Senate Bill Raises Possibility of Withdrawl From ITER As Science Cuts Loom

ananyo writes "Are the knives coming out for ITER? A Senate Department of Energy spending bill, yet to be voted on, would cut domestic research for fusion and directs the DOE to explore the impact of withdrawing from ITER. The proposed cuts for domestic fusion research are in line with those proposed in the Obama administration's budget request but come after the House ... voted to boost ITER funding and to support the domestic program at almost 2012 levels on 6 June. U.S. fusion researchers do not want a withdrawal from ITER yet but if the 2014 budget looks at all like the 2013 one, that could change. 'They're not trying to kill ITER just yet,' says Stephen Dean, president of advocacy group Fusion Power Associates. 'If this happens again in 2014, I'm not so sure.' The problems for fusion could be small beans though. The 'sequester', a pre-programmed budget cut scheduled to take effect on 2 January, could cut 7.8% or more off science and other federal budgets unless Congress can enact last-minute legislation to reduce the deficit without starving U.S. science-funding agencies."

Comments

Gotta love politicans

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of cutting where its needed (gross government pay and military), they cut everything else instead.

And before hell is raised, yes the military budget CAN be cut. However, the way they have gone about it recently has been messy. 2 wars we're footing the bill for haven't helped either.

Re:Gotta love politicans

[ZenDragon]

Agreed. 2012 total military spending: $1.030–$1.415 trillion! Just a small fraction of that reallocated to research for something that would benefit all of humanity would make a HUGE difference. Hell while they're at it they should toss a couple billion towards this countries waning educational system.

Re:Gotta love politicans

[akeeneye]

Yes, military spending should be cut back drastically. Endless pork for the military, endless, war, and demands for domestic spending cuts "because the government's broke" and "because we can't afford these programs" don't add up. And now this, cutting fusion research funding, something that could end oil dependence, while giving oil companies billions of dollars in subsidies every year. Which politicians are in the pockets of defense contractors and oil companies? Pretty much all of them.

Re:Gotta love politicans

[Rei]

[blockquote]The US's education system is the most highly funded system in the world by a large margin already.[/blockquote]

You'd hardly know it from the results.

(Yes, you've got a lot of the best universities, blah blah blah... A) a large chunk of those students are international, and B) your high standard deviation on educational acheivement doesn't change the fact that your average sucks.)

Re:Gotta love politicans

[oh_my_080980980]

It is when you haven't paid for it.

Re:Gotta love politicans

[dkleinsc]

Take a guess as to who said this in 1960:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

You might think it's some liberal peace activist type speaking to a bunch of hippie protesters. But you'd be wrong: it's Dwight D Eisenhower.

Re:Gotta love politicans

[DesScorp]

I hear the words "teacher pay" starting to echo.

Well, here's on the Slashdot doesn't like to touch: administrator pay. Administrator pay is a problem in education, healthcare, the corporate sector, government agencies... it's across the board. And when it comes to education it's almost a taboo subject.

It's not just administrator pay, it's also the sheer size of administration. And pork projects (yes, schools have those too) as well. The education budget for the most part is bloated, with little to show for it.

Re:Gotta love politicans

[DesScorp]

[blockquote]The US's education system is the most highly funded system in the world by a large margin already.[/blockquote]

You'd hardly know it from the results.

(Yes, you've got a lot of the best universities, blah blah blah... A) a large chunk of those students are international, and B) your high standard deviation on educational acheivement doesn't change the fact that your average sucks.)

First, you're right, in K-12, we have the highest spending in the world, and you're correct: you'd hardly know it from the results.

Second, our university system is at the edge of a precipice. Our colleges have been living off of their reputations for years, and other institutions across the world are catching up, or have caught up with us. Harvard and Yale... like Oxford and Cambridge... will always have a brand to sell, but our higher education bubble is going to burst soon, and it's going to make the housing bubble look small by comparison. We have too many colleges with too many students that shouldn't be their learning too much fluff and paying too much for it. If something can't last forever, it wont.

Re:Gotta love politicans

[Entropius]

Yeah, this.

My mother taught at a ghetto school for quite a while at the end of her career. I worked there for a semester, and volunteered quite a bit in addition to that. They had gobs and gobs of "technology" (computers, teleconferencing equipment) lying around that wasn't being used, paid for by federal grants -- and that nobody there really knew *how* to turn into actual student learning. They maintain an "aerospace science" magnet program in name only which (for a while) was there in name only and existed just to qualify for federal funding.

What we need to do to fix education is:

1) Pay teachers a salary that is commensurate with highly-trained competent professionals
2) Demand that they actually be highly-trained competent professionals
3) Get the hell out of their way and stop micromanaging them

Re:Gotta love politicans

[Vellmont]

What you call "entitlements", other people call "not dying of cancer", or "being able to eat".

SS and medicare are only a problem because our taxes are too low, and the economy is in the shitter. If we repealed the Bush tax cuts, most of the problems go away. If you repeal the tax cuts, and cut the military budget back to pre-9/11 levels, the problem goes away entirely.

You don't have to agree this is a good thing to do. But you do have to agree that simply saying the problem is "entitlements", is a vast, vast oversimplification.

Next article up, shortage of scientists

[vlm]

Next article up, some manager whining about how there's a shortage of scientists because he wants to pay almost nothing and the domestic eggheads think they're worth more than $7.25/hr so we'll have to crank open the H1B floodgates until Physicists can only dare to daydream of having the career opportunities of a mcdonalds fry cook. I'm glad I didn't go into science. Would have loved to, but hate grinding poverty even more and don't want to spend my middle age as a taxi driver like happened to all the rocket scientists I know after Apollo.

Next article after that will be some washed up town patting themselves on the back for rolling out a new STEM program for grade school kids, to handle the massive future shortage of STEM employees. You know, the kind of town where 2000 STEM employees just got the axe because one of the STEM educational initiative corporations just moved their HQ from that heartland town to China, and another 200 person foundry just went bankrupt and a 200 person cement factory just closed (this is my home town... I'm not directly affected but it still sucks)

As long as the rich get richer I guess we're on the right path...

Re:Next article up, shortage of scientists

[cyfer2000]

In a piece of related news the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST, internal designation HT-7U), or the test bed of ITER in China, has reached 400s of stable plasma.

I have this CRAZY idea on how to cut the deficit..

[MikeRT]

How about...

1. We pull back all of our military forces except at a few major naval bases, end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and tell Europe, Japan and Korea to pick up 100% of their defense budget from now on. Then cut the defense budget by 25%-30%.
2. We reduce unemployment benefits to six months instead of two years. Sorry, if you haven't worked in your field for about two years you don't have a career in it anymore. Unemployment benefits I believe are right now about $500B-$600B of the current federal budget.
3. We means test the hell out of Social Security and Medicare.
4. Release all non-violent drug offenders (including dealers) from prison, end the War on Drugs and send the enforcement personnel DEA and ATF to work for another federal law enforcement agency.
5. Privatize TSA, repeal 90% of the legislation behind Homeland Security and just admit that the only sensible reform we really needed post 9/11 was letting the FBI and CIA coordinate on terrorism cases.

But nope, we can't stop bombing foreign backwaters where some jihadi is rattling his sabre and AK47 impotently at the Great Satan(tm) or tell someone they need to back away from the federal trough.

Re:Japan

[vlm]

Why do I get the feeling this wouldn't be on the cards if Japan had got ITER, as the US essentially demanded in the first place... Once France got it, US interest took a massive nose dive, with multiple calls for investment in a home grown alternative instead.

I think you're rewriting history a bit as the USA bailed completely out of the project in the 90s until the canadians pouted and quit in the 00s because they didn't get the construction site and we joined sorta in their place, kinda, at about the same time Japan agreed to stop arguing about where to build it if they got extra job slot quotas. So if anything interest picked up when Japan stopped fighting, not reduced. I suppose "interest decreased" in a sort of prime time reality TV drama sense in that it got less dramatic and more boring once Canada stopped pouting and got evicted from the island or whatever mixed metaphor and Japan stopped picking fights with everyone. On the other hand, after the prime time TV drama ended, they actually started working on stuff and there's dirt being dug up and things being built right now...

It won't be the first time we've bailed, it'll probably happen again.

Kazakhstan wants to join (yeah, Kazakhstan, no kidding) ... I suppose as a point of national pride they are a rising country instead of a declining one like the US. They even have a superior medical system. Its embarrassing that replacing us with them will, overall, be an upgrade to the ITER project.

To some extent this is just a larger scale version of what happens every time a school district budget is squeezed. Don't lower mahogany row salaries from $250K to "only" $200K per year because then we wouldn't attract the "leadership" of the best and brightest who are currently running us into the ground, nahh, just threaten to cut something cool and popular like drivers ed or high school football until the taxpayers are beaten into submission and meekly accept higher tax rates.

Science and education

[circletimessquare]

are investments in the future.

Our politics has been infested with the corporate tendency to think short term, just as long as the next quarterly results. Which makes sense, since our representatives answer to the agendas of the corporations that fund them, certainly not the people who elected them.

The result of which is that the USA is declaring its intent to be a declining power in the world. You invest in science and education, or you head towards second rate status in the world. It's that simple.

Yet another reason why the corporate infection of our democracy basically means our doom.

If the money was directed to Thorium...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

and/or nuclear plants with passive safety systems and a rational waste storage facilities, it would be a good idea. Instead, well'l use the savings to pay down debt caused by military spending, bail out banks and making sure very wealthy people stay wealthy and get wealthier. We are almost the definition of a culture in decline.

Re:I have this CRAZY idea on how to cut the defici

[Sponge Bath]

Unemployment benefits I believe are right now about $500B-$600B of the current federal budget.

Combined state and federal unemployment benefits peaked in 2010 at $160 billion, 2010 was about $120 billion.

Re:science funding is not a significant % of budge

[CrimsonAvenger]

before we talk about entitlements I think we need to create a proper bar graph where one bar is entitlements and the other is military. Then we can talk entitlement cut.

From the 2012 budget...

MIlitary budget, including overseas contingency operations: $716.3 Billion.

Note that the above doesn't count the VA, which can adds in another $129.6 Billion.

If you assume that the VA is part of "military spending", that makes the total $845.9 Billion.

If you assume VA is NOT part of "military spending", then it probably should be added to "entitlement spending"....

Entitlement spending...

Social Security: $778.6 Billion.

Medicare: $484.4 Billion

"Income Security": $579.5 Billion.

Total: $1842.5 Billion

Not sure if that's all the entitlements, but looks reasonable. Note that Medicaid may or may not be included in "Income Security". If it's not, then add a hundred billion or so more onto the entitlement pile.

Note that payment on the National Debt amounted to $225 Billion. So about 6% of our federal spending vanishes to pay for overspending in previous years....

So, "entitlements" amount to rather more than twice "military spending" if you count VA as "military spending", and 2.75x "military spending" if you count the VA as "entitlement spending"....

Note, by the by, that those two chunks of money ("entitlements" and "military spending" amount to considerably more than we take in in tax revenue. So we could ZERO the rest of the government, and still have a large deficit with those untouched.

This is an ongoing debate

[Sgs-Cruz]

Ph.D student in fusion here. (I was one of the authors of this Ask Slashdot.)

It's important to note that there are a range of opinions on this. Everyone thinks ITER is a good idea, at the right price. That price was originally quoted at $5-billion (with the U.S. picking up 9% of that) when the U.S. made the decision to join in 2003; today the construction cost is estimated at somewhere north of $20-billion. Hopefully now with Motojima as Director-General, this cost will stop rising. (From what I hear, he's being very rigorous about cost and schedule control and pushing the team hard on these fronts.)

The problem for the U.S. is that participation in ITER doesn't make sense without a strong domestic program in place to take advantage of the results that come out of it. And without a (temporary) surge in U.S. fusion funding to get over the ITER construction "hump", the entire domestic program might be "squeezed" out of existence. Check out the graph here:

http://fire.pppl.gov/FusionFuture_USbudget_profile.jpg

So it's not so much a matter of "is ITER good science?" (it is!). The question is: "is ITER the right path for the U.S. at a cost of 9% of $20-billion or $25-billion, without a commitment to sustain the domestic program through the ITER construction phase?"

I urge everyone here to go to our website that we set up at fusionfuture.org, which has a lot of information about this issue. We still need your help - the House has restored funding for the domestic fusion program, but the current Senate version of the bill still has the domestic fusion budget slashed (and the fusion experiment at MIT entirely closed down). There is still work to do!