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Comment by solotronics | Hacker News Reader

why not finish the one in Texas? yes the facility probably needs repairs but a lot of initial work is done I would think?

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AFAICT, it's an entirely different design - it would probably cost more to retrofit the existing SSC facilities than it would to start from scratch.

More importantly, the SSC site was sold to private industry more than a decade ago.

This will be hosted at either Brookhaven National Lab (NY) or Jefferson Lab (Virginia). Unfortunately, National Labs need to find new large construction projects to justify their continued existence, and there aren't enough big science projects to go around. The European model of sharing a single facility (CERN) is much more sensible in that it decouples scientific prioritization and the issue of local jobs.

It's worth mentioning that the national labs are also considered a wartime resource. Having geographic separation is an asset in that sense.

The EIC and the SSC study radically different physical regimes, differing by 3 orders of magnitude in energy.

It's a collider of electron on proton/ion beams. There are two candidate sites: Jefferson Lab (Newport News, Virginia), which already has a electron beam (CEBAF). And Brookhaven National Lab (Brookhaven, Long Island, New York), which already has an ion beam.

This suggestion is for an electron beam, and they radiate sybchrotron radiation like crazy when you make them turn at high energies. So building it in a circular tunnel is a good idea if you want to make a x-ray source or a lot of radioactive rock.

Politically considering how that went down... I don't know if any politician wants to touch that again. Except of course some in Texas.

I wish that would happen, the SSC design is even more powerful than LHC. But not sure Texas is culturally the optimal place for such high science these days. Part of the opposition to SSC back in the day was religious. CA or NV might be better.

They might give physicists a hard time, yeah.

  http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

It seems like the SSC was located there as more of a congressional boondogle than serious science?

It's impossible to copy and paste that link on mobile Safari fwiw, fixed width scroll area.

Sorry... http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

As long as you buy your project's land outright and don't try and take it via eminent domain, you're good.

https://www.texastribune.org/2017/02/23/come-and-take-it-emi...

PS - part of the opposition to the LHC also was religious. Remember people objecting to humanity deliberately searching for the “God Particle”, aka Higgs Boson, which the LHC was specifically designed to find? Probably not the best word choice on the part of the scientific community, unless they were deliberately trying to troll the 20-30% of the population that treats religion literally. There were similar undercurrents reaching all the way up to Congress during the SSC’s life.

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