Important phase of FRIB project approved
Facility's design, cost established to the tune of about $55 million
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The forthcoming Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, received critical decision 1 approval Wednesday from the U.S. Department of Energy, which establishes the design of the building to house the facility and the next phase’s cost.
With this approval, preliminary design on the facility will take shape during fiscal year 2011-12. That phase is expected to cost about $55 million, said Alex Parsons, FRIB project communications manager.
Construction on the facility is expected to be complete near the end of the decade at a total cost of $550 million.
“We’re pleased that we got this approved and that we can continue to design this effort at MSU,” Parsons said.
In the coming years, the facility will be used to research various topics of advanced science, he said.
“The effort will exist to help scientists continue to study rare isotopes (for) applications in medicine, nuclear theory and other areas of study,” Parsons said.
To see an artist’s rendering of the building design, click here.
For more on this story, check statenews.com.
Commentary
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Small Business
(09/04/10 5:43pm)Report
Hey University Federal Research Complexes: send some of those billions of research dollars our way.
Federal Job Transfers
(09/04/10 5:47pm)Report
Remember, no job is created or destroyed, just transferred inefficiently. Every federal expenditure to create one of their jobs took away two jobs from the rest of the market through federal income taxes.
@ Federal Job Transfers
(09/07/10 10:17am)Report
What the comment above misses is that government spending like this can be an investment. Let’s say the construction of the railroads, or the interstate system, or research into civilian nuclear power took tax money and diverted jobs from the “more efficient” private sector (as I’m sure all of these projects did). Doing so was still defensible because of the later economic benefit — each projected led to the creation of new private sector jobs many times over the initial investment and increased the country’s productivity. Just as companies find it worth their while to fund R&D departments (even if that means they make less money at the moment), it’s a worthy function of government to invest in the country’s future. I’m not saying that the FRIB is necessarily a good idea, but I want to point out that the government doesn’t have to be wasting money by virtue of spending it.