moscow

The head of a leading Russian physics institute is under attack from colleagues for refusing to salvage a multi-million-dollar boring machine being used to dig a tunnel for a new particle accelerator.

Anatoly Logunov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of High Energy Physics in Protvino, 70 kilometres south of Moscow, is known for rejecting Einstein's theory of General Relativity, the existence of black holes and the ‘Big Bang’ for his own theories of matter.

He has decided to abandon a tunnel-boring machine built by the Canadian company Lovat, said to have cost almost US$18 million, following its completion of a tunnel required for the proton accelerator-accumulator (PAA).

The machine, which is 55 metres long and weighs 360 tonnes, can cover 100 metres in 24 hours, and has almost completed its task. “It would cost only 2.5 million roubles ($400,000) to bring the machine to the surface,” says Vasily Pasika, the engineer-in-chief of the PAA tunnel-building company.

The PAA project received priority treatment from the government, but has run into financial problems. It was allocated 56 million roubles in the 1998 budget, but in April this was cut to 39 million roubles, and by June the institute had received only 6 million roubles.

Logunov says the institute has no market for the project's only product — mu mesons — and no other income. “Many of our scientists have gone abroad, and with salaries here at less than $100 a month, I can't blame them,” he says. He says the tunnelling machine is the best in the world, “but we have no money to maintain it”.

Water enters the tunnel at a daily rate of 30-40 cubic metres, but the pumps are switched off because there is no money for electricity. Technicians, who have long been unpaid, occasionally struggle through the tunnel to check that the borer is working.

There are many potential purchasers for the machine, once it has been brought above ground. It is wanted for the Moscow subway, and four Russian cities — Chelyabinsk, Ufa, Kazan and Krasnoyarsk — have each offered $18 million for it.