MIT at center of political power play over campus fusion reactor

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/06/07/mit-used-lobbying-influence-restore-nuclear-fusion-dream-after-white-house-sought-stop-funding/T5Q9esYqbZsxIbXUpnEHFN/story.html

by ilamont • 12 years ago

104 78 12 years ago

bostonglobe.com

jostmey• 12 years ago

As an aspiring scientist and postdoctoral candidate, few things dishearten me more than when political agendas creep into the scientific process. Research is hard enough not having to worry about political competition. I fear the mixing of science and politics could erode the objectivity of the community.

soup10• 12 years ago

This fear is part of why we have the absurdly opaque and inefficient grant writing process, in which funds are allocated by the government without so much as interviewing the recipients.

DaniFong• 12 years ago

+100

Absolutely this is a key factor in why scientific grants have terrible yield vs private funding.

As a former fusion scientist, I saw this coming, and left the field to make my own fortune and direct it towards what I believed the best energy research was.

afarrell4• 12 years ago

Name me one field of human endeavor that is not impacted by the fact that groups of humans need a process to decide which things to allocate resources to. Name me one field of human endeavor which is not impacted by the fact that this process is operated by humans and therefore occasionally exhibits pettiness, favoritism, dysfunction and short-sightedness.

Name me one field of human endeavor without politics.

nitrogen6• 12 years ago

Name me one field of human endeavor that should be more removed from politics than the search for fundamental knowledge about the workings of the universe. "Is" does not imply "ought". We deserve better.

Retric9• 12 years ago

Writing fanfiction? Your prohibited from making money from it so it's rather insular.

pizza• 12 years ago

According to the article, this was an issue of MIT's reactor being a waste of money compared to the other reactors the administration backed and continued to increase funding for.

pdonis13• 12 years ago

Yes, and I'm not sure that's a fair description. As far as I can tell, MIT's reactor has been producing as much useful data as the other ones; and I don't think the other US projects, or ITER, have a significantly better chance than MIT's of achieving ignition, which is supposed to be the goal that makes all this worth the taxpayer's money. See my response to nitrogen 51 upthread.

wallflower• 12 years ago

few things dishearten me more than when political agendas creep into the scientific process.

"Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly.

The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II...

Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world. Governments went into the science business big time.

Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research...

James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue.."

-From Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner (and the genius inventor of PCR) in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field".

kourt• 12 years ago

MIT's next best use of its political power would be to bring Massachusetts laws regarding innovation to parity with California's circa 1980. Specifically, adopting the "Minnesota Model" employee IP protection, making noncompete agreements unenforcable, and protecting moonlighting.

afarrell4• 12 years ago

We're are working on the noncompete thing: https://malegislature.gov/Bills/188/House/H1715/History

dalek2point3• 12 years ago

And backed by solid research by MIT academics: http://mitsloanexperts.mit.edu/matthew-marx-non-compete-agre...

VLM• 12 years ago

Apparently something useful is being produced, lots of research papers.

http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/alcator/pubs/index.htm

There is a sunk cost effect where it must cost a billion to build another, but only a couple million to keep it running, so once you throw it out, you better be sure you'll never find it useful again because another experiment would have a capital cost of about a century of labor/maintenance cost. Something that big and cool would seem quite capable of generating enough "stuff" to be worthwhile.

pdonis13• 12 years ago

I agree the reactor is useful and shouldn't simply be shut down; but the capital cost could just as easily be recovered for the taxpayers by selling the reactor to a private company that could focus on using the thing productively instead of seeking government grants.

ufmace3• 12 years ago

I've gotta disagree with that. I'm all for private enterprise over government control in general, but I don't believe that there are any private enterprises capable of or willing to do the type of long-term engineering research that we'll need to get a working fusion reactor. The article I linked upthread quotes the MIT researchers as saying that we're about $80 billion in research away from a fusion reactor that can put watts on the grid. What private company in the world has ever invested that level of money on something not likely to pay off for decades?

ufmace3• 12 years ago

Here's a great old Slashdot post with lots of info about what they're doing there:

http://beta.slashdot.org/story/167399

I'm not sure exactly when it was published, since their new Beta thing hides dates older than 2y ago, but it's great for showing why the MIT project, and all of the other fusion projects, deserve to get a lot more money than they're getting now.

DennisP3• 12 years ago

That interview makes it pretty clear that the MIT project is not the obsolete boondoggle that the NYTimes portrays it as. They've made significant recent advances. Something I don't think they mentioned: the Alcator C-Mod has the strongest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, several times stronger than ITER will have.

Aside from that, comparing it to ITER is a bit silly since ITER won't be operating for another eight years. We shouldn't just shut down research while we wait.

DennisP3• 12 years ago

A note on Focus Fusion, mentioned in one of the questions: in 2012 they published a paper in Physics of Plasmas, the leading fusion journal, showing they'd reached the temperature and confinement time necessary for boron fusion. Right now they're on the front page of Indiegogo (in the "trending now" section, hit the right arrow) with a $200K campaign for the next piece of equipment they need, a beryllium electrode that they think will improve the plasma density.

rory096• 12 years ago

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowerthewo...

pasbesoin• 12 years ago

Soulskill posted more than 2 years ago | from the and-are-awesome dept.

I see that you noted this, as well. I hope Slashdot will reverse this. Some older posts are still very useful and relevant; however, knowing their context including timing is an important part of this.

Slashdot used to cater to "technical people", i.e. people who can cope with dated material that is older than e.g. "last week", and that is still specific -- some of us still remember calendars more than a year old and what was happening at specific times of those years.

I hope that is not changing. Such a change is not the kind of "social" that I want...

P.S. From the non-beta version of the site:

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @10:52AM

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

Is it truly mixing politics or rather about money? If the project is not funded, many will be unemployed. To me, that's the center of the issue. People want to keep their jobs.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 12 years ago

How do you separate human endeavour from politics and money? They seem to be inextricably. Or rather, they are one and the same thing and we use the terms 'politics', 'money', 'human endeavour', and whatever other terms are fashionable in the social sciences this week, as a convenient way to communicate about specific aspects of the human condition.

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

I don't disagree with you. In fact, I agree with you. My comment is directed at the title of the article, suggesting this has something to do with government and politics. But reading a few paragraphs the whole problem to me is just people don't want to lose their jobs, which is part of reality. I think the journalist who wrote the article is trying to make the money part less, so no one gets hurt by people who are against mass public funding program.

cjslep• 12 years ago

I had the privilege of touring and getting to see the reactor directly for an ANS student conference. Even without the politics about keeping the reactor active, the way the graduate students use the reactor seems to already be mired in bureaucracy. If I recall correctly, they have to wait on the order of a year (or more) to get one full day with the reactor to conduct their experiment.

I can only imagine how horrifying it is to have your thesis work mired in these political struggles.

DennisP3• 12 years ago

I got to see it too, and got an informal tour by one of the grad students. He showed us a steel tie about a meter long, and said they'd calculated that two of them could hold down the Space Shuttle while it was trying to launch. To hold the machine together while it operates, they need 38 of them.

It's not surprising they they have so much trouble getting time on the machine. They barely have the funding to run it. During the budget problems last year they went a whole year without running it at all.

pavement• 12 years ago

Then again, the experiment involves controlling the hot plasma of nuclear reactions using little more than a vacuum and magnets. Nothing like some miserable bureaucracy to separate the responsible adults from the children looking for new toys. I'll take one individual's disillusionment over a nuclear accident any day of the week. Not to mention that one year in college goes by so fast that it's pretty much over before it started.

noname123• 12 years ago

Tangential, but anyone ever been to Paradise the bar or Flour the cafe right across the street from the nuclear power plant? Cool places to go but I've always been afraid there because of the radiation exposure if there's a meltdown.

mvarner• 12 years ago

I visited Flour a year or so ago and it was absolutely delicious! Lovely atmosphere as well. Totally recommend, regardless of potential nuclear meltdowns :)

neltnerb3• 12 years ago

Paradise has cheap, strong drinks, if you're cool with the not fantastic gay porn.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 12 years ago

You do realise nuclear power is safer than any other base-load generation technology currently employed? Nuclear kills fewer people per kilowatt-hour electricity generated than even roof-top solar, including the deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima. [1]

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

angersock• 12 years ago

The first nuclear pile of note was under the University of Chicago's stadium, if memory serves. I wouldn't sweat it.

theplaz• 12 years ago

I lived (in a MIT dorm) in that area for 4 years.

mathattack• 12 years ago

I'm a big fan of MIT, and consider it a national treasure.

My question - will this type of political play create enemies? I can't imagine that the politicians who were overruled were happy, and they can make MIT pay with 1000 small cuts.

MIT at center of political power play over campus fusion reactor

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