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A blow to Fusion in the FY13 Budget
posted by Andrew Holland on February 14, 2012 at 2:01 pm
In Science Magazine’s Science Insider blog, we see troubling news about the state of fusion research in the President’s FY13 budget:
At DOE, Body Blows to Fusion, Nuclear Physics, and Particle Physics
DOE would pay for an increased contribution to the ITER international fusion project by diverting funds from its domestic fusion programs, including shuttering a fusion experiment known as the Alcator C-Mod at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Overall, the fusion energy sciences budget falls by 0.8% to $398 million, but increases the U.S. contribution to ITER to $150 million, up from $105 million this year. That shift forced officials to throw some things overboard, including MIT’s $18 million budget for C-Mod. That machine is a donut-shaped device known as a tokamak that uses magnetic fields to trap an ionized gas or plasma and hold it at very high temperature and pressure. C-Mod is one of three tokamaks in the United States and a cousin of the gigantic $23 billion ITER that researchers are planning to build in Cadarache, France.
Read the rest from Adrian Cho here.
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