Cutting-edge accelerator project lures top minds, creates jobs

[SpartanDem]

Source: Detroit Free Press

EAST LANSING -- It will be two years before ground is broken on the $600-million Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University. But already this haven for nuclear physics research, projected to inject $1 billion of economic activity into the state, is having an impact.

Some of the top minds in science have been recruited to MSU. Students in the nuclear physics graduate program are energized. And that program? It's now tops in the nation.

All this despite a lengthy construction timetable that won't have the facility running until 2020.

When it's done, it will house the world's most powerful heavy-ion accelerator, which will be 1,000 times more powerful than existing accelerators at MSU and capable of creating intense beams of rare isotopes. The implications are enormous, and the project is expected to lead to cutting-edge research in nuclear physics and medicine.



Read more: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110118/NEWS05/101180401/1318/MSU-creating-a-haven-for-nuclear-physics-research&template=fullarticle

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This is a great project not only for my alma mater and my home state, but for the country as well. Just a reminder of what we can create when invest in something worthwile

[SkyDaddy7]

1. You are 1000% correct!

And that goes for all investments in science after all that type of investment has been one of the main factors in new products & technologies that create even more jobs.

[Javaman]

2. It wasn't quite clear in the article; where is the funding coming from? nt

[Peace Patriot]

4. $600 million gov't investment yields $1 billion in economic activity.

Now that's how things should work. That's what our properly taxed money should be for. That's what our properly taxed money has been for, since the "New Deal"--until wrongful taxation hugely favoring the rich was imposed upon us by the Reagan economic thugs and government began to be "drowned in the bathtub" (except for padding the pockets of war profiteers and other multinational corporations) by the Bush Junta, and now even the Democrats are doing the unthinkable--attacking Social Security! Soon there will be no "commons" and "common good" projects will cease. And the multinational monsters spawned from our shores will run off to China for their R&D, leaving behind the ravaged, looted, "third world" country they are turning us into.

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The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) will be a new National User Facility for nuclear science, funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC), Office of Nuclear Physics and operated by Michigan State University (MSU). FRIB will cost approximately $600 million to establish and take about a decade for MSU to design and build.

http://www.frib.msu.edu/

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Unless we do MORE of this--not just stop the attack on the "New Deal" but reverse it--we are doomed to be discarded as the passive, lootable dupes that we have been. The "New Deal" was the most decent, progressive, educated, hopeful, creative and forward-looking government and society that we have ever been blessed with. It was built on public works. We must restore this public spirit and then some!

[SpartanDem]

5. It could've been more

this is scaled down verison of orginal project planned during the GWB's first term was budgeted near 1 billion, but near the end of his first term DOE decided to delay. It can back in it's current form and MSU won it just after the 2008 election

[IDemo]

3. I was hoping for a Toyota article..