Science: A Controversial Prize for Texas

Charges of political favoritism began to fly almost as soon as Energy Secretary John Herrington announced that Texas had won the competition for the $4.4 billion superconducting supercollider (SSC), designed to be the world's ! largest and most powerful atom smasher. Led by Arizona's Dennis DeConcini, Senators from several also-ran states protested to President Reagan that "there is a widespread perception that this decision was based . . . on political and other factors." They called for an investigation by both the General Accounting Office and a commission of "nationally respected physicists." Other legislators issued similar complaints.

Their upset was understandable. As the world's premier facility for investigating the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy, the SSC -- or the Ronald Reagan Center for High Energy Physics, as its Texas boosters want to call it -- would attract the best experimental physicists in the world, with their attendant prestige. More important, it would give its home state a major economic boost. The machine's tunnel, a ring through which subatomic particles would race at nearly the speed of light, is to be 150 ft. underground and 53 miles in circumference; building it and the lab's 20 buildings could provide jobs for an estimated 4,000 construction workers. The completed facility is expected to employ 2,200 scientists and engineers, as well as 1,300 support staffers. It was certainly plausible to suspect that such powerful Texas politicians as President-elect George Bush, Senators Phil Gramm and Lloyd Bentsen, and House Speaker Jim Wright had twisted a few arms to get their state the nod.

Plausible, perhaps, but Herrington argued otherwise. "I have run this on a nonpolitical basis," he maintains. "We were picking the best from the best, and it is clear that the Texas site is superior." In particular, the site 28 miles south of Dallas and completely surrounding the town of Waxahachie (pop. 18,300) was rated "outstanding" on four criteria and "good" on two others, clearly outperforming the competition. The best alternative was Tennessee, with three "outstandings," two "goods" and one "satisfactory." Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Illinois and North Carolina rounded out the pack. Moreover, Texas volunteered to throw $1 billion of its own money into the project and to donate the necessary 16,000 acres of land.

This is not to say that politics and the SSC do not go hand in hand. But the real battle, which has barely begun, will concern not the machine's location but whether it should be built at all. The Reagan Administration says it should, but that means little unless Congress is willing to pay the bills on an ongoing basis.