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by simonh
3228 days ago
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>Why is funding fundamental physics research a bad idea? It's not a bad idea and we are doing it. Fundamental research into fusion is happening on many fronts. That is a good thing and I am not arguing against it. There may even be good arguments to increase funding on some of those approaches. I'm saying that a 'huge' increase in funding, as proposed, at this stage would be premature given that there are plenty of other alternative power technologies that are proving very effective. We already spend billions of dollars on fusion research. If we're going to spend huge amounts of extra funding on power generation, there are better ways to use it right now. >We can decide to spend resources on solar and wind electricity generation and to fund fusion research What do you think we should hugely cut spending on in order to fund this huge increase? Proposals to spend lots of money on this or that are somewhat unconvincing unless you can explain where the money should come from. |
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That is actually the easy part. Latest numbers I have seen are from 2009, when the US government paid farmers $5 billion to waste their time growing corn to turn into ethanol (basically to turn 1 barrel of oil into 0.7 barrels of oil equivalent), and paid oil and gas companies $7 billion in oil and gas exploration subsidies. Enough money for huge increases in both renewable energy and fusion research programs:
http://www.eli.org/sites/default/files/eli-pubs/d19_07.pdf