150 acres of dreams dashed: Buyer now sought for super-collider site

150 acres of dreams dashed
Buyer now sought for super-collider site
By JIM HENDERSON
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

WAXAHACHIE -- The historical footnote will record that it was the most expensive dry hole ever drilled: 18 miles, $2 billion.

It was a cursed quest not for oil or gold or any other tangible resource, but for a brief glimpse -- through a window measured in billionths of a second -- at the creation of the universe.

It touched off a frenzy of land speculation, ignited delusions of quick wealth and long-term prosperity, inspired visions of this placid, North Texas prairie town, best known for its gingerbread homes and ornate courthouse, turned into a hub of international scientific commotion.

That was then. Now, a decade after Congress pulled the plug, what was to have been a superconducting super collider, capable of smashing atoms at near the speed of light, is just a plugged hole, seven drab buildings of assorted sizes and 150 acres of dashed dreams.

Ellis County officials would like to sell it and put the debacle behind them, but while potential buyers drop in occasionally, they have never been able to close the deal.

"It's pretty much a single-use facility," says Ellis County Attorney Joe Grubbs, who handles the legal work of disposing of the property. "One building is 28 feet wide and 600 feet long and it curves. There are not a lot of uses for that building. You couldn't even use it for a shooting range."

The county thought it was close to unloading the white elephant a few weeks ago. A Dallas businessman entered into serious negotiations to acquire the buildings and convert them into an antiterrorism training camp.

Like others before it, that deal fell through. The buildings, which were built to operate what was touted as one of history's grandest scientific experiments, are now near-deserted warehouses. Some county office furniture is stored in one. Mountains of boxes containing plastic foam food containers fill another.

"Everybody gets excited when somebody looks at it," Grubbs says of the property, "and then they are disappointed when a sale isn't made. After a few times, you get a little jaded."

After Congress killed funding for the program in 1993, the Department of Energy ceded nearly 10,000 acres to the state, which sold some of it to private individuals and parceled out some to the county and local school districts.

Rent from companies using the buildings for storage and for television commercial and movie production have helped defray the costs.

"It pays for itself," says County Judge Chad Adams, who took office early this year.

Still, the county is eager to unload the bland, brown buildings that are a dreary monument to what one scholar called a "super boondoggle."

"The SSC promises to do little more than provide permanent employment for hundreds of high-energy particle physicists and transfer wealth to Texas," Kent Jeffreys, director of environmental studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., wrote in the spring of 1992.

Enthusiastically advocated by the Reagan administration -- including then-Vice President George Bush -- and embraced by Congress in the early 1980s, the super collider was designed to be a 54-mile elliptical tunnel lined with 11,000 superconducting magnets that would hurl atoms on a collision course for a small-scale replication of the Big Bang.

It would employ nearly 2,500 scientists and technicians and would cost what seemed like an affordable $5 billion. The Energy Department promised that other nations would gladly contribute to the cost for their scientists to have access to the facility.

Twenty-six states engaged in fierce bidding for the colossus, but passions in Washington cooled as the decade came to a close. The scientific community was divided over the value of the collider, and when Texas was chosen for the site, regional resentments surfaced.

"Politics is what killed it," says Keith Roberts, the Ellis County property manager.

"The government said, `Wait, this is Texas. You've got NASA and the collider. You guys have to choose,' " she says.

More likely what killed it was the debate over the scientific value and the cost.

By the time President George Bush signed the first appropriations bill for the collider in 1989, the estimated cost was approaching $8 billion, with no guarantees it wouldn't go higher.

And, that was a time when the country was facing tough choices. During the 1980s, the national debt soared higher than a space lab, and interest payments alone devoured a quarter of annual federal outlays.

Defending such a massive and controversial project, which promised little practical return, was becoming difficult, especially for Bush, who would soon have to renege on his "read my lips" pledge and go along with a tax increase.

Still, work proceeded in Ellis County. Scientists began moving in. Land was acquired, and work on the tunnel started. Land values shot up, and businesses jockeyed for a bite of the golden egg.

"There was a lot of hope," says Susie Witcher, who works in an antique shop in Waxahachie. "But some of us thought it was going to be a fiasco, that we were going to get screwed. It was just too good to be true. I couldn't understand why they would put it here anyway. We're the fire ant capital of the world. Those things can get into a bank vault."

Feelings also were mixed in the community of Boz (population 200), just southwest of Waxahachie, where houses and farms and ranches were being acquired for the project.

The village vanished. Most residents went willingly, having exacted generous prices for their land.

Monnie Bratcher, eightysomething, became a local legend and is still talked about, several years after her death, when conversation turns to the collider.

She had a small farm where she had lived for 80 years. She had 17 cattle, fences, a barn and was close to the cemetery where her parents were buried.

"She wanted to die in her house," says Witcher. "She told them they would have to physically move her off her land, and they did."

Lon Robert Wakefield, who surrendered most of his 140-acre cattle ranch to the Department of Energy, also remembers Bratcher's last stand.

"The sheriff came out and moved her," he says. "She told them they were never going to finish it (the collider) and she was staying right there."

She was the last to go. Less than two years later, the project, 20 percent complete, was halted.

"There was some bitterness about losing their land," Wakefield says. "But most who went through this are dead and gone now."

After he sold his land, Wakefield, now 71, moved into town for a few years. He then returned to the country to settle on six acres, something less than a ranch.

"Everything was gone ... the fences, the barns. I would have had to start all over," he says. "I'm too old for that."

Adams, the county judge, says local residents have recovered from the disappointment of the project's demise but would like to see the facility sold and put to profitable use.

Tentative offers for the property have ranged from $3 million to $8.5 million -- paltry sums in the scheme of what was planned here.

Still, most residents believe, anything would be better than storing plastic foam cups in a $2 billion warehouse.

Curiosity, mainly as to the lack of any sort of an adjective along with the word "physicist".

Aaah, so you clicked on it because wanted to know more about me. I see.

I guess then it's fortunate that my web page talked about me, instead of, say, shoes or toasters.

I pity the generation of elementary school-age children growing up in a world where such things as social progams, welfare and healthcare for illegal aliens take precedence over the quest for scientific discovery. The dismal public school system can't even teach the English language,nor is it allowed to convey the thoughts and ideas of eras gone by without insulting one group or another. Science has become the domain of the elite who can afford a decent education and the future hinges on whether the investments are wise.

Gettin'-rich-on-public-largesse ping.

Well, science "must" be funded somehow and our Constitution mentions it by establishing a task for our Congress-- To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;. However, you can see that the means of funding it were intended to be private.

Could they? Maybe. Would they? I highly doubt it. Basic research, almost by its definition, has very little immediate commercial application, therefore little prospect for profit. I don't see any new sellable gadgets or technology coming out of Fermilab anytime soon, but the Tevatron is currently the best tool we have for studying the building blocks of matter. It's not going to give us a "muon bomb" or something like that, but a more detailed understanding of our universe could help us further down the road.

I just don't see businesses having the foresight for such a long term horizon when their shareholders are baying for immediate profits. It's not an "evil" of capitalism, just the nature of the business. True, pharmeseautical(sp?) companies start research on new drugs years in advance of any real results being available and tech companies do similar things, but we're talking times scales of decades for some science being commercially useful. The only entity with pockets deep enough and a long enough investment horizon is the government.

Who knows what other worthy projects the geniuses in Congress will kill, to save pennies, while they spend hundreds of billions every year on various welfare programs -- all money down the drain forever.

This is always my response to the leftist dimbulbs who continually whine about "so much money being wasted on (science, space, military), when we could be spending that money better on (welfare, social programs, The Earth)", blah blah blah. Spending on welfare and other various social program failures absolutely dwarfs anything spent on the Apollo program, or high energy physics, or whatever. So whenever the libs pull that crap on me, I tell them, we have spent so much more on welfare and social programs, and where has it gotten us? Has it solved the problem? No, and in many cases, has made it worse.

At least with Apollo, or the SSC, there was a defined endpoint. Either you were going to do it, or it would be cancelled. With the welfare program failures, its a never-ending failure, a voracious money pit that seems bottomless, destined to suck the lifeblood out of productive, tax-paying citizens.

I wish the US Government would reactivate it and use it for its intended purpose. I remember reading about this in old issues of National Geographic when I was young. We need more facilities like this. These are as important as the space program. We cannot let europe and china take any lead.

"The SSC promises to do little more than provide permanent employment for hundreds of high-energy particle physicists and transfer wealth to Texas,"

One thing that made me feel the right decision had been made was after the cancellation when I heard some physicists on the radio whining about how they had thought the people of this country wanted a SSC, how they had already taken their kids out of the schools they had been attending, etc.

Who remembers "Operation Mole Hole", another taxpayer-funded waste of money by the ivory-tower scientific community? I say that if the project is so great and so necessary, surely they should be able to attract private investors to fund a project. The government invests too much money in these worthless ventures.

A perfect example of why congress is second only to Al Qaeda as the most hated group on the planet.

First they deem something important enough to take peoples' homes from them, then a couple of years later it is so unimportant that given an identical estimate to shut it down or continue it, they decide to shut it down.

Meanwhile, the space station has proved to be utterly pointless, built in the wrong orbit merely as a foreign aid device that lets the Russians save face.

I'm not bitter about the lack of job prospects. Nobody owes me any sort of job. Lord knows I'm not in it for the money: after more than 11 years of college and 10 years experience at the Ph.D. level, I make less than the starting pay for a local public school teacher. That choice is entirely mine.

North Korea's hiring. ;^)

The current US National Science Project is the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) in Oak Ridge Tennessee.

Most physicists don't think the CERN boondoggle will get very far with finding Higgs Boson, and will probably just be another experiment than creates more questions than it answers. As someone else already posted, there are smaller scale experiments and theoretics that are a better use of money.

By contrast, the SNS produces neutron beams for actual science and engineering application. The US will be the lead in Neutron Science for generations with this project. And as far as national pride goes, the SNS dumps an order of magnitude more high speed protons from its main beam line (non-usable energy), than the next most powerful accelerators in the world (including CERN) use as good protons in their research. More power Ahrgh, Ahrgh, Ahrgh!

And the best part...its on schedule and under cost.

What may be the only drawback is that by resourcing SNS, the US will probably not have the money to bring the next generation fusion reactor (ITER) to US soil. It will probably be built in Asia with us a partner.

Most physicists don't think the CERN boondoggle will get very far with finding Higgs Boson,

You know nothing about it, nothing. If there is a Higgs to be found--and almost all particle physicists expect that there is--the LHC will find it very quickly. It's as close to a guaranteed discovery as anything in the history of science.

Ahhh, you noted the challenge here..."if."

That's why I left physics for engineering. When you know with 99.999% accuracy how things work, run with it.

Wasting money on the 0.0001% to chase a dubious theory is noble, but foolish given other temporal challenges. All the best!

And IF there is not a Higgs, the discoveries of the LHC will change the face of physics. But that's a best-case scenario.

Of course, that will create many, many more questions than it answers, but that's the true hallmark of successful science. If you don't appreciate that, you are indeed better off out of physics.

Dear friend, you seem somewhat bitter. Your rather terse assessment is non-sequitur. If we are pursuing a "god particle" are we not trying to answer questions rather than create more? I need something to engineer, something to pervert for purely capitalist gain. I need to know how gravity field waves/particles/franisats work, so I can produce cheap limtless power. More questions won't help be with the bottom-line. :^)

Maybe the superstring guys can help me unravel a couple of dimensions..."Throw me a freakin' bone here."

Killing the SSC was, in my mind, like our retreat from the Moon. Two giant steps backwards. At least we have the Hubble. Who knows what other worthy projects the geniuses in Congress will kill, to save pennies, while they spend hundreds of billions every year on various welfare programs -- all money down the drain forever.

Well said. Except Hubble will be dead soon as well. Just waiting for the gyros to die. :-(

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.