Good News For US Fusion Research 149
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."
political science (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:political science (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
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Every attempt at reform to date has sought merely to spread the cost, not reduce the cost.
What we need is an anal exam of all the players in the system. Full top to bottom audit, no information hidden. No relying on anecdotal stories or other gut feel explanations. That way, policy makers will KNOW what's driving the costs and design appropriate remedies.
Until that happens, any attempt to solve this will fail.
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You are doing the same as has been done before...ignoring the fact that there undoubtedly things that can be done to reduce the structural costs.
Costs are not skyrocketing not ONLY because people insist on MRIs for the running nose. They are going up because MRIs cost a lot of money to do. Why? who knows? You can guess...large capital costs, specialized training, special housing, etc. But still, it is a piece of equipment governed by the laws of GAAP and FDA regulation. Each of these regulatory systems can
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Well in the case of MRIs, since you're talking about very large superconducting coils, I expect they're also expensive to run because a) very strong B fields require lots of power to generate, b) superconducting magnets need to be cooled with liquid helium (which itself tends to be kept in an intermediary LN insulating "blanket").
The LHe and LN also require power to condense/cool and when dealing with stuff kept that cold, there almost certainly is more maintenance complexity (and hence costs) than with th
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And when that does happen, I'm sure that the cost of manufacturing and maintaining/operating MRI's will drop significantly. In the meantime however...
Anyways, thanks for the heads up. Once you had alerted me to it, I did find the mention of new YBCO wire allowing high Tc magnets to be built back in 2007, and that the test magnet supported .96T at 77K. That's on the low end of MRI field strengths and it's not clear they'll be able to get much more out of it. Who knows though, maybe they'll be able to use var
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That is an opinion and not a fact. While things perhaps "could" be done there were unfortunately leeches that fed off those structural costs and they needed to fight change to keep their money supply. Unfortunately due to the vast amount of waste feeding those leeches and a system where influence can be legally bought they had the ability to fight very effectively.
You have an insurance system that pretends to
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There is also the massive problem of malpractice insurance. The doctor who delivered my children had to go out of business because, even though he was a good doctor, the malpractice insurance was too expensive to afford. All because people read the papers about there being a risk of death, or blindness, or whatever, and think the risk won't hit them, then when it does, they sue the doctor for it happening. If we could reduce lawsuit payouts, the healthcare system would become much cheaper to run.
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but this is supposed to be about fusion. The funding is there for now, because it's trendy. And it's at the expense of other projects. And fusion will still be 20 years away. Expect t
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Well, factually, it would knock something like 10-20% off the healthcare costs for the country (assuming it could drive power costs down 90%).
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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?
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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As Evil as MaBell was they still pumped plenty of money into Bell Labs for frivolous research into fiber and lasers.
Add the transistor to that list, if I'm not mistaken. But I'm not sure the comparison of Ma Bell to energy utilities is entirely valid. For one thing, I would guess that the amount of science, technology and shareholder equity returned per research dollar spent per fiscal quarter at Bell is much higher than anything you'll ever see in research on new energy sources.
Please understand, I don't mean to insult energy researchers here. Quite the contrary. My hat is off to them. They have a tough challenge w
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It's not really government versus private but instead it reflects a lack of attention span in general in the private sector. It's not universal, people like Jobs and Murdoch made a fortu
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That was a well thought out articulate comment.
What the devil are you doing at Slashdot?
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In my state that's no longer true. Prices fluctuate up-and-down with customer demand (though it's usually a fixed-price contract like cellphones), so in theory any one of those ~50 electric companies could have excess profits lying around for research.
Still wondering how power & health costs connect?
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Cheaper power = Less overhead utility costs for medical providers
Cheaper power = More disposable income = Healthier lifestyles
Cheaper power = More clean water = Cheaper crops and Healthier people
Cleaner power = Less pollution = Fewer pollution related illnesses
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A significant cost involved in running hospitals and smaller offices is power for lights, devices, etc.
Subtract that out of the equation, and healthcare gets cheaper.
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Ahhh good point, but someone has to pay that bill. It might as well be the hospital, otherwise if they were handed a blank check, they'd have no motivation to control costs. They could burn-up all kinds of power w/o consequences.
Some people like Al Gore and Barack Obama think power is already too cheap, and a carbon penalty should be added, to encourage less usage.
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Well, I think the (part of) the point with fusion power is that the ancillary costs are also low. That there's essentially zero carbon footprint, the only output is harmlessly small amounts of helium, that the input is sufficiently plentiful to last essentially indefinitely. And as a result, the low cost of fusion power would MORE accurately reflect the costs of generation. Whereas with things like coal power, we're subsidizing generation costs with atmospheric costs that are getting paid by people who w
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There are startups doing exactly that.
Jeff Bezos (of amazon) funded a Canadian one just this year to the tune of $20million
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Because without gvmt intervention, research stalls and the country flushes down the toilet bowl of past superpowers.
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Congress reads /.? (Score:2)
That's new! ROFL. Lets see, which member's districts will this money go to...
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Probably the distinct that hosts the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Odds that it is a Republican district are something south of zero.
It's just 50 years away now! (Score:4, Funny)
That means in 10 years, it will be just forty years away, right?
Re:It's just 50 years away now! (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe the fact that it always seems 50 years away has something to do with this [wikimedia.org]?
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.
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No, it won't work that way, but those armchair admirals are easily snowed.
Why not?
If this hypothetical fusion power plant runs on D-D or D-T or even the more esoteric p-B there's no real reason that fuel could be extracted from seawater. That of course assumes that you could fit a distillery into the boat. If not, then it's no big deal when you realise just how minuscule the amount of fuel such a craft would need.
Still I think you're dead-on when it comes to approaching the DoD; those people have pockets as deep as the oceans they patrol.
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That of course assumes that you could fit a distillery into the boat.
Most of the US Navy ships and subs that are nuclear powered dump excess distilled water overboard.
I think they could easily come up with a smaller, simpler distillery than a nuclear reactor to address that part of your comment. :-)
Besides, knowing sailors, I imagine there have been occasional 'field-improvised' distilleries on ships for many decades/centuries. ;-)
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I'm sorry, I should have been more specific*. By "distillery" I meant something used to extract heavy or deuterated water from the sea, which could yield deuterium fuel for a fusion reactor.
*Or more general, depending on how you look at it.
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Maybe the fact that it always seems 50 years away has something to do with this?
I saw that graph for the first time in the MIT fusion research Q&A. Man was it depressing seeing the "actual funding" line drooping way below the "fusion never" line. :(
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No it's a different type of math actually. Just like lightspeed minus another speed remains lightspeed, 50 years minus 10 years remains 50 years. It takes a bit of getting used to but after a while you start to see that it makes perfect sense. You just have to get used to the different math.
Re:the same idiots (Score:1)
The same idiots who deny cannabis's medicinal benefits agree it should be grouped along with crack and ecstasy.
Everything is already running on fusion.... (Score:5, Funny)
I gatta get me this shirt (on thinkgeek)...
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I get my power from a nuclear power plant you insensitive clod!
Fusion = Boondoggle Pipe Dream (for now anyway) (Score:1)
LFTR, LFTR, LFTR. Seriously. We need a Manhattan Project-style sprint to commercialize Thorium-based energy. That'll give us 1000+, carbon-neutral years to figure out the whole Fusion thing. And hoverboards.
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I agree. While I do think that fusion power is worth researching, it should be a long term research project. LFTR is a "right now" project that will yield immediate results. Oak Ridge National Laboratories had a working LFTR reactor back in the 60s. We could have LFTR up and running on a global scale in 10 years if we could get just a little funding for it, say 1 billion dollars, which is a fraction of what has been spent so far on Fusion so far with no practical application yet.
Here's the primer on LFT
He actually did it (Score:2)
Liquid fluoride thorium reactor (Score:1)
We already have a technology that would give us energy independence for the 40 + years it will take to get the fusion reactors working!
10,800 LFTR would produce enough energy at 100 MW's each to fill all the US needs utilizing existing store of Uranium to start the fission process. They produce only 1% of waste and its only radioactive for 300 years apposed to the 10,000 years for Uranium. Alternatively they could build 1080 1000MW reactors to do the same job at a small fraction of the cost of conventional
go Congress! (Score:1)
Glad to know Congress is good for something!
Can't See Forest For The Trees (Score:3)
The fusion research give back was a sop to Sen. Brown of MA. Overall, this bill is a step back... did @zrbyte read the article?
I'm fine with funding fusion, but the fact is that we haven't been and aren't anywhere near payoff on fusion research. While this Administration has tried to focus resources on technologies with near-term benefits towards supplementing and eventually substituting our energy supplies with cleaner sources, this Congress is sticking with their usual pork buddies: oil, coal, and uranium. That they threw a bone to Scott Brown was an afterthought, the cost of doing business for when they get to their real priorities: cutting social insurance and 1%er taxes.
The overall DOE budget is cut $365 million below the 2012 budget, $1.76 billion below the Administration request. ... mostly to keep Alcator C-Mod open. ... a drop in the bucket for the billions ITER will require from the US over 10 years.
To pay for this:
- Fusion Energy Sciences program: +$72.6 million
- Various domestic fusion research programs: +$48.3 million
- ITER contribution: +$73 million
They're cutting from this:
- DOE's Basic Energy Sciences: -$36.9 million, $142.5 million below Administration request, mostly by canceling or delaying construction projects.
- Biological and Environmental Research: -$69.8 million, $83.4 million below request.
- Advanced Research Projects Agency: -$75 million, $75 million below request.
Other winners:
- Fossil energy research: +$207 million
- Fission energy research: +$765 million
Depressing (Score:2)
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Fission energy research: +$765 million
If we can get Integral Fast Reactors being built, then at least fission is a very good way of generating power resulting in very little (short-lived) nuclear waste.
Dilithium Crystals (Score:2)
--
"Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who."
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The double lithium atom is actually carbon-14, but it sells for more with the cool name.
Yay! Oh, wait. (Score:2)
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I've been kinda enamoured with Thorium salt fast breeder reactors lately, seems to me it's a much more attainable goal. Fusion would be cool and all, but isn't TSFR technology, like, already within our grasp?
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I've been kinda enamoured with Thorium salt fast breeder reactors lately, seems to me it's a much more attainable goal. Fusion would be cool and all, but isn't TSFR technology, like, already within our grasp?
You would only spend money on researching one technology at a time? Most of what is being researched in something like ITER falls into two categories: plasma physics (which couldn't be found out before; plasmas aren't scale-invariant and the mathematics of them is furiously difficult) and advanced materials (how to cope with the neutron flux and efficiently convey the heat away without everything being super-brittle). The latter will also benefit fission reactors (including those Thorium salt fast breeders
Reverse Psychology. (Score:2)
Obama wanted to cut the funding because he knew the republicans in the house would do the exact opposite.
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You have to wonder (Score:2)
Politics, more funding, timeline (Score:2)
Forget politics. With the extra funding, I predict fusion will be a reality in about 40 years.
It's always about MIT getting money. (Score:1)
Re:Slashdot carrying Republican water again (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly is fusion power a dead end?
You're confusing "distant destination with rewards that are worth it" for "dead end".
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"rewards" that might never happen. Just like warp drive has never happened.
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I must have missed the weaponized uncontrolled faster-than-light explosion 60 years ago that proved the basic principles in an artificial device, and the whole thing being consistent with generally known physics.
Constructing a warp drive would require new basic science. Getting a fusion reactor working with an energy gain might require specific discoveries and a lot of hard engineering, but it's not inconceivable in any way. I also think the recent interview with the Alcator C-Mod guys here at /. made the p
Fusion exists -- warp drives don't (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Fusion exists.
In a place (sun) where there is free energy (gravity) to force it to happen. And also in a location where it does not matter that massive amounts of atom-destroying radiation make the surrounding ~1,000,000 miles uninhabitable. And explosions occur frequently.
We don't have free energy to force fusion to happen. We have to burn something else (electricity) to jumpstart it. ALSO we can't have radiation leaking all over the place or risk a runaway reaction, so that requires extra safeguards
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it's a dead end because you, like me are nothing but dust without water.
thus fusion power quite literally means death sentence for all organic life.
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The supply of hydrogen available for fusion is so ridiculously large that the concern you have won't be a serious issue for something like a hundred billion years. And at that point, we'll be struggling to figure out what to do about the heat death of the universe anyway, hydrogen exhaustion will be the least of our civilizations' problems.
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In which case they were doing fusion so fast they would have made a nice smooth glassy surface too.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've SEEN a working fusion reactor. Tokamaks work right now.
There's a world of difference between working and practical.
I think we both know that's what the parent meant. After all, there are fusion machines that can sit on a desk, but you don't see anyone proclaiming that fusion power is here yet.
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Pfft. "There remain serious engineering challenges", a statement nobody would disagree with, is far from the bullshit "dead end" claim that started this thread. You have, in essence, made everyone else's point for them by backpedaling to their side of the argument.
It's all about the secondary effects (Score:2)
There's a world of difference between working and practical.
Is there? The Farnsworth fusor (a type of fusion device based on inertial electrostatic confinement) is working, and nowhere near "break even", so therefore useless as a power source. Yet it is a quite practical source of neutrons, for various purposes.
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Well you know the old joke... we have been 30-40 years away from practical fusion for a few decades now :)... eventually we'll get there... but it's only 30-40 years away
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You're confusing "necessary test-bed for materials" and "money hole".
But as you clearly know nothing about the field I understand the confusion.
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If so, I'm not alone:
Re:Slashdot carrying Republican water again (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Actually, that is an interesting comparison. Nobody denies that da Vinci was a a visionary and a genius.
However, it is not at all clear that his designs actually influenced the modern planes and helicopters - as far as I know the helicopter was reinvented and developed independently and only later people figured out that it was kind of similar to da Vinci's design.
So was his work impressive? You bet. Did it have an impact on society at the time? No. Did it have an impact on technological development much la
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Lots of folks worked on making people fly for hundreds of years. They failed. Then some folks succeeded. Now I can get on a plane across the country for a week's wages.
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Friendly clue from Europe:
As long as you believe the only politics that exist is "Democrat" or "Republican" your country is never going to arise from it's current venture into corporatism.
Fix it by changing the system. Not supporting it.
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Unfortunately, here in the States, we have First past the post [wikipedia.org] or "winner take all" voting, which simply means that the person/party who gets the most (NOT (necessarily) a majority, simply the MOST) votes - wins. Essentially, a vote for any candidate other than the second place finisher is a vote for the winner. As a recent historical example, Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000. See also Duverger's law [wikipedia.org], which says that first-past-the-post systems are
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Because if people voted for the candidate they actually wanted rather than their second least hated candidate, then even if the 1st candidate still wins, the r
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Yes, Europe is a place that looks to have figured out how to make government work all right. Let's take our clues from them.
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Friendly clue from Europe:
Yes! Let's be more like Europe!
No. Let's not. We have enough trouble running a productive economy as-is, without further drowning in an even larger entitlement nightmare and crushing, productivity-killing tax and regulatory environment. Once the Germans finally get eveyone else in the EU straightened out - at an inconceivable cost to every German - maybe we can revisit this. But by the time all that dust is settled, any viable-looking European economy won't be operated much like it is now. Because the w
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I'd rather the Irish banks weren't being funded by taxpayers like me (to the tune of E14,000 each per Irish man, woman and child) just to pay back German banks who were feckless enough to lend it to them in the first place.
As for your knee-jerk reaction, the Germans were the first ones to break the Eurozone rules back in the early 2000s.
What I'd like to see is more funding being put forward to Gen 3+ nuclear plants and shutdowns of the Gen 1s. Also a bit of funding towards Thorium fueled reactors ;)
Why? Wel
Re:Slashdot carrying Republican water again (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [huffingtonpost.com]
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 [wikipedia.org]
(United States: #24)
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Friendly clue from Europe: (...)Fix it by changing the system. Not supporting it.
Yeah, and in Europe, we fixed the system by removing any power we can from elected national representants, and we transfered it to unelected bureaucrats in Brussel. What a smart move!
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Re:Slashdot carrying Republican water again (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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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?
Oh, make no mistake, the right wing media does exist....but not here at Slashdot.
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I can't speak for the Bush part, but this isn't all rosy. Quoth the Science article:
Is all of the
Re:There must be some way... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Your comment is about five years late. This was an Obama cut that got undone by the House.... it's all (D)s involved.
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Anti-science Republicans (Score:1)
Don't you understand? This is obviously a ruse to throw Slashdot commenters off the trail of their anti-science agenda. Or it could be a disagreement about priorities and funding. But I think it is more fun if I make broad, sweeping generalizations about people I don't generally talk to.
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There probably is.
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So I guess that Obama deleted the funding to hurt Scott Brown then?