Dept. of big science boondoggles
Exhibit A: fusion power
Production of viable fusion power is a heat transfer problem: quickly removing the heat produced by the union of atoms. The cost of the hardware required to blanket a reactor alone would make fusion power more expensive than nuclear, an American nuclear scientist has estimated. Still, this has not stopped America from pouring about a quarter of a billion dollars each year into such research for the past quarter century.
Exhibit B: James Webb Space Telescope
The budget for NASA’s next-generation space telescope keeps going up; its launch date keeps slipping back. Estimates of how much the JWST would cost have spiraled from US$1 billion in 2000 to $4.5 billion; the launch date has also been set back by 22 months, to the second half of 2013. The danger, an article in the current issue of Nature points out, is that Hubble and Webb will eat up funding for other NASA-sponsored astrophysics projects, such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder, an observatory that was meant to detect Earth-sized planets. That was scrapped earlier this year.
-Mike Ghenu
Sources: Science, Nature
