Senate Budgetmakers Move To End US Participation In ITER

Graculus (3653645) writes Budgetmakers in the U.S. Senate have moved to halt U.S. participation in ITER, the huge international fusion experiment now under construction in Cadarache, France, that aims to demonstrate that nuclear fusion could be a viable source of energy. Although the details are not available, Senate sources confirm a report by Physics Today that the Senate's version of the budget for the Department of Energy (DOE) for fiscal year 2015, which begins 1 October, would provide just $75 million for the United States' part of the project. That would be half of what the White House had requested and just enough to wind down U.S. involvement in ITER. According to this story from April, the U.S. share of the ITER budget has jumped to "$3.9 billion — roughly four times as much as originally estimated." (That's a pretty big chunk; compare it, say, to NASA's entire annual budget.)

Comments

fusing relitivity to orders of magnitude

[nadaou]

compare and contrast, the US's war in Iraq, 1 ea. at $2.29 trillion, up to $6T if you act now.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

pick your technological investment, rinse and repeat and hope to have something to show for it at the end of the day.

Something to think about on the 4th.

Democrats getting a pass here?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I have a feeling if the story was about the current House of Representatives slashing ITER funding, we'd see a screed about "anti-science Republicans." However, since the Senate is led by Democrats...

Re:One question

[nadaou]

> How much did the politicians receive from the OPEC to
> abandon fusion research?

I imagine depressingly little.

And call a Koch a Koch, it probably wasn't the local OPEC proxies.