For the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (OFES), the conferees agreed to provide $276,110,000 which is $12 million over the President's request. The said "The additional $12 million is to be used to increase utilization of existing large and small experiments; further work in inertial fusion technology; take advantage of opportunities in High Energy Density Physics, including work on fast ignition, and large scale scientific computing; and provide for cost-effective construction and development of the National Compact Stellarator Experiment." They also said, "The conference notes the delay in site selection for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and directs the Department to reduce its planned expenditures on ITER in fiscal year 2005 in consideration of this delay."

For inertial confinement fusion (ICF) in the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration's account, the conferees agreed to provide $541,034,000. Within the total, they said, "An additional $46 million is provided to support expanded research on non-NIF ICF research including petawatt and high-energy petawatt laser development." They also said, "The conference recommendation includes an additional $6 million for university grants and other support. Of this amount, $3 million is provided for continued development of the petawatt laser at the University of Texas at Austin; $1 million is provided for an optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier upgrade and associated operations of the short pulse laser at the University of Nevada, Reno; $1 million is provided to the University of Nevada, Reno to continue its collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories on highly diagnosed studies of exploding wire arrays and implosion dynamics; and $1 million is provided for research using the Z-Beamlet laser at Sandia National Laboratories under the Z-Petawatt Consortium...."

They also said, "The conferees also include $25 million to continue development of high average power lasers and supporting science and technology, the budget request for the Naval Research Laboratory, and $73,469,000 for the University of Rochester, an increase of $28 million over the budget request." They also said, "The conference recommendation includes $9 million to initiate double-shift operations and assessments and initial development and testing of Z-pinch inertial fusion energy. The conference recommendation includes $1 million to the University of Nevada - Reno for magnetized plasma/laser interaction studies at the Nevada Terawatt Facility, using the Zebra pulse power machine and the Leopard short pulse laser system.

The complete text of the fusion sections of the conference report at posted at http://fire.pppl.gov