Russia Will Collaborate With US on the SSC
On January 6, the Department of Energy and the Russian Federation Ministry of Atomic Energy signed an agreement to collaborate on the Superconducting Super Collider. According to Secretary of Energy Admiral James Watkins, the Russians will help with the “design, engineering and production of two of the project’s booster accelerators.”
Under the agreement, six Russian labs have signed laboratory-to-laboratory pacts with the SSC Lab in Waxahachie, Texas. The Budker Institute for Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk will design, engineer and build conventional magnets for the SSC’s Low Energy Booster. The Radiotechnical Institute in Moscow will build quadrupole, or focusing, magnets for the Medium Energy Booster. A DOE press release on the collaboration says that “these agreements represent a potential total savings to the US of more than $100 million as an offset to the project’s baseline cost.”
Other Russian labs will collaborate with the SSC Lab on experimental detectors, including the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, and the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow.
To pacify critics of the $8.3 billion megaproject, DOE has promised that a significant fraction of SSC funding will come from foreign sources. Both India and China have already joined collaborations. India is working on the design and fabrication of beam-line transfer magnets, correction magnets and radio-frequency equipment. The Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing has agreed to build the cavity-coupled Linac, part of the SSC’s linear accelerator. While DOE has been actively wooing Japan for several years, no agreements have yet been announced.
The SSC went through some troubled times this summer when, to prove its budget-cutting ability, the House voted 232-181 to terminate it. However, the Senate and House-Senate conferees both approved the project, and the House finally agreed to fiscal year 1993 funding of $517 million.
What is in store for the SSC for fiscal 1994 is not clear. While President-elect Clinton has said he supports the collider, Vice President-elect Gore voted against it in the fiscal 1992 budget (Gore did not vote on it this year.)
It will probably be mid-March until the Clinton Administration provides the details of its plans for the SSC in its fiscal 1994 budget submission to Congress. While the White House is supposed to submit a budget in February, Clinton is expected to ask for an extension.
