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sophisticated research equipment. This annual, competitive program involves substantial cost sharing from the institution receiving the equipment.

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The FY 1991 request of $4.9 million will assist universities in purchasing instruments that cost over $100,000 each and that will be used by a number of researchers, including students. In selecting approximately 20 proposals to be funded, special emphasis will continue to be placed on innovative instrumentation needed to carry out research on advanced topics in energy

research.

MULTIPROGRAM ENERGY LABORATORIES--FACILITIES SUPPORT

The objective of the Multiprogram Energy Laboratories--Facilities Support program (MEL-FS) is to maintain the capabilities of the five national laboratories overseen by the Office of Energy Research to carry out their missions in a safe, healthy, and cost-effective manner. To accomplish this, the program supports activities that help counter problems of aging and obsolescence of facilities as well as safety and health inadequacies.

The FY 1991 Construction request of $23.7 million will support continuation of all ongoing projects. There are no new starts included in the request.

ADVISORY AND OVERSIGHT PROGRAM DIRECTION AND POLICY AND MANAGEMENT

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The FY 1991 budget request for Advisory and Oversight Program Direction is $4.3 million. The FY 1991 request will provide the staffing resources required by the Director of Energy Research to carry out his responsibilities under legislation (P.L. 95-91) and those assigned or delegated by the Secretary in areas beyond the scope of other ongoing Energy Research programs. These funds are required to provide for the salaries, benefits, travel, and other expenses associated with 50 full-time equivalent employees.

The FY 1991 request for Policy and Management is $0.9 million. These funds are required to provide for the salaries and related expenses associated with 8 full-time equivalent employees in the Office of the Director of Energy Research.

That concludes my statement. I would be happy to answer questions.

Senator FORD. Thank you, Dr. Decker.

Dr. Schwitters, you may proceed.

STATEMENT OF DR. ROY F. SCHWITTERS, DIRECTOR, SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER COLLIDER LABORATORY, DALLAS, TX

Dr. SCHWITTERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure to be back before you again and to be able to report to you on the activities of the SSC laboratory in its first year of existence. I have prepared a written status report that I would like to submit to the record.

Senator FORD. It will be included in the record.

Dr. SCHWITTERS. Thank you, sir, and I would like to now just summarize briefly that report. First of all, let me say, let me raise this question again that has been before us this morning, why do we want to build the super collider.

I believe that since humans first became curious about the world around them, they have sought answers to two basic questions: What are things made of and how do they work? Through history the answers to these questions have evolved over time, and we now have reached the stage at which we can describe what we know about the constitution of matter throughout the universe in terms of what is called the standard model.

All experimental evidence to date is consistent with that model, and yet the model itself is incomplete. We really know-again, it describes reality as we have been able to test it in our laboratories and our observations, but it is unable to describe the why of that reality, and particularly this issue of the basic origin of mass which is really one of the most basic questions of the substance of sub

stance.

Therefore, the next step in this historically important and intellectually exciting quest is to gain new experimental information to be able to guide us beyond our present understanding to a much deeper understanding of the standard model and its inner workings. T.D. Lee, a colleague of ours and Nobel laureate in physics has said, "Our aim is to understand that set of laws which governs everything." The SSC makes a direct route toward achieving this understanding. It will be our contribution to the civilization of the next century.

When President Reagan announced his intention to proceed with the construction of the SSC, he signaled this country's resolve to remain a world leader in the search for knowledge and understanding. His announcement changed the nature of the SSC from a conceptual effort to understand the design of a next generation accelerator into a project with the goal of creating the world's most powerful accelerator and the world's premier high energy physics laboratory.

In January of last year DOE chose Universities Research Association, a consortium of 77 of our leading research universities in this country, to serve as the management and operations contractor for the SSC with responsibility to build and operate the new laboratory. We have been in existence now just over a year, and I would like to tell you about some of the accomplishments that have taken place in that time. When formed last year and indeed in our

discussions before your committee last year, I listed a number of the objectives, and I am happy to report that many of those are now successfully completed.

Our first job was to mobilize near the site in Texas. We have done that. We have built and occupied temporary quarters. The staff is growing. It is a very exciting, dynamic group with over 500 people on board now from literally a green field start a year ago. Our principal effort that you have heard about this morning and I want to go into in more depth and, again, the report I made last year was that we wanted now with responsible engineers and scientists to go into depth, a review of the original conceptual design and apply that to the actual site in Texas and from that develop the necessary cost and schedules that go with that. We call that the baseline design, and it is has been our principal activity.

Associated with that we have performed various geological investigations. We have done work in supporting the environmental impact statement. As you have heard, we have selected an outstanding architect engineering firm to assist us with the construction and engineering of the facility. A major technical effort has been and continues to be the development of the superconducting magnets, and we are also beginning to initiate the scientific programs in the laboratory.

Now, let me address this issue of the baseline design. This has been our most important activity over the first year. The central design group which prepared the original design in 1986 did an excellent job of giving us a foundation for this machine. However, since that time, the 3 years that have transpired since that original conceptual design report was completed, there has been considerable new information available to our accelerator designers. First of all, we have the Tevatron. It is the first large superconducting accelerator, and it was really only after the original design report that we had considerable operating experience in the storage mode. In addition, other accelerators at CERN and in Germany have provided more information about the behavior of particles stored in these accelerators. We have applied that new information to the design of the SSC, and that has resulted in our recommended figures of the 20 TeV energy, the high luminosity, the 2 TeV injector, and the force changing from 4 to 5 centimeters on the aperture.

The recommended design was accompanied by a very careful cost estimate. This is the first cost estimate, I should point out, prepared for the SSC on an actual site. The laboratory worked closely with DOE and continues to work closely with DOE to develop a precise and agreed upon cost estimate that we intend to commit our reputations to and our whole effort to as we go forward with this project.

I want to be very clear about something here. Although the figure will be higher than the $5.9 billion talked about last year and submitted with the President's request, it does not in any sense constitute a cost overrun. It is the first true cost estimate for the project as it is proposed to be built. It came out in the questioning earlier today. We have examined in detail the reasons for the higher number. About half of the difference is due to the design changes that I mentioned before that, again, we felt were required to ensure the proper operation of this immense investment that we

are making well into the next century to be able to provide the scientific tools and reliable operations that we need for this kind of facility.

The other half of the difference comes from revising the technical and economic assumptions and various labor rates and so forth that went into the design. It has been recognized for some time now that a principal technical challenge facing the SSC, perhaps the principal challenge, is the design and production of the large superconducting dipole magnets that will guide the beams of protons around the ring.

The challenge here is one of scale, not concept. Superconducting magnets have been built and used in accelerators around the world. Under the auspices of the central design group at Berkeley, a magnet research and development program was begun a few years ago to turn the proven concept of superconducting magnets into the cost-effective design for the SSC. A number of mechanical and electromagnetic designs were developed and tested at our national laboratories. To date, 14 full-length magnets have been built and tested.

We now know that we can build these magnets that achieve the required field strength at the operating temperature of 4 degrees Kelvin. One important characteristic of the magnet, their quench performance-this is the way they behave when the superconducting materials become normal-has been demonstrated to be satisfactory. The mechanical and cryogenic performance meets our requirements.

Over the life of the magnet R&D program the design of the magnets has evolved as new and improved ideas about the mechanical and electromagnetic performance has been incorporated into the design. However, as I mentioned earlier, one change in the baseline design was recommended by accelerator experts and adopted late last year. That was the change of the inner coil diameter from 4 to 5 centimeters. This change, reflecting an improved understanding of the field quality in the magnets and the behavior of protons in the magnetic field was sensible and conservative, one whose goal is to create a more reliable accelerator.

I have established a task force at the laboratory to incorporate the modification in magnet aperture in the baseline design. The task force is progressing well. The new magnet cross-section has been established, and magnetic and mechanical design for the 5centimeter magnet is complete. With the demonstration in the testing program of satisfactory field strength and mechanical performance, the emphasis of the SSC magnet program now shifts to two areas: field quality and manufacturability. These will be the focus of the next year's program.

As I have often stated, the SSC really has two major goals. Our first goal is to create the world's premier high energy physics laboratory by the year 2000. And our second goal is to create a major national resource for science education at all levels.

In the remaining couple of minutes here I would like to tell you a little bit about our efforts in the second area. We have just announced in the laboratory, with the State of Texas, the award of the first SSC national fellowships to 20 outstanding young scientists to help them pursue their studies at universities all around

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