Science Insider – House Panel Would Protect Domestic Fusion Program
Science Insider – House Panel Would Protect Domestic Fusion Program
By Adrian Cho | 19 April 2012 – 5:15 PM
The details won’t be out for another week, but in their version of the 2013 budget for the Department of Energy (DOE), legislators on a spending panel in the House of Representatives would reverse dramatic cuts to the U.S. fusion research program that the White House proposed in February. They would, however, take a big bite out of DOE’s fledgling Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which aims to quickly develop the most promising energy-related basic research for technological exploitation.
Overall, the version of the DOE budget approved yesterday would give DOE’s Office of Science, the United States’s single largest funder of the physical sciences, $4.824 billion next year. That’s $168 million less than the Obama Administration had requested and $50 million less than the agency received this year. “It’s somewhat disappointing that the modest increase requested by the Administration wasn’t supported,” says Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, one of DOE’s 10 science labs. On the other hand, Mason says, the situation is far better than 14 months ago, when House appropriators proposed slashing DOE’s science budget by 18% for what was then left of fiscal year 2011, which ended 30 September. “Overall, [the current number] does show a recognition that basic research is important,” Mason says.
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