Ah, the cutting cost argument. Heard it most of my life as justified on doing something better. The something better never happens.



What's easier to do than cut costs?



Not increase costs!



If something better is on the table, it will be getting funding, and getting excitement and support for higher costs, which ulltimately end up in budget meetings where the pool of money is split if the efforts to grow the pool of money fail.



The thing is, as any scientist should know as primary axxioms: zero sum, tanstaafl.



Higher costs are good because, zero sum, thats the only way to get bigger benefits.



And for science, costs are never profits, but instead payments to worker, jobs, income to communities.



Many times, cost cuts lead to community decline, decay, even drug addiction.



I'm not arguing for continuing to produce plutonium for bomb tests, underground, to pay uranium miners, power plant operators, and drillers to place the bombs underground. But costs are not a bad thing. Better to be a middle class cost instead of an unemployed cost. But, as an example, current reactors were designed to produce enriched uranium and plutonium for bombs first, power second. To cut costs, research on reactors that produced only power we ended. Research for naval vessel power units, that would replace the scaled down bomb research reactors going into nuclear powered subs.



That was mid 70s during the "energy crisis" of OPEC going on strike, intersecting with fighting pollution. Cutting nuclear research did not go to wind, solar, storage research increases. They had already fought and got funding. And once the non-OPEC oil product broke OPEC power, cost cutting cut funding for wind, solar, storage.



The LHC exists because Congress cut costs on the SSC already been being constructed in Texas. Nothing better replaced it. All the jobs moved to Europe, and Texas lost a boost to its economy.