Friday, December 28, 2007
Science-policy reps were patting each other on the back in August when
President Bush signed the bipartisan America COMPETES Act in response to
the NAS report Rising Above the Gathering Storm. It was meant to keep
America competitive by boosting basic science, including a doubling of
funding for NSF and the DOE Office of Science. Six months later, the most
basic of all the sciences, high-energy physics, is in a death spiral.
Fermilab faces major layoffs, the neutrino oscillation experiment, NOvA,
which was expected to be the lab's principle activity after the Tevatron
shuts down, is terminated. Three quarters of the funding for the
International Linear Collider is cut. The US again stiffed ITER on our
share of the fusion program. The NSF increase was pared down to 1
percent. Meanwhile, in a letter to the research community, House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said her "commitment to the innovation agenda remains
strong and steadfast." Try spending that.
Why would fragile, self-replicating collections of atoms, trapped on a
tiny planet for a few dozen orbits about an undistinguished star among
countless other stars in one of billions of galaxies, spend their orbits
trying to understand how it happened? Others claim to know all the
answers, but the only way to know is to experiment - and they haven't done
it.
The spending bill did increase funding for "clean coal." Sound like an
oxymoron? Integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) generators were
supposed to be all over the place by now. They turn coal into gases and
filter out the CO2 before the gases are burned. Clean coal plants cost
more to build but are cheaper in the long run - or at least they would be
if they captured and sequestered the carbon dioxide like they're supposed
to. The technology, however, is not there yet, and some planned clean-
coal plants are being cancelled. That's a relief to some people in West
Virginia, where coal companies want to scrape the tops off the mountains
to get the coal, filling the valleys with the rubble.
The rules have changed. China, according to a story in today's Wall
Street Journal, has become the dam builder for the world. Chinese
companies are now involved in deals to construct at least 47 major dams in
27 countries, not all of which have nice leaders. Construction of large
dams involves the forced relocation of people - in the case of the
gigantic Three Gorges Dam in China 1.4 million people had to be
relocated. Fifty years ago the Pacific Northwest was the envy of the rest
of the nation for its cheap hydroelectric power - the sun does all the
work. Then the public mood began to shift away from fish ladders and back
toward wild rivers. With global warming as a new term in the equation,
pressure for new dam projects is certain to increase. Although dams alter
the environment, the changes are not necessarily bad.
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