The Death of Big Science in Russia

From 1987 to 1991 the largest construction project in the Soviet Union was neither a new hydroelectric station nor an oil pipeline. It was the world’s largest proton synchrotron accelerator in Protvino, a small science town about a hundred kilometers south of Moscow. The twenty-one-kilometer-long underground tunnel ring with a diameter of five meters (comparable to the circle line of the Moscow metro) had already been excavated, and people were working around the clock to assemble the massive vacuum chamber with large bending and focusing superconducting magnets, each six meters long and weighing many tons. A special factory had been built in Serpukhov, a nearby industrial city, to manufacture the two thousand magnets needed for the accelerator. The world’s largest helium liquefying plant, designed to generate thirty thousand liters of liquid helium per hour, was also under construction. Liquid helium was required to keep the temperature in the giant vacuum chamber as cl...