BERKELEY — Rarely have the arcane workings of high-energy physics captured the fancy of so many people as they have this spring, as quarks, leptons and other esoterica have joined highway projects and school budgets on political agendas in statehouses from Sacramento to Albany and from Olympia to Tallahassee.
This is what the federal government has wrought with its proposal to spend $4.4-billion to build the latest, biggest and most powerful atom smasher ever--the superconducting super collider.
No fewer than 31 states are studying at least 52 possible sites for the new megaproject, which promises to generate billions of dollars of new business activity, hundreds of millions of dollars in added tax revenue, thousands of high-paying jobs, plus the prospects of the spinoff of related local industries.
Would Set Records
Considered the world's largest and costliest scientific instrument, the huge machine, an oval-shaped atom smasher that would measure 53 miles in circumference, would more than earn the double superlatives in its name. For one thing, it would include 10,000 exotic superconducting magnets buried in a tunnel long enough to encircle Manhattan and San Francisco side-by-side.
For another, it would be 20 times more powerful than the most powerful such collider working today. And, proponents assert, if authorized by Congress this year as expected, it could be opening new vistas in science by 1996.
"The super collider holds the potential for a . . . revolution in science, education, technology and commerce," Energy Secretary John S. Herrington said when he announced the federal government's decision to build the machine. "It will have spinoffs, discoveries and innovations that will profoundly touch every human being."
Teams of engineers and physicists are busy finishing up preliminary designs for the machine in California, which also happens to be one of the top two or three contenders in the competition to host the project.
The state, along with all other competitors, is busy conducting soil tests, preparing a list of assets for federal decision-makers to consider, and trying to stir up public support. In some states, this job is handled out of the governor's office or state economic development agency. California has established a special super-conductor executive steering committee headed by University of California Vice President William B. Baker.
Winning the super collider, Baker contends with the fervor displayed by many of the competitors, will make a tremendous difference--in terms of economics, education and prestige--for whatever state is chosen.
"You can't be economically strong if you aren't technologically strong," said Baker, who usually manages budget matters for the nine-campus university system. "The SSC (superconducting super collider) . . . is a remarkable economic base from which to grow and prosper."
With so much at stake, selecting a site for the collider could have posed a tough political problem for the federal Deparment of Energy, which administers federal physics research programs. The solution was a competition open to everyone, even large private landholders who would agree to donate at least the 16,000 acres of land the machine requires.
The project has been discussed since 1983, but the competition formally opened in February, after President Reagan approved the project. States must file their complex applications by August, and a panel of independent scientists will select a set of finalists by the end of the year. A site will be chosen in 1988.
State officials consider the competition a shrewd way to select the winner, because it gives every state a chance to be chosen, and thus gives every state an incentive to support federal financing of the project, which still is pending in Congress.
At the same time, the competition encourages states to add to their offers additional cost-sharing proposals, or "sweeteners"--subsidized electricity in California, subsidized tunneling in Illinois, and subsidized financing in New York have been mentioned, for example.
Small states squawk that this provision favors wealthier and more populous states, and some have mobilized their senior congressional representatives to try to skew the selection process back in their favor.
"While it is in one sense in the best budgetary interests of the United States government to seek bids which reduce federal budget costs," Kansas Lt. Gov. Jack Walker recently told a congressional committee, "such a provision would be shortsighted if it acted as a bar to states which have technically superb sites, but lack the resources to outbid more affluent neighbors."
Nonsense, argue congressmen faced with cutting the federal deficit. Major cost-sharing by states may be the only way to shoehorn this project into the already overburdened budget.
