DOE Plans to Amend Nuclear Physics Budget Request for Bates Lab
The Department of Energy has announced plans to alter the budget request for Nuclear Physics, which was released on Monday, February 1 (see FYI #15 ). DOE intends to amend the request to enable continued operation of the Bates Laboratory at MIT. The director of DOE’s Office of Science, Martha Krebs, explained in a February 3 press release that “the Department will be developing a budget amendment to support continued operation of the facility and allow work to be completed on a new detector that will provide unique data on the structure of the atomic nucleus.” How much funding will be required, where it will come from, and whether it will cut into other DOE science programs, is not yet known.
The original DOE budget documents, dated February 1, stated that “in accordance with guidance from the Nuclear Sciences Advisory Committee, Bates at MIT...will cease operations at the end of FY 1999; the FY 2000 funds will be used for decontamination and decommissioning and support of some scientists; fabrication of the Bates BLAST detector is discontinued.” However, on February 3, MIT President Charles Vest reported that Energy Secretary Bill Richardson “assured me that the Department would act to restore funding for Bates during the congressional appropriations process. Today, the Department publicly announced its intent to develop a budget amendment for this purpose.... In the coming months, MIT will cooperate with the Administration to present to Congress a logical and compelling case for the current importance of the Bates Laboratory to the nation’s nuclear physics program. It is especially important to complete the BLAST [Bates Large Acceptance Spectrometer Toroid] experiment.”
In FY 2000, DOE’s Nuclear Physics program is facing the first full year of operation for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), as well as transfer of operation of the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron from the High Energy Physics program. Last year, DOE asked its Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) to review the program’s 1996 Long Range Plan and reassess priorities and opportunities in light of the fact that funding has fallen substantially lower than the plan projected. NSAC produced a report in September 1998 (available on DOE’s web site at http://www.er.doe.gov/production/henp/nucphys.html ) considering three possible budget scenarios: constant dollar; constant level- of-effort; and increased resources. The constant dollar case assumes funding does not keep pace with inflation, declining instead by 3 percent in real terms. Constant level-of-effort assumes funding keeps pace with inflation. The FY 2000 request for Nuclear Physics as announced on February 1 is $342.9 million, an increase of $4.5 million over the FY 1999 appropriation of $338.5 million. This represents growth of 1.3 percent, or slightly less than inflation, which falls between NSAC’s constant dollar and constant level-of-effort scenarios.
In all three cases, the dominant recommendation is to give “the highest priority to effective utilization of CEBAF” at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF). In the constant-dollar case, NSAC recommends that Bates “cease operations following the completion of the deuterium target run of the SAMPLE experiment in FY 1999,” with the savings applied to partially stanching the reductions to university programs and CEBAF. Under the constant level-of-effort scenario, operations at Bates would end after completion of SAMPLE “and a limited experimental program using the OOPS [out-of-plane] spectrometers in FY 2000.” NSAC would apply the savings from closure of Bates toward fuller utilization of TJNAF.
“Increased funding at the $8-10M level above constant effort,” the committee’s report said, would “allow MIT/Bates to run beyond FY 2000. Unique scientific opportunities would then be realized using the combination of internal targets and the BLAST detector as envisioned in the 1996 Long Range Plan..... subcommittee notes that a commitment of funding at this level is necessary through FY 2004 in order to complete construction of BLAST and carry out its experimental program”[emphasis in original].
In his September 30, 1998 cover letter transmitting the report to Krebs, NSAC Chairman C. Konrad Gelbke refers to the BLAST detector program at Bates as “an excellent and unique scientific program.”
“I’m very pleased that Secretary Richardson made this important decision” to maintain the program, Krebs said in her February 3 press release. “The work that can be done at Bates will lead to a better understanding of the fundamental nature of matter and is an important resource to help train the next generation of nuclear physicists and accelerator scientists. We will work with the Congress to find a way to continue this important teaching and learning center.” The details of the budget amendment are reportedly still being worked on.
