corporatism.
Fix it by changing the system. Not supporting it.
That means in 10 years, it will be just forty years away, right?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
A day without fusion is like a day without sunshine!
I gatta get me this shirt (on thinkgeek)...
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Says the expert.
I've SEEN a working fusion reactor. Tokamaks work right now.
ITER merely take scientificially-demonstrated technology, and makes it industrial-scale.
How do you know it will ever work? You're confusing "wishful thinking, daydreams and delusions" with "historical track record of proven failures and almost insurmountable engineering obstacles". You want a distant destination with rewards? Time to remodel our western social structure. But that's too hard, better stick to fanciful sci-fi scenarios and techno-fixes that will never happen. So much easier to cope with than reality! Also means never having to change the old career-suburbs-car model either, too comfortable in front of your Chinese TV!!
Damn and me without a time machine to go tell Da Vinci all those drawings of flying machines are a waste. I mean really hundreds of years of none stop proven failures. He should have just stuck to art.
Let's see, a series of anti-global warming stories, anti-environmental stories, etc, shortly followed by a pork barrel promotion story blaming the sitting president for, of all things, cutting funding to a dead end science experiment. Gee whiz, I wonder why Slashdot is once again carrying Republican talking points and pushing a Republican agenda? Oh rriiight, it's an election year so the right wing media is ratcheting it up a notch and slashdot is doing its usual duty for the right.
Here are the recent Slashdot stories:
Who Needs CISPA? FBI Has a Non-Profit Workaround
WW2 Vet Sent 300,000 Pirated DVDs To Troops In Iraq, Afghanistan
Key Test For Skylon Spaceplane Engine Technology
China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture
Microsoft Patches Major Hotmail 0-day Flaw After Widespread Exploitation
Conflict of Interest Derails UK Government Open Source Consultation
Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief
Bionic Eye Patient Tests Planned For 2013
BOLD Plan To Find Mars Life On the Cheap
'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany
UK Digital Economy Act Delayed Till 2014
The only thing I see here remotely political is the "Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief", which is another way of calling religious people stupid and "'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany", which contains a whole bunch of comments comparing "Mein Kampf" to the Bible.
Seriously dude! How bad do you really really want to believe in the fictional "right wing media" to make you see evidence of it where it does not exist?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I've SEEN a working fusion reactor. Tokamaks work right now.
There's a world of difference between working and practical.
I think we both know that's what the parent meant. After all, there are fusion machines that can sit on a desk, but you don't see anyone proclaiming that fusion power is here yet.
The fusion research give back was a sop to Sen. Brown of MA. Overall, this bill is a step back... did @zrbyte read the article?
I'm fine with funding fusion, but the fact is that we haven't been and aren't anywhere near payoff on fusion research. While this Administration has tried to focus resources on technologies with near-term benefits towards supplementing and eventually substituting our energy supplies with cleaner sources, this Congress is sticking with their usual pork buddies: oil, coal, and uranium. That they threw a bone to Scott Brown was an afterthought, the cost of doing business for when they get to their real priorities: cutting social insurance and 1%er taxes.
The overall DOE budget is cut $365 million below the 2012 budget, $1.76 billion below the Administration request. ... mostly to keep Alcator C-Mod open. ... a drop in the bucket for the billions ITER will require from the US over 10 years.
To pay for this:
- Fusion Energy Sciences program: +$72.6 million
- Various domestic fusion research programs: +$48.3 million
- ITER contribution: +$73 million
They're cutting from this:
- DOE's Basic Energy Sciences: -$36.9 million, $142.5 million below Administration request, mostly by canceling or delaying construction projects.
- Biological and Environmental Research: -$69.8 million, $83.4 million below request.
- Advanced Research Projects Agency: -$75 million, $75 million below request.
Other winners:
- Fossil energy research: +$207 million
- Fission energy research: +$765 million
Luke, help me take this mask off
If only it were that easy...
Unfortunately, here in the States, we have First past the post or "winner take all" voting, which simply means that the person/party who gets the most (NOT (necessarily) a majority, simply the MOST) votes - wins. Essentially, a vote for any candidate other than the second place finisher is a vote for the winner. As a recent historical example, Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000. See also Duverger's law, which says that first-past-the-post systems are guaranteed (over time) to become two-party systems. Of course, the alternative is multiple parties and coalition governments, which many other nation's governments are living examples of how well and smoothly that system works, too.
When it comes right down to it, humanity has yet to invent the ideal system of government.
I must have missed the weaponized uncontrolled faster-than-light explosion 60 years ago that proved the basic principles in an artificial device, and the whole thing being consistent with generally known physics.
Constructing a warp drive would require new basic science. Getting a fusion reactor working with an energy gain might require specific discoveries and a lot of hard engineering, but it's not inconceivable in any way. I also think the recent interview with the Alcator C-Mod guys here at /. made the point that the "failures" for at least the last 40 years have been the failures of funding agencies to provide the resources that the researches expected to be needed all along. ITER will be better know compared to if it had been built 20 years ago (new insights, better materials, better resources), but the basic design for what was needed to evaluate the next level of tokamaks concepts was there that long back.
We know fusion exists, and that the reaction can produce more energy than it takes to maintain. If that weren't true, we wouldn't be here. That's not to say there aren't issues with fusion power, but comparing it to warp drives -- a fictional technology -- is silly.
AC speaks the truth.
Power balance in tokamaks and other magnetic fusion machines is well understood enough, to the point where they're covered in chapters in various textbooks on the subject. They lay out, in black and white, roughly what design decisions need to be made to have tokamaks and friends produce significant net power. The books I have are quite a few years old too.
OTOH, there are quite a few papers out there, outlining why farnsworth fusors and polywells make rubbish power plants.
I agree. While I do think that fusion power is worth researching, it should be a long term research project. LFTR is a "right now" project that will yield immediate results. Oak Ridge National Laboratories had a working LFTR reactor back in the 60s. We could have LFTR up and running on a global scale in 10 years if we could get just a little funding for it, say 1 billion dollars, which is a fraction of what has been spent so far on Fusion so far with no practical application yet.
Here's the primer on LFTR called "Thorium in Five Minutes" it's a good watch.
http://thoriumremix.com/2011/
Here's a link to the Thorium petition.
http://thoriumpetition.com/
Calling it a major cut is a slight exaggeration, the actual cut is 2%, as opposed to Obama's request to increase it by 8%.
It sounds like they're just shifting some money from Obama's "Green" energy initiatives to fusion research.
Yes! Let's be more like Europe!
World Happiness report ranking:
1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. Norway
7. Sweden
And yes, us "socialist" Scandinavian/Nordic countries have perfectly healthy economies. And we would never accept your two party dictatorship.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/world-happiness-report-2012_n_1408787.html
No. Let's not.
Yeah well. How's that working out for you.
In Transparency International's 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index all five Nordic countries were ranked among the 11 least corrupt of 178 evaluated countries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
(United States: #24)
it's in my head