What's a Few More Billion

....when your country is already drowning in red ink and paper money?  Not much, according to Tennessee's own Lamar Alexander, freshly minted authority on all things nuclear. Lamar laments that the U.S. is not contributing more to the the billion dollar boondoggle in France:

"That's an embarrassing mistake by Congress. That's what it is," Alexander said Friday during a visit to Oak Ridge, where he attended the annual meeting of the East Tennessee Economic Council.

In its omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal 2008,

Congress included only $10.7 million for U.S. work on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor - a multinational, multibillion-dollar project that's supposed to demonstrate the capabilities of nuclear fusion as an unlimited energy source for the 21st century.