Physics Today - Politics and Policy

In a meeting held on the 18 and 19 November, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) council, representing the fusion project's seven international partners: China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the US, did not automatically confirm the baseline cost, schedule, and design of ITER as expected.

Instead council members requested ITER staff to reevaluate the technical and organizational risks associated with the baseline proposal, particularly regarding the manufacturing and building schedule and report back in three months.

The concern is that the schedule, which calls for the reactor to be built and operational by 2018, may be too optimistic, and as Daniel Clery reported in Science, the cost could be much higher than the ITER partners expect.

Paul Guinnessy

A new web site called ScienceWorksForUS, has been launched that highlights research and science-related funding from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The data for the site was gathered by a group called the Science Coalition in collaboration with the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

"This [funding] reflects what’s possible when smart investments in the public sector are placed in the hands of our scientists, innovators, and academies of higher learning," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who was at a press conference launching the site. "We will ensure that the Recovery Act was not the end of our investment in innovation, but the beginning of a sustained commitment to science," she added.

The stimulus contained $21.5 billion for scientific research, the purchase of capital equipment and science-related construction projects.

This money is less than 3 percent of the $787 billion stimulus measure.

"These research projects—large and small—are making a difference in hundreds of local communities by providing jobs for researchers, lab technicians, and graduate students," said University of Arizona President Robert Shelton.

Long-term impact

“When we invested nearly $22 billion in the Recovery Bill for scientific discovery, we set the stage not just for job creation today, but for the economic growth of tomorrow," said Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), co-chair of the Congressional Research and Development Caucus. "It is vital for our long-term economic prosperity that we maintain this robust commitment to scientific research and development."

How strong this commitment is from the Obama administration will clearly be seen in next year's budget. All the federal agencies have been asked to create two budgets, one with flat spending at 2009 levels (excluding stimulus funds) and the other with a 5% cut from 2009 levels.

Paul Guinnessy

The American Geophysical Union, the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and 15 other major science groups have written a letter to Congress asking them to take action on carbon emissions:

Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.

These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.

Moreover, there is strong evidence that ongoing climate change will have broad impacts on society, including the global economy and on the environment.

For the United States, climate change impacts include sea level rise for coastal states, greater threats of extreme weather events, and increased risk of regional water scarcity, urban heat waves, western wildfires, and the disturbance of biological systems throughout the country. The severity of climate change impacts is expected to increase substantially in the coming decades.

If we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, emissions of greenhouse gases must be dramatically reduced. In addition, adaptation will be necessary to address those impacts that are already unavoidable. Adaptation efforts include improved infrastructure design, more sustainable management of water and other natural resources, modified agricultural practices, and improved emergency responses to storms, floods, fires and heat waves.

We in the scientific community offer our assistance to inform your deliberations as you seek to address the impacts of climate change.

There was a large turnout at the end of October for the public sessions of the US Department of Energy's Accelerators for America's Future symposium in Washington DC.

The attendance, as well as the presentations, demonstrated the great interest in the potential of accelerators outside of high energy particle physics.

The three-day symposium was cochaired by Walter Henning and Charles Shank.

Seeking advice

Dennis Kovar, director of DOE's Office of High Energy Physics, explained that in closed sessions on the following days, five working groups would come up with a series of recommendations on "opportunities for advancements in accelerator technologies" for DOE's Office of Science.

The groups would also review impacts accelerators would have in basic research and applications "so that investments in accelerator R&D can be directed to best meet the needs of the Office of Science and the Nation" in a series of fields such as medicine and biology, energy, environment, national security, and industrial applications and production.

The Director of the Office of Science, William Brinkman, told attendees that his office spends approximately $500 million annually on Fermilab's Tevatron, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and R&D on advanced accelerator technology.

Speaking of the proposed International Linear Collider, which reports indicate could cost $25 billion, Brinkman said "the science community can't afford this thing." New accelerator approaches are needed, Brinkman said, listing five "promising emerging accelerator technologies" such as Wakefield technology that could bring the cost down.

Norman Augustine expressed concern about a drop in physical sciences funding after the economic stimulus funding is spent, warning that science could be worse off than it was before these one-time funds were made available.

Federal funding of basic research is especially important, he emphasized, since private industry concentrates its spending on applied research.

The role of accelerators

Frederick Dylla, CEO of the American Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics Today), described the unique role that accelerators play as a discovery tool, with benefits that are less obvious to the general public.

The accelerator community needs to do a better job of communicating the value of accelerator research to the public, he said, citing the comments made during the House hearing. Dylla spoke of the importance of new technologies in lowering the cost of accelerators, citing the average $150 million cost to build a medical accelerator that is based on a fifty-year-old design.

The common theme running through the remaining public presentations was the important role that accelerators do play and potentially make in areas such as the prevention of nuclear terrorism, fusion, clean water, and better medicines.

While there are many opportunities, there are also challenges—one speaker expressed concerns about the decreasing number of university accelerators and the impact this is having on the future accelerator workforce.

Originally published as FYI's Symposium on "Accelerators for America's Future" written by Richard M. Jones.
Edited by Paul Guinnessy

Jay Davis, the former director of the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency from 1998 to 2001 has spoken out against an editorial in Nature that called for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW) to be abandoned.

Davis points out that although the plutonium pits that are at the heart of the US nuclear warheads have a predicted lifetime of 40 to 80 years, "the thousands of non-nuclear components in the pit's environment are less stable" and that some parts and materials no longer exist due to environmental and safety regulations.

"The proposed RRW was designed using nuclear systems that were more robust and had higher margins against failure, thus relaxing the stress on new non-nuclear systems intended for replacement and future production."

"It is not a stalking horse for nuclear testing but would increase military and congressional confidence in weapons performance," he says.

Davis also points out that the US is not the only nuclear power planning or working on modernizing its stockpile—the UK, France, Russia, and China all have programs in place to do so.

Gerald E. Marsh, who wrote a piece on non-proliferation for the American Physical Society's Forum on Physics and Society two years ago, argues an opposing view.

"Existing nuclear weapons are already very reliable and their safety features are adequate," he says, and the concern over having an untested weapon in the stockpile will increase the pressure to conduct a nuclear test, he adds.

Paul Guinnessy

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Tara O’Toole, who has been waiting since May for the Senate to confirm her as under secretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), finally got the nod on 4 November.

O’Toole, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity, is a former assistant secretary for environment, safety and health at the Department of Energy, where she led the Clinton administration’s government-wide investigation into the human radiation experiments that had occurred during the cold war.

Her confirmation came several days after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) took to the floor to blast Republican senators for stalling action on more than 200 presidential nominations, including O'Toole.

Senate rules allow any member to prevent a nomination from coming up for a vote, no matter how certain confirmation may be.

The under secretary post has been vacant since the Obama administration began. Its purpose is to meet the diverse technology needs of the numerous DHS agencies. A notable exception is technology for the detection of nuclear materials, a function that belongs to DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office.

By contrast, Patrick Gallagher, Obama’s nominee for director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, had to wait only a few weeks for his confirmation, which came on 5 November.

Gallagher who has been acting director of NIST since September 2008, has worked at the agency’s Gaithersburg, MD headquarters since 1993.

President Obama has turned to a veteran Clinton administration appointee in nominating Philip Coyle to become associate director for national security and international affairs at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Coyle, whose past appointments include a seven-year stint as director of operational testing and evaluation at the Department of Defense, also spent a total of 32 years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

He was one of nine members of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission in 2005 and 2006, and was a deputy assistant secretary for defense programs at the Department of Energy in the Carter administration.

Most recently, he was affiliated with the Center for Defense Information, a national security think tank. Should he be confirmed by the Senate, Coyle will fill the third of four OSTP associate director slots.

Updated 11/11/2009: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that President Obama had not yet nominated anyone to become the associate director for environment at OSTP. In fact, Shere Abbott has been serving in that position since her Senate confirmation in April. Obama has yet to nominate an individual to become associate director for science at OSTP.

The Particle Astrophysics Science Assessment Group (PASAG) which was formed in April by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and National Science Foundation (NSF) to assess priorities in high-energy physics research under four different funding scenarios over the coming decade has released its conclusions.

The group looked at projects in dark matter, dark energy, high-energy cosmic particles (cosmic rays, gamma rays, and neutrinos), and projects seeking high energy physics resources to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Budget numbers

The four scenarios are:

"These budget scenarios provided very tight constraints that forced difficult choices in the planning," says the report. But "by constructing the optimal science program possible in each budget scenario, there emerged a consensus view of the priorities."

On the list

Even under the tightest constraints DOE and NSF should fund two next generation dark-matter experiments: upgrading VERITAS, a ground-based VHE gamma-ray detector, and the proposed $15 million High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-ray observatory.

"Even in this very lean scenario, the diversity offered by [the VERITAS and HAWC] projects is a priority, and their impacts are large for a relatively small investment," they argue.

The SuperCDMS-SNOLAB., an underground dark matter experiment based in Canada, should also be funded says the report.

Moreover, "Given the central importance of the CMB to our understanding of energy, matter, space, and time, and the unique contributions high energy physics can provide," CMB experiments would continue as they are relatively cheap.

Nearly all the projects have an international component: HAWC for example, would be based at a high-altitude site in central Mexico, and consist of 300 large, closely spaced water tanks, each outfitted with three 20-cm photomultiplier tubes to detect the Cherenkov light of charged particles from gamma-ray and cosmic-ray showers as they hit the tanks.

But funds from international collaborations would not help keep major US participation in other proposed projects—in areas such as dark energy—under scenario A, as there would not be enough funds to pay for major hardware.

No third generation dark matter experiments can be started in this decade under scenario A, says the report, "risking loss of US world leadership" in the field.

The best guess

The most likely budget for the field may be scenario C, as the NSF budget for 2009 is 7.8% above 2008, and the proposed 2010 budget is 8.5% above 2009.

Moreover Congress approved a doubling of science budgets over 10 years when it passed the 2007 America Competes Act.

In this scenario the US could have "a world-leading program [in dark energy]... with coordinated activities in space and on the ground," says the report.

PASAG recommended two additional third generation experiments for dark matter, and a global ground and space based program in dark energy.

"A significant DOE contribution to Joint Dark Energy Mission—a NASA-DOE space-based visible/NIR observatory—is possible, along with full support of BigBOSS—a new 4000-fiber visible/near infrared spectrograph for the existing Mayall 4-meter telescope in Arizona—and support for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)—a new ground-based 8-meter-diameter telescope to discover and measure the shapes and photometric redshifts of more than 3 billion galaxies," says PASAG.

Moreover, under this scenario C, the group recommends funding the Auger North observatory—a US$127-million array of 4,400 cosmic-ray detectors to be based in southeastern Colorado—as a northern counterpart to the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. This project would be 60% funded by international partners.

"PASAG finds the science reach of Auger North to be important, and it recognizes the strong international support with the corresponding expectation that the US would be the host site," says the report. "Technically, construction could start in 2011."

PASAG suggests that the proposed US-led $299 million Advanced Gamma Imaging System (AGIS)—an array of 36 telescopes, each having a primary mirror diameter of 11m and making use of a novel two-reflector design—should be merged with the similar European-led Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). "It is generally understood on both sides of the Atlantic that a merger of the two projects should occur to develop a global effort," they say. Under this proposal the US would have a reduced, but still significant, role in the project.

A conservative position

Although the majority of direct research funding is from programs at DOE and NSF, there are indirect funds from facilities such as the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab (DUSEL) could have been included in creating the recommendations.

Instead, PASAG decided to take a conservative approach and not include the potential of any additional DUSEL research funding due to the "uncertainty in [DUSEL] funding...even though the US dark matter program would be greatly strengthened by it."

Although PASAG lists the recommendations for each budget scenario, they did not state which scenario DOE and NSF should fund. A decision over which planning model to follow will be made by the agencies sometime around April next year.

Paul Guinnessy

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday announced that three prominent US scientists have been named “science envoys” to arrange scientific collaborations between the US and countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and in south and southeast Asia.

Former National Academy of Sciences president Bruce Alberts, former National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni and Ahmed Zewail, a Nobel laureate professor of chemistry and physics at Caltech, will travel to the regions “to foster scientific and technological collaborations,” Clinton said in a speech delivered in Marrakech, Morocco.

The US also will expand the number of science, technology, environment, and health officers positions at its embassies by an unspecified number. And the government’s Overseas Private Investment Corp is to establish a “global technology and innovation fund” to finance S&T collaborations, she said.

“It was the Islamic world that led the way in science and medicine. It was the Islamic world that paved the way for much of the technology and science that we now take for granted,” Clinton said. “We want to look to your societies and we want to help Muslim majority communities develop the capacity to meet economic, social and ecological challenges through science, technology, and innovation.”

The measures come five months after President Obama promised to increase cooperation with Muslim-majority nations during a June speech at Cairo University.

Two of the envoys are foreign-born—Zewail is Egyptian and Zerhouni is Algerian—while Alberts spent much of his 12 years as NAS president engaging with science academies throughout the world. Zewail is also a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Responding to a question he posed during PCAST’s 22 October meeting, State Department science adviser Nina Federoff said the amount of US foreign assistance devoted to science and technology is “minuscule, probably not much more than a couple hundred million dollars, which is pathetic.” While funding is sparse, Federoff said a bright spot is a memorandum of understanding between the US Agency for International Development and the National Science Foundation, which commits the two to co-fund collaborations between US scientists and their counterparts in developing nations.

To complement the science envoys program, Federoff said her office is implementing a new “embassy science and entrepreneur fellows” program where scientists from other federal agencies, as well as university fellows already working at State, are assigned to certain US embassies for periods of up to three months.

In his Cairo speech, Obama promised additional steps to elevate S&T cooperation with Muslim, African and Southeast Asian countries, including “centers of scientific excellence,” and expanded scientific exchanges and scholarships.

In August, Obama further signaled his interest in aligning US S&T with foreign policy, directing his national security and economic advisers to reevaluate US foreign aid policy to take into account such global factors as climate change and natural resource scarcities.

David Kramer

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Todd Stern, President Obama's envoy for climate change has dashed hopes of a bilateral deal on climate change during this month's presidential trip to China in an interview with NPR's Louisa Lim.

"There is no agreement per se," Stern says, adding that there had been no intention of cutting a separate bilateral deal.

Obama's trip will focus on clean energy cooperation, and aligning Chinese and American positions ahead of the upcoming global climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The US is pushing for China to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

"They absolutely have to cap their emissions in the sense of having them reduced significantly as compared to where their trend line is," Stern said. "China could make a reduction twice as ambitious as the US is doing, and that would still involve their emissions going up somewhere from where they are now."

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UN inspectors have received their first formal look inside Iran's once-secret uranium enrichment facility that has raised western suspicions about the extent of their nuclear program.

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