International Linear Collider - not anytime soon
The DOE and Ray Orbach today released their updated interim report on future facility funding. This is important as US funding policy has a big influence on whether big accelerator projects get funded, wherever in the world they are sited. Unfortunately, ILC has not made it onto the ‘Near-Term’ list, but is at the top of the ‘Mid-Term’ list, or 13th overall. This means ‘not building it any time soon, but keep going on the design work’. Actually, this is not too unusual, especially for a project of this size. When we worked on DIAMOND, we started out in 1993 with the Woolfson Review and the machine was only commissioned in 2006.
You can just imagine a call centre at DOE: ‘You are thirteenth in the list. Please continue to hold. Your project is very important to us. We are sorry for the continued delay in funding your project.’
You can read the updated interim report here. It’s interesting to see the order of priority they’ve put the accelerator projects in:
- LCLS - under construction, so not surprising it’s at the top.
- Rare Isotope Accelerator - not yet being built
- CEBAF upgrade - been on the cards for a while, and to be built by our good friends at JLab.
- ILC
- SNS power upgrade (What an amazing machine that is - the target chamber is something else).
- SNS second target station
- RHIC II
- NSLS upgrade
- Super Neutrinos
- ALS upgrade
- APS upgrade
- eRHIC/eLIC
The perceptive among you will notice that ‘multi-user’ facilities feature highly (i.e. those facilities where multiple experiments may happen simultaneously); well over half are facilities of this sort.
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