Wendell Ford (D-Ky.), chairman of the Senate Energy Research Committee. "Those who want the SSC have their work cut out for them,'' said Sen. With an eye on the price, he cautioned, ''There must be a strong public consensus for this project or it simply will not go forward." Senators sounded even tougher. Robert Roe (D-N.J.) was not as sanguine when Congress started looking at the project. "Based on the information we have received, they feel the information is so basic and so valuable, we would be unwise not to get such knowledge if we can," said Bruce.īruce's chairman, Rep. ![]() He is a member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, a key committee in deciding if the collider will be built. "The question that Congress has to face is: Is it worth the investment of tax dollars to increase the base knowledge of the construction of the universe?" said proponent Rep. The winning site should be named in July 1988, when the presidential campaign is heating up, although it won't be final until January 1989. The big bills for construction more than $600 million annually for five years and peaking at $709 million in 1994 will not come until Reagan is out of office. Only a sour person would note that Reagan may get credit for the collider but someone else will have to pay for it. The competition among states (site proposals are due August 3) is as spirited and aggressively as the "Let's Make a Deal" enthusiasm displayed the past few years for automobile plants. The administration wants a congressional decision this yeair on whether to build the collider. The annual budget for collider operations would be $270 million. "The SSC is the most significant economie development 'plum' of the last quarter of the 20th century," says Nevada Gov. If it is built, the super collider will employ about 3,000 scientists and technicians and lure related industries, schools and laboratories to the area. To some callous people, this is high-tech pork. The degree of scientific knowledge may not be as high at another building anchoring the Mall, the Capitol, but congressmen understand the value of a multibillion-dollar project especially if they can get it for their hometown. "This will be the crown jewel of high-energy physics," Energy Secretary John Herrington said January 30 in announeing President Reagan's decision to go ahead with it. It would be the largest and most expensive scientific machine ever built a racetrack-shaped ring of 10,000 super-magnets 53 miles in circumference carrying a price tag of at least $4.4 billion and conceivably closer to $5.3 billion. Seven blocks away, in the Energy Department headquarters building overlooking the Mall, are some of the people who understand how cyclotrons work and who want to go to the frontier in high-energy physics: the superconducting super collider (SSC). Replied her companion, "How do they get one atom? I don't understand." "We just had a test on this," one teenager said during an Eastertime visit to the atom smasher display. Visitors tend to pay more attention to the display behind it: a full-scale model of a 1936 cyclotron that used a massive World War I surplus 70-ton magnet and a 27-inch vaccuum chamber that looks like a large, hollow metal pancake. It is small enough to fit comfortably in a man's hand. late in 1930," says the description next to the hockey-puck like "tube," which is four inches in diameter and one inch thick. "The first successful cyclotron 'tube,' constructed and tested. There is the Friendship 7 capsule that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the earth, the Hope diamond, one of the lead tractors from the farmer tractorcades of the 1970s and, easily overlooked between "Textiles" and an 1865 telescope from Vassar College at the National Museum of American History, a relic from the early efforts to take atoms apart. The Smithsonian Institution, renowned for its museums along the Mall in Washington, is sometimes nicknamed America's attic, a comfortable place where visitors can wander about and rummage for knowledge. Super competition for superconducting super collider
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