WASHINGTON—Congress last month passed an $18.7 billion-dollar appropriations bill to fund all 1990 research programs sponsored by the Department of Energy. For officials at DOE’s research laboratories, the next move is to figure out how to cope with $31 million less than they had requested.
The appropriations bill was intentionally vague, spelling out only $l0 million of the cut. Brookhaven’s Alternating Gradient Synchrotron will get $5 million less for operating costs than it asked for. But lab officials, although unhappy, take pride in the fact that a write-in campaign by those who use the facility staved off a possible cut twice that size. Another $5 million cut was made in high-energy technology, a classification that includes much of the funding for designing new or improved accelerators. Both the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Fermilab had hoped to use some of those funds to plan upgrades of existing facilities.
Accelerator...
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