Supercollider’s Cost Could Rise by 50%

The Reagan Administration’s most ambitious civilian scientific project, a gigantic atom smasher called the Superconducting Supercollider, may cost nearly 50% more than the $4.4 billion estimated by the Energy Department, according to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office.

In addition, the project that President Reagan has called a “doorway . . . to a new world” could drain money from other areas of basic research, the congressional study said. It noted that the federal research budget is already so tight that the National Institutes of Health manages to fund only one-third of grant applications for biomedical studies that it considers worthy of support.

46% Increase in Cost Called Possible

The Congressional Budget Office said that, if the cost of the supercollider follows the pattern set by two much smaller particle accelerators built by the Energy Department in recent years, the price could be expected to rise by as much 46% to $6.4 billion. Even at its officially estimated cost, the report noted, the project would consume 7% of the entire federal budget for basic research at the current level for half a decade and double the proportion now spent on high-energy physics.

The 120-page study notes that the cheapest alternative--besides simply postponing the project--would be to join CERN, the European nuclear research organization based in Geneva, in building its next-generation machine, the Large Hadron Accelerator.

Both the cost and the power of this accelerator would be about a third of the supercollider’s. The congressional study conceded that this makes the European machine potentially less rewarding in scientific terms, and American participation would have the effect of shifting the focus of world research in high-energy physics from the United States to Europe.

The nonpartisan budget office offered no specific recommendations on the supercollider project, whose fate is likely to be among the most contentious research issues that the next President faces. Congress has appropriated $205 million so far to cover research and development, $100 million of it for the current fiscal year. But, in the face of a $155-billion federal deficit, Congress has resisted authorizing any money for construction.

The supercollider, billed by the Administration as a means of preserving American leadership in the competitive field of high-energy physics, was the object last year of a nationwide scramble among 25 states to obtain a project that would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the winning regional economy well into the next century.

Later this month, Energy Secretary John S. Herrington is to announce a preferred site in one of the seven finalist states--Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. After an additional 30 days required to complete an environmental review, Energy Department officials hope to obtain President Reagan’s formal endorsement of a site before he leaves office on Jan. 20.

The supercollider would explore basic forces of nature by using 10,000 superconducting magnets arrayed around a 53-mile oval course to accelerate two beams of protons in opposite directions, then letting them collide at energies 20 times those possible with current machines.

One of its goals is to find an elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs Boson, whose existence would help confirm theories that have sought to unify two fundamental forces in nature, electromagnetism and the weak atomic force.

Physicists hope that a unified understanding of such forces will eventually bring technological rewards of the kind spawned by Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell in the 19th Century, whose understanding of the relationship between electricity and magnetism paved the way for modern electronic technology.

Largest Instrument Ever Built

But, while Faraday and Maxwell got along with paper, pencil and table-top experiments, U.S. physicists today are lobbying for the largest scientific instrument ever built, one that would consume as much concrete as a major hydroelectric dam.

The congressional study conceded that the supercollider would be “powerful enough to answer most of the next-step questions in high-energy physics,” but it said that the Energy Department’s record in building its last two machines--the much smaller “energy doubler” and the Tevatron I at the Fermi National Laboratory near Chicago--suggested that the cost could be much higher than the agency has estimated. The two accelerators, which upgraded existing facilities, were 64% and 121% over their budgets.

Phil Keif, an Energy Department spokesman, said that the overruns were caused largely by unanticipated costs for research and development, which would be mostly completed for the supercollider before construction begins. He noted that the last two accelerator facilities the government built “from the ground up”--Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California--were finished at or below budget.