A Controversial Prize for Texas

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Charges of political favoritism began to fly almost as soon as Energy Secretary John Herrington announced that Texas had won the competition for the $4.4 billion superconducting supercollider (SSC), designed to be the world's ! largest and most powerful atom smasher. Led by Arizona's Dennis DeConcini, Senators from several also-ran states protested to President Reagan that "there is a widespread perception that this decision was based . . . on political and other factors." They called for an investigation by both the General Accounting Office and a commission of "nationally respected physicists." Other legislators issued similar complaints.

Their upset was understandable. As the world's premier facility for investigating the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy, the SSC -- or the Ronald Reagan Center for High Energy Physics, as its Texas boosters want to call it -- would attract the best experimental physicists in the world, with their attendant prestige. More important, it would give its home state a major economic boost. The machine's tunnel, a ring through which subatomic particles would race at nearly the speed of light, is to be 150 ft. underground and 53 miles in circumference; building it and the lab's 20 buildings could provide jobs for an estimated 4,000 construction workers. The completed facility is expected to employ 2,200 scientists and engineers, as well as 1,300 support staffers. It was certainly plausible to suspect that such powerful Texas politicians as President-elect George Bush, Senators Phil Gramm and Lloyd Bentsen, and House Speaker Jim Wright had twisted a few arms to get their state the nod.

Plausible, perhaps, but Herrington argued otherwise. "I have run this on a nonpolitical basis," he maintains. "We were picking the best from the best, and it is clear that the Texas site is superior." In particular, the site 28 miles south of Dallas and completely surrounding the town of Waxahachie (pop. 18,300) was rated "outstanding" on four criteria and "good" on two others, clearly outperforming the competition. The best alternative was Tennessee, with three "outstandings," two "goods" and one "satisfactory." Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Illinois and North Carolina rounded out the pack. Moreover, Texas volunteered to throw $1 billion of its own money into the project and to donate the necessary 16,000 acres of land.

This is not to say that politics and the SSC do not go hand in hand. But the real battle, which has barely begun, will concern not the machine's location but whether it should be built at all. The Reagan Administration says it should, but that means little unless Congress is willing to pay the bills on an ongoing basis.

No one disputes the SSC's scientific importance. Physicists' knowledge of the subatomic particles that make up atoms, the bits that constitute the particles and the forces that bind them all together depends on accelerators -- and the bigger the better. The reason: the best way to produce particles for study is to create intense bursts of energy. Einstein's discovery that matter and energy are equivalent guarantees that such bursts will spontaneously transform themselves into particles of matter. The SSC would make these extremely concentrated energy bursts by using its magnets to guide protons, moving at nearly 186,000 miles per second, around the enormous ring in opposite directions. Then they would be forced to collide. The major difference between the SSC and the largest accelerator that currently exists -- the Tevatron, at Fermilab near Chicago -- is size and, therefore, power. The SSC would produce some 20 times as much energy as the Tevatron can and would generate correspondingly more interesting particles. Among the discoveries are certain to be some surprises. Says Harvard physicist Roy Schwitters, who is a leading candidate to be the SSC's director, "I don't know what we're going to find, because we are the first ones to go there."

What many scientists do dispute, however, is whether the potential intellectual rewards are worth the cost -- especially given widespread fears that the SSC would rob funding from other research. "It's good science," says Princeton's Philip Anderson, a Nobel laureate for his work in solid-state physics, "but we can learn equally fundamental things in other areas of physics and with a lot less money." And while proponents say the SSC would spark a resurgence of national interest in research that would benefit all sciences, M.I.T. physicist Daniel Kleppner fears that smaller projects simply are not glamorous enough to attract congressional attention. "They lack the dramatic quality to make a big splash," he says, "yet the ability to measure a molecular reaction, for example, is absolutely essential for dealing with problems like the greenhouse effect."

The project's path through Congress will not be smooth in any case. A Department of Energy spokesman notes that the supercollider has been given only $100 million out of a requested $348 million in funding for fiscal year 1989. It is projected that afterward the SSC would require $600 million a year until 1995, an uncertain amount in 1996 to finish the job and a projected $270 million a year in operating funds thereafter. At a time when deficit and budget reduction will become ever more important, that kind of spending will take every bit of clout Bush, Bentsen, Gramm, Wright and their fellow Texans can muster.

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CAPTION: Tunnel cross section.

With reporting by Glenn Garelik/Washington and J. Madeleine Nash/San Francisco