NEWPORT NEWS
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility will receive $75 million in economic stimulus funds, including $65 million to speed up construction of a more powerful electron beam, the federal laboratory said Monday.
Doubling the beam's energy will enable physicists to advance their knowledge of nuclear and particle physics, the Department of Energy lab in Newport News said. The remaining $10 million will be used to modernize lab facilities.
Physicists have been puzzled by quarks because these fundamental particles are never found alone, Allison Lung, deputy project manager for this endeavor, said. "It has something to do with how a quark interacts with its neighbors," she said.
With a more powerful electron beam and expanded facilities at Jefferson Lab, "we will finally have a scientific tool to try and unravel this mystery," Lung said.
The stimulus money will generate about 150 local jobs at the laboratory, Sen s. Jim Webb and Mark Warner said in a joint statement. The lab currently employs 650.
The project, Lung said, will create about 50 permanent positions for engineers, designers, technicians and doctorate-level scientists. The remaining jobs will involve temporary work to be done by technicians, engineers, designers and construction workers. A dozen job openings already have been posted, she said.
Work on the lab facilities is scheduled to begin this spring and take 5-1/2 years. The $310 million project calls for construction of a fourth experimental hall, a 250-foot extension to the lab's underground accelerator tunnel, and new roads and utilities.
The money came from $1.2 billion of stimulus funds allocated to the Department of Energy's Office of Science.
Jefferson Lab, which began conducting research in 1995, is operated by a partnership between Computer Sciences Corp. and a consortium of 60 universities, including several in Hampton Roads.
Tom Shean, (757) 446-2379, tom.shean@pilotonline.com
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Well placed money
Wow, partnering with local intellectual talent from acedemia and outreach to the public, (I just attended an excellent Chrysler Museum public lecture two weeks ago), what a gem! Any money that goes into this facility is money well spent. The building of these halls require nuts and bolts blue collar smarts (and contracts) and the payoffs are often overlooked: like when the laser was developed (the common wisdom was that it was a solution waiting for a problem). How many processes, from retail to medical, employ lasers nowadays?...
I used to work there. They
I used to work there. They use their money very wisely. They seem to stretch their budget as much as possible, compared to DOD. Kudos to them getting money. They had the 89th most powerful supercomputer (really a cluster of systems) in the world as rated by top500.org. Not bad for something in Southeastern Virginia. Also, the open house where they allow people into the accelerator tunnels should happen this summer. Be sure to check it out, it's neat.