Today's link:
The High Water Mark of American Science: at Physics Buzz. The post features pictures from the abandoned Superconducting Super Collider in Texas:
In the 1980s the Department of Energy started to design what would have been the biggest science experiment in the world, the Superconducting Super Collider. Waxahachie, Texas was all set to host a particle accelerator that would have dwarfed Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider, today's reigning champ. Construction began in 1991, then was abruptly canceled in 1993.
The SSC was designed to collide protons and anti-protons at energies of 40 TeV, today the LHC can only ever hope to reach 14 TeV. The LHC has tunnels 17 miles in circumference; the SSC would have been more than 54 miles.
Congress pulled the plug in 1993 for a couple reasons. The projected budget swelled from about $4.4 billion to $12 billion. Political support for the project had always been shaky, and it essentially came down to whether Congress wanted to fund the International Space Station, or the SSC. The ISS won out.
Today the old SSC site sits rusting away. No one wants to buy the derelict buildings, so they are slowly rotting into the Texas prairie. Workers had drilled over 14 miles of tunnels underground.
It is pretty amazing what was done there, and then just left to rot. There is another good link to a story called
Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear Plant, at TruthOut, which indicates that
this chart may just indicate that the worst accidents in nuclear energy may not yet have occurred. It is well worth reading.
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