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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.

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.

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

Related Politics & Policy link
Progress for Obama's science diplomacy

A brief roundup of policy news stories last week indicates that political temperatures are rising in the run up to new climate talks, and that Iran is slowly becoming more flexible over opening up its nuclear program.

Climate bill faces hurdles in Senate
The climate-change bill that has been moving slowly through the Senate will face a stark political reality when it emerges for committee debate on Tuesday reports the Washington Post: With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.

US Envoy: No bilateral climate deal with China
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."

But Beijing is resisting US pressure, arguing that it is using other measures. It already has announced a goal of improving energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2010. China also is planting trees over an area the size of California.

Jiahua Pan of the Institute for Urban & Environmental Studies in, Beijing says that negotiations will depend largely on decisive mitigation action being taken by the developed nations. China will have every reason to follow suit if the rich nations demonstrate leadership and commit to more substantial cuts than they have offered so far.

India pushes for common responsibility
Rajendra K. Pachauri says in Nature that India wants to be a constructive partner in Copenhagen negotiations on climate change. The country is taking domestic action even though it cannot accept mandatory emissions limits.

UN inspectors visit uranium enrichment facility in Iran
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.

The semi-official Mehr news agency reported that the four-member team visited the heavily protected facility, carved into a mountainside south of Tehran. The tour marked the first independent examination of the site, but no conclusions about the state of the facility are expected until after the next IAEA committee meeting.

Chart: How the ‘Darpa for Energy’ is slicing its $150-Million pie
Wired.com has created a chart describing which area's the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency will be handing out more than $150 million for what the agency describes as “bold, transformational” energy projects (see also DOE awards 'Smart Grid' and ARPA-E grants).

President Obama's 28 October announcement of $3.4 billion in grants to begin a major upgrading of the US electricity grid came a day after the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) grant program at DOE named the winners of its first $151 million in grants to support 37 high-risk research projects that could advance novel clean energy technologies.

The 100 "smart grid" grants will begin a modernization of the US electrical generation, transmission, and distribution system--a process that when completed will save consumers $20 billion over 10 years on their utility bills, Obama said. Ranging from $200 million to less than $1 million, the awards will pay for utilities to install 18 million "smart" meters, covering 13% of US homes--devices that will allow customers to monitor their electricity use in real time, and as utilities begin to move to dynamic electricity pricing, to program new smart appliances to operate when rates are low.

The awards will also pay for the replacement of 200,000 transformers and the automation of 700 substations--5% of the US total--improvements that will allow utilities to respond faster and more effectively to restore service after power interruptions. More than 850 sensors called phasor measurement units are to be installed, providing improved monitoring of conditions on the grid and helping prevent minor disturbances from cascading into power outages or blackouts. Awardees, who were chosen from 400 grant applicants, are putting up another $4.7 billion of their own capital for the grid upgrades.

Chu traveled to Google Inc's Mountain View, California, headquarters to unveil the ARPA-E grants, which are to support R&D for especially high-risk, but potentially high-payoff concepts for producing clean energy. All 37 awards went for projects proposed by universities or to small and large companies, though a number of DOE national laboratories were teamed with awardees. ARPA-E will award its remaining fiscal year 2010 funding of $249 million through a second solicitation later this year. As with the smart grid program, ARPA-E's resources are from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

"We're here to announce a portfolio of bold new research projects, any one of which could do for energy what Google did for the Internet," Chu said. Renewable energy, energy storage, industrial and building efficiency, petroleum-free vehicles, and carbon capture are all represented. DOE received 3700 responses--"a stunning level of interest"-- Chu said, when it first solicited expressions of interest in the ARPA-E program in April. The agency invited 300 of those to submit full proposals, which were put before 500 expert reviewers.

David Kramer

On 2 October, 100 Russian researchers who permanently work abroad published a letter in the leading Moscow business newspaper Vedomosti complaining of "the disastrous situation in Russian basic research" reports Science and Radio Free Europe.

Official Russian statistics suggest that 25,000 scientists emigrated from Russia between 1989 and 2004, and another 30,000 went abroad under temporary contracts says the newswire service RIA Novosti. Independent reports estimate at least 80,000 emigrated in the early 1990s alone.

According to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's press office, Medvedev responded by initiating work on a plan for developing Russian science.

Both Medvedev and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have called for increased science investment in the last year, triggered in part by the US stimulus bill which channeled billions of dollars to basic research.

Medvedev's visibility with science investment increased recently when he opened the Second International Nanotechnology Forum held in Moscow, which was attended by a number of government officials.

In his speech, Medvedev said that Russia had all the intellectual, organizational and financial resources necessary to become a leader in nanotechnology by investing $10.5 billion of government funding over the next few years to 2015.

Medvedev praised the university system suggesting that "they represent a genuine potential advantage" compared to international competitors.

He also stated that Russia needs to facilitate the return of researchers who fled the country and create favorable conditions for research, and expressed concern how Russia will train up the 100-150,000 workforce needed for nanotechnology.

"It is obvious that we need modern, informed, qualified professionals in this [nanotech] field, people who have been trained in the new programs.... If the existing nomenclature of specializations does not provide the capabilities we need, then we simply need to change it and to prepare the sort of professionals that we do need," he said. "A shortage of personnel remains a serious barrier to Russia’s serious engagement in nanotechnology."

Paul Guinnessy

Tonight, the U.S. Senate confirmed two more senior appointees: Marcia McNutt as director of the United States Geological Survey, Department of the Interior, and Arun Majumdar as director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, Department of Energy.