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Just outside of Waxahachie is the country’s most-ambitious science experiment that never was.
It was called the Superconducting Super Collider, and it was going to be a 53-mile underground loop where particles could collide and scientists could study those fragmented pieces to unlock the secrets of matter and discover the origins of the universe.
The Super Collider would have brought billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the area, and it was close to becoming a reality in the 1980s. But after years of missteps, the project was shut down and funding was pulled.
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What was left of the Super Collider now lies in the form of 14.5 miles of tunnels and the shell of a building that was once filled with many dreams of scientific opportunities.
That’s why a reader asked Curious Texas: What was done with the old Super Collider site near Waxahachie?
The site is now home to Univar Solutions, a chemical manufacturing and packaging company. The company in 2012 acquired Waxahachie-based Magnablend, which had reopened the site after the destruction of its plant in a 2011 fire.
The warehouses had been vacant for nearly two decades at that point. But how did Texas end up with the site of one of the biggest experiments in the world?
In the 1970s, scientists had discussed studying atomic particles, and they needed space to make it happen. A years-long nationwide search for the perfect site ended November 1988 near Waxahachie. It became official the following January, and by then the town had rented out a space on a billboard off Interstate 35E that read: “Waxahachie, Home of the Super Collider.”
Roy Schwitters, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, remembers the project well. He was called upon to be the project’s director in 1989, just as the tunnels were being developed.
Schwitters’ expertise is in experimental high-energy physics. He left a professorship at Harvard University to work on the Super Collider, and he still believes the project had more physics potential than CERN, one of the world’s largest labs for physics research.
“CERN doesn’t have the potential in the same way we had, because to get really high energy particles, it takes big accelerators,” Schwitters said. “And Texas … had a great site and ideal underground conditions and all the things you need to build those accelerators.”
The Super Collider magic came together in a makeshift warehouse-turned-office just south of Dallas, Schwitters said. He remembers sitting on boxes with a team eager to make the project come to life.
According to The Dallas Morning News’ archives, the lobby of the temporary offices had models that showed what the collider ring would have looked like, and posters explained how scientists would collide atoms at almost the speed of light.
Ellis County Judge Todd Little, a freshman in high school when the project started, said his family-owned about 800 acres of land in nearby Red Oak, and — ahead of the project’s development — his father sold about 150 lots for homes to be built.
“I remember literally having scientists from other parts of the world that had come into my neighborhood, and they were there specifically to work for the Super Collider,” Little said.
Little was away at school for some of the construction, but when he came home there wasn’t much talk about — so much of the building happened underground, and whatever was aboveground was off-limits.
Initial reports estimated that the Super Collider was going to cost about $6 billion of federal money. At the time, the potential for discovery was worth the price.
For six days a week, crews used boring machines to dig the tunnels in early 1993. Roughly 11 miles — about 20% of the loop — had been carved out by July, and the estimated cost ballooned as high as $11 billion.
Because not much was known about accelerators, Schwitters said the project changed in size and scope once construction had started, and more money and materials were needed in order to adapt to those changes. The additional building of an office facility also added to the costs, he said.
“Our position was if the government wants to build this, you don’t want to build a dud that doesn’t work,” Schwitters said.
He said a lapse in funding from other countries forced the project to pump the brakes.
According to’ archives, tensions between Japan and the U.S. over the automobile industry got in the way, and Japan’s Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa decided to wait until after the 1992 U.S. presidential election to decide on funding the Super Collider. After the election, the Clinton administration did not give as much support to the project.
“That was a huge loss for us,” Schwitters said.
After spending nearly $2 billion on the project, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to kill the project that summer, and it was officially axed by Congress on Oct. 21, 1993.
“It was just devastating to the risk-takers who came to build the Super Collider,” Schwitters said. “That was … that was really hard.”
Little remembers hearing about the disappointment from people in the community. For people in Ellis County who had been following the project for years and years, the experience was traumatic, he said, especially for those who had worked on the Super Collider.
“A lot of them relocated their families to Waxahachie, and once the project was canceled, some of them never left — they made Waxahachie home,” he said. “But the younger ones that had a career in front of them, they left and moved on to the next project.”
In Switzerland, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson, or “God particle”, in 2012. It was a revolutionary discovery that confirmed scientific theories of how the universe began.
The Super Collider would have accomplished that and more, Schwitters said.
After the project was pulled, Schwitters held a professorship at UT-Austin. He’s been back to the site a few times, but he said he finds it depressing to look at the buildings.
” I’m just not a ‘what might have been’ kind of person; I just don’t want to get hung up there,” he said. “On the other hand, it was a grand opportunity, and all the pieces just weren’t quite able to come to come together, unfortunately.”