U.S. Plans ‘Supercollider’ : $4.4 Billion Sought for Largest Atom Smasher

President Reagan will ask Congress for $4.4 billion to build the world’s largest and most powerful atom smasher, a nuclear particle accelerator 52 miles in circumference, Secretary of Energy John S. Herrington announced Friday.

Sought by American scientists since the early 1980s, the gigantic “supercollider” machine is intended to maintain the nation’s preeminence in high-energy physics into the next century, with the promise of opening a new window on the fundamental relations between energy and matter in the universe, Herrington said.

Site to Be Selected

No site has been selected for the accelerator, but the Department of Energy is to announce a formal nationwide competition on Feb. 10. If authorized by Congress for fiscal 1988, construction would be completed in 1996.

More than 20 states, including California, have indicated an interest in providing the site. The two-year selection process--assuming congressional approval--is expected to bring intense lobbying for a basic research facility Herrington called “the jewel in the crown of high-energy physics.”

Comparing it to the Apollo moon program, Herrington, whose agency is responsible for funding basic particle research, cast the project in terms of the Administration’s burgeoning theme of global “competitiveness.”

“In high-energy physics, the development of the supercollider is the equivalent of putting a man on the moon,” Herrington told a hastily arranged news conference. “This is a watershed for America’s scientific and technological leadership and another sign that President Ronald Reagan is committed to keeping this nation on the cutting edge of world leadership and competitiveness.”

Officials acknowledged, however, that there is significant opposition within the Administration to spending such a large sum on a prestige project with no definable social benefit at a time of huge federal deficits and fiscal austerity. The accelerator project was not mentioned in the budget summary the White House sent to Congress on Jan. 5 or in President Reagan’s State of the Union address on Tuesday.

Administration officials said that internal opposition to the project was not finally resolved until Thursday afternoon in a meeting of the Domestic Policy Council, a Cabinet forum for resolving inter-agency disputes that is chaired by Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III. The officials declined to say which agencies opposed building the machine but indicated that they were mainly those in charge of social programs, which face further deep cuts in the 1988 budget.

The estimated cost of $4.4 billion reflects costs in constant 1988 dollars. Officials said that taking inflation into account, the final cost when the device is completed in 1996 would be about $6 billion. In both size and power, as well as cost, the “supercollider” would eclipse any atom smasher currently in operation or on the drawing boards of other nations.

10,000 Electromagnets

The machine would consist of a tunnel in the form of an elliptical “race track” 52 miles in circumference, covered by about 30 feet of earth. About 10,000 electromagnets lining the tunnel would accelerate protons, a basic constituent of all atoms, to energies of 20 trillion electron volts--a level approaching energies of subatomic particles in the “big bang” in which the universe is believed by many scientists to have originated.

The formal name of the accelerator--the Superconducting Supercollider--reflects its novel design.

Two beams of high-energy protons would be accelerated in the tunnel, then allowed to collide with a total energy of 40 trillion electron volts. To achieve such enormous energies, the magnets that form the heart of the machine will be supercooled by liquid nitrogen and liquid helium to a temperature of minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit, a point at which they lose virtually all resistance to the flow of electricity and produce extremely intense magnetic fields to entrap and accelerate the protons.

The two counter-rotating beams of protons would achieve energies 20 times those now possible at the Fermilab accelerator near Chicago, currently the world’s most powerful, and six times the energies envisioned by Soviet scientists who are currently building a massive new accelerator at the Serpukhov physics research center near Moscow.

The American supercollider also would exceed by a wide margin the cost of any previous single research device. In an article in the May, 1986, issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, James W. Cronin, a Nobel laureate in physics at the University of Chicago, estimated that the total capital investment in the United States’ four major accelerators now in operation is about $2 billion. The supercollider will cost more than twice that to build.

Leadership Shift Seen

American physicists, who began lobbying for the machine in 1982, have argued that without it the focus of leadership in particle physics will shift in the next decade from the United States to Western Europe, where a large new machine is under construction at the multinational CERN research center in Geneva, and to the Soviet Union.

More than prestige is at stake, however. In recent years, efforts to upgrade existing machines, combined with advances in theoretical physics, have carried scientists tantalizingly close to what some believe is an understanding of the common links between the four basic forces in nature. These are the so-called “strong force,” which binds neutrons and protons in the nuclei of atoms; the electromagnetic force, which binds electrons to nuclei to form whole atoms; the “weak force,” which makes radioactivity possible; and the force of gravity.

Historically, each major step in the power of accelerators, since Ernest O. Lawrence built the first hand-sized cyclotron at the University of California at Berkeley in 1930, has propelled theoretical physics forward by confirming some old predictions, confounding others and raising a host of new questions that await the construction of still larger atom smashers.

In view of the huge cost of the new machine, Herrington said that the Administration will actively seek international cooperation in building and running it. Other officials, however, said that while there is wide international interest in the supercollider, no other governments so far have offered to share the cost.