GAO noted that: (1) DOE estimated in 1991 that SSC would cost $8.25 billion, but it did not include $1.2 billion in costs that are expected to be funded by other sources (2) the total estimated costs for constructing SSC will exceed $11 billion (3) annual funding limitations will increase costs by $1.6 billion to $2.4 billion and lengthen the SSC construction schedule (4) the project's cost and control system does not produce accurate monthly cost performance reports because of problems with the project's baseline cost estimates and the allocation of costs among tasks (5) DOE and the prime contractor have not recorded cost increases in a timely manner, which hampers Congress' oversight of the project (6) project costs will increase because many of the high technical and cost risk items have not been completed and (7) DOE expects to receive only $400,000 from foreign contributions, which will necessitate Congress reconsidering its funding of SSC. For more on the Desertron, watch the video above, and check out Atlas Obscura's other 100 Wonders videos here.GAO discussed the estimated cost of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and indications of further cost increases. Plans for the site over the years have included mushroom farming and data storage, Atlas Obscura notes, although the land is currently owned by a chemical company-who can hopefully salvage something from the site of so much wasted ambition. Today, according to Atlas Obscura, “the site looks like a decrepit office park dropped in the middle of nowhere.” The tunnels still exist, although they have been flooded to protect them. (One of the biggest stumbling blocks was the fact that the projected cost tripled as the work progressed, and expected funds from foreign governments and the state of Texas never materialized.) When it was finally squashed in 1993, $2 billion had already been invested and 14 miles of tunnels had been dug.

It was doomed by budget issues and political concerns over “luxury science,” among other conflicts. During 1986 - 1988 the North Carolina Geological Survey (NCGS) conducted geologic investigations to prepare a bid to host the Superconducting Super Collider. House of Representatives voted to kill the project in 1992, just a year after it began. As Dylan Thuras of Atlas Obscura notes in the new video above, all that’s left of the collider in Waxahachie now is “a 14-mile scar on the soul of American physics.” Despite this ambition to build a particle accelerator that likely would have found the Higgs long ago (among other discoveries), the U.S.

Arizona Geological Survey Open File Report. According to Scientific American, the Superconducting Super Collider “was to have 20 times the collision energy of any existing or planned machine it would have had five times the energy of even today’s LHC collisions.” The project was to have a circumference of 51 miles, and was planned to encircle the desert town of Waxahachie, Texas.īut it was all just a beautiful dream. Welty, J.W., 1988, Volume 3, Geology and Tunneling of the Maricopa Superconducting Super Collider Site Proposal. Its purpose is to create large amounts of. In principle, superconductors can allow electrical current to flow without any energy loss (although, in practice, an ideal superconductor is very hard to produce). It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 19 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. At the time, Reagan’s scientific advisor encouraged the physicists involved to think big. A supercollider is a large ring designed to accelerate particles of protons and anti-protons until they collide. A superconductor is an element or metallic alloy which, when cooled below a certain threshold temperature, the material dramatically loses all electrical resistance. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. The Superconducting Super Collider, also known as the Desertron, first got going in the early 1980s, and was approved by President Ronald Reagan in 1987.

But if things had gone just a little differently, the Americans would have been the ones to prove the existence of the Higgs, the so-called “God particle” whose existence physicists needed to prove in order to verify the rest of the Standard Model, which describes how the fundamental particles of the universe behave and interact.

Today, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva-the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, known for discovering the Higgs boson-grabs most of the atom-smashing headlines. All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only.

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