December 26, 2007 (LPAC) -- The U.S. Congress axed $149 million in the 2008 budget that had been pledged as the U.S. contribution to the construction of the international thermonuclear reactor ITER, located in Cadarache, France. Thermonuclear fusion power would provide an almost unlimited source of electrical power and high-energy-density process heat, using the deuterium present in ordinary seawater as fuel.

Congress also stipulated that the Department of Energy could not take funds from other programs to give to ITER, but the Administration's science advisor John Marburger told Science magazine that he thought that this prohibition would not hold.

This will be the second time that the United States has removed itself from the international fusion project, a collaborative effort funded by several nations.

The U.S. was absent from the program from 1999 to 2003. In 1980, with the help of the LaRouche forces, both houses of Congress passed the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act, which called for an engineering reactor by 1990 and a prototype fusion reactor by the year 2000. The bill was signed into law by President Carter, but the Reagan Administration never funded it.

It's a sorry situation for a nation that promotes "alternatives" to oil and coal.