by Adrian Cho
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science gets a healthy $226 million funding increase, to $5.12 billion, in the proposed 2011 budget. The lion’s share of the 4.6% increase would be go to the basic energy sciences (BES) office, which funds research into condensed matter physics, materials science, chemistry, and related fields and runs DOE’s x-ray synchrotrons and other user facilities. BES’s budget climbs from $1.637 billion to $1.835 billion, an increase of $198 million or 12.1%.
In contrast, funding for DOE’s fusion energy sciences (FES) program gets clipped from an estimated $426 million this year to a requested $380 million next year, a reduction of 10.8%. That reduction would come out of the United States’s contribution to the international fusion experiment, ITER, which will be built in Cadarache, France. Under the proposed budget, ITER would get $80 million next year, down from an estimated $135 million this year. The decrease marks the latest dip on the ITER budget roller coaster. In 2008, Congress zeroed out $150 million of spending on ITER in a squabble with the White House. The project got $124 million the following year.
