Texas Atom Smasher Project Survives Senate Budget Vote; Super Collider Issue Sent to Conference Panel
The multibillion-dollar Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) survived its most serious challenge so far in Congress yesterday, saved by some of the Senate's most vocal budget-cutters.</br></br>Thirty-three senators who voted last month against President Clinton's budget package, largely on grounds it did not include enough spending cuts, brushed aside critics' charges that the giant Texas atom smasher amounted to a high-tech "piece of pork" and voted to spend $640 million on it next year.</br></br>Among them were Minority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.), Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) and several Democrats who split with Clinton over the budget, including Sens. J. Bennett Johnston (La.) and David L. Boren (Okla.). The Senate vote was critical because the House earlier had voted 280 to 150 to kill the project and its foes were given a long- shot chance of prevailing in the Senate because of concern over the budget deficit. Opponents picked up 10 votes from last year, but still fell short, largely because so many states share in contracts and other benefits from the project.</br></br>The issue now goes to a House-Senate conference as part of a $22.5 billion spending bill for fiscal 1994 energy and water projects. Faced with a similar clash between the two chambers last year, conferees agreed to continue construction of the SSC.</br></br>The huge project, estimated to cost $10 billion or more when completed over the next decade, is the largest science project in history - a 54-mile tunnel with magnets to force high-speed collision of protons in a way that scientists hope can reveal the nature of matter and other mysteries of the universe. Supporters, led by Johnston, in whose state the magnets are being built, described the project as essential to U.S. leadership in scientific breakthroughs and accused its opponents of indulging in "flat earth" thinking.