[Paul_Denton]

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.

[animoveritas]

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.