Re: Budget Cuts Will Mean Layoffs at Fermilab

On Dec 24, 8:07 pm, Agent Smith <agent-sm...@two-blocks-on-your-
left.com> wrote:
"hhc...@xxxxxxxxx" <hhc...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote innews:ac809132-6b74-4c05-aaa2-07bde13bed95@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:







On Dec 23, 8:48 pm, Agent Smith <agent-sm...@two-blocks-on-your-
left.com> wrote:
Budget Cuts Will Mean Layoffs at Fermilab
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/science/22fermi.html?ex=1356152400
&e
n= 89141bea94a6537b&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss

By KENNETH CHANG
Published: December 22, 2007
The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the nation's premier
center for plumbing the mysteries of the universe in the tiniest bits
of matter, is planning to lay off more than 10 percent of its
employees in the coming months, the result of impending budget cuts
mandated by the spending bill passed by Congress this week.

Fermilab's collaboration in an international project to design and
build the International Linear Collider, which would slam together
electrons and their anti-particles -- positrons -- at ever-higher
energies, will slow to a halt. A Fermilab experiment called NOvA to
look for an asymmetry in the laws governing evanescent particles
known as neutrinos will be placed in limbo with hopes that it can be
revived next year by new financing.

Outside of Fermilab, the spending bill also eliminated the United
States' planned contribution of $160 million to ITER, a test fusion
reactor that is intended to lead to commercial energy production by
emulating the process that powers the Sun.

Fermilab, in the western suburbs of Chicago, had expected its budget
to rise to $372 million from $342 million. Instead it will fall to
$320 million. Officials said they were caught unaware by the cuts,
and because they affect the 2008 fiscal year that started nearly
three months ago, the officials said they had to take action quickly.

"I have never been handed a problem more difficult than this one,"
Piermaria Oddone, Fermilab's director, told his employees at a
meeting on Thursday, where he announced that probably 200 layoffs out
of a work force of 1,940 people would be necessary.

Remaining employees will effectively have their pay cut. Beginning in
February, they will have to take off two unpaid days a month.

Some scientists attributed Fermilab's woes to Congress's reviving its
practice of earmarks that direct agencies to finance projects that
would probably not receive money otherwise. In a statement, the
American Physical Society said it "notes with some dismay that had
Congress applied the same discipline to earmarking as it did last
year, the damage to the science and technology enterprise could have
been avoided."

President Bush is expected to sign the spending bill into law.

In the budget proposed by Mr. Bush in February as well as the
versions passed later by the Senate and the House, the Office of
Science at the Energy Department was slated for a healthy budget
increase of more than 18 percent, part of a promise to double
financing for research for the physical sciences over the next
decade.

But to meet bottom-line spending targets demanded by Mr. Bush,
Congress rolled back the planned increases for the Energy Department
and other science agencies. Fermilab's budget fell, because the
spending bill specifically dictates large cuts to the International
Linear Collider and the NOvA projects.

Young-Kee Kim, deputy director of Fermilab, said the laboratory had
expected to receive $47 million for the collider project, employing
about 170 scientists, engineers and technicians. With the final
spending bill, that amount was reduced to $15 million. "The money is
kind of already spent," Dr. Kim said.

About $36 million had been allocated for NOvA with about 80 Fermilab
people working on that project.

OK, I've worked in that field.

Now Fermi has about 150 support guys, and at best 4 clever idea guys
(and trust me that I could name each one of them). Each of these 4
guys relies on the machinsts and technicians to contruct their
experiments, and this amounts to about 6 guys per major experimenter.
That's 24 people, not 150.  OK, with secretarial and administrative
people, that count rises to 30.

The funding cuts are entirely appropriate to the need.

I can't believe that they're pulling out of ITER.  It's like the
interest in fusion just keeps getting worse and worse.  ;(- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Then too, Fermilab was never primarily funded to do fusion research.

Having once worked at Forrestal, my impression is that the then and
current directions of fusion experimentation are equivalent to
attempting to swat a fly by slamming two bricks together witht he fly
in between.

By now it should be clear to all that the brute force attempts at
controlled fusion haven't worked in spite of 50 years of very costly
experimentation. Perhaps now it's time to hand the ball back to the
theoretical folks -- in other words, go back to the drawing boards.
Spend nothing on experimentation until a credible new method of
obtaining controlled fusion is found to work on paper.


Folks, we've now gone through 8 generations of very costly fusion
experiments, and ITER will be by my count be the 9th. There is no real
reason why to expect it to succeed, because it is merely a revamped
earlier experiment. Only idiots repeat the same actions when the
previous near identical attempt has not produced the desired result.

Harry C.







.

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