Congress Pulls the Plug on Super Collider

WASHINGTON — Congress officially killed the superconducting super collider Thursday, halting construction of the giant machine that was one-fifth complete at a cost of $2 billion.

The $640 million sought by the Clinton Administration to continue construction this year will instead be used to shut down the project under an agreement reached Thursday by House and Senate negotiators.

“The SSC has been lynched, and we have to bury the body,” said Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), the collider’s key backer in the Senate.

The $11-billion atom smasher’s demise was all but sealed Tuesday when the House rejected additional spending. It marked the third time in 16 months and the second time since June that the House had snubbed the physics project, which critics said was a luxury science project that was too costly in an era of huge budget deficits.

Johnston and other senators who had revived the funding legislation on two previous occasions decided that a third attempt was futile.

“The super collider’s dead, the taxpayers have saved $10 billion and I think that’s good news for the American public,” said Rep. Jim Slattery (D-Kan.), who orchestrated the campaign against the collider in the House.

Scientists had hoped to answer centuries-old questions about the origins of matter by observing the collisions of beams of subatomic particles hurtling through the collider’s 54-mile underground tunnel at near the speed of light.