DOE Unveils 20-Year Priority List for Developing 28 Research Facilities

With a level of fanfare that signaled a significant commitment by the Bush administration to basic science research, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham used a packed National Press Club luncheon on 10 November to unveil the Department of Energy’s priority list for developing 28 major science facilities over the next two decades. The list, based on recommendations from six advisory panels, was finalized by Office of Science Director Raymond Orbach.

The high visibility of the secretary’s announcement was, in itself, considered important because such speeches are typically cleared by the White House and the Office of Management and Budget before being delivered. Abraham emphasized that the facilities list is not a funding document, but said, “Clearly, this document has implications for the budget.”

Later, in a background briefing, a senior DOE official said that the budget assumptions used in selecting the 28 facilities were based on a 60% increase in Office of Science funding over the next five years and then a 4% increase every year through 2023. That would be a dramatic change in fortune for the office, which has had an essentially flat budget for several years.

Congress recently approved a $3.2 billion Office of Science budget for fiscal year 2004, a 4.3% increase that is regarded as respectable but is not the dramatic increase that will be needed to realize the five-year, 60% increase envisioned in the facilities plan. Much of the 4.3% increase is for high-performance computing research, domestic fusion research, and 90 congressionally designated earmarks for programs in the Office of Science’s biological and environmental research division.

“This is an outlook,” a DOE official said of the facilities plan. “If we were to go to Congress or to the administration and say we’d like an increase in funding, we can say this is what we would do with it. What you have here is a recipe for facilities, were there to be additional funds for the Office of Science.” (The facilities report and background documents are available online at http://www.science.doe.gov .)

Although the overall funding future of the 28 facilities is hazy, Abraham was not reserved in stating the list’s significance: “Nothing of this scope has ever been attempted by our department, or indeed by any other science agency in government. We are not only planning two decades out, but we are prioritizing our facility needs across all fields of science supported by the Department of Energy.”

Near-term facilities

The list identifies 12 facilities as near-term, meaning significant activity could be under way within the next six or seven years. Leading the near-term list is ITER, the international thermonuclear experimental reactor project the US recently rejoined after dropping out several years ago because of the high cost. When ITER costs were scaled back, Orbach became a strong advocate of US participation in the project. He has said he believes ITER will lead to usable, clean, fusion-based electricity in about 35 years and may be a significant way to counter global warming. White House officials see ITER as an eventual source of hydrogen for President Bush’s hydrogen initiative.

Ranked second on the list is the UltraScale Scientific Computing Capability, a project that Abraham said reflects “our desire to regain global leadership in areas of supercomputing that many believe we have lost.” He noted that Japan’s Earth Simulator “has the computing power of the 20 fastest US computers combined.” The UltraScale project, to be located at multiple sites, is intended to “increase by a factor of 100 the computing capability available to support open scientific research,” the facilities report said. A DOE official said the intention is to develop “leadership-scale machines that can do grand-challenge calculations.”

Ten other facilities are on the near-term list. The US is interested in advancing its lead in light sources, Abraham said, and the Linac Coherent Light Source, an x-ray free electron laser, would provide brightness that is 10 billion times greater than current light sources. “That would allow researchers … to create real-time images of chemical reactions at the atomic scale,” he said. The Protein Production and Tags facility, he said, would build on the Human Genome Project and, working in conjunction with another of the proposed new projects, the Characterization and Imaging of Molecular Machines facility, would help “mass-produce tens of thousands of proteins a year, code them by their DNA, and make them available to researchers around the country.”

The Rare Isotope Accelerator, said Abraham, would be “a major addition to [DOE’s] nuclear physics program and make a major contribution to stockpile stewardship.” The Joint Dark Energy Mission, which would be developed with NASA, is also near the top of the facilities list. The space-based probe “will help us understand one of the greatest mysteries in science today—why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate,” Abraham said.

The remaining near-term facilities and facility upgrades are the National Transmission Electron Achromatic Microscope project; the Energy Sciences Network upgrade; an upgrade of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility 12-GeV upgrade at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory; and the BTeV, or “B-particle physics at the Tevatron,” at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Longer-term facilities

The list includes eight mid-term facilities, such as the Linear Collider, which the DOE report said would work at energies comparable to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider that is scheduled to come online in 2008. The precision of the Linear Collider, the report continued, “will enable new phenomena discovered at the LHC to be more fully explored.” The mid-term list also includes an upgrade for the Spallation Neutron Source and a second target station for that facility.

Eight facilities are listed as far-term, meaning they likely won’t be developed until the second decade covered by the list. They include the Super Neutrino Beam facility, which the report said would produce “a neutrino beam 10 times more intense than those available with current accelerators.” An Integrated Beam Experiment, a Second Cold Source and Guide Hall for the High-Flux Isotope Reactor, and an upgrade of the Advanced Photon Source also fall into this far-term category.

Burton Richter, director emeritus of SLAC who has worked in Washington to increase the visibility of the Office of Science, said Orbach did a good job in determining the priorities. “I would have done a few differently, some up and some down,” he said. “But for the first time, somebody has done the job of setting priorities across scientific fields.”

Four of the 12 recommendations from DOE’s High Energy Physics Advisory Panel made the final list of 28 facilities, including the Joint Dark Energy Mission and the BTeV in the near-term category. The Linear Collider facility is listed first on the mid-term list, and that was “the big issue for high-energy physics,” Richter said. The top mid-term ranking “is the best it could do,” he said. “It’s as high on the overall list as it could have been considering its state of readiness.”

A thoughtful process

University of Oregon chemist Geraldine Richmond, who cochaired DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee panel, which developed facilities recommendations for Orbach, described the process as “thoughtful.” BESAC had to “take a gamble on what [facilities] we thought were the most exciting and had high feasibility,” she said. Seven basic energy sciences projects made the list, with two—the Linac Coherent Light Source and the National Transmission Electron Achromatic Microscope—making the near-term list. “The BESAC committee is absolutely pleased with the outcome,” Richmond said.

Rutgers University physicist Charles Glashausser, chair of the facilities subcommittee of DOE’s Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, said that NSAC completed a report on long-range facility plans in April 2002, so the nuclear science community was “very well prepared for such an exercise.” The Rare Isotope Accelerator was the highest new construction recommendation in the NSAC plan and it is high on the DOE list, which also includes four other nuclear physics facilities.

“We are happy to see so many items on the list,” Glashausser said. Like others involved in the process, he noted that creation of the list doesn’t necessarily mean money will flow, “but the fact that Abraham came out with this and publicized it himself is a positive sign.”

DOE officials said the FY 2006 budget will be the first true indicator of financial commitment to the recommended facilities. “This will be in our [budget] request,” a DOE official said of the facilities report. “And yes, we hope it will be responded to.”