Washington

Digging deep: (from left) Ray Orbach, Senator Lamar Alexander, Spencer Abraham and William Madia, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, break ground for the lab's nanotechnology facility. Credit: ORNL

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is developing an ambitious plan to build a new generation of large scientific facilities during the next two decades.

Over the past six months, the head of the DOE's Office of Science, Ray Orbach, has been collecting a list of proposed experiments and facilities that would range in cost from tens of millions to billions of dollars. The list now includes some 50 projects, mostly in the physical sciences, and supporters say it could provide direction for the science office for years to come.

But before the list can be prioritized and released, it must win the support of the energy department's highest officials and pass muster with the president's budget office, which is attempting to hold down government spending in the face of record budget deficits.

Researchers at the laboratories involved are eager to learn how their projects are faring in the prioritization process, but Orbach has declined repeated requests to discuss its progress. The facilities plan is currently undergoing a stringent review within the upper levels of the department, according to those close to the process.

The DOE is the largest supporter of physics in the United States, and Orbach's office spends more than $3 billion a year. Most of that goes on a network of laboratories that house many of the nation's largest scientific facilities, such as the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab near Chicago, which discovered the top quark in 1995. The department last outlined a comprehensive facilities plan 20 years ago, in an exercise that led to the construction of a string of projects. Although it still starts up some medium-sized facilities — such as the nanotechnology facility for which Orbach and his boss, energy secretary Spencer Abraham, broke ground last week at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee — it has no overall plan for larger ones.

Last December, Orbach sent out a letter to advisory groups asking them to suggest new facilities that the directorate could build. “Creating these facilities for the benefit of science is at the core of our mission,” the letter read.

The response was enthusiastic, according to University of Oregon chemist Geraldine Richmond, who chairs the department's basic energy sciences advisory committee. Among the facilities recommended by Richmond's committee is a series of new light sources to probe materials and molecules.

At the top of the nuclear physicists' list is the Rare Isotope Accelerator, which would carry out experiments on highly unstable nuclei in an effort to reproduce nuclear reactions inside stars and supernova explosions. Planning for the machine has been hampered by budget problems and uncertainty over when it will be built, says Richard Casten, a nuclear physicist at Yale University who heads the nuclear science advisory group. “My feeling is that maybe what Orbach's doing can change that,” he says.

At a cost of about $800 million, the isotope accelerator would be one of the more ambitious projects under consideration, but it is by no means the most expensive. Also being considered are a $5-billion experimental fusion reactor known as ITER, and a $6-billion linear collider for high-energy physics.

Martha Krebs, who served in Orbach's position under the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1999 and is now a consultant in Los Angeles, says: “Putting out a preferred list will be very difficult to do.” She tried to draw up a similar list of facilities during her tenure, but ran into difficulties with the energy secretary and the White House Office of Management and Budget, whom she says wouldn't approve a plan that called for billions of dollars in additional spending.

At that time, support in Congress was weak for both the energy department and its science office — but that may be changing, Krebs says. The House of Representatives has just approved a 6.5% increase for DOE science (see page 361), and congressional staff members who oversee the department are eager to see what facilities plan the department can come up with. “I'm dying to see how they're going to handle this,” says one.