Superconducting Super Collider Site

The strangest landmark in Ellis County is the one you cannot see. In the late 1980s the US Department of Energy chose a site south-west of Waxahachie for the Superconducting Super Collider, an 87-kilometre underground particle accelerator that was supposed to keep American physics ahead of CERN. Above-ground laboratory buildings went up, shafts were sunk, and tunnel-boring machines began carving an oval ring through the chalk beneath the cotton fields.

Then in 1993 Congress pulled the plug. The buildings stood empty for years before being sold off; a chemical company now uses parts of the site, and the tunnels are flooded and inaccessible. There is no visitor centre and not much to see except the surviving complex from the roads around Boyce, but for anyone interested in big-science history this is the largest abandoned monument to a scientific project that never happened — a Texas-sized particle physics ruin under a Texas-sized stretch of farmland.

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Congress cancelled the project in 1993 after $2 billion had already been spent and 23 km of tunnel bored. Had it been completed, the SSC would have been three times as powerful as the Large Hadron Collider that eventually discovered the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012. Ellis County was left with empty buildings and a long underground ring that floods every spring.

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