**Facilities for the Future: Next Steps towards a Twenty-year Plan**

> *There can be no doubt that a modern and effective research
> infrastructure is critical to maintaining U.S. leadership in science
> and engineering. New tools have opened vast research frontiers and
> fueled technological innovation in fields such as biotechnology,
> nanotechnology, and communications. The degree to which infrastructure
> is regarded as central to experimental research is indicated by the
> number of Nobel Prizes awarded for the development of new instrument
> technology. During the past twenty years, eight Nobel prizes in
> physics were awarded for technologies such as the electron and
> scanning tunneling microscope, laser and neutron spectrography,
> particle detectors, and the integrated circuit.*
>
> \-- National Science Board, December 2002

**Background**

For more than a half-century the Department of Energy's Office of
Science has envisioned, designed, constructed and operated many of the
premiere scientific research facilities in the world. More than 18,000
researchers and their students from universities, other government
agencies (including NSF and NIH), private industry and from abroad use
our facilities each year. This group of users is both growing and
diversifying. Light sources, giant machines that serve as "microscopes"
allowing scientists to investigate materials at the atomic level, were
until very recently the province of chemical and materials science
specialists. Today, these facilities support a full spectrum of
scientific endeavor, serving, for example, twenty times as many users
from the life sciences community as they did in 1990.

Large scientific instruments---synchrotron light sources, neutron
sources, particle physics accelerators, genome sequencing centers,
supercomputers and others---are at the heart of the Department of
Energy's scientific enterprise and are indispensable to progress in
almost every scientific discipline. Building and maintaining these
facilities is a core mission of the Office of Science, and part of a
unique contribution to American as well as global science. We must and
will continue to build facilities that reflect the hallmarks of
Department of Energy science:

-   create institutional capacity for strengthening multidisciplinary
    science,

-   provide world class research tools that attract the best minds,

-   create new capabilities for exploring the frontiers of the natural
    and physical sciences, and

-   stimulate scientific discovery through computer simulation.

**A Path Forward**

In parallel with its strategic planning process, the Office of Science
is taking a new look at the next generation of scientific facilities.

As a first step, the Office is drawing on its six advisory committees,
supplemented by input from its national laboratories and federal program
managers. These groups were asked to identify scientific facilities, or
upgrades to existing facilities, with a total project cost of \$50
million or more, whose construction should be started in the next 20
years to support the Nation's research needs in areas that have been the
traditional responsibility of the Department of Energy.

The resulting initial list of 46 facilities ranged from those that have
been under discussion for many years and for which there is a strong
community consensus, to less-defined and more speculative projects. Each
facility is being assessed by the appropriate Office of Science advisory
committee on the basis of the importance of the science it would
support, and the readiness of the concept for construction. The
resulting advisory committee evaluations will serve as a starting point
for the development of a twenty-year plan for DOE facilities.

Many additional factors contribute to the importance of constructing a
scientific facility, not the least of which are the costs of both
building and operating the facility, the portfolio of research that
could be conducted as a result, how the facility would contribute to the
mission of the sponsoring agency, and where the facility fits within the
larger portfolio of research important to the Nation. As the Office of
Science moves forward, these factors will be considered as well.

**[Initial List of SC Facilities (as of 1/1/03)]{.underline}**

-   1 Angstrom Free Electron Laser Major Use Facility

-   Advanced Light Source Upgrade

-   Advanced Photon Source Upgrade

-   BTeV

-   CEBAF 12 GeV Upgrade

-   CEBAF II Upgrade

-   Center for Computational Sciences Upgrade

-   Charged Kaons at the Main Injector

-   Component Test Facility

-   Double-Beta Detector (Liquid Xenon)

-   Energy Recovery Linac

-   Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)

-   Facility for Analysis and Modeling of Cellular Systems

-   Facility for the Production and Characterization of Proteins

-   Facility for the Production, Characterization, and Imaging of
    Exceptional Proteins and Molecular Machines

-   Facility for Whole Proteome Analysis

-   Femtosecond X-ray Source

-   Gamma Ray Energy Tracking Array (GRETA)

-   High-Flux Isotope Reactor Second Cold Source and Guide Hall

-   Inertial Engineering Test Facility

-   Integrated Beam Experiment

-   Integrated Research Experiment

-   International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility

-   International Thermonuclear Experiment Reactor (ITER)

-   LHC Accelerator Upgrade I

-   LHC Accelerator Upgrade II

-   LHC Detector Upgrade

-   Linac Coherent Light Source

-   Linear Collider

-   Muon Storage Ring/Neutrino Factory

-   National Compact Stellarator Experiment

-   National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

-   National Synchrotron Light Source Upgrade

-   Neutrino/Double-Beta Decay Experiment

-   Next-Step Spherical Torus Experiment

-   Off-Axis Neutrino Detector

-   Proton Decay Detector

-   Rare Isotope Accelerator

-   RHIC IIeRHIC

-   Spallation Neutron Source 2-4MW Upgrade

-   Spallation Neutron Source Second Target Station

-   Super B-Factory

-   Super Neutrino Beam (Proton Driver)

-   SuperNova Acceleration Probe (SNAP)

-   Transmission Electron Achromatic Microscope

-   UltraScale Scientific Computing Capability