California Offers a First-Rate Home to the Supercollider
When John S. Herrington, secretary of energy, announced that President Reagan had approved initial construction funding for the Superconducting Supercollider, the question of where it would be built was left unanswered.
The correct answer, of course, is that the supercollider must be located where there is the best chance of its being used in a supportive, first-rate scientific environment and where it can be built and operated at reasonable cost. In the rigorous selection process that Herrington has said will begin this fall, the merits of the California site will be weighed. We believe that its merits are substantial.
The supercollider is America’s bid to regain the lead in high-energy physics research. Because it explores the basic structure of matter, high-energy physics in a very literal sense is the most fundamental of all sciences. As ever-increasing energies have become available through the construction of larger and more powerful accelerators, we have probed deeper into the world of elementary particles and the forces that govern their movement.
With the supercollider we have arrived at a new level of observing power and potential for broadening our understanding. In this enormous particle accelerator two beams of protons will speed in opposite directions through a 52-mile-long underground tunnel of superconducting magnets and produce head-on collisions with 40 trillion electron-volts of energy. This is 20 times the energy of the largest machine now available in the United States, and four to five times the energy of the largest machines under construction or in the planning stages in the Soviet Union and Western Europe.
The supercollider will not be inexpensive, and it is imperative that funding for this critically important project not come at the expense of other vital scientific research sponsored by the federal government. But the Energy Department’s decision reflects the widespread view that the benefits will far outweigh the costs.
At the conclusion of a two-year study financed by state appropriations, a statewide panel is recommending that the California proposal include a preferred site located just east of the city of Stockton. The terrain, the geology and the climate of this site would permit rapid construction, with predictable timetables and minimal environmental impact.
Because the tunnel could be bored at depths of only 50 to 100 feet below the surface, the underground experimental areas would be relatively inexpensive to build and operate. The huge pieces of equipment needed for the experiments could be moved in and out with comparative ease, and even extensive alterations over time are feasible at a practical cost. Necessary support services in high-technology engineering and manufacturing are nearby in abundance.
Equally important is California’s remarkable and unmatched array of public and private world-class research universities: the University of California, with its nine campuses, Caltech, Stanford and USC. Since the days of Ernest O. Lawrence and the first cyclotron at Berkeley in 1930, California has been the site for pioneering work in high-energy physics. It remains the leader today in such research in the United States, much of it done at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. With its proven history of public and private support for excellence in science, California would continue to be able to attract and retain scientists of the highest caliber.
The Department of Energy has said that the competition for siting the supercollider will be as open and far-reaching as possible and that there are no front-runners. The governor, the Legislature and the state congressional delegation have given their strong support to the effort to develop the case for a California site. We are eager to compete, and intend to do so vigorously.
