DOE Advisory Committee Alarmed Over Fusion Appropriations, Language

Since the January 1996 meeting at which they approved a restructured Fusion Energy Program to fit within a reduced budget, members of DOE’s Fusion Energy Advisory Committee have not rested on their laurels. The committee and various subpanels have taken up a number of specific issues within the restructured fusion program, at the request of DOE Director of Energy Research Martha Krebs. At the most recent meeting of the retitled Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC) on July 16 and 17, reports on these issues were reviewed by the whole committee and submitted to the Department of Energy.

The remainder of the meeting revolved around recent congressional action and report language on appropriations for the fusion program. When the House and the Senate Appropriations Committees passed their fiscal year 1997 funding bills for DOE on July 16, neither provided as much as the Administration had asked for in fusion funding. The House Committee’s report caused FESAC additional concern because it prescribes uses for most of the money and leaves very little flexibility for the department. (See FYI #110 for the House and Senate report language on fusion.)

FESAC chairman Robert Conn of UC San Diego prepared a letter to Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary on the appropriations situation. (Please see FYI #116 for the full text of the letter.) Responding to FESAC’s concerns, James Decker, Deputy Director of DOE’s Office of Energy Research, noted that both the House and Senate reports commended FESAC for developing the restructured fusion program, and commented that “the situation could have been substantially worse without your efforts.” He remarked that while Members of Congress remain supportive of basic science programs, the fusion program still faces “a lack of broad political support throughout Congress.” He told FESAC members that the House report specifies how DOE should spend all but $16 million (or about 90 percent) of the fusion funds. Anne Davies, Associate Director for DOE’s Office of Fusion Energy, added that the $16 million would be needed to fund "$55 million worth of work.” The specificity of the language, she said, was the result of election-year politics, and she expected it would be “softened in [the House-Senate] conference.” Also discussed was the fact that both House and Senate committees required DOE to fund fusion program direction and computation from within the fusion budget, while the Administration had budgeted those items separately, outside of the request for fusion.

Ernie Moniz, the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Associate Director for Science, thanked the FESAC members for working together to develop a consensus on the restructured program and stating that they “earned considerable credibility in all quarters, including Congress.” He advised that in approaching Members of Congress, the fusion community should frame the issue as working together to accomplish common goals. He added that the outyears (future) budgets for fusion “depended significantly on many variables,” such as the performance of the economy. The Administration’s position, he said, was to try to protect, on a year-by-year basis, as much as possible of the investment portfolio.

Topics that the committee and its subpanels have considered at DOE’s request include a plan to maximize science usage on the three major tokamak facilities, suggestions on strategy and criteria for investment in alternative fusion concepts (magnetic configurations other than the advanced tokamak), and the role of inertial fusion energy. The report on major facilities recommends that DOE apply about $1 million in additional resources to the Alcator C-Mod tokamak to enhance its scientific capabilities. Assuming a fixed facilities budget, it advises obtaining resources for the Alcator C-Mod by equal reductions to the budgets of the two other major facilities, TFTR and DIII-D. Davies reported that her office has already incorporated those recommendations into its plans for next year.

The report on alternative concepts states that a sound investment strategy for the fusion program should include a broad conceptual development program and should ultimately remove program distinctions between tokamak and non-tokamak investments. The report recommends establishment of a Concept Development Panel under FESAC to assess the relative merit of alternative proposals and to provide recommendations to DOE for the best science balance.

The report on inertial fusion energy (IFE) notes the importance of the Inertial Confinement Fusion Program (within DOE’s Defense Programs) to the much smaller inertial fusion effort within the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences. This report advocates a more formal mechanism of cooperation with the defense programs, and recommends that annual funding for IFE within the civilian program be increased from the FY96 budget of about $8 million to $10 million, with approximately $2-3 million designated for non-heavy ion issues.

Krebs, who joined the meeting for part of the second day, seemed pleased with the committee’s actions. “It sounds like you did everything I asked you to,” she commented. She concluded that it had been “a remarkable meeting,” and that FESAC had “done a tremendous service for us all.”