Senate Bill Raises Possibility of Withdrawl From ITER As Science Cuts Loom 180
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."
Gotta love politicans (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Japan (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Next article up, shortage of scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
science funding is not a significant % of budget (Score:2, Insightful)
The entire US science funding - for EVERYTHING - is a drop in the bucket.
You want to make a difference in the budget? Here's what you have to do:
(1) Trim entitlement spending
(2) Trim military spending.
Shit, there's enough graft, corruption, and incompetence in both that you could probably cut their budgets in half and end up with the same effectiveness at the end.
Nothing else besides entitlements and military spending matters to any significant degree, and eating your seed corn is always a bad idea.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gotta love politicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Science and education (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Gotta love politicans (Score:5, Insightful)
[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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.