Abandoned SSC Site can provide underground facility for geoscience research

Abstract

By the time Congress terminated the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project in October 1993, the Department of Energy and the state of Texas had sunk $2 billion into the project. Now closure and remediation of the disturbed surface and subsurface lands are underway with a budget of $22 million, according to a recent agreement between the DOE and Texas. Rather than chalking up the creation of the large, expensive hole in the ground to failure, however, some are hailing the site as an excellent test‐bed for geoenvironmental and geotechnical research (Figure 1). They hope to use the site's tunnel, exploratory shaft, and test wells to identify new and improved methods for investigating subsurface fluid flow and transport processes, to characterize physical properties of weak and fractured rock through geophysics and geomechanical testing, and to test model predictions through large‐scale experiments conducted underground.