Posted on 03/15/2003 10:48:51 PM PST by ItsJeff
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.
Holly Davis, an assistant to the county judge, agrees.
"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.
But there were a few skeptics.
"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.
He had a chance to buy back the land he lost, but he declined.
"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.
"It needs to be used for something," Wakefield says.
Do you know if Oak Ridge is still running the HFIR? My understanding is that the combination of SNS pulsed source and the HFIR steady state were the comprehensive plan.
Concur with you political assessment, anything that has the word "nuclear" associated with it never sees the light of day under left wing ignorant fear mongers. I think under President Bush, Gen IV research is finally progressing...albeit 8 years late.
There was an article in Drudge today about the Chinese taking the lead on a pebble-bed Gen IV system. We're being left behind (again). But, people don't care about basic science and technology development in this country. If it doesn't generate a 25% increase in revenue on the quarterly bottom line or buy some CEO a $20 million bonus or earn shareholders an extra penny or two in dividends that year, they tell it to take a hike. It is my guess that in 20 years' time all the important neutron scattering work (and with it the basic and applied materials research that comes directly from it) will be done in Europe and Asia.
We moved to DeSoto (town just north of Waxahatchie) shortly before it was canceled. The high school was amazing, since many of the kids were the children of physicists from the collider project. When they canceled it, the town really hurt. It was sad. It was a terribly stupid waste of money, and it was simple politics that killed it.
FYI: ItsJeff’s last post was February, ‘07.
I put a note about the age of the topic itself. :’)
LOL
When I first got the ping, I was reading the first posts and never even looked at the date! Oh well.... ;)
Well, I should have gone to the ping first!
I saw that, what I was saying is itsjeff has been AWOL from FR since Feb 2007, which was his last posting that I saw.
I know, freepers come and go. I just hope for all (except trolls) that it's not permanent.
I read some of his posts, and, well...
:’)
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