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."

Comments

political science

[bolthole]

Yay election year motivated spending.... lets see them get anything the following year :p

Re:political science

[Anonymous Coward]

The disheartening thing about our budget is that we were unable to find a reasonable solution to contain health care costs in our country. We have plenty of examples of country who are able to offer good health care for a fraction of the cost and yet we have chosen to kick the can and not solve this problem. Anything else in the budget (other than defence) is peanuts compared to health care. Yet, we have no solution in sight. Harder than facing the problem, we chose to digress the discussion and talk about 'death panels' and other nonsensical distractions. .... sigh....

Re:political science

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost no company could absorb the risk inherent in basic science at that scale and companies do not benefit from raising all boats equally - they only benefit from raising their own boat. Companies are also usually not very interested in improving things 20 years or even 2 years down the road. Government is better equipped to deal with basic science because of that.

Re:political science

[ArcherB]

What? I'm not following the connect between power & health costs.

How come the government is doing fusion research instead of the private sector, like existing electric companies?

Because electric companies are public utilities. See, in order to spend (invest) an enormous amount money into expensive, unproven research projects like this, you must have "extra" money laying around. That money comes from profits. Utility companies are a natural monopoly and are therefor heavily regulated so they don't take advantage of their consumers. If the utility companies had the types of huge profits needed to invest in nuclear fusion research, the government would step in and force them to lower their prices, thus eliminating their profits and research capital.

Re:political science

[Microlith]

You imply that if they were allowed to the type of profits required to do this research... that they would actually do this research. I suspect, rather, that they would simply return it to their investors and release "record profits" announcements quarterly while buying off legislators to continue doing what they have been.

Re:Slashdot carrying Republican water again

[Entropius]

How exactly is fusion power a dead end?

You're confusing "distant destination with rewards that are worth it" for "dead end".

It's just 50 years away now!

[crazyjj]

That means in 10 years, it will be just forty years away, right?

Re:It's just 50 years away now!

[MozeeToby]

Maybe the fact that it always seems 50 years away has something to do with this?

They said in 1978 that then current funding levels would never produce a viable power platform. To get one going by today would have required on average $2.5 billion per year by the fusion researchers' own estimates. Actual funding since 1978? $500 million per year. Quite blaming the science for the politicians shortsightedness.

Everything is already running on fusion....

[Petron]

A day without fusion is like a day without sunshine!

I gatta get me this shirt (on thinkgeek)...

Re:Slashdot carrying Republican water again

[benjfowler]

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.

Re:Slashdot carrying Republican water again

[ooshna]

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.

Re:Slashdot carrying Republican water again

[ArcherB]

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?

Fusion exists -- warp drives don't

[dlenmn]

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.

Re:There must be some way...

[tomhath]

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.

Re:Slashdot carrying Republican water again

[Troed]

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)