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Reprieved: the $10m needed to keep the Bates accelerator open will have to be found elsewhere. Credit: MIT/BATES

The US Department of Energy'sdelicately balanced, $320 million budget for nuclear physics was thrown into turmoil last week, just as it was being presented to Congress, when energy secretary Bill Richardson revoked its plan to close down the Bates Linear Accelerator. This facility, built in 1968, is operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

According to a spokesman for MIT, Richardson called the institute'spresident, Chuck Vest, on 1 February, the day the budget was released, to inform him that its provision to close Bates at the end of this year was a mistake. The following day, Martha Krebs, assistant secretary for science at the Department of Energy (DoE), issued a statement saying that Bates would be funded after all. The department is expected to issue a budget amendment within the next month, saying where it will find the extra $10 million needed to keep the facility open.

Ernest Moniz, a former director of the Bates accelerator, is now under-secretary for energy, but is said to have excluded himself from the decision.

MIT plans to use some of the money to complete the Bates Large Acceptance Toroid (BLAST) experiment, which will study the basic physics of magnetism in nuclei. “I'm delighted that we'll be able to continue the work,” says Robert Redwine, director of MIT'snuclear science laboratory.

But the decision leaves DoE staff scrambling to find the money without hurting the rest of the nuclear physics programme. Last year, a sub-panel of the department'sNuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) recommended that, unless more money became available for nuclear physics, Bates should be closed to allow funds to be diverted to more modern medium-energy physics facilities, primarily the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Newport News, Virginia. In last week'sbudget, nuclear physics received an overall increase of just $4.5 million, to $343 million.

“We're going to work very hard to have it not impact the rest of the nuclear physics budget,” says Krebs. “We'd like to see MIT make a contribution as well.”

Claus-Konrad Gelbke of Michigan State University, the chairman of NSAC, says he welcomes the news that Bates will stay open. “We never felt there was a scientific justification to close it,” he says, adding that closure had only been recommended if no additional money was available. “I hope there will be an increase in the nuclear physics budget — if not, they are robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Pressure from Senator Edward Kennedy (Massachusetts, Democrat) and Congressman John Tierney (Massachusetts, Democrat) may have led to Richardson'sdecision. The congressmen were concerned about job losses at the facility, which employs 85 people.

Officials involved in reallocating the funds warned that it would be difficult to do so without upsetting the fine balance that currently exists between different elements of the department'sbudget, and that the money for Bates can only come from other science programmes.

Herman Grunder, the director of CEBAF, was not available to comment, but a spokeswoman said that he had been happy with the budget of $73.7 million which the facility was promised, before the Bates reprieve. CEBAF'sbudget may be more secure than the $118 million that the DoE pledged last week for the first year of full operations at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state.