There remain some 1,983 people in the employ of the SSC (or rather in the employ of the Universities Research Association, a luckless academic bureaucracy that manages the SSC and has taken most of the political blame for the cost overruns). The dead Collider's technical staff alone numbers over a thousand people: 16 in senior management, 133 scientists, 56 applied physicists, 429 engineers, 159 computer specialists and network people, 159 guest scientists and research associates on grants from other countries and other facilities, and 191 "technical associates."
"Deadwood," scoffed one attendee, "three hundred and fifty people in physics research when we don't even have a machine!" But the truth is that without a brilliantly talented staff in place, all those one-of-a-kind cutting- edge machines are so much junk. Many of those who stay are staying in the forlorn hope of actually using some of the smaller machines they have spent years developing and building.
There have been, so far, about sixty more-or-less serious suggestions for alternate uses of the SSC, its facilities, its machineries, and its incomplete tunnel.
The SSC's Linear Accelerator was one of the smaller assets of the great machine, but it is almost finished and would be world-class anywhere else. It has been repeatedly suggested that it could be used for medical radiation treatments or for manufacturing medical isotopes. Unfortunately, the Linear Accelerator is in rural Ellis County, miles from Waxahachie and miles from any hospital, and it was designed and optimized for physics research, not for medical treatment or manufacturing.
The former "N-15" site of the Collider, despite its colorless name, is the most advanced manufacturing and testing facility in the world -- when it comes to giant superconducting magnets. The N-15 magnet facility is not only well-nigh complete, but was almost entirely financed by funds from the State of Texas. Unfortunately, the only real market remaining for its "products" -- brobdingnagian frozen accelerator magnets -- is the European CERN accelerator.
CERN itself has been hurting for money lately, its German and Spanish government partners in particular complaining loudly about the dire expense of hunting top quarks and such.
Former SSC Director Roy Schwitters therefore declared that CERN would need SSC's valuable magnets, and that the US should use these assets as leverage for influence at CERN.
This suggestion, however, was too much for Texan Congressman Joe Barton. He described Schwitter's suggestion as "very altruistic" and pointed out that the Europeans had given the SSC "the back of their hand for eight years!"
One could only admire the moral grit of SSC's former Director in gamely proposing that the magnets, the very backbone of his dead Collider, should be shipped, for the good of science, to his triumphant European rivals. It would seem that the American particle-physics research has suffered such a blow from the collapse of the SSC that the only reasonable course of action for the American physics community is to go cap in hand to the Europeans and try, somehow, to make things up.
At least, that proposal, galling as it may be, does make some sense for American physicists -- but for an American politician, to drop two billion dollars on the SSC just to ship its magnets to some cyclotron in Switzerland is quite another matter. When an attendee gently urged Congressman Barton to "take a longer view" - - perhaps, someday, the Europeans would reciprocate the scientific favor -- the Texan Congressman merely narrowed his eyes in a glare that would have scared Clint Eastwood, and vowed "I will 'reciprocate' the concern that the Europeans have shown for the SSC!"
It's been suggested that the numerous well-appointed SSC offices could become campuses of some new research institution: on magnets, or cryogenics, or controls, or computer simulation. The physics departments of many Texas colleges and universities like this idea. After all, there's a great deal of handy state-of-the-art clutter there, equipment any research lab in the world would envy. Six and a half million dollars' worth of machine tools and welding equipment. Three million in high-tech calibration equipment and measuring devices. Ten million dollars in trucks, vans, excavators, bulldozers and such. A million-dollar print shop.
And almost fifty million dollars worth of state-of- the-art computing equipment circa 1991 or so, including a massively parallel Hypercube simulator, CAD/CAM engineering and design facilities with millions of man- hours of custom software, FDDI, OSI, and videoconferencing office computer networks, and 2,600 Macintosh IIvx personal computers. Plus a two-million dollar, fully- equipped physics library.
Unfortunately it's very difficult to propose a new physics facility just to make use of this, well, stuff, when there are long-established federal physics research facilities such as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, now going begging because nobody wants their veteran personnel to build new nuclear weapons. If anyone builds such a place in Waxahachie, then the State of Texas will have to pay for it. And Texas is not inclined to shell out more money. Texas already feels that the rest of the United States owes Texas $440,885,853 for the dead Collider.
Besides the suggestions for medical uses, magnetic and superconductive studies, and the creation of some new research institute, there are the many suggestions collectively known as "Other." One is to privatize the SSC as the "American Institute for Superconductivity Competitiveness" and ask for corporate help. Unfortunately the hottest (or maybe "coolest") research area in superconductivity these days is not giant helium- frozen magnets for physicists, but the new ceramic superconductors.
Other and odder schemes include a compressed-air energy-storage research facility. An earth-wobble geophysics experiment. Natural gas storage.
And, perhaps inevitably, the suggestion of Committee member Martin Goland that the SSC tunnel be made into a high-level nuclear waste-storage site. A "temporary" waste site, he assured the Committee, that would store highly radioactive nuclear waste in specially designed "totally safe" steel shipping casks, until a "permanent" site opens somewhere in New Mexico.
"I'm gonna sell my house now," stage-whispered the physicist next to me in the audience. "Waxahachie will be a ghost town!"
This was an upshot worthy of Greek myth -- a tunnel built to steal the fiery secrets of the God Particle, which ends up constipated by thousands of radioactive steel coprolites, the Trojan Horse gift of Our Friend Mr. Atom. It's such a darkly poetic, Southern-Gothic example of hubris clobbered by nemesis that one almost wishes it would actually happen.
As far as safety goes, hiding nuclear waste in an incomplete 14.7 mile tunnel under Texas is certainly far more safe than leaving the waste where it is at the moment (basically, all over America, from sea to shining sea). DoE's nuclear-waste chickens have come back to roost in major fashion lately, as time catches up with a generation of Cold War weapons scientists. "They were never given the money they needed to do it cleanly, but just told to do it right away in the name of National Security," a federal expert remarked glumly over the ham and turkey sandwiches at the lunch break. He went on to grimly mention "huge amounts of carbon tetrachloride seeping into the water table" and radioactive waste "storage tanks that burp hydrogen."
But the Texans were having none of that; the chairman of the Committee declared that they had heard Mr. Goland's suggestion, and that it would go no further. The room erupted into nervous laughter.