3 days ago
Science Savants Mourn DOE Funding Cuts As Google's Fusion News Provides A Quiet Rebuke
Inside Commonwealth Fusion Systems' Devens, Massachusetts facility.
Two of America's most senior scientists are enraged at the Trunp administration's slashing of research funding for energy, as well as draconian cuts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The protesting scientific savants are John P. Holdren, President Barack Obama's science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Neal Lane, a former NSF director and President Bill Clinton's science adviser and OSTP director.
In an impassioned essay, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, they say, 'What is happening now far exceeds our worst fears.'
They state: 'Brutal cuts in staff and budgets have devastated not only science and science-centered work conducted inside the government, but also science at colleges, universities and nongovernmental research centers across the country that depend on federal funding.
Profusion Of Companies Benefit
'The businesses that support the decimated offices and programs are likewise being impacted. The immense profusion of U.S. companies that work to convert the advances flowing from government-supported sciences into societal benefit, will suffer, too.'
The co-authors see organic damage at the Department of Energy (DOE). They say that of its $50 billion budget in fiscal year 2024, about $15 billion went to non-defense research and development, and $7 billion of that went to energy supply options – nuclear, fossil and renewables — and to energy efficiency.
Some $8 billion, according to Holdren and Lane, went to basic research, supported by the DOE's Office of Science.
'That office, the nation's largest funder of basic research in the physical sciences, supported 25,000 researchers (including students) at 300 institutions around the country, including 17 Department of Energy national laboratories; that work included advanced scientific computing, basic energy sciences, biological and environmental research, fusion energy sciences, high energy physics, and nuclear physics.'
When I asked John Savage, the retired co-founder of the computer science department at Brown University, what the key ingredient is in research, he responded, 'Passion.'
He explained that scientists need constant passion to barrel through the disappointments and constant roadblocks that stand between concept and realization, the time spent working at the bench on a microscope or a computer.
An example of the rewards of that tireless seeking of a way forward in science came with the announcement that Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), headquartered in Devens, Massachusetts, has signed a deal with Google to provide 200 megawatts of power from a site in Chesterfield County, in southwestern Virginia. This could be the beginning of the greatest revolution yet in energy and electricity production.
Breakthrough Lit Industrial Revolution
It could be as big a breakthrough in science and engineering as when James Watt added a condenser to an embryonic steam engine — and lit the fuse to the Industrial Revolution.
It will have come after decades of frustration and passion — and untold billions of dollars of funding from world governments and private companies and research universities, often deploying government funding
This money has been spread across two principal competing fusion technologies: magnetic confinement fusion (tokamak) and inertial confinement fusion, in which a target is compressed with a beams of energy or light. Both have been stubbornly difficult, head-breakingly hard.
Lately there have been major advances in inertial fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but magnetic confinement promises, through CFS leadership, to be the first commercial plant.
Tellingly, during the past 70 or so years, there have been many efforts to cut funding for fusion.
Success isn't guaranteed, but CFS has reached the threshold and is confident that it will succeed. The lessons learned in many experiments have paved the way for a moment of high excitement: the opening of what might be the beginning of a new chapter in the energy and the human prospect.
