DOE puts Inflation Reduction Act funds to work

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a 1 December post on FYI, which reports on federal science policy. Both FYI and Physics Today are published by the American Institute of Physics.

The Department of Energy Office of Science announced last month that it has distributed across 52 projects and facilities the $1.55 billion it received from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was signed into law in August.

Congress offered broad direction that the money should generally go toward major construction and equipment projects, and it specified amounts for all the DOE programs that have large portfolios of such projects. The legislation further stated that the office’s newly reorganized isotope R&D and production program should receive $158 million—almost twice its current annual budget—and that $133 million should go to general infrastructure projects at laboratories the Office of Science oversees. Those directions aside, DOE was free to choose which projects would receive shares of the money and how much.

The graph below shows the funding boosts that the IRA provided to projects including the LBNF/DUNE neutrino experiment , the international ITER fusion facility , and upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), and Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) x-ray facility. To learn more , read what the budget officer for the Office of Science, Kathleen Klausing, had to say about DOE’s reasoning behind the funding allocations.