![]() What is more, the House-Senate panel could simply hold on to the bill until Congress is close to its scheduled Thanksgiving adjournment and then try to exact continued money for the Supercollider as the price of getting out of town for the winter holidays.Artistic impression of the Future Circular Collider. The Supercollider fight could be waged once more should money for the project be included in that bill. If the panel does not act by late this week, Congress will have to pass a stopgap spending measure to provide temporary financing for the branches of Government covered in the bill. With today's action, the water-projects bill goes back to the House-Senate panel, which is free to obey or ignore the House's demand to kill the Supercollider, or to strike another compromise, like reducing its annual allotment. The Bush and Clinton Administrations have also pledged that foreign governments would help pay - most recently $625 million - but actual commitments after years of soliciting total only a tenth of that, critics said today. The cost jumped $2 billion in one fell swoop after designers discovered that the Supercollider's huge magnets, whose power would propel the protons along their collision course, contained a hole too small for the proton beam to fit comfortably, and had to be redesigned. Cost estimates jumped from $4.4 billion in 1982 to $5.9 billion in 1989 to $8.25 billion in 1991 to a minimum of $11 billion today. Still, the collider has been in political trouble for years. They said the Supercollider had created at least 7,000 jobs, mostly in technical and scientific areas and warned that it would cost the Government $250 million to $1 billion to cancel the construction contracts and close the project. It will also be expensive to shut it down, the project's backers noted. "The only way we will compete is if we are ahead in technology," he said. Supporters argued today that the Supercollider was the kind of investment in basic science that has led in the past to advances like lasers, transistors and gene-splicing.įoreign competitors already hold a manufacturing edge because their wages are usually lower than those in the United States, said the House majority leader, Richard A. The decision would leave the Supercollider about one-fifth complete, giving Waxahachie a sprinkling of laboratory buildings above ground and a 10-mile hole beneath it. Physicists proposed to accelerate the protons to nearly the speed of light and then crash them into each other, hoping to release still-smaller particles that could resolve basic questions about the nature of matter. ![]() As first envisioned, the Supercollider was to be a 54-mile oval, a tube as big as a submarine deep beneath the Earth, that would serve as a sort of race track for tiny atomic particles called protons. If the vote stands, construction on the Supercollider will finally come to a halt. What killed the program was their assertion that the taxpayers could no longer afford it. Instead, after repeated redesigns and additions that more than doubled its cost, it has become a potent reminder of the nation's wasted fiscal muscle.Ĭritics did not argue today that the Supercollider was bad science or even a waste of money. When it was first conceived in 1982, proponents said the project would cost $4.5 billion and stand as a global symbol of American technological supremacy. Nonetheless, the noises emanating from the House sounded a lot like death rattles for the Supercollider, a program already in serious peril from staggering cost overruns, mismanagement, its own visibility and the growing political impetus to cut Federal spending. That proposal passed, 242 to 143.Ī leading critic of the project in the Senate, Dale Bumpers, Democrat of Arkansas, said the House votes were "encouraging, but not conclusive." The Supercollider cannot be certified dead until the House disposes of the entire $22.5 billion water and energy bill, he said. ![]() Minutes later it did vote to ship the bill back to the House-Senate panel, but with orders that financing for the Supercollider be removed. The vote today turned back that effort to. House supporters of the project knew they lacked the votes to keep the $640 million allotment in the bill, and so they tried to buy time by sending the measure back to a House-Senate committee. At issue was whether the House should give its final okay to a bill allotting $22.5 billion for hundreds of water and energy projects around the country, including $640 million that the Senate had approved for continued construction of the Supercollider.
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