In the past week, members of Congress frustrated with the Department of Energy's proposed cuts to research projects in their home states seem to have settled on a shared scapegoat: a long-running international agreement to build an experimental reactor that could help scientists make fusion energy a reality.

During a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday, former Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) criticized Energy Secretary Steven Chu for a planned cut to the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, at Michigan State University.

The idea behind the $615 million lab is to create powerful beams of rare isotopes, allowing for nuclear research that could also lead to advances in waste management, nuclear weapons and medical care. The $55 million allocated for the $615 million lab in fiscal 2013 would be cut by more than half to $22 million under the Obama administration's proposed budget, preventing construction from beginning this year, Dingell said.

He told Chu that the cuts are inappropriate when DOE's budget would increase America's contribution to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which is under construction in the south of France.

The reactor, which is aimed at harnessing energy from atomic fusion to meet human energy needs, would see its budget raised from $105 million to $150 million in fiscal 2013.

"We should first ensure that we're meeting our project obligations here at home, before sending our money and scientists abroad," Dingell said yesterday, adding that he worries "the work and the benefits that will be achieved from this will be sent abroad and will strengthen foreign scientific applications as opposed to American."

As designed, ITER would turn 50 megawatts of input power into 500 MW of output power. Its fuel would be two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, which will take the form of plasma at temperatures higher than 150 million degrees Celsius. Superconducting coils would create a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than that of planet Earth, keeping the plasma away from the walls of the doughnut-shaped reactor vessel.

Half the money for the $21 billion fusion reactor will come from the European Union, while the United States, Japan, China, India, South Korea and Russia have agreed to split the rest of the bill. Construction is scheduled to finish in 2019.

Chu, hoping to defuse claims that the budget proposal would send taxpayer money toward new technologies for Europe, said 80 percent of the U.S. contribution would go toward research at American laboratories and work by American companies.

But Dingell's criticism shows the new target of the campaign by members of the Michigan delegation. Others have rallied around FRIB, including Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who pressed Chu on the project's budget during a Senate hearing last month.

They are not the first members of Congress to contrast the spending increase for ITER with a cut to a prized project back home.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said during a hearing last week that she is working with Republicans on a proposal to defund the U.S. contribution to ITER out of frustration about a cut to another nuclear science project near her Bay Area district. She said the National Ignition Facility, a fusion research center completed three years ago at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, could shut down without more money in next year's budget, though Chu said he expects the facility to have enough money to stay open (E&E Daily, March 2).

Chu said yesterday that he still believes FRIB is a "worthy project" and he hopes Congress will approve the funding. Though the proposed budget could change dramatically as lawmakers push for their home-state projects, Dingell said the proposal was poorly thought out.

"You know I have great affection and respect for you, but you cannot lay this one off on Congress," Dingell told Chu yesterday, when the Energy secretary said Congress will ultimately decide funding for FRIB. "I'm talking to you about what the budget does, and not what the Congress might do."