This week I am visiting Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) to do several experiments that I cannot do at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) where I work. Being here puts a few things in sharp perspective. Being a renewable energy lab, NREL gets the majority of it’s funding from the department of energy. LANL on the other hand receives the majority of it’s funding from the department of defence. 
I am not one to complain after the increase in funding from the new administration, but being here makes a few things quite clear. Here in the US, we care a lot more about bombs than solar panels. To start with, LANL is 25 square miles while NREL is about five. The budget on the other hand is 10 times larger for LANL and that does not include the part that is not disclosed because it is top secret. While I was here I learned that almost every day between 9 and 10am you can feel the explosions being set off only a few miles away. Now finding out exactly how much each of these bombs cost is extremely difficult, but I can assure you that they are all more than my car and most of them more than my house. On the other hand we are still using 10 year old computers and 20 to 30 year old equipment to run the experiments that are necessary to conduct the solar research that we do. Maybe you agree that defence is more important than energy science but, just consider that each exploded bomb would probably provide most of a research lab like NREL with new computers.
I believe that we have more to worry about than how to build a better bomb. Energy security and renewability are much more pressing issues than how to more efficiently kill people. Maybe one day these priorities will change, but for now they are firmly rooted and the only thing that will change that is for people to start being more concerned/ scared about our environment than they are about terrorism. Considering the fact that we have not had an environmental 9/11 I don’t think that will happen any time soon.
