PRI: Public Radio International

Proposed budget cuts domestic funding for fusion research, may delay 'energy of the future'

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:10:00 -0500

President Obama's proposed budget for the 2013 fiscal year would cut funding for domestic fusion research in order to fund ITER, a multi-national fusion research project in France. That could mean lost jobs and a more limited market for physicists at research facilities like the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Kris

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:46:11 -0500

What is the current funding of domestic test fussion reactors? The only dollar figure in the whole article is that $50 million will be cut; that could be a small fraction or even the entirety of the current budget, but there is no way of knowing based on this article. The closest the reader has at assessing this is Dean's comment that it is "a very severe cut."

Derek Shannon

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:11:05 -0500

Hi, Bruce, I hope you'll direct some further coverage to the new results our lab published in Physics of Plasmas Friday (http://pop.aip.org/resource/1/phpaen/v19/i3/p032704_s1). We've issued a press release here: http://bit.ly/H9PsHO.

So, while we've now been able to achieve two of three critical criteria for net energy with <$1M/year in private funds, we do hope this latest advance illustrates the need to expand the diversity of fusion projects receiving support, not cut back.