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Posted on 07/03/2005 10:00:05 PM PDT by neverdem
The Senate voted early yesterday morning to stop construction of the nation's costliest science project, a laser roughly the size of a football stadium that is meant to harness fusion, the process that powers the Sun.
The project, the National Ignition Facility, or NIF (pronounced niff), is at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and has cost $2.8 billion. About 80 percent complete, NIF is scheduled to be finished in 2009 at a cost of $3.5 billion and operate for three decades at an annual cost of $150 million, for a total of $8 billion.
The Senate's action, part of the $31 billion energy and water appropriations bill, prompted warnings from the project's leaders that its demise could damage the nation's leadership in a field important to confronting energy shortages. This week, an international consortium picked France as the site of the world's first large-scale, sustainable nuclear fusion reactor, a project with an estimated cost of $10 billion.
"What's at stake here is the opportunity to meet one of the grand challenges of science," Michael R. Anastasio, director of the Livermore laboratory, said in an interview. "It's essential for investigating fusion, which will help sustain confidence in our nuclear stockpile and inform our future thinking about fusion energy."
Other Livermore officials warned of a parallel to the Superconducting Supercollider, a proposed 54-mile particle accelerator that Congress killed in 1993 after spending $2 billion. Some physicists regard its fate as a symbol of the erosion of the nation's scientific standing.
The Bush administration backs the National Ignition Facility, and the Senate action could be reversed or modified later this summer in conference with the House.
"There's going to be some meeting of the minds," said Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a private organization in Albuquerque that...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Our Congress is so smart. Damn they are smart.
I am not surprised. Sigh.
This sounds like raw, jealous political wrangling at its worst. Crazy Pete needs to step back and stop acting like someone's spurned lover.
British Scientists Say Carbon Dioxide Is Turning the Oceans Acidic
Gotta pump money into all of those highly productive social welfare programmes instead of this quaint science stuff...
/sarcasm
Why even have "national labs" when they just let our (read taxpayers) investments get stolen by two bit spies.
So they are flushing 2.8 billion??? Why? Lemme guess, they want to spend the money to force some emission nonsense?
Sorry, I won't "subscribe" to the NYT for any reason.
I hope a mad scientist steals it.
What is despicable is that this potential huge leap in scientific and energy progress would have cost only another $3.5 billion, and they canned it, but Bush's despicable $15 billion down the African rathole of murderous billionaire tyrants? Our public servants in the Senate apparently had no problem with that.
Obviously they got the email that Sun god Ra would look on this project with displeasure and would send locusts, eartquakes and such to punish these upstarts.
IMHO, one of the great scientific blunders of the 20th century. Fortunately we were able to get the Gravity Probe-B off the ground. That was a close call.
No fusion projects. No supercolliders.
Outsource all our science to china, I suppose.
:(
Or Europe. :-(
I'm for killing this thing.
Fusion is really tough to do in a controlled, economical way.
Besides, these guys are trying to use brute force to solve a problem that demands a more elegant theory and solution.
I am sorry the super collider got killed. Who knows what knowledge could have come from that. Of course, there was a small chance it may have produced a quantum singularity that would destroy the galaxy but those are the risks you have to take.
Anyway, a few billion into nanotech or fuel cells or solar power will yield better returns.
In our backyard we have Fermilab and they are lobbying for the International Linear Collider.
Fully agree with you. Instead of seeing my money flushed down African rathole [as a friend of mine uses to say - no baboonery with my money!] I'd rather see it going to pay for things like supercollider or this laser. At least here there's a good chance of getting something out of it, besides ingratitude.
The problem is so huge and the payoff also, that this expenditure is trivial. Besides, they don't have an elegant solution yet.
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