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UW physicist Wick Haxton is in a competition worthy of reality TV--if the average American actually cared about science, that is. He is competing with three other teams in various US locations to be chosen as the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant for over half a billion dollars to build and run a laboratory buried deep under Stevens Pass to study neutrinos. (The further underground, the less the sun's rays interfere with techniques used to study these mysterious little subatomic particles that many physicists believe are the key to understanding not only the Big Bang, but other elusive phenomena like supernovae and dark matter.)
Sadly, enthusiasm for this project here in liberal, well-educated Seattle has been met with reactions varying from malaise to outright opposition (as when the first site selected outside Leavenworth was rejected by both locals and environmental and "outdoor activists"). Yet small town Lead, in South Dakota (population just over 3,000)--one of the other four finalists under consideration for the underground lab site-- organized a big town celebration in February replete with "Neutrino Day" banners.
Way to go, Seattle. Anything else that is good for people and society that you'd like to develop anxious, ill-informed concerns about how it will negatively impact your small little existence? In the meantime, South Dakota is looking downright enlightened in comparison.
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Did Leavenworth object because of anxious, ill-informed concerns, or was it another variation on the "don't use construction equipment anywhere we can see it" attitude so familiar in this region? I couldn't tell from the Times article.
If I lived in a town the size of Lead, I'd take to the streets to celebrate neutrinos, too -- not much else to do.
Well there were a few informed people, but mostly it was regarded as though a nuclear waste plant was being proposed there instead. The digging! The noise! It will ruin our water! The construction vehicles!
It was a fairly uniform and instantaneous panic, and I say this as someone who absolutely loves the outdoors and does care deeply about wilderness protection. But I do have a level of trust for scientists that extends well beyond that for the government's typical "construction projects" and disregard for the environment. A county commissioner from Leavenworth had said this:
People were concerned about traffic, noise and environmental damage. "Yet, we never saw it. We never heard it," Griffith said. "The arguments made by opponents to try and stop this (lab) are not valid."That said, the new Stevens Pass location does not require nearly as much digging thanks to the pre-existing tunnel. It may indeed be a better spot, but what frustrates me the most is the Wallingford-esque smug satisfaction that Leavenworth residents must have had in feeling that they ran that project out of town.
It seems like just yesterday that a small E. Wa. farming town called Hanford was uprooted to build a perfectly safe nuclear research facility. For some reason, highly experimental atomic physics just didn't catch on as a regional development model.
Hell, people in South Dakota literally live next to viable thermonuclear warheads. I'm not sure desperation is the same as enlightenment. On the desolate prairie, there's plenty of wind to throw caution to. Dinkville, South Dakota would probably have a "Nuke Days" celebration if they were selected as an A-Bomb test site.
But K, the whole Hanford thing only reiterates my point about governmental projects vs. core scientific endeavors (and to say that Hanford was intended for a "perfectly safe nuclear research facility" is definitely stretching the truth more than a wee bit unless you're ironically quoting the story the government tried to sell everyone when they took over that land--that place was always intended as a production facility to supply nuclear weapons). Plus no-one is trying to do anything like shutting an entire town down for this facility.
Sigh. Has no-one heard of CERN?
unless you're ironically quoting the story the government tried to sell everyone when they took over that land
Yes, that's exactly it; my point being that Washington locals are perfectly justified in being wary of atom-twiddling projects in their backyard no matter how safe they are touted to be.