It's nicknamed "Money ITER"

When I visited a friend in Czechoslovakia in 1985, he had just installed a very expensive ( for him ) satellite dish so he could watch West German TV. Now the Internet makes it easy to watch and participate. Even with heavy censorship closed societies can no longer control the ongoing discourse. Closed society can mean anything from China to various "self contained" religious groups.

Yup.
I followed this closely. To get re-elected, Reid needed it killed. And Obama needed Reid. And it never came up during the election.

By the way, the cost quoted is only the cost of the project. In addition, the USG is on the hook for another 12 B because DOE signed contracts to start taking fuel in 1998. The utilities are suing to recover their costs since 1998. Worst, this last cost does not come from the Waste Fund. It comes from general revenues.

I am retired and have time to kill. At each call I strung them along, answered all the questions. When they asked me for my credit card number, I said that I have to go and get it. A minute later I picked up the phone and gave them a fake credit card number. (The first 4 digits should match a real card as there are only a few allowable codes. ). The number did not go through of course. I apologized and gave them another fake number. When that didn't go through I thanked them for making my day less lonely and asked them the call again. What is amazing is they didn't get the hint and kept calling.

Just shows the difference between the level and scrutiny of funding between the military/intelligence sector and the civilian sector. NASA has to go through a long period of request and debate to get a space telescope, while the military just builds a few too many with no comment from anyone.

I'm confused. I thought the non-encoding (junk) DNA was not selected for. That is random mutations were passed on because they evidently did not effect the organism's survival or reproduction. Coding DNA ( genes ) accumulated fewer mutations because mutations adversely effected it or it's offspring's survival.

Now it appears that that non-encoding DNA is important, but seems to be less effected by mutations. Am I missing something?

If you're in Britain you want a computer with efficient chips.

In 1965, I got a bargain round trip to London from a student association charter on Icelandic Airlines. It was the first time I ever flew . The cost was $600, 18% of my graduate student yearly stipend. In today's dollars that is $4300.

If you want old fashion service, take your dollars and fly first class. It is still less than I paid.

One aspect is that we are part of an international consortium, and to pull back would initiate an diplomatic scuffle. In a more rational world we would't be building this.

To put things into perspective it is not more money than we use to bail out one sleazy banker so he can get his bonus, or run a few days of a stupid war.

Twenty years ago I was a program officer at the Office of Fusion Energy, US Department of Energy. The ITER planning had started. My take -- there is no way on Earth that a tokamak can be cost competitive. Even if it works, even if the first wall problem is solved as may be indicated above, the engineering costs are so prohibitive as to price the whole concept out of consideration.

I earlier worked on Trisops, a simpler fusion concept that might be economically feasible, but I even doubt that. In the official fusion community, which is fixated on the the tokamak, it suffered from the NIH ( Not Invented Here ) syndrome and was defunded.

There go millions of truck and taxi driver jobs. Not great jobs, but still jobs.

Many will say that this is inevitable and will make us safer and more productive. The industrial revolution also did wonders for our wealth and quality of life in the long run, but it was pure hell for the lower classes when it happened.

I read Clifford Simak's "City" as a teenager in the 50's and I still remember it as clear as it was yesterday. It is one of my two all time favorites. The other is Bester's "The Stars my Destination". Bester is at least not underappreciated

The $2.5B would hardly serve to bail out one sleazy banker so he can get his bonus.

The ultra strong tidal forces around the black hole probably squeezed the star apart rather than peeled off the surface. This is called the noodle effect or spaghettification.