gazette@watserv1.waterloo.edu ( Chris Redmond - Internal Communications Office ) (11/22/90)
Text from the UW Gazette, Wednesday, November 21, 1990: DEANS OPPOSE "KAON" PROJECT OVER COSTS Top research officials at five major Ontario universities have sent a last-minute plea to the prime minister: don't spend $236 million on a "big-science" project in British Columbia and starve basic science in the rest of the country. The project is the "kaon factory", a centre for research into sub-atomic physics which is proposed by a consortium of western universities called Triumf. A quarter of a billion dollars has been promised by the B.\C. government, and contributions adding up to same amount from eight foreign governments. Now the federal okay is being requested, and an answer is expected any day now. But outside western Canada, "Nobody wants it!" says UW's dean of research, Dr. Arthur Carty, who sent the November 6 plea to prime minister Brian Mulroney. The letter is co-signed by deans or vice-presidents from Western, McMaster, Toronto and Queen's. It points out that the National Advisory Board for Science and Technology has recommended against the kaon factory, which gets its name from an atomic particle, the kaon, which the huge installation would produce in order to trace the physics of what happens at sub-microscopic levels. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the National Research Council are also opposed to the project, Carty commented later. The objection is not to nuclear physics, but to the cost of the project. "Canada's predominant need at this time," the letter says, "is not a single Big Science project such as Kaon but an investment in basic science and engineering through the research councils to train the highly qualified manpower essential for global technological competitiveness." According to Carty, writing in the Globe and Mail@ last week, NSERC, "the primary source of operating grants for all university-based science and engineering research in Canada| has a budget of only $422 million, and $90 million of it is due to be phased out by year's end. "With the capital costs for the Kaon Factory alone more than double the NSERC budget, it's small wonder that scientists are traumatized by the prospect of having to finance Ottawa's share of it from current NSERC money." The letter to Mulroney -- with copies to nine national science officials and ministers -- says NSERC and the other granting councils (one for medicine, one for social sciences and humanities) need the money more than Kaon does. "The Kaon Factory is a capital intensive big science project in fundamental particle physics which will have little impact on Canada's economy or its industrial and technological capabilities," the letter says. "An annual increment to the granting councils over the next five years, comparable to the required Federal contribution to the capital and infrastructure costs of Kaon, will have a much greater payoff in terms of manpower trianing and technology transfer." The letter says the research deans "would heartily approve" a big infusion of federal money into science, enough to double the granting council budgets and pay for Kaon at the same time. But, it says, "it would, in our view, be a disaster for research in Canada if in a competition for research funds Kaon was given precedence." At Monday evening's senate meeting, Carty spoke briefly about the letter, and noted that a number of UW faculty have also written to the government arguing against funding Kaon at the expense of basic science.