National Ignition Facility

When it comes to actually cutting budgets, which ones would you cut?  That's the question that gets bandied about in politics in the coming election season. 

If the idea is to create a new source of energy, somebody may have considered cutting this at one time.  According to the New York Times article, printed in 2000, this was originally a 2.2 billion dollar project.  It may have had as much as a factor of four final price tag higher than originally planned.  These numbers are not precise, but that brings it up to nearly 9 billion dollars. 

Surely there were better uses for the money elsewhere.

It would seem a contradiction for me to be critical of this, but consider the fact that the Polywell project headed up by Dr. Bussard was much cheaper.  It also had a plan for a prototype reactor, which I can't find in the wikipedia write up for the NIF.  With a fraction of the money spent, there may have been a working reactor by now if Bussard's device was fully funded instead of being stopped at about 2005 or 2006.

Since so much more money was spent on the NIF, there wasn't enough money for the Polywell.  Nor for any other project, such as Dense Plasma Focus.  Both of these projects would have had a smaller price tag than the NIF and each of them could have been successful sooner.

There may well have been money left over for other projects. 

No room to make cuts?  If this is any indication, there's plenty of fat to cut from the budget.  And it won't harm priorities.  To the contrary, it may achieve them sooner and at a lower cost.  That's the whole idea.