Governor Visits an Atom Smasher in Bid for Super Collider

Having spent a good portion of the year waging a fight over California’s bid for a multibillion-dollar federal atom smasher project, Gov. George Deukmejian got a chance Monday to see what a high-energy physics research facility looks like up close.

Donning a hard hat, Deukmejian joined Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter for a tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center--the closest thing California has to the proposed superconducting super collider atom smasher that the governor covets.

The tour included a walk through a tunnel housing a portion of the two-mile-long underground linear accelerator, which fires beams of subatomic particles called electrons and positrons at each other.

Emerging from the tunnel and a briefing from Richter, director of the facility, Deukmejian called high-energy physics “fascinating” but “very mysterious.”

One lesson impressed upon the governor was that big experimental physics projects like those being conducted at Stanford can mean big bucks for the local and state economy.

The facility, with its huge, multi-story $60-million drum that collects and records information about the colliding electrons and positrons and its dozens of administration, laboratory, warehouse and other buildings, has an annual budget of $89.5 million and a staff of 1,350. Money to run it comes from the U.S. Department of Energy.

“It’s sort of a paradox to see that it is so necessary to have such huge equipment and buildings (for) something that we can’t see,” Deukmejian said.

The purpose of Deukmejian’s tour was to raise the visibility of the state’s bid for the super collider.

Specifically, Deukmejian envisions that the super collider project, which would cost $4 billion to $6 billion to build, would result in 10,000 construction jobs and 25,000 more new jobs created either directly or indirectly if the federal government decides on California as the site for the atom smasher.

Even though Congress has not approved funding for the project, California is in hot competition with at least 25 other states to become the site for the super collider. Later this year, the Department of Energy will draw up “a short list” of about half a dozen states that it considers to have the best bids and decide from among them next year.

The super collider, if it is built, would be enclosed in an underground oval, 53 miles in circumference. It would be the world’s largest scientific instrument. The two California sites under consideration are within an hour’s drive of the state Capitol, near Davis and Stockton.

Two rings of magnets would thrust streams of nearly invisible protons at each other at nearly the speed of light, and the resulting collision would provide the basis of numerous experiments not possible on existing particle accelerators.

For example, it is hoped that the super collider will allow scientists to break down the smallest subatomic particle known to man, called a quark, into even smaller bits of matter, getting them closer to the essential matter that existed precisely at the moment of the so-called “big bang” that some physicists believe led to creation of the universe.

The governor was accompanied on his tour by a group of publicists, University of California officials and Stanford physicists. The novelty of the event attracted a large contingent of newspaper, television and radio reporters, who nearly filled a yellow school bus for a tour of the facility.