Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 16, 1990 TAG: 9003162835
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/6 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MIAMI BEACH, FLA. LENGTH: Medium
The Energy Department on Thursday approved the 54-mile ring, W. Henson Moore, deputy secretary of energy, told a gathering of more than 600 representatives from government, industry and science who will build the superconducting super collider.
The announcement allows Texas to begin a land-buying binge outside of Dallas with some of the $1 billion it pledged in a successful effort to lure the project, and enables scientists to begin planning construction that could take a decade.
"Start your engines and start your land buying," Moore said.
The Bush administration decided to support changes that would make the super collider more effective and more expensive, bringing the price tag up from the original estimate of $5.9 billion.
"The unanimous position was to go with the best science," Moore said.
Morton Meyerson, head of the Texas National Research Laboratory Commission, said his agency, armed with a $250 million bond issue, is ready to move now that the site plan finally has been approved.
"The big flag goes down," Meyerson said. "Now we begin land acquisition, and that's the toughest, hardest most intense project we have - the one that will affect the most people."
Hundreds of individual land purchases will have to be negotiated in rural Ellis County outside of Dallas, he said.
The ring will be built underground and is intended by its backers to be the world's premier high-energy physics laboratory.
It will hurl streams of protons, guided by powerful electromagnets, through the ring at almost the speed of light until they smash together and break up into even smaller particles.
Critics of the super collider have complained it will absorb too much of the nation's scientific funding.
Backers say it will increase interest in science.
The project is expected to spend $370 million annually when completed. It will create 2,500 permanent jobs and 4,500 temporary ones.
by CNB