In examining the unsuccessful efforts between 1985 and 1987 to secure sites for LIGO’s twin detectors, Tiffany Nichols’s article that we spotlighted in August provides insight into how, at that time, unstructured decision-making was running up against political limits in advancing major science projects. Instead, more formalized and consultative processes were becoming increasingly common in order to strengthen vetting and encourage buy-in.

In the current century, such processes have come to seem like a natural, permanent feature of the science policy landscape. Yet, with the recent assertion of aggressive political control over agency decision-making, the fate of such processes may be up for grabs again.

The Berkeley light source controversy

In a lecture at AIP last spring, Nichols discussed how, following early failures to find sites for LIGO, in the early 1990s NSF Director Walter Massey implemented a more structured selection process modeled on how the Department of Energy settled on a site for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) a few years earlier. Alighting on sites near Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, that process opened the path to the successful detection of gravitational waves in 2015.

This was not just a shift at NSF: DOE’s own decision-making was likewise changing. As Catherine Westfall detailed in a 2008 article on the Advanced Light Source (ALS) facility at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, at that time it was still thinkable that a major DOE facility could be advanced through private agreement between its proponents and influential decision-makers. In this case, in late 1981 President Reagan’s science adviser, physicist George Keyworth, gave LBL director David Shirley assurance the lab would receive support to build a synchrotron light source for use in materials science.

An offshoot technology from the synchrotron accelerator rings used in particle physics, synchrotron light sources harness the electromagnetic radiation emitted by orbiting charged particles into ultraviolet or x-ray beams, which can be used to probe material structures. Sporting an array of beamlines, each with specialized instrumentation, synchrotron facilities serve the needs of a variety of researchers who are granted use of the facility. In the 1980s, operating such user facilities was beginning to become an important way for national labs to maintain their relevance by broadening the community they served.

As Westfall shows, Shirley understood himself as following in the politically entrepreneurial footsteps of his predecessors at the lab, and he wrongly assumed his success would be broadly welcomed. In fact, many felt blindsided when the White House unexpectedly announced in January 1983 it was requesting funds for the light source as part of a broader materials research facility at the lab. The project met strenuous objections, including from materials scientists concerned about whether it was an appropriate facility or whether scarce resources should go to such facilities at all. Ultimately, Congress provided the project with only a small fraction of the requested funding that year.

Moving forward, the DOE Office of Energy Research (today called the Office of Science), led by fusion scientist Alvin Trivelpiece, began pushing the facility through successive independent review processes, which ended up ranking ALS lower than competing priorities. The facility’s fortunes only improved with a further press to gain buy-in from potential users and the facility’s inclusion in an agreement known as the Trivelpiece Plan that came together in early 1985. The plan entailed DOE committing over the long term to backing a series of major facilities across four national labs. Congress began funding ALS in fiscal year 1987 and maintained its support through to the facility’s opening in 1993.

Who killed ISABELLE?

The Trivelpiece Plan was part of Trivelpiece’s efforts to corral support for DOE projects, which was especially necessary to keep the department’s flagship project, the SSC, progressing smoothly.

From its origins in the early 1980s, the SSC was enmeshed in tricky political dynamics. As Robert Crease has detailed, prior to the decision to move ahead with the SSC, DOE had been supporting a particle collider at Brookhaven National Lab called ISABELLE that was severely delayed by engineering difficulties with its cutting-edge superconducting magnets. By the time the magnets were on track, the case for the collider had become less compelling, particularly in view of progress in Europe, turning attention to the far more ambitious SSC as the next major US project in high-energy physics.

DOE decided to cancel ISABELLE and proceed with the SSC following the recommendation of a committee it convened in early 1983 that was chaired by Stanford physicist Stanley Wojcicki. Members of that committee recalled they were nearly evenly split on ISABELLE’s termination and that the deliberations were agonizing. Yet, while they clearly felt ISABELLE’s (and, to some extent, Brookhaven’s) fate rested in their hands, others have claimed the decision had already been made.

At the White House, Keyworth was privy to shifting sentiment against ISABELLE in the high-energy physics community. In a later interview, he suggested that by the time the Wojcicki committee convened, he had lined up the White House Office of Management and Budget behind ISABELLE’s termination. He remarked, “I don’t mean to be egotistical, but I think this was my decision. I don’t think this was a community decision.… It wasn’t the DOE. I am the guilty party.” Another physicist in Keyworth’s office, Doug Pewitt, concurred: “The Wojcicki panel made no decision; they delude themselves to think that they had.… The project was dead well before that.”

Keyworth’s and Pewitt’s arguments suppose that the White House was the crucial point for decision-making on such matters. But the ALS experience shows Congress was willing to flout the White House on questions where community buy-in was lacking. There may well have been such buy-in with the ISABELLE decision, but it took the Wojcicki committee to focus and convey it. Without the committee, ISABELLE’s defenders might have made more noise and muddied the picture, and, while Congress might have ultimately acceded to the White House position, it certainly could have been a much messier and more destructive political process.

As it was, Trivelpiece recalled in a later interview that, when he presented the termination decision to Congress in fall 1983 as a DOE decision backed by the Wojcicki committee’s recommendation, the representative for Brookhaven’s district agreed to relent on the matter provided that Trivelpiece protect jobs at the lab. (See the top photo.) Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was another of the four projects supported in the Trivelpiece Plan two years later, backed, of course, by still other processes.

Siting the SSC

Following early planning work, the Reagan administration formally approved the SSC project in early 1987 and launched a site-selection process soon thereafter. As detailed by Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne Kolb in their history of the SSC, Tunnel Visions, Trivelpiece and others at DOE were persuaded that a rigorous competition, drawing on the experience with siting Fermilab in the 1960s, was the best way to secure assent and dispel suspicions of political favoritism.

The process was split into two parts. In the first, an open call for proposals stipulated eligibility and evaluation criteria and resulted in 43 submissions from across the US, with 36 deemed eligible for consideration. Preparation of the proposals engaged widespread interest in the project, with many costing over $1 million to assemble. In fall 1987, a committee convened by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering pared the original set of proposals down to eight, one of which then withdrew. A separate group from DOE then evaluated the finalists, settling on the winning site outside Dallas, Texas, announced in November 1988.

The SSC process encountered some of the same sorts of obstacles that Nichols relates Rainer Weiss encountering while trying to secure a LIGO site in Maine’s Blueberry Barrens. Notably, an attractive proposed site adjacent to Fermilab in the Chicago suburbs presented a complicated land acquisition problem. While the state of Illinois had already moved to address the issue legislatively, protesters greeting the DOE group visiting the site created wariness about the proposal’s viability. By contrast, land acquisition in Texas was simpler, the local population more welcoming, and the regional chalk geology essentially ideal for building the collider’s circular 53-mile tunnel.

One political drawback of the expansive site-selection process was that, although it attracted widespread congressional interest while it was still in motion, that interest quickly waned after every site but Texas had been eliminated. Thereafter, awareness of the SSC as an exceptionally expensive scientific endeavor persisted, leaving it vulnerable to political attack in the 1990s, including accusations that the Texas congressional delegation’s ongoing support was evidence of pork-barrel politics at work.

In the end, Congress terminated the SSC in 1993 following a protracted, vicious, and highly public battle. Formalized process might have been in the ascendant, but it was far from the only ingredient in ensuring a project’s success.

William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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