MSU, E.L. gathering celebrates FRIB approval

In spite of being about eight years away from completion, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams is already accelerating beams of excitement throughout MSU’s campus and in the community.

MSU hosted an event Friday that brought administrators, as well as local and federal officials, together to commemorate MSU’s selection as the future home for FRIB, a $550 million-dollar nuclear research facility that will use cutting-edge technology to allow researchers to study rare atoms, or isotopes.

“We’re proud to be part of the international science agenda,” MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon said. “We see this as a culmination of decades of work.”

The university announced last Monday it had signed a cooperative funding agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, which chose the Cyclotron as FRIB’s host in December 2008. The agreement was the last step before the DOE officially begins funding the project, which will make MSU a world leader in nuclear research.

Steven Koonin, under secretary for science for the DOE, said FRIB will be the harbinger of important research in the field of nuclear physics.

“It is one of the forefront, flagship nuclear physics facilities,” he said. “It will greatly expand the range of nuclei that we have available to us, teach us about nuclei in the cosmos and also teach us about the very fundamental properties of nature.”

FRIB will have other societal implications, he said, such as potential applications for medicine, national security and industrial processes.

MSU was designated as FRIB’s home by the DOE after a six-month competition with the federally funded Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Konrad Gelbke, director of the Cyclotron and FRIB, said the Cyclotron was facing issues keeping itself visible in the science community prior to FRIB’s arrival.

“It was very clear that the international competition making half-billion dollar investments would be surpassing us,” he said. “We needed to do something which would bring us back to the international frontline, and this is what FRIB will do.”

The facility is expected to be in use for 20 years after its completion, with possible upgrade options that could increase its lifetime to 30 years, Gelbke said.

“Science facilities, by design, have a finite lifetime,” he said. “Unless we continuously innovate, we will just disappear into history. … We’ve laid a foundation for something just really grandiose.”

Construction is tentatively set to begin in 2013, and will take four years to complete. It also will create about 5,700 one-year construction jobs, said Geoff Koch, spokesman for the Cyclotron.