Supplement to president's FY 2007 budget defines nanotech spending

Filed in archive Government on August 6, 2006

Professor David Berube at NanoHype offers a very nice post on the Supplement to the President's FY 2007 budget, which defines government nanotech funding for the coming year.

Berube has plowed through the report and distilled out its essence. If you want to know where the government's nanodollars are going in '07, here are some of the highlights:

Heavily highlighted technologies included medicine devices and systems to diagnose, prevent and treat disease, especially cancer, as well as energy.

The Department of Homeland Security is primarily interested in sensor technologies. Other areas include fire resistant construction materials and surfaces to deactivate biological agents and decompose hazardous chemicals.

The Department of Energy repeatedly references hydrogen production and storage and solar energy conversion in addition to solid-state lighting and low cost fuel cells, lab on a chip systems, and fossil fuel advances.

The Environmental Protection Agency is developing a voluntary pilot program for reporting of nanomaterials manufacturing. It also wants to fingerprint characteristics, especially layer, separation distance, curvature and tortuosity starting with C60 fullerenes. It is interested in energy-efficient recovery of biofuels, nanoporous filters to remove gaseous pollutants and particulates from air streams, reactive coating to destroy or immobilize toxic compounds, and all things for greener manufacturing, like solvent free production.

Some of the areas of pre-occupation with the National Science Foundation were quantum computing, biosystem exploitation, cellular organelles and biomolecular motors, biocompatible structures for implantation, and miniature sensors for diagnostics.

The US Department of Agriculture wants to advance food safety and biosecurity, especially tracking product identity, and nutrition enhancement.

The US Forest Service wants to capture value in wood-based lignocellulosic materials, wood-plastic composites and engineered biocomposites.

$44 million is slated for studying environmental, health and safety concerns.